In The Company Of Glenn

Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1922-2008

From La Belle Captive, 1983

The man who dreamed up the above image (which was shot by the great Henri Alekan) died early today, aged 85, after being hospitalized for a heart ailment. His greatest fame was as a novelist, maybe not even as a novelist but as the putative inventor of the "new novel" (nouvelle roman), which putatively jettisoned plot, character, psychology, all that sort of thing, and replaced them with precise, objective, painstaking description. (Vladimir Nabokov, while a great admirer of Robbe-Grillet's fictions, thought the notion that they were non-and/or-anti-psychological to be ludicrous.) Robbe-Grillet took his work as a filmmaker just as seriously. This work began with his scenario for L'Annee Derniere a Marienbad, which was directed by Alain Resnais in 1962. Robbe-Grillet began directing shortly thereafter, with L'Immortelle in 1962 and Trans-Europ-Express in 1963. Both his novels and his films got, for lack of a better word, kinkier over the years, with plenty of bondage and fluids involved; the hideous sex murders-as-peep-shows in his novel Project for a Revolution in New York do play as violent pornography—exquisitely written violent pornography. Were Robbe-Grillet's convoluted narrative strategies merely subterfuges to excuse what the literary critic Roger Sale called (when writing of another controversial novelist, John Hawkes) a "vile imagination"?

A brief clarification of auteur-based criticism

A random wander over to Slate—something I really oughtn't ever indulge in—reveals that the zine got one of its editorial assistants to do a takedown or something of Alfred Hitchcock. "The Man Who Did It All" is the headline, but the real amusement is in the subhed: "Or so he'd have you believe. Does Hitchcock get too much credit?"

I like that present-tense "so he'd have you believe." As if Hitchcock's genius has such a dark side that he's able to manipulate your opinion of him FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE!!! That BASTARD!!

The accompanying slide show is a relatively inoffensive account of what looks to be a very interesting exhibition, now at Northwestern University's Block Museum, entitled "Casting A Shadow: Creating The Alfred Hitchcock Film." This exhibition, Slate's Juliet Lapidos muses, "suggests that Hitchcock was in fact a deeply collaborative artist." Indeed it does. As the notes on Northwestern's website state, "[i]n reality, however, Hitchcock was a deeply collaborative artist, working intensely with actors, producers, cinematographers, screenwriters, editors, and production and sound designers to create what the public knew as 'an Alfred Hitchcock film.' "

Waxing ever so slightly more original a little later on, Lapidos points out that "the director [...] paved the way for the achievements, and excesses, of the new Hollywood era." As I'm trying to be nicer these days, I suppose I ought to refrain from pointing Lapidos to the refrigerator, from whence she might be well-advised to retrieve a can of Shut The Fuck Up. But confronted by the trite combativeness of the Slate-ean perspective, we movie writers who keep Bazin's and Truffaut's and Sarris' auteur-theory explorations in our critical toolboxes have every right to at least sigh in exasperation. YES, we know that Alfred Hitchcock did not put up every light himself and operate the camera. YES, we know that every film is a collaborative effort involving dozens if not hundreds of other creative artists. If we discern what we refer to as a "personal signature" in the work of a particular director we are not attempting to negate the work of the other dozens or hundreds of other creative artists. And YES, Hitchcock was a credit hog...but he was a credit hog well before the politique des auteurs was a gleam in Bazin's eye, because he was a self-branding showman. Turned out to be a pretty good career strategy, as it happened.

Oh well. Speaking of Slate, I wonder if it'll assign William Saletan to review The Great Debaters. That ought to stir some stuff up.

"Mister Lonely"

Has Harmony Korine abandoned his artistic principles, or has he just machoored, as they say?

I ask because there's a scene in his new film Mister Lonely in which a herd of sick mutton have to be exterminated. Those of us who not-too-fondly recall the cat-flaying scenes of Gummo might have expected him to show the slaughter full-on. But here he keeps it discreetly off-screen. Now there's a bunch of name actors in this thing—Samantha Morton, Diego Luna, James freakin' Fox for heavens' sake. Maybe Korine read about Danny Glover John C. Reilly walking off the Manderlay set on account of that donkey killing and got spooked.

Nah. I like to think Korine—who I ran into here at Cannes two years ago when he was looking for financing for this, and who was as nice as pie—is just making better choices all around. Which isn't to say that Mister Lonely isn't one whacked-out piece of cinema.