Alain Resnais's L'Année dernière à Marienbad | Last Year in Marienbad (1961)

Samuel Beckett's own English translation of his originally French-written play Fin de partie (or Endgame) (1957) – interestingly published just four years before the release of Marienbad – contains the lines:

'Hamm: We're not beginning to...to...mean something?

Clov: Mean something! You and I, mean something! (Brief laugh.) Ah that's a good one!'

We could make a number of comparisons between the play and the film – the fact that Beckett's play refers to a game, is apparently absurd in nature, etc – but to my mind meaning is the key concept. To Hamm and Clov, meaning is almost a joke, or almost something to be feared, and the brunette A (Delphine Seyrig) seems to be frightened of having a meaning which the Italian-accented X (Giorgio Albertazzi) is attempting to give her by taking her away from the ever-repeating present, fixing her in a past somewhere (perhaps in Marienbad), and moving with her into a future which is by definition indefinable.

This is of course absurd, but then the film Marienbad, with its eternal present peopled by speechless, unmoving ghost-like beings some of the time or at other times dancing, small-talking, mindless game-playing zombies trapped in a surreal, oneiric or potentially nightmarish situation of which they appear to have no cognizance, is surely absurd?. Over them, Death (personified perhaps by M (Sacha Pitoëff) for Mort, possibly) stalks, or gloats: they are evidently lost in a living death and only X holds the key to at least free A from. I'm also reminded of Philippe (Lino Ventura) in Jean-Pierre Melville's film L'Armée des ombres calling the three domino-playing men 'imbéciles' in the Vichy concentration camp which can only lead to death.

Also coming to mind is Pierre Assouline's book of interviews with Antoine Blondin, Le Flâneur de la rive gauche: Entretiens (1988): famously, Blondin wrote in his novel L'Humeur vagabonde: 'Un jour nous prendrons des trains qui partent'. Although Assouline can't pin Blondin down to a specific meaning of that expression, it suddenly occurs to me that meaning itself is exactly what the sentence is about: one day our lives will have meaning. Perhaps X gives A meaning in the end, which she has all the time been avoiding for so long: but why? Even odder, this reminds me of what my cousin Charles Pembleton wrote on the title-page of his poetry book Living in a Timewarp (1974), which he published shortly after a traumatic experience: 'Anything above zero is painful because it has meaning.' Yes, that must be it.

Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'Année dernière à Marienbad – in spite (or perhaps because) of its lack of hardfast meaning – is one of the greatest films ever made, and just in the English langauge alone its influences extend from Stanley Kubrick's The Shining to David Mould's video of Blur's song 'To The End'.

Alain Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express (1966)

Robbe-Grillet's Trans-Europ-Express is a film-within-a-film, a kind of spoof spy film with sado-masochistic elements, or rather a comedy that doesn't really go very far but winds itself into repetitive circles, starts all over again, and then ends with a bang: but a quieter bang than at the beginning.

There's a film director, a producer and a continuation secretary working on the plot of a film, to be called 'Trans-Europ-Express', in a carriage on the Trans-Europ-Express. It's to be about a drug dealer called Elias, and as they create the story we see it played out by Elias (Jean-Louis Trintignant), who changes suitcases with another man after giving the password 'Père Petitjean', and he will use these magic words a number of times between the Gare du Nord and Antwerp, the town of his destination. In Antwerp he passes a row of houses, all with a prostitute in the window, although when one, Eva (Marie-France Pisier), comes up to him, he tells her that he only likes 'rape', and she agrees for extra money. After various escapades he learns that the whole business was only a dummy run to test his aptitude, and that the 'drugs' were in fact only powdered sugar.

So Elias is sent on a second journey, although when he meets Eva again he discovers that she is a police informant. He ties her up and strangles her, goes to a night club where he sees a woman stripping, is surrounded by the police and shot dead in the back yard. The three on the train think that diamond smuggling may have been a better idea for the film.

Alain Robbe-Grillet's L'Immortelle (1963)

Alain Robbe-Grillet wrote the screenplay L'Année dernière à Marienbad, which was directed by Alain Resnais and released in 1961. L'Immortelle is Robbe-Grillet's first film as director, and is perhaps less opaque than expected. The, er, action takes place in Istanbul, where a French teacher, N (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) meets the alluring and mysterious Lale (Françoise Brion), who has other names.

Lale (which mean 'tulip') becomes N's guide and his lover, although she is elusive. She disappears and he looks for her, eventually finds her, although she dies in a car crash after seeing a dog belonging (it appears) to one of the men who have been trailing the couple. N. dreams, and dreams, and drives a car, visiting the same spot as where Lale dies, and he too crashes and dies. A haunting film.

Penelope Houston of The Spectator called this film 'pretentious' but with a 'hypnotic allure', which gives me pause for thought. There's pretentiousness and pretentiousness, let's not forget: any true artist of any nature should aim for pretention because it's designed to reach beyond the conventional, beyond the tedious norm, exploring new territories; but then, there are the pretentions of cranks, phonies and cod-philosophers such as the justifiably forgotten and wilfully unacademic Colin Wilson. Robbe-Grillet, on another very different hand, is a brilliant writer and brilliant film maker who will live on.