2012 MUBI World Cup Voting, Match #67: France (Eden and After) vs. Mexico (The Heist)
In case anyone wants to read it, I wrote an introductory thread for The Heist. It is here .
The Heist is a film with such an interesting background, and it is as well interesting on itself. I hope you’ll enjoy it! :D
Oh, boy! After just recently seeing both films, I was waiting for this unusual pairing of two very different films and styles. We have surrealism vs intense realism. I hope those willing to share their thoughts re these films do so, for it might make for some interesting observations. I’m saving most of my comments for the R-G film, as I think it will be the most contentious.
First off, thanks to Santropez for doing the hard work for us of subbing this distinctive Mexican film. Although I’m not generally keen on these prison dramas, this one felt very real and authentic. These men live in a hell-hole where everyone is on the take or doing drugs, just to survive for another day. There are no good guys, just desparate ones. No moralizing in the film, except to show us what men become reduced to in these intolerable conditions. Full marks to the director for tackling this in a way that was unflinching and compelling. A difficult film to watch, but for the right reasons.
I had seen some of Robbe-Grillet’s films in the first Directors’ Cup and found him an imaginative, but rather indifferent director. I had at one time followed his literary career (reading some of his novels, etc.). Robbe-Grillet is, of course, one of the master-minds of Last Year at Marienbad. He is drawn to highly convoluted plots, labyrinthine scenarios, allusions, doublings – all the tropes of the Nouveau roman, of which he was a founding influence. The writers in this movement were trying to break away from conventional, linear narratives. His films show this same influence, reminding me of Ruiz, in this way.
This film represented his shift (also reflected in his writings of the time) to a kinky type of S&M eroticism, tinged with macabre violence. Perhaps he was just trying to spice up his rather dry, elliptical style – I don’t know. The film comes across as a soft porn variation on ideas he had expressed better elsewhere. It’s sort of Emmanuelle at Marienbad, with the beautiful and seductive Catherine Jourdan as the ingenue lost in the labyrinth.
Some parts of the film reminded me of his writing style: the house of mirrors type club, illusion vs reality, the labyrinthine warehouse, the similar maze-like desert scenes, the doubling of the lead actress at the end, mysterious photos fore-telling later events. Another trope is the figure-eight that is alluded to in the warehouse scene when Jourdan is running to get away. She is told that the entire pathway is a figure-eight, where one can easily become loss. This figure-eight symbol appears repeatedly in his work as an illusion to the sign of infinity.
So, some interesting ideas that never seem to jell in this fantasy world of fake blood, bondage, and illusion. Still, I’m giving it my vote just because of some of the imagination gone wild in the film – and for what it might have been in less self-indulgent hands. A vote, then, for this Catherine Jourdan S&M fantasy. In this case, gratuitous female nudity trumps gritty, hard-hitting realism – meaning I enjoyed the playful R-G film a little more. I’m sure I will be in a distinct minority on this one. I am prepared to be the shallow one, this time.
France (Eden and After) 1 – Mexico (The Heist)
Nice breakdown Oxy. I look forward to watching both and hope I have something to say later.
France (Eden and After) 0 – Mexico (The Heist) 1
The Heist : I must admit that I wasn’t blown away by this film. It was a gritty realist drama on a subject that didn’t quite interest me but it still could keep me awake after a tiring day. I hope I can watch the rest of the trilogy to get some kind of context to the motive behind this work. Thank you Santropez for your effort.
Eden and After : This felt like an eroticised version of City of Pirates(which came much later than this film). I wonder if Ruiz had seen this. All said and done, I just wish the surrealism was sexier than the women.
France (Eden and After) 0 – Mexico (The Heist) 1
El apando is a good film, though not as good as its source material. Cazals’s earlier film Canoa has a lot more narrative tension and draws out a lot of anger in the viewer, so he certainly knows how to construct a tension-filled film. As Rohit says, I’m not blown away, but I did enjoy it a lot (enjoy is probably not the right word, but you know what I mean).
Eden and After is terrible. Robbe-Grillet is likely a unique intellect, but he made some absolutely awful films from the 70s on, and this is the one that started it.
Thanks, Brother – I look forward to your own take on both films. Not to deny any of the negative comments re Eden and After, but in lieu of an intro thread (if Herbie S. is around, he is welcomed to comment) here’s the best analysis I could find of the film – from the IMDb boards:
Though David Lynch cites him as an influence and though he wrote the screenplay for “Last Year at Marienbad”, Alain Robbe-Gillet’s feature films now tend to get little attention. One of his best, and his first in colour, is “Eden and After”, a near impenetrable co-production between France and Czechoslovakia.
The film’s first third takes place in the “Eden Cafe”, a psychedelic joint rife with youths, drugs, jaded sensualists, Coca Cola billboards, “Drink Blood” slogans and mock funerals. It’s a den of apathy, Eden’s inhabitants withdrawn from political engagement and basking in escalating games of performance/role-playing, each of which stresses risk, ritual, power, even rape. Outside Eden, the world is an industrial wasteland; Antonioni’s “Red Desert” at midnight.
This cloistered, Edenic existence is shattered by the arrival of “the stranger”, a ghostlike figure who imposes his visions upon Violeete, a young woman whom he meets. Significantly, these visions are triggered by the vanishing of an abstract painting. From here on, reality and “hallucinations” seem to bleed into one another, Violette thrown headlong into the deserts of North Africa – mankind’s cradle – and other bizarre locations, including factories and the site of the stranger’s own death. As these visions plague Violette, who seems deliriously lost in time, she finds herself “collecting” various objects, be they keys, books, or postcards. But the objects fail to ground Violette. As she becomes increasingly unhinged, sadomasochistic images needle into her skull.
Thematically “Eden and After” may be Godard/Fassbinder in full activist mode – chartering the post-1960s death of innocence, the souring of idealism, a global retreat into addictive and increasingly intense bio-chemical and mediated escapades (at one point a Russian roulette player wishes he were playing with real bullets), the beginning of Fukuyama’s “end of history” and the seeming death of “social alternatives” – but visually it’s a wholly unique beast. Robbe-Grillet, who has always been interested in phenomenology, structures the film as a mythic spirit-quest, his camera trying to sketch the fleeting, emotional and psychological “surfaces” of his characters. Indeed, almost all the role-playing (and stories) that unfold in Eden have analogues in Violette’s “outside world”, implying that the film is either a drug fuelled dream, a premonition of an already unfolding future or that Eden, for all its distractions, is itself a training ground, a place where the subject’s “inside” is colonised before he/she enters the wastelands “outside”.
Early in his career, Robbe-Grillet set out to be “hostile to the very idea of a narrative”. We see this clearly in many of his films and screenplays, most of which shun continuity and causality in favour for a series of seemingly unrelated, temporally out-of-sync segments. This is largely why viewers remain sympathetic to the Cahiers du Cinema or “Right Bank” group of French filmmakers, who tend to be a bit more audience friendly (Truffaut, Chabrol etc), whilst shunning Grillet and the “Left Bank” or “Nouveau Roman” (New Novel) group of film-makers (Resnais, Grillet, Agnes Varda, Melville, Chris Marker, Richard Roud), who ignored convention and had an already existing engagement with experimental literature. Note that many of the Right Bank filmmakers – Godard, Rohmer, Rivette – would come to resemble their Left Bank brothers from the 1970s onwards.
No surprise, then, that “Eden and After’s” narrative is based on the musical structures of Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, who invented the twelve-tone technique, a technique that ensured that all 12 musical notes are essentially given equal importance. For Schoenberg, the “twelve-tone” is such that there is no longer any dominant “sound”, just a constant, often discordant sounding (how can something be disharmonious when the musical piece is designed to have no harmony?) repetition of the same notes. So what “Eden and After” does is takes its very loose plot (a hybrid of “Alice in Wonderland” and the Marquis De Sade’s “Salo” and “Justine”) and repeats a series of 12 themes – each with its own 12 sets of image banks – over the course of twelve segments (or some argue ten: “Intro”, “Eden”, “Drugs”, “Games”, “The Stranger”, “The Factory”, “Tunisia”, “Djerba”, “The DutchMan’s Villa”, “Prison”, “The Desert”). For example, Robbe-Grillet will have real villages overlap with postcards of villages, or blood and blood-art overlap with sexual fluids and real blood. Meanwhile, doubles are mirrored to doubles, incidents occur in groups, and motifs are repeated and retextualized as they reappear from scene to scene. This leads to a visually unorthodox film, but one which viewers sympathetic to more surreal, expressionistic directors may find appealing.
8/10 – Multiple viewings required.
Also, to add re The Heist (El Alpando): I thought the actor playing the dumb guy (with his older mom) a great characterization. Reminded me a bit of Lon Chaney, Jr. in the film version of Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men. What does he say, something to the effect (Santropez can correct this) that he is “everyone’s bitch.” His role made the film that much more real to me. Liked the touches with the men imagining their lovers in the appropriately red water. Would like to see more work by this director.
Let the Eden bashing continue – ha!
France (Eden and After) 0 – Mexico (The Heist) 1
Unlike Brian, I find the extreme realism of El apando (in Spain Celda de castigo / Punishment Cell) more effective than the uneven historical reconstruction of Canoa, Cazals’ most acclaimed film.
Thanks for providing that analysis Oxy. The only thing noticeable and perhaps interesting about the structure of Eden was the way Grillet gives us a kind of trailer of what is going to happen in the rest of the movie through the girls hallucinatory dream and then we observe those things happening as the movie progresses. Reminds you a lot of Chris Marker’s La Jetee which is sort of similarly structured though vastly superior in content.
The problem, I guess, with the Robbe-Grillet film, is that it is being forced to be seen as a singular entity, as “a” film in this match, contrary to the fact that the film is a part of a diptych which includes, N. Took the Dice(1971)…. N. Took the Dice re-arranges the scenes from Eden… in a manner that deconstructs/ reconstructs everything that the earlier film stood for; the ‘belle captive’, Violette, for example, is now Eve, who willfully takes part in the “game” that ensues, shifting from the trapped to the hunter and so on. The two films taken as a whole, posit extremely important ontological questions like the structurality of what we see and do, the constant need of a transcendental entity in order to fill the voids that ‘history’ and ‘reality’ consist of, the way we perceive images and how the sequence is much more important than one unique image and so on. In fact, with N. Took the Dice… Robbe-Grillet posits the audience(‘You’) with a possibility to invent the rules of the game that occur(ed). (I bet, if the film was made now, he would release the footage of the film online as a Godardian stunt and allow the audience to make their own order out of it!!)The rest, very overtly evident themes that the film(s) deal with have been accurately addressed to, in the analysis that Oxymoron gave earlier.
That being said, Robbe-Grillet does seem a bit myopic in his ‘limit-modernist’ exercise. He does not exhaust the cinematic medium in itself to the extent that someone like Ken Jacobs(Tom, Tom, The Piper’s Son) or Chris Marker or even ol’ Hitch could. Also, the whole explicit nature of his pointing things out really puts me off. There is a lot to discuss about Robbe-Grillet’s tropes and methods, which I hope to carry-on doing on another day.
As the format demands, we have to rate Eden and After, in itself, as a singular entity against the uncompromisingly well realized The Heist. The Heist is remarkable for a unique restraint in the pacing that exists in between the usual fast-paced mainstream films(I am not talking of the ultra-fast contemporary stuff a la Chris Nolan or Greengrass) and the seeping dullness of most of the CCC films today. “They just don’t make them like this anymore” : )
France (Eden and After) 0 – Mexico (The Heist) 1
Nice work Oxy. R-B being “hostile to the very idea of narrative,” is a telling phrase in both his novels and films, or so it seems to me.
Wow – thanks for the info re the connection of Eden and After with N. Took the Dice, Rahee. I haven’t seen the other film, but you bring up some interesting points of how they are related and the later film transposes the story of the first. Robbe-Grillet really reminds me of Ruiz, whose films make more sense as one sees more of his work, to see repeated themes (like pirates, mirrors, stories-within-stories, etc. in Ruiz). Still, I think Ruiz the more consistent and interesting filmmaker, although not all his films work for me, either. Chris Marker, as noted, is another filmmaker whose works tie-in, with each film informing the other and certain re-occuring images become easier to spot (Marker’s cats, for example) the more familiar one is with the films. With filmmakers such as this, it’s hard to take one film out of context, as all their films seem tied into a continuing dialogue with the viewer. That is, if the viewer is willing and interested! I guess this applies to all filmmakers of interest, as their work connects somehow to an even more meaningful whole.
Taken on its own, Eden and After can just seem a rather confusing mess – as it does to a number of the viewers here, it seems. Maybe in his films Robbe-Grillet was not as consistent (or as clear) with his hermetic structure as he was in his writing. His writing really does inform his films, however, and it helps to have some familiarity with it to approach his film work. Perhaps his films are too opaque, meaning it might take more patience than most are willing to invest into them to make sense of just what the hell is going on.
I want to highlight something the IMDb reviewer says in the posting above that I think very apt:
This is largely why viewers remain sympathetic to the Cahiers du Cinema or “Right Bank” group of French filmmakers, who tend to be a bit more audience friendly (Truffaut, Chabrol etc), whilst shunning Grillet and the “Left Bank” or “Nouveau Roman” (New Novel) group of film-makers (Resnais, Grillet, Agnes Varda, Melville, Chris Marker, Richard Roud), who ignored convention and had an already existing engagement with experimental literature. Note that many of the Right Bank filmmakers – Godard, Rohmer, Rivette – would come to resemble their Left Bank brothers from the 1970s onwards.
Good point, I think, how the so-called ‘Right Bank’ group of filmmakers seemed to take on a more playful style of narrative, maybe under the influence of the first group. Look at Rivette’s work, for example, to see this ‘playfulness’ of narrative. It’s clear, one group influenced the other. But, poor Eden and After will just have to be hung out to dry.
Oxymoron-I get the whole left-right division that has been charted out, except for the inclusion of Rivette as someone who possibly developed upon the works of people like Robbe-Grillet; he is too damn cool for that! :)
France (Eden and After) 0 – Mexico (The Heist) 1
France (Eden and After) 1 – Mexico (The Heist) 0
There is always a temptation when thinking about a film to reference it with other films by the same director. It can also become a diversion away from focus on the work in question. Luckily, there’s no question of that in either of this match’s entries owing to my virginity in exposure to the work of Felipe Cazals, director of Mexico’s El Apando, as well as Alain Robbe-Grillet’s films- Eden and After being my first. I seem to have a vague memory of reading one or two Robbe-Grillet novels only to stop somewhere near the first quarter mark and put it down, never to be looked at again. Oddly, I seem to confuse him with Michel Houellebecq, another writer whose novels I’ve had trouble reading. But that’s not here nor there, which of the two films do I think is the better? The worthier? The more important? My favorite? The most efficient? Or perhaps which country’s film resources I think should be recognized over the other? I don’t ask these questions in some rhetorical way, but because the films themselves asked them of me. Meaning I suppose they want me to think. Oh bother.
Eden and After is built from three main chapters and a coda to return the film to its beginning. I found the first 15 minutes almost unbearable with its highly stylized action, forced narration, overcooked acting techniques, intimations of sex, drugs, ennui, pain, social agreement, subconscious ramblings, all set in the Eden Cafe, a stage set borrowed from Le Corbusier’s Pavilion in Zurich, or a multi-plane painting by Mondrian wherein a gaggle of young people perform childish games with their new adult bodies. Even their studies of Shakespeare has only been a prelude to boredom’s parlor games using fake blood, fake guns, fake friendships, fake interests. The players are not so different than Bresson’s crew in The Devil, Actually, though treated here as mere mini-skirted and long-haired puppets, doodles perhaps on a psychotherapists notebook listening as his patient recounts events real or imagined. We all know the story, having watched the film, so I’ll skip any additional introduction. Eden and After was a fractured, and splintered tale, one which always wound back onto itself or its touchstones. Unlike most films, it wasn’t fearful of ambiguity, confusion, repetition, foolishness, pretensions, stilted dialogue or narration, and yet it held certain time honored traditions almost sacrosanct. One of those would be the demand for European ideals of beauty. The cast is all young, nubile, athletic, groomed, dressed in formally identifiable costumes. In addition, rigorous aesthetics are never compromised, each scene blocked as if for a Godard-ean tableau, or an action sequence from a Rudolph Valentino silent film. The “look” is never allowed to waver from a stylish 1970 French modernity, as if a layout from Zoom magazine. Even the choice of Djerba, Tunisia with its white-washed geometric architecture and contrasting blues of ocean and sky mark it as a location mixing modernist line and color with allusions to mythical history and tribal psycho-metaphors for Robbe-Grillet’s dabbling into primal forces of fear, sex, art, pain, death, most often announced in a skit borrowed from an over-used crime movie.
I must admit, had it not been for the titillation of Violette (Catherine Jourdan) scampering about in micro-mini skirts and knee high boots, or absence of any clothes, I may not have even finished this film—the Gaulish leering over nudity a mainstay throughout, seemingly trite, but perhaps just another repetition of formulaic signs of neurosis, not only in the characters on the screen, but digging into audience response as well as food for possible introspection. Although, if that is the case, the film’s use of common sexual triggers seems largely designed for male reaction, even in the few lesbian allusions, it felt intended as fodder for the male viewer’s voyeurism. More than once I felt that the camera following Violette in her go-go costume was the actual threat of harm. The viewer (myself, male) and my personal proclivities for heterosexual sex, jealousy, sadomasochism, authority and greed, were the unstated causes of her fear and her constant running away, searching for safe harbor. If I were a woman, would this have been so? Is this film largely gender biased, or is it one more fracture and unbalanced feature of an equation which refuses an answer?
These types of questionings and the mesmerizing use of images are what finally gave me a reason to value Eden and After. It is experimental in its fearlessness to make a dizzy, almost embarrassingly self-aggrandizing film of elementary psychological questions, forgoing even its viewers’ desire to be entertained by overall structure. Instead shooting rapid fire addictive images while psycho stand-in characters march through the scene with Macbeth’s blood on their hands, or women slathering in a bucketful of Zeus’ cum tinted in tinctures of red, or hand guns which won’t ejaculate their intended use, or Violette (Terry Southern’s Candy comes to mind) jerking odd primal go-go dance moves before a bonfire while all male nomad musicians surround her and blow on their pipes throughout the night. Surely, it all seemed over-the-top, but Tantric imagery can be that way. Finally, it became less an intellectual look into post May ‘68 political defeatism, or a view of selfish ennui draped in Parisian fashion, or Capitalism reinstalling its death-head insignia in the red herring of a valuable painting desired by everyone except our heroine (she confused by pharmaceutical powders, doppelgangers, harem tortures, and a rather high body count by film’s end). Instead, Eden and Beyond, seemed to question how stories themselves are presented, or expected to be presented. Sure, I can recite a short few lines on the phenomenological story presented, but when viewed through the kaleidoscopic re-arrangements through time, place, re-telling of one story (drug trip) into another longer Tunisian-Jungian murder story, we find that the audience is given certain power. We are no longer given a schematic screenplay to follow with a well-worn ending to close the tale, but instead, almost Whitman-esque, the story and questions keep unfolding and expounding after the last credits have rolled.
Once again, it wasn’t an easy film to like, in fact I don’t like it. Though I think its a heady use of the methods and involvements of cinema. To watch the other films Robbe-Grillet constructed of these same scenes using other discordant and new patterns might also be an interesting and thoughtful use of editing skills. Though I don’t think I must see all of the directors linked stories to enjoy those given in Eden and After, it was enough for me.
_
I apologize that this is running so long, but as a prior thought to mentioning Felipe Cazals’ The Heist, I want to give a little shout out to Mexico and their film archives, which I believe is filled with incredible and masterly films of depth and insight, be it genre, or with attending music, or drama, or historical—and many experimental films barbed with surreal or originally mythic forms of imagistic communication. Which is a long-winded way of saying I can’t get enough Mexican films (subbed in English).
The Heist was rather effortless to watch, though its subject matter was certainly dark. The director seemed to work with a tight screenplay and/or storyboards to fashion an earthy and uncompromising view of the lower depths. His characters were writ believable, with all the transgressions and vehemence of human instincts driven against one another in a Dantesque view of hell where only powders from opium pods could alleviate the moment’s hatred with a cool, clean, welcome kiss to the brow. The Heist reminded me of stories by José Giovanni, the ex-convict turned screen writer who contributed to many of France’s best crime films of the 1960’s (ie. Le Trou, Le Deuxieme Souffle).
I have no criticism of Felipe Cazals’ film. I’d certainly vote for it had I not talked myself into the rather murky excellence of Eden and After.
France (Eden and After) 1 – Mexico (The Heist) 0
I don’t agree with some of the characterizations in this thread:
“This film represented his shift (also reflected in his writings of the time) to a kinky type of S&M eroticism”
It really didn’t. That is present in a lot of his earlier work – La Maison de Rendez-vous and The Voyeur for example.
“For Schoenberg, the “twelve-tone” is such that there is no longer any dominant “sound”, just a constant, often discordant sounding (how can something be disharmonious when the musical piece is designed to have no harmony?) repetition of the same notes. "
That’s such a horrible misrepresentation of the goals of twelve-tone music. First the twelve-tone system has nothing whatsoever to do with “sound”; it only has to do with notes. And many of the works of Webern, say, are anything but “constant”, and “repetition of the same notes” was very far from being what twelve-tone composers were trying to achieve – that makes it sound like it’s somehow related to Minimalism. I’d go so far as to say the reason many listeners find twelve-tone music ‘difficult’ is that they have trouble finding any ‘repetition’ in it. Schoenberg was inspired to devise the twelve-tone technique because, while he and others had been composing ‘free atonal’ music for a couple of decades, believing that earlier music had exhausted traditional harmony, Schoenberg still wanted some kind of formal foundation for atonal music that would replace traditional harmony. And free atonal music didn’t have that formal foundation. So while many people think the system is an avant-garde development (maybe because the music isn’t easy to sing along to), it was really a very conservative development, born from a desire to bring a system of rules back to music. It also doesn’t work, but that’s a longer discussion.
And while I guess any artist can borrow the serial system and use it as Robbe-Grillet does, it was fundamentally based on the phenomenology of perception of sound. We tend to imagine harmonic centers even they aren’t really there. Schoenberg’s system is devised so as to prevent, to whatever extent possible, composition based around tonal centers. I don’t know what the analog of a ‘tonal center’ is in film, but it certainly isn’t the ‘scene’, and there probably isn’t one at all. So it isn’t clear to me why it would be a good idea to try construct a film using a serial or ‘’twelve-tone’’ technique. And most European composers had abandoned serial technique by the time Robbe-Grillet made N a Pris les Dés and l’Eden et Après, which makes it even more bizarre to my mind that Robbe-Grillet decided it would be a good idea to use it.
As for Rivette, I don’t think a film like Céline et Julie vont en bateau happens without the Nouveau Roman. If you don’t care for Robbe-Grillet, you can credit Claude Simon instead as an influence, I guess, but it seems to me that the attitude to narrative in some of Rivette’s films was ‘in the air’ for a while in French film and fiction.
France (Eden and After) 0 – Mexico (The Heist) 1
Having enjoyed Trans Europe Express, I was disappointed with Eden and After, with its apparent nods to Mondrian colours and geometry and other 20th century European modern artists, some of whom were influenced by N.Africa.
Phew, the Mexican film doesn’t hold back much. The guards and the system more brutal, corrupt and despicable than the desperate imprisoned drug addicts. The film reminded a bit of Last Exit to Brooklyn. A prison system says a lot; keeping people locked up in harsh conditoons is not a sign of success, and a goal to aim for, but failure. At Grenada, i heard a tour guide telling some US tourists how in the prison in the distance the prisoners had a hard time. The response from the group was gleeful, “yeeeah”, “that’s great!”. I almost puked. Whether the film’s violence, sex and female nudity impact on viewers the way the film-maker wanted i’m not sure; nowadays it may seem less shocking or still titillating to some.
VOTING IS CLOSED
Final tally:
France (Eden and After) – 3
Mexico (The Heist) – 6
The winner is:
MEXICO!
Mexicans, at the cry of war,
make ready the steel and the bridle,
and may the Earth tremble at its centers
at the resounding roar of the cannon.
and may the Earth tremble at its centers
at the resounding roar of the cannon!
Risselada
This topic is part of the 2012 MUBI World Cup. If you have not already done so, please read the first post at the topic for an introduction to and rules about this year’s World Cup:
http://mubi.com/topics/2012-mubi-world-cup-introduction-submit-your-list-of-films
France
Original title: L’éden et après
Directed by: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Approximate runtime: 93 min
Submitted by: herbie s
Mexico
Original title: El apando
Directed by: Felipe Cazals
Approximate runtime: 83 min
Submitted by: Santropez
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The purpose of this topic is to cast votes in the matchup listed above and also to be a forum for discussing the films in the match.
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