Alain Robbe-Grillet, an author and filmmaker who was one of France’s most important avant-garde writers in the 1950s, died on Monday. He was 85.

He died at a hospital in western France where he had been admitted over the weekend for cardiac problems, officials said.

As a novelist, Mr. Robbe-Grillet helped establish the New Novel, a genre that rejected conventional storytelling. As a screenwriter, he was best known for his work on Alain Resnais’s “Last Year at Marienbad” (1961), for which he was nominated for an Academy Award.

An enigmatic work whose characters, often bored and identified only by initials, live in an otherworldly chateau, not sure whether they are planning seductions or remembering them, “Last Year in Marienbad” was released in the United States in early 1962 and became one of the most talked-about art films of the year.

Among the films Mr. Robbe-Grillet directed himself were “L’Immortelle” (“The Immortal”) (1963), “Trans-Europ-Express” (1967) and “Eden and After” (1970).

He was the most prominent of France’s so-called New Novelists, a group that emerged in the mid-1950s whose other members included Claude Simon, Michel Butor and Nathalie Sarraute. Their experimental work tossed aside literary conventions like plot and character development, narrative and chronology, chapters and punctuation.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/19/books/19robbe-grillet.html?em&ex=1203570000&en=64f692cbadb64b71&ei=5087%0A