Subscribe to watch - 14-day free trial, then £6.99 a month

Eden and After
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s sensual fantasy follows a group of students who enter a bizarre sado-masochistic realm after taking a mysterious drug.
Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Overview
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first film in colour finds him audaciously marrying his theories of narrative experimentation with a highly sensual visual style to create one of his most distinctive works. It charts the descent into depravity of a group of bourgeois students, who enter a bizarre sado-masochistic desert realm after taking a mysterious drug called “fear powder”. As their realities distort and their interrelationships diverge into master-slave hierarchies, Robbe-Grillet’s narrative becomes ever more fractured and fevered.
Partially set in Tunisia, the film’s desert setting was in fact a key factor in the film’s genesis, with the country’s red and yellow desert hues convincing Robbe-Grillet he could finally make a film in colour, having previously expressed dissatisfaction with the way Eastmancolor stock conveyed the colour green. Drawing on an array of visual influences from Piet Mondrian to Marcel Duchamp and Paul Klee, Robbe-Grillet certainly found favour with his new palette (revelling especially in splashes of red blood), but it was arguably the theories of sonic adventurers that proved the most pertinent. The director was fascinated with the twelve-tone musical structures of August Schoenberg and Pierre Boulez, so he structured his plot as a series of twelve recurring themes rather than a conventional narrative. Despite the rather stiff-sounding theories and formal experiments that Robbe-Grillet adopts, the film is far from a dry exercise. A tactile and playful fantasy brimming with beautiful bodies and startling images, Eden and After is not so much a mystery to unravel but rather a narcotic, sensory experience to bathe in.
Related

Edit Edit
Animation & Artists Moving Image 2014 30 mins Director: Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard
Short film by musician Joe McAlinden (BMX Bandits) and artists Iain & Jane (20,000 Days on Earth) about loss, truth and the emotional power of the sea

Memoir of a Snail Memoir of a Snail
Animation & Artists Moving Image 2024 95 mins Director: Adam Elliot
Nick Cave and Sarah Snook voice an Oscar-nominated stop-motion classic of divided twins, told with adult candour and uncanny warmth.

Ghost in the Shell Ghost in the Shell
Animation & Artists Moving Image 1995 83 mins Director: Mamoru Oshii
Mamoru Oshii's beautifully animated and disturbingly prophetic anime classic about the hunt for a supreme hacker in a transhumanist dystopia.

Watership Down Watership Down
Animation & Artists Moving Image 1978 92 mins Director: Martin Rosen
An apocalyptic vision pushes a group of rabbits to abandon their warren in search of a new home, in this landmark British animation.

Requiem for a Village Requiem for a Village
Documentary 1975 68 mins Director: David Gladwell
The idyllic, pastoral past of a Suffolk village is reborn through memory in this extraordinary, little-known film from director David Gladwell.

Un Chien Andalou Un Chien Andalou
Animation & Artists Moving Image 1928 16 mins Silent Director: Luis Buñuel
A scabrous study of desire, the subconscious and anti-clericalism - Buñuel and Dalí’s provocative first film is a classic of Surrealist cinema.

Celine and Julie Go Boating Celine and Julie Go Boating
Drama 1974 194 mins Director: Jacques Rivette
Jacques Rivette’s biggest commercial hit is an exhilarating combination of theatricality, paranoia and ‘la vie parisienne’, around an entrancing examination of making and watching films.

Swimming Pool Swimming Pool
Drama 2003 102 mins Director: François Ozon
A crime novelist seeks peace but gets a dangerous muse in this twisted bilingual thriller from François Ozon.

Enemy Enemy
Drama 2013 91 mins Director: Denis Villeneuve
Jake Gyllenhaal stars as doppelgängers in this dark, pulsating thriller from Denis Villeneuve.

Reawakening Reawakening
Thriller 2024 90 mins Director: Virginia Gilbert
BAFTA-winner Jared Harris stars as a father wrestling with uncertainty when his daughter reappears a decade after vanishing.

Memories of Murder Memories of Murder
Detective drama 2003 131 mins Director: Bong Joon Ho
A pair of detectives clash trying to solve the brutal murder of two women, in Bong Joon Ho’s masterful blend of true crime and dark social satire.

Following Following
Drama 1999 67 mins Director: Christopher Nolan
Christopher Nolan’s gritty neo-noir first feature about a young London writer who gets drawn into a criminal underworld.

Trans-Europ-Express Trans-Europ-Express
Thriller 1966 95 mins Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet
This stylish, cult 1966 erotic thriller stars French New Wave icons Jean-Louis Trintigant and Marie-France Pisier.

Successive Slidings of Pleasure Successive Slidings of Pleasure
Drama 1974 106 mins Director: Alain Robbe-Grillet
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s serpentine erotic mystery presented as a surreal investigation into a woman with feared sexual powers.

The Marching Band The Marching Band
Drama 2023 103 mins Director: Emmanuel Courcol
An acclaimed conductor strikes up a relationship with a brother he never knew he had in this touching French drama with echoes of Brassed Off.

Eclipse Eclipse
Drama 1976 85 mins Director: Simon Perry
Unsettling, little-seen 1970s psychological thriller – a story of sibling rivalry set on the lonely Scottish coast, with Tom Conti and Gay Hamilton.

Vampyros Lesbos Vampyros Lesbos
Horror 1971 89 mins Director: Jesús Franco
Jesús Franco’s dreamily seductive, sun-kissed take on Dracula is one of his most famous works; famed for its hip, psychedelic-loungecore soundtrack.

84 Charlie MoPic 84 Charlie MoPic
War 1989 91 mins Director: Patrick Duncan
Cult 'found footage' war film following a Vietnam patrol unit from the perspective of an embedded combat cameraman.

War and Peace War and Peace
Documentary 2002 134 mins Director: Anand Patwardhan
The rise of nuclear nationalism in 1990s India is explored in a powerful and personal documentary from Anand Patwardhan.

Traffic Traffic
Crime 2000 147 mins Director: Steven Soderbergh
Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning ensemble drama explores America’s war on drugs at the start of the 21st century.