| Eden and After | |
| Director: | Alain Robbe-Grillet |
| Producer: | [1] |
| Story: | Alain Robbe-Grillet |
| Starring: | Catherine Jourdan Pierre Zimmer Juraj Kukura Catherine Robbe-Grillet |
| Music: | Michel Fano |
| Cinematography: | [2] |
| Editing: | Bob Wade |
| Distributor: | Plan Film (France) Mundial Films (USA) |
| Runtime: | 100 minutes |
Eden and After (French: L'Eden et après|link=no; Slovak: Eden a potom...) is a 1970 French-Czechoslovak drama art film[3] directed by French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. It was entered into the 20th Berlin International Film Festival.[4]
Instead of writing a detailed script for the film, Robbe-Grillet created a story through composer Arnold Schoenberg's system for the twelve-tone technique and based the film's plot on the result. Since the project lacked a proper script, Robbe-Grillet had to hire actors who were mostly unknown for the roles.
A group of university students meet after class at a café called Eden, where they perform enigmatic rituals—such as a simulated Russian roulette or pretending one of them has been poisoned to death. One evening an older stranger named Duchemin enters Eden and engages them in magic tricks. He asks them to pick up broken glass pieces with bare hands and heals the resulting cut wounds instantly, a trick he says he learned in Africa. He offers a drug he calls "fear powder", which one of the students, Violette, takes. She hallucinates, terrified by lurid visions of torture and murder, but soon bursts out laughing. She agrees to meet Duchemin later at night in an abandoned factory, where she gets lost upon arrival. After going through a series of hallucinatory visions, which includes a semen-like substance oozing from a pipe, she exits the factory next morning. Duchemin is found dead at the foot of a staircase overlooking the nearby canal. She finds a postcard from Tunisia in his pocket.
Returning home, she discovers that she has been robbed of a valuable painting. She leaves for Tunisia, where she meets Duchemin's doppelgänger named Dutchman and becomes his lover. A gang of thugs who seem like the students she was with at Eden kidnap her. Imprisoned and subjected to torture, she manages to free herself with the help of a doppelgänger of hers. Violette recovers the painting and finds Dutchman dead at the foot of a staircase by the sea, which reminds her of the place where she found Duchemin's body earlier.
Back home, Violette narrates that nothing has happened yet or perhaps everything was just a fantasy, hallucination, or premonitory dream of hers.
Robbe-Grillet's 1968 film The Man Who Lies, which was shot in black-and-white like all the previous films he had directed, performed poorly at the box office.[5] He told an acquaintance that he was considering to quit filmmaking because he felt making films in black-and-white was no longer possible.[6]
There was no detailed script for the film.[7] Instead, Robbe-Grillet came up with the idea that he could create a story using the system Austrian-American composer Arnold Schoenberg used in his version of the twelve-tone technique, constructing the film's plot with ten sets of twelve themes arranged in a different order for each set.[7] [8] The result was, according to Robbe-Grillet, a mixture of Marquis de Sade's Justine and Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, with elements taken from the chivalric romance.[1] With no written details to rely on, Robbe-Grillet had to discuss the film's each shot and scene at depth with the cinematographer, which granted Luther significant creative control over the film.[2]
Robbe-Grillet hired mostly unknown actors since well-established ones in general would not work for a film without a proper script.[7] The actors were informed very little about the film beforehand, only that it was to be shot in Czechoslovakia and Djerba, Tunisia.[7]