La Nouvelle Vague: Alain Robbe-Grillet's "Trans Europ Express"

The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of classical cinematic form and their spirit of youthful iconoclasm and is an example of European art cinema. Many also engaged in their work with the social and political upheavals of the era, making their radical experiments with editing, visual style, and narrative part of a general break with the conservative paradigm.


Alain Robbe-Grillet was one of the most notorious figures of the French New Wave. According to Wikipedia, he wrote screenplays, notably for Alain Resnais' 1961 film Last Year at Marienbad, a critical success considered to be one of the finest French films of the 1960s. It was followed by a number of films written and directed by Robbe-Grillet himself: "Trans-Europ-Express" (1966), his two French-Slovak films "L'homme qui ment/Muž, ktorý luže" (The Man Who Lies) (1968), "L'Eden et après/Eden a potom" (Eden and After) (1970), "Glissements progressifs du plaisir" (The Slow Slidings of Pleasure) (1974), "Le jeu avec le feu" (Playing with Fire) (1975), "La belle captive" (The Beautiful Captive) (1986), and many others.


Trans-Europ-Express is a 1966 film written and directed by Alain Robbe-Grillet and starring Jean-Louis Trintignant and Marie-France Pisier. The title refers to the Trans Europ Express, a former international rail network in Europe. The film has been variously described as an erotic thriller, a mystery, and a film-within-a-film. Screenwriting guru Robert McKee classifies Trans-Europ-Express as a "nonplot" film, that is a film that does not tell a story.