At the first of three conferences held in Alexandria and Cairo last week, the reminiscences and reflections of novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet captivated the audience For authors like Nathalie Sarraute, Claude Simon and Marguerite Duras, who sought to divest narration of linearity and emphasise the distance between the text and the reality to which it refers, Alain Robbe-Grillet was for many years the principal point of reference -- the father figure. Years after he invented the nouveau roman (new novel), a genre that was to epitomise avant-garde French writing of the 1950s and exercise a strong influence on successive generations of writers, he amazingly went on to direct 10 full- length features -- a feat that was to bring him to Egypt some half a century later as an honouree of the 20th Alexandria Film Festival, a circumspect, white-bearded octogenarian with remarkably good posture for his years. During the conference preceding the opening of a programme of screenings of his films at Alexandria's Creativity Centre, moderated by critic Rafiq El-Sabban, Robbe-Grillet seizes the first available opportunity to stress, first, that he is unequivocally heterosexual and, secondly, that Istanbul, the setting of his debut film L'immortelle (1963), the first screening on the programme, is the city in which he fell in love with his wife. " La fantôme de la liberté " (the phantom of liberty, 1974), a humorous reference to the Luis Buñuel film, is what he has to say about the windowpane shaking in response to the Mediterranean wind. And he has his wits about him enough to disavow the brief speech with which El-Sabban introduces him to the audience, remarking that his ignorance of Arabic makes it impossible to judge whether it gives the right idea of who he is. He also interrupts the interpreter to point out that he did not cite Alain Resnais's Guernica (1950) among films by that director that he had seen and liked. Evidence of the mental agility and precision found in his work does not end there: when the loud air-conditioning is switched off and the windows opened -- in response to his complaint about the low temperature -- only to let in the amplified azan (call for prayer), Robbe-Grillet cries out, "Conspiracy!" Such a heightened sense of potential danger, bordering on paranoia, is in line with the imagination of an auteur who experiences reality as a set of responses and signals. "I'm not at all of your opinion," he responds to an audience member who insists that the film and the novel belong to the same creative universe, "but I don't have a monopoly on the truth. You may be as right as I am, and we just happen to be thinking differently. A film, like a novel, is an exploration of what happens inside the head of a human being, but each uses different means. Let me be more precise. Freud's big mistake was that he believed the psyche could only express itself through words, asserting that the subconscious is structured in the same way as language. He was to encounter a difficulty, because in exploring the subconscious he became interested in the dreams of his patients, demanding that they recount them. But we all know it is impossible to narrate a dream; one tries to tell a dream, only to discover it's impossible. The patients could only narrate the dreams they imagined -- with hesitations, contradictions, 'reprises'. Freud would write down these statements, the basis of his interpretations. Which means that transformations happened -- from dream experience to spoken word, and from spoken to written word. All his conclusions were based on the latter, never taking the former into account. The decline of psychoanalysis, that pseudo-science, reflects the biologists' gradual realisation that the subconscious is not structured like language. Hence Lacan's statement, which I actually find funny: 'The subconscious is structured like language, or else psychoanalysis is impossible.' It's as if he was saying we have to accept Freud's mistake, otherwise we lose our jobs. I do think that there are things in the subconscious that express themselves in words, so the novel will remain, because language still affords a passage into the subconscious. But there are things in the subconscious that cannot express themselves in language, and for those we need another kind of analysis with images and sounds." It was in acknowledgement of the latter, Robbe-Grillet implies, that he first became involved in cinema. The story as he recounted it is as complex, unpredictable and nonlinear as one of his books. Duras had set a successful example with her script of Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour (1959) when, by then an established novelist, Robbe-Grillet was commissioned to direct a film in Turkey. Reassuringly, the producers had frozen assets in the country, but the project fell through within two months of preparation due to political turmoil -- the Turkish president was to be executed soon after that. Later, in France, another producer invited Robbe-Grillet to follow in Duras's footsteps, and the resulting collaboration with Resnais (who had proposed for the task such names as Simon de Bouvoir and François Sagan) yielded L'année dernière � Marienbad (1961). But after the first meeting with Michelangelo Antonioni, who had expressed interest in working with Robbe- Grillet, it was clear the two artists, despite an affinity of style and thought, were unable to collaborate. The disagreement reflected Robbe-Grillet's cinematic independence -- when he said to Antonioni, "And then we see," the latter reportedly retorted, "No. You tell me what happens and I'll worry about what we see." -- an aspect of his way of working that Resnais, who had staged the descriptions in Robbe-Grillet's script to the letter irrespective of cost, was apparently more willing to accept. His scripts, he tells the Alexandria audience, are more découpage than scenario. "I don't know how to write a scenario. If I think about a film," he insists, "I see a film. I can describe a series of elaborate shots, with montage, framing, camera movement, dialogue, but I couldn't come up with a scenario." Within an unexpectedly short period Robbe- Grillet was back in Turkey, unhindered by the presence of a director other than himself. Critics accused L'immortelle of imitating Resnais -- a charge that Robbe-Grillet counters by pointing up his technical limitations as director, which, along with his natural inclinations, he says, resulted in a "much simpler" style. "Even tough I wanted to direct films," he points out, "when I wrote Marienbad I had Resnais's style, which I admire, at the back of my mind; hence all those long travelling camera shots accompanied by internal monologues, because Resnais is a specialist in this technique. In L'immortelle on the other hand there is hardly a single travelling camera shot; static and panoramic scenes prevail." Many other differences were to demonstrate just how distinct his cinema is from Resnais's. Unlike Duras, he never adapted his novels for the screen, nor his films for print; he respects the "purity of form" of each medium. "If I have in my head a structure of phrases, a mode of organising words, I know it will be a novel. If images and sounds prevail then I know it's a film." In one of many anecdotes related during the conference, Robbe- Grillet recalled how Marienbad 's producer, on seeing the film, declared, "This film will never see the light of day. One does not ridicule the public to this extent. I'd rather lose all the money I spent than show this to a cinema manager." It was for political rather than artistic reasons -- it could be interpreted as sympathetic to the Algerian struggle for independence -- that the Venice Film Festival finally decided to feature Marienbad on its programme. But even after the film received the prestigious Golden Lion, Robbe-Grillet insists, people went to see it out of a sense of cultural snobbism; no one really expected to like it; and no one did. Critics preferred the simplicity with which L'immortelle was directed, he goes on, "not realising that it resulted from my not knowing how to do certain things. Today the film is screened mainly because it's a testimony of the 1960s, and because it shows Istanbul, which has changed so much since then, the wooden houses for instance. But its cinematic structure, which was misunderstood on its release, is at the same time only just beginning to be appreciated -- in particular the fact that its basic structural unit is not the sequence or the scene but the shot, or a string of static shots." Speaking of his contemporaries, Robbe-Grillet makes an interesting series of associations. He regrets that Jean-Paul Sartre never managed to brave the medium of film, for example, noting that André Bazin's notion of realism triumphed on screen in the popular films of François Truffaut, while non-realist cinema like that of Antonioni and Robbe-Grillet, which would find favour with theorists like Roland Barthes, was marginalised by the mainstream. A few sentences into the discussion of the notion of place in his work, which results from such musings, Robbe-Grillet excuses himself, pointing out that an 82-year-old man must retire early. "Thanks to this Coca Cola," he says, "a drink which I absolutely detest, I am able to be with you at this hour." The last-minute question -- does he consider himself primarily a writer or a filmmaker? -- seems somewhat redundant by now, but Robbe-Grillet gracefully responds to it nonetheless, "In France, above all, people are defined by their profession. And by profession I'm an agricultural engineer; neither a writer, nor a cineaste. At 30 I began writing novels, at 40 directing films and at 50 painting. I'm not a novelist by nature, otherwise I would have been totally dedicated to the study of literature; nor, by the same token, am I a cineaste, for I just have film ideas in my head. In my opinion, a great cineaste often overlooked by film critics is Jean Cocteau, and he is overlooked simply because he also happens to be a writer. It's something I strongly object to, because according to such reductive classifications I'm just an agricultural engineer who studied biology and mathematics -- neither literature nor cinema. Still, I taught film at New York University, I've been teaching film all over the world for over 20 years now."
