TRIBUTE TO ALAIN ROBBE-GRILLET

18.00 = CAFÉ OPENS 

19.00 = “Eden and After,” directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1970, 93 minutes /

If a psychedelic, sado-masochistic, decomposed narrative of feminist self-actualisation against a macho hegemony, improvised around mid-20th-century atonal music compositional techniques, sounds a little dry to you, then you’d be fully justified in giving Eden and After (L’éden et après) a miss. …But you’d be wrong… ‘All you need to make a movie…’ to famously quote Jean-Luc Godard, ‘…is a girl and a gun’; if Catherine Jourdan’s performance in Eden and After proves anything, it’s that any prospective filmmaker could easily dispense with the firearm. However, Jourdan is only one of many pleasures of the film.

21.00 = “N. Took the Dice,” directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1971, 79 minutes /

Not content with simply carrying on in the same vein, Robbe-Grillet uses different footage shot for Eden and After to make a second film with a completely different and mesmerizing plot; the strangely circular N. Took the Dice (N. a pris les des… 1971). It’s one of the strangest pairing of films, the idea of using footage from the same project to actively discuss the thinking behind the main work is both ambitious and quite insane.