Eden and After
1970 film
Eden and After (French: L'Eden et après) is a 1970 French–Czechoslovak drama art film directed by French novelist and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet. It was entered into the main competition of the 20th Berlin International Film Festival.
The film's plot follows a group of university students, led by the central character Violette, who engage in enigmatic rituals at a café called Eden. Instead of writing a detailed script for the film, Robbe-Grillet created a story through the 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 relatively obscure actors for most of the roles.
Plot
A group of university students meet after class at a café called Eden, where they perform enigmatic rituals and games—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.
The public source identifies “Eden and After” as 1970 film. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Eden and film.
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Object files, edition statements, performance records and contemporary criticism preserve different stages of the work’s history. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1640370. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1970.
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This entry incorporates text from “Eden and After” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.