The Man Who Lies
A leading figure of the Nouveau Roman movement and the screenwriter of Last Year at Marienbad, an aesthetic and narrative manifesto of 1960s cinema, Alain Robbe-Grillet liked to play games. He went on to direct a dozen feature films, all poking fun at the blurred lines between fantasy and reality, while also disrupting time and space. This program features a few key films from his early directorial period.
Winner of the Best Actor Award for Jean-Louis Trintignant, 1968 Berlin International Film Festival
An enigmatic man arrives in a small town shortly after the Second World War. Constantly contradicting himself, he nevertheless manages to make the relatives of Jean, a missing member of the Resistance, believe that he knew him, and then interferes in their daily lives.
Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet was a French writer and filmmaker. He was one of the figures most associated with the Nouveau Roman trend of the 1960s, along with Nathalie Sarraute, Michel Butor and Claude Simon. He was elected a member of the Académie française in 2004, succeeding Maurice Rheims. He married Catherine Robbe-Grillet, a writer also known as Jeanne de Berg. His film career began when Alain Resnais chose to collaborate with him on his 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad. The film was nominated for the 1963 Academy Award for Writing Original Screenplay and won the Golden Lion in Venice. He then launched a career as a writer-director, creating a series of cerebral and often sexually provocative feature films that explored similar themes to those in his literary work.
