Dissolving & Reconstituting Narrative Cinema

1	The Man Who Lies	1968 – Alain Robbe Grillet (France)
	The New Novel & Truth	Profile – Alain Robbe-Grillet; moebius narrative structure; foregrounding the act of narration; photographic falsehood

A: Background

In the early fifties, Robbe Grillet was part of the nouveau roman (the New Novel, also known as the New French School) movement or period, where certain writers (notably Robbe Grillet and Marguerite Duras) experimented in how the novel as the product of the author's textual tracing within and across a narrative form could repudiate 'objective reality' arid concentrate on the 'fictional reality' it constructed within the text. Robbe Grillet developed what he termed the cine novel, which was a type of writing which simulated the effect of watching and interpreting a film. Eventually, he started making films himself after his first cinematic collaboration with Alain Resnais in 1961 with LAST YEAR AT MARIENBAD. Robbe Grillet's own films include THE IMMORTAL (63) THE TRANS EUROPE EXPRESS (66) THE MAN WHO LIES (68) and EDEN & AFTER (70). Other filmakers related to this approach of writing fiction : Marguerite Duras, Alain Resnais, Jacques Rivette.
 
B: Robbe Grillet

Following the New Novel's view of how a film will conform to a logical framework through which we are made to comprehend the narrative structure as replicating our rational understanding of an objective reality, the films of Robbe Grillet et al develop their narrative structures from two essential premises :
 
(a) "mental time" sounds, words, images and gestures in our everyday life all work together to constitute a phenomenological experience which we call reality ; but we each focus on on those sensory elements in different ways, reconstructing the 'real situation' in our own subjective translation of the actions of the event, in a way which stretches time, space, sequence and logic.
(b) "subjectivities" film can rearrange, reconstruct and play with sounds, images and sequences in order to present not an objective reality, but a subjective experience ; the form of such a film then defines its own reality it is a reality of forms, where all experience of the narrative is contained within the narrative's structure rather than our rational and logical extension of it into our so called objective reality.
 
C: The Man Who Lies

What follows is a series of notes which form a set of considerations which you should reflect on in order to analyse what you were experiencing during the film, and to see if you can pin point what the film was doing at that point to trigger such an experience.

(a) Could one 'rationalize' the narrative's structure into digestible story? If so, what is would that story be, and if not, why not?
(b) How did you register differences or similarities in the three major narrative levels of the film - the story of sounds, the story of words, and the story of images? At which points did these, three levels work in unison or in conflict?
(c) Who exactly is the "man" who is lying? What is his voice? His story? His narration? Is he (whoever he is) a character, or is he representative of something else, and does he perform a different kind of function within the narrative?
(d) Following on from point (c), what are the differences between all the characters not in terms of their personality, motivation, disposition, etc. but in terms of how they contributed to the narrative, mobilizing it, freezing it, causing ruptures, forming connections, etc.? What are the narrative devices which these cinematic elements represent? For example how do you respond to the following proposition :
Boris (the man who lies) representing the act of telling a story the way in which any telling can be true or false depending on what the tale eventually reveals to be the case.
John Robin (the man of whom is lied) representing the truth element ; the narrative component that works to explain things ; the key to the mystery ; the object of our desire to know what the hell is going on in both the story and its narration.
Sylvia, Laura & Maria (the women who are lied to) representing the convolutions of the whole narrative ; the fact that the story itself knows how it is going to end, and that it (like an Agatha Christie novel) is playing itself out in order to confuse us, divert us, suspend us.
(e) How do the present tense, presence and present ness all exist and perform throughout the narrative? How is that kind of "present ness" (of which Robbe Grillet speaks in his notes) relate to the way in which we continually suspect and ever) know that the film (or everyone in it) is lying, yet we are still somehow seduced by and attracted to certain spaces, gaps and phrases wherein we think we might have solve the mystery ; wherein we read the present tense effect of the screen image as somehow not lying to us momentarily?