Parky at the Pictures (DVD 7/8/2014)

Born in Brest in 1922, Robbe-Grillet trained as an agricultural engineer and only completed his studies after spending two years in a tank factory in wartime Nuremberg as part of the Service du travail obligatoire scheme. On graduating, he worked as an agronomist for the Institut des Fruits et Agrumes Coloniaux in Morocco, French Guyana, Martinique and Guadeloupe, where he helped supervise banana plantations. However, ill health forced him to return to France in 1951 and, while recuperating, he followed his first, unpublished novel, Un Régicide (1949), with Les Gommes (1953), which won the prestigious Prix Fénélon and earned Robbe-Grillet a post as literary advisor at Les Éditions de Minuit.

Robbe-Grillet confirmed his place among the pioneers of the nouveau roman, alongside Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor, Claude Simon, Marguerite Duras and Phillipe Sollers, with Le Voyeur (1955) and La Jalousie (1957), which respectively experimented with objective subjectivity and the concept of an absent third-person narrator. Set on a banana plantation, the latter only sold 746 copies on its original publication. But its postmodernist disregard for the conventions of narrative fiction, as it switched between observed and imagined incidents, attracted Resnais and prompted Robbe-Grillet to wonder whether a literary style based on an absence of plot, character and imposed meaning could be transposed to the screen.

Shades of Resnais and Michelangelo Antonioni inform Robbe-Grillet's directorial debut, L'Immortelle (1963), which embraces the violence that was excised from Last Year At Marienbad and provides a possible solution to the mystery in L'Avventura (1960). Photographed in shimmering monochrome by Maurice Barry and edited with obfuscatory precision by Bob Wade, this is film that refuses to allow the audience the luxury of passive spectatorship, as it follows visiting academic Jacques Doniol-Valcroze on a repetitious cycle, as he tries to fathom the disappearance of Françoise Brion, who offered to show him the sights of Istanbul when he arrives on an unexplained assignment.

Unable to speak Turkish, Doniol-Valcroze is utterly dependent upon Brion, even though she also claims not to know the language and appears to be fluent in French almost by accident. She shows him the mosques and the market places and rundown buildings, as well as architectural masterpieces. In private, she is willing to indulge his darker passions, but she insists on propriety in public and makes puzzling allusions to secret prisons and white slavery. Then, she vanishes. And Doniol-Valcroze retraces his steps in the hope of finding clues to Brion's whereabouts.

Suddenly, places that had seemed touristy become sinister and figures who had been unnoticed in the crowd acquire a disconcerting significance. Yet no one remembers seeing Brion and Doniol-Valcroze is plunged deeper into melancholy as his search becomes more hopeless. However, an unexpected reunion proves tragic, as Brion is killed in a car crash before Doniol-Valcroze can find out what has happened to her and he torments himself that he might have caused by the accident by grabbing the wheel. Eventually, he reaches some sort of closure, as mutual friend Catherine Carayon (who would later marry her director) explains that Brion was part of a sex trafficking racket and she suggests that sometimes it is best not to know the truth.

Some may question the decision to translate the Turkish dialogue, as Robbe-Grillet's original intention was to shatter storytelling tradition by forcing the audience into an uncomprehending alliance with Doniol-Valcroze. However, this remains sufficiently cryptic to challenge the liveliest mind and keenest observer, as it ruminates upon identity, liberty, memory, the past, the present and death. Michel Fano's sound design is particularly mesmerising, as it frequently feels detached from the visuals, which are often framed to enhance the ambiguity and latent menace of their content. But what proves most memorable is the air of aching sadness that pervades every scene

In his 1963 tome, Pour un nouveau roman, Robbe-Grillet posited that traditional novels had become hidebound by the need to impose spatial and temporal unity and by the preoccupations of omniscient narrators. So, in Trans-Europ-Express (1967), he set out to dispense with accepted fictional techniques and, in the process, created a work of meta-cinema that outdid the most playful efforts of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard to make self-reflexivity a key component of the filmic process.

Director Alain Robbe-Grillet boards a train from Paris to Antwerp with producer Paul Louyet and script girl Catherine Robbe-Grillet. They plan to use their journey to hatch a movie plot about a smuggler operating on the line and envisage a bearded man in glasses sitting conspicuously in the corner of a compartment. However, on spotting actor Jean-Louis Trintignant, the trio decide to cast him as the unwitting hero and have gang leader Charles Millot subject him to a series of challenges during the journey to see if he has what it takes to become a courier.

Trintignant buys a suitcase to hide his contraband and asks salegirl Virginie Vignon if it has a secret compartment. He boasts of being an amateur assassin and fantasises about striking James Bond-like poses with an obviously toy pistol. Back on the train, Trintignant is confronted by prostitute Marie-France Pisier, who agrees to act out his perverse rape fantasies. However, reality intrudes all too brutally when Trintignant learns that his experiences have been fabricated to test his mettle and he lashes out at Christian Barbier. But he turns out not to be a narcotics cop rather than a member of Millot's gang and Trintignant is perplexed when he sees Pisier hand Barbier a key stolen from his jacket.

Although the claustrophobic duplicity intrigues, Robbe-Grillet has no intention of letting us sit back and watch a formulaic thriller. Instead, he deconstructs the clichés and caricatures and constantly reminds viewers that that are being served up an anti-narrative that is being made up as it goes along. In addition to drawing attention to the dual role that Trintignant plays as the patsy and himself, Robbe-Grillet also frequently cuts back to the creative triumvirate driving the action with their ad hoc suggestions that often fly in the face of diegetic logic. The script girl forever tries to alert the director and producer to their disregard for story sense and continuity. Indeed, at one point, they even concoct a brief sequence to silence her complaints that Trintignant is no longer carrying a parcel of clothes.

Such mischievousness could easily seem capriciously pretentious. But Robbe-Grillet never allows the humour to distract from his theoretical gravity of his purpose. An element of controversy arose regarding his use of nudity and sexual violence and the scenes of rape and sado-masochism have come to seem more dubious with each passing decade. But the Robbe-Grillets enjoyed bondage as part of their marital coupling and its inclusion here owes as much to teasing autobiographical allusion as it does to straightforward misogyny.

The performances, in so much as they are performances, are splendid, as is Willy Kurant's atmospheric imagery and Bob Wade's crisp cutting between the various planes of reality as the action veers off at tangents and seemingly crucial facts and faces are consigned to the margins. But, once again, it's Robbe-Grillet's genius that predominates, as he combines enigma, ellipsis and entertainment with an effortless elegance that the likes of Charlie Kaufman, Christopher Nolan and Michel Gondry has since striven to emulate with varying degrees of success.

It's readily evident from the title that unreliable narration is again a key constituent of Robbe-Grillet's reunion with Jean-Louis Trintignant, The Man Who Lies (1968). But the rules of storytelling are not the only satirical target of this impish disquisition, as Robbe-Grillet is also intent on demythologising recent French history and forcing audiences to confront the bitter truths of the Vichy era as the edifice of the Fifth Republic started to crumble during the May Days of 1968. How apt, therefore, that the Kafkaesque picture should have been a co-production with Czechoslovakia.

The action opens with handheld footage of a man (Trintignant) running through the forest. As he looks back towards his pursuers, he begins to rehearse a narrative in his head, in which he presents himself as both a nobody named Boris Varissa and a war hero called Jan Robin. Machine-gun fire rattles out and the fleeing figure collapses into a bush. Eventually, the scene fades. But, when the light returns the following morning, dusts himself down and heads into the nearby town and eavesdrops on the conversations in the tavern.

Having learned about Jan's wartime heroics, Boris goes in search of the chateau where Jan lived with his father (Jozef Cierny), his wife Laura (Zuzana Kocúriková), his sister Sylvia (Sylvie Turbová) and Maria the maid (Sylvie Bréal). As the latter had never met Jan, Boris convinces her that he is a trusted companion of her fallen master and seduces her into introducing him to Laura and Sylvia. Jan's father doesn't believe Boris and drives him from the castle with the help of his manservant, Franz (Jozef Kroner). But Boris is not to be deterred and he returns to the village, where he takes a room at the tavern. He flirts with Lisa the maid (Dominique Prado) and fastens on to a story told him by the pharmacist (Catherine Robbe-Grillet) about Jan's activities with the resistance. When he retells the tale, Boris is a key player in its drama, but his variations denounce the druggist as a collaborator and expose Jan as a quisling who betrayed his own men.

Shortly after Jan's father is killed (in what might have been an accident), Boris tries to inveigle himself into Laura's affections. He is tormented by nightmares, however, and his imposture is exposed when Jan (who has long been presumed dead) returns home. Yet, once again, Boris rises from his seeming quietus and begins upon another version of his chequered past before he finds himself being chased through the woods once more.

The audience's suspicions should be aroused from the outset by the fact that Trintignant wears modern clothes while those in pursuit are dressed in Second World War uniforms. But, such is the conviction of his impromptu testimonials that the viewer is swept along on the free-flowing tide of deceit that overwhelms hearers so desperate for a hero that they are willing to accept fabrication as fact. Exploiting their weakness and guilt, Trintignant excels as the mendacious stranger. However, his tall tales would be less persuasive without the dexterity of Bob Wade's editing, which again allows Robbe-Grillet to conspire with cinematographer Igor Luther and sound designer Michel Fano in playing fast and loose with the audiovisual truth and the audience's perception of it. No wonder Kocúriková, Turbová and Bréal are first shown playing blind man's buff.

There are faint echoes of Walerian Borowczyk in the pseudo-surrealism that Robbe-Grillet concocts in this allegorical fable. But there is also a hint of the Euro eroticism that is usually associated with the likes of Jesús Franco, José Larraz, Max Pecas, Jean Rollin and José Benazeraf, and this would become even more apparent in Eden and After (1970). By all accounts, a dislike of green had prevented Robbe-Grillet from making The Man Who Lies in colour. But the prospect of being able to banish verdancy persuaded him to adopt Eastmancolor and cinematographer Igor Luther and production designer Anton Krajcovic unite to create a milieu that is unlike anything else seen in French cinema of the period.

Resembling something devised by Piet Mondrian and Jacques Tati, the steel and glass edifice that is the Eden Café plays host to a group of students including Lorraine Rainer, Sylvain Corthay, Richard Leduc, Ludovít Króner, Jarmila Kolenicová and Juraj Kukura, who expend their subversive, sadomasochistic energy on staging a gang rape, a murder, a wake, a poisoning and an execution. However, their revels are interrupted by the arrival of Pierre Zimmer, an older stranger, who beguiles them with his tales of mind-bending adventure. He produces a white substance from Africa that he calls `fear powder' and Catherine Jourdan volunteers to sample it. She launches into a series of prognostications and begins dancing wildly.

Eventually, she comes down from her high. However, many critics have presumed that what happens from this point on forms part of Jourdan's continuing trip. But whether the remainder of her journey is physical or metaphysical, she agrees to a date with Zimmer, who arranges to meet her at a factory on the outskirts of town. Convinced that she is being stalked, Jourdan wanders around the factory and finds Zimmer's corpse. Yet, it has disappeared by the time she has rushed back to Eden to fetch her friends and she is left with a blood-stained postcard from his pocket after the theft of her sole possession, a valuable painting of a blue and white building.

As befits a film in which duplicates, doubles and mirror images abound, this view is reflected the architecture in the Tunisian town in which Jourdan now finds herself. However, she is kidnapped by some locals and tortured before an incident involving some poisoned water affords her the opportunity to escape. This is a throwback to the hijinks in which she indulged in Eden and there is further replication in the dance Jourdan performs to tribal music beside the bonfire in the desert. But the picture ends with the mysterious meeting between Jourdan and her doppelgänger, who seeks to provide reassurance with the whispered words: `I found the sea again.'

Taking its cue from the works of Lewis Carroll, this treatise on birth, innocence, sensuality, fear, obsession, violence, abandonment and renaissance makes for exceedingly perplexing viewing. It was produced in a somewhat bizarre manner, as Robbe-Grillet diverted funding from a television commission that he eventually fulfilled by re-editing scenes along with out-takes and other ephemera to form N. Took the Dice. Although completed in 1971, this was not shown until 1975. But there was method in Robbe-Grillet's madness, as while Eden and After was organised according to the serialist principles of such composers as Arnold Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez, the teleplay owed more to the aleatoric theories of Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.

Time has not been particularly kind to the happening-style Edenic antics of the opening third, but it is still possible to appreciate the avant-gardist audacity of Robbe-Grillet's ambition. There is something a touch patronising about the 48 year-old's bid to capture counterculture nihilism and the viewer is occasionally made to feel like an intruder, as Robbe-Grillet gazes upon Jourdan's face and form with evident longing. But, while some will lack the patience to decode the sometimes self-consciously dense symbolism, the sense of unpredictability is often exhilarating and it is tempting to forge connections to Louis Malle's Zazie dans le Métro (1960) and Jacques Rivette's Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974).

Fittingly, the last title in this selection, Successive Slidings of Pleasure, was also released in 1974. Once again, there is a Borowczykian feel to the frankly erotic action, although there is also a giallo edge to the focus on naked flesh, sharp blades, sadism, blood, lust and insanity. Once again photographed in lustrous colour (this time by Yves Lafaye) and superbly designed by Anton Krajcovic, this is an uncompromising exercise in psycho-sensuality that some have dubbed lecherous rather than audacious. But the intent was always to provoke and this still has the power to shock and darkly amuse four decades after its initial release.

Prostitutes Anicée Alvina and Olga Georges-Picot share a room and a bed. Alvina enjoys fetishising her friend and when not swathing her in drapery or dressing her in a leather coat, she is cracking eggs on her naked torso and watching them slide off in a stream of red wine. Georges-Picot remains impassive as Alvina paints her breasts. But when detective Jean-Louis Trintignant surveys the room, he finds her body smeared with red paint and with one hand chained to the iron bed post.

Alvina is arrested for her murder and is detained in a convent cell that closely resembles her old lodgings. She is interviewed by judge Michel Lonsdale, but insists she had nothing to do with her friend's death and claims that a malevolent voyeur must have broken into the room while she was away and stabbed Georges-Picot in the chest with a pair of scissors. Lonsdale is tempted by the unrepentantly flirtatious suspect and spies on her through the door of her cell and vigorously engages in a re-enactment of the crime before sucking Alvina's toe.

Against the better judgement of stern priest Jean Martin, Lonsdale also allows photographer Hubert Niogret to take pictures of Alvina, who claims to be able wish people dead. She is attended by nuns Claude Marcault and Nathalie Zeiger, but the latter becomes unhealthily obsessed with the prisoner and almost swoons when she strips naked, covers herself with red paint and leaves a hand print on Zeiger's robes before she proceeds to rolls along the white walls of the cell.

Eventually, Alvina is allowed access to a lawyer, who turns out to be a dead ringer for Georges-Picot. She is disturbed when Alvina avers that women are taken to the dungeon to be whipped. But when Georges-Picot makes inquiries about such torture, she is informed that such bestial behaviour would serve no purpose other than entertaining the onlookers.

This far from subtle allusion to the complicity of the audience rather sums up a film that too often tends towards smugness in its bid to dress up softcore pornography in intellectual pretensions. The studied performances reveal that the entire cast (including a debuting Isabelle Huppert) were in on a joke that might then have amused devotees of Georges Franju and Mario Bava and may now crack a smile among aficionados of David Lynch. But a vaunting sense of artistic superiority isn't enough to elevate this above the many examples of nunsploitation and the women behind bars melodrama being churned out across Europe and America.

Claims have been made that Robbe-Grillet returned to the image of the naked female form in bondage to protest at the social oppression of women and the patriarchal denial of their sexual rights. But, while the symbolism may be as acute as the barbs at linear and generic convention, it isn't always easy to detect the mastery of a visionary in the tasteful smut he engages in here before insulting the audience's intelligence with a cornball conclusion.