{"id":4614,"date":"2014-07-04T06:57:51","date_gmt":"2014-07-04T05:57:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/?p=4614"},"modified":"2014-07-22T23:34:53","modified_gmt":"2014-07-22T22:34:53","slug":"eden-and-after","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2014\/07\/04\/eden-and-after\/","title":{"rendered":"Eden and After"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Eden<\/a>
Eden and After<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\n

\nFormat:<\/B> Blu-ray + DVD

\nRelease date:<\/B> 30 June 2014

\nDistributor:<\/B> BFI

\nDirector:<\/B> Alain Robbe-Grillet

\nWriter:<\/B> Alain Robbe-Grillet

\nCast:<\/B> Catherine Jourdan, Lorraine Rainer, Sylvain Corthay

\nOriginal title:<\/B> L’\u00e9den et Apr\u00e8s: <\/i>

\nFrance, Czechoslovakia 1970

\n93 mins\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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\u2019d be fully justified in giving Eden and After<\/i> (L’\u00e9den et apr\u00e8s<\/i>) a miss. <\/p>\n

But you\u2019d be wrong.<\/p>\n

\u2018All you need to make a movie\u2026\u2019 to famously mis-quote Jean-Luc Godard, \u2018\u2026is a girl and a gun\u2019; if Catherine Jourdan\u2019s performance in Eden and After<\/i> proves anything, it\u2019s that any prospective filmmaker could easily dispense with the firearm. However, Jourdan is only one of many successive, sliding, pleasures of the film.<\/p>\n

As one of the leading literary luminaries (along with Georges Perec and Marguerite Duras) of the experimental nouveau roman<\/i>, novelist Alain Robbe-Grillet had been confounding narrative and character expectations in print since the early 50s and in the early 60s turned to film to explore his provocative themes to equal acclaim.<\/p>\n

After the relative commercial and critical disappointment of his 1968 feature, The Man Who Lies<\/i> (L’homme qui ment<\/i>), Alain Robbe-Grillet was prompted, taking note of the late 60s youthquake, to create something with a specific appeal to a younger audience. In this endeavour, Robbe-Grillet appears at times to be channelling the kaleidoscopic colour schemes of the Italian horror maestro Mario Bava and the slow, surreal sensuality of Jean Rollin and Jess Franco. The hallucinatory atmosphere, flat compositions and pop colours often bring to mind the 60s erotic comics published by Eric Losfield and drawn by Guy Peellaert, Guido Crepax, or more recently, Milo Manara.<\/p>\n

Eden and After<\/i> is certainly Robbe-Grillet\u2019s most visually pleasurable film; red, white and blue dominate \u2013 though not, we are assured, for patriotic reasons. Due to a longstanding loathing for the colour green, Robbe-Grillet\u2019s fourth film was only his first in colour. Although the resources were available to him, the verdant locale of The Man Who Lies<\/i> had by its nature prohibited the process. However, the azure and whitewashed landscape viewed during a short lecture tour of Tunisia provided the chromatic inspiration for Robbe-Grillet\u2019s thrust out of monochrome and into Eastman Color. <\/p>\n

In a canny piece of budgetary manipulation, Robbe-Grillet endeavoured to finance Eden and After<\/i> by using funding intended for a separate feature-length piece destined for French TV, thus requiring a process designed to create two distinct and unique productions, from the footage of a single movie shoot. Robbe-Grillet\u2019s solution came via his fascination with the compositional techniques of mid-20th-century contemporary atonal music (Robbe-Grillet was pals with the Pierre Boulez set). For the improvisational structure of one film, he embraced the serialist theories of Arnold Schoenberg; and for the other, he drew on the aleatoric (literally, throwing a dice) compositional theories pioneered by Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. The result was Eden and After<\/i> (1970) and the anagrammatical \u2013 in both title and content \u2013 N. Took the Dice<\/i> (N. a pris les d\u00e8s<\/i>, made in 1971 but not broadcast until 1975).<\/p>\n

The plot \u2013 and there definitely is one \u2013 involves university students at the Eden caf\u00e9 \u2013 a mutable, Mondrian-gridded, mirrored maze \u2013 taking part in ritualized play-acting of various dark scenarios (a gang rape, a wake, a poisoning, an execution). A mysterious, older stranger arrives, disrupting their youthful routine and seemingly offering a passport to adulthood. A chase through a disused, Pompidou-hued factory follows and a mysterious death leads to an exotic North African adventure involving the search for a stolen painting. <\/p>\n

The joy of Eden and After<\/i> is in deciphering the many punning symbols (a key, a keyboard, a musical key, 88 keys, the looping symbol for infinity) and identifying the doubles and mirror images of characters, actions and events in what is, after all, intended as playful; an improvised game following the rules of serialism \u2013 12 generating themes (prison, water, blood, labyrinth, death, sperm etc\u2026) for each of the film\u2019s five chapters, in sequence, with no theme repeated within that chapter.<\/p>\n

We are invited to respond to it as we would to a painting or piece of music, and indeed there are many references to painters (another of Robbe-Grillet\u2019s obsessions and occupations), the aforementioned Mondrian and Duchamp among others. It is a very painterly film: deliberately flat to echo the shadowless September noon of the Djerba medina quarter.<\/p>\n

Joining the cast a mere three days before production began, Catherine Jourdan was a last-minute replacement when the original actress cast was made temporarily alopeciac due a botched henna-ed hair job. A nightclub acquaintance, Robbe-Grillet was struck by Jourdan\u2019s Medusan locks, which in a typically bloody-minded act, Jourdan had chopped before arriving on set. Although she was not initially cast as the intended protagonist, Jourdan\u2019s effulgent screen presence so dominated the improvisation process that it grew clear that she was the lead, and indeed it is her character that we follow in the second half of the film.<\/p>\n

Eden and After<\/i> is one of a rare handful of films (including Argento\u2019s Profondo Rosso<\/i>, and Godard\u2019s Le petit soldat<\/i> perhaps) where you are tangibly aware of the director falling in love with his main actress; Jourdan was never as commanding on screen before or after.<\/p>\n

Eden and After<\/i>, N. Took the Dice<\/i> and The Man Who Lies<\/i> are available on the BFI\u2019s Alain Robbe-Grillet Six Films 1963-1974<\/i> Blu-ray\/DVD box-sets, released on 30 June 2014. Also included are The Immortal One<\/i>, Trans-Europ-Express<\/i> and Successive Slidings of Pleasure<\/i>.<\/div>\n

Vadim Kosmos<\/I><\/B><\/p>\n

\u2013 Eternally indebted to Tim Lucas\u2019s (of Video Watchdog<\/i> magazine) typically effusive and scholarly commentary on the BFI discs.<\/i><\/p>\n

<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This psychedelic, sado-masochistic, experimental adventure is also Robbe-Grillet\u2019s most visually pleasurable film.
\nReview by Vadim Kosmos<\/I><\/B><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,3],"tags":[530,907,960,31,145,961,959],"class_list":["post-4614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-check-it-out","category-dvds-and-blu-rays","tag-1970s-cinema","tag-70s-cinema","tag-alain-robbe-grillet","tag-experimental-cinema","tag-french-cinema","tag-nouveau-roman","tag-sado-masochism"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","wps_subtitle":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/purUP-1cq","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":3153,"url":"http:\/\/www.electricsheepmagazine.co.uk\/reviews\/2013\/07\/05\/a-field-in-england\/","url_meta":{"origin":4614,"position":0},"title":"A Field in England","author":"Pam Jahn","date":"July 5, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Ben Wheatley\u2019s astonishing, psychedelic period piece is an original, adventurous, imaginative, compelling work. 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