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Alain Robbe-Grillet discusses his script for the movie Last Year at Marienbad.
The universe in which the entire film occurs is, characteristically,
that of a perpetual present which makes all recourse to memory
impossible. This is a world without a past, a world which is
self-sufficient at every moment and which obliterates itself as it
proceeds. This man, this woman, begin existing only when they appear on
the screen the first time; before that they are nothing; and, once the
projection is over, they are nothing again. Their existence lasts only
as long as the film lasts. There can be no reality outside the images
we see, the words we hear.
Thanks to bright stupid confetti for the quote. It is from the essay "Time and Description in Fiction Today" from the collection For a New Novel. Google Book gives you access to the majority of the essay.
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“This man, this woman, begin existing only when they appear on the screen the first time; before that they are nothing; and, once the projection is over, they are nothing again.”
Taken to its logical conclusion — no, accepted in terms of its expressed logic — this means the man and woman do not even possess a narrative existence *within* the world (so to speak) of the movie’s narrative; i.e., they stop “existing” at the end of every scene, and in fact what we are watching is not a fictional narrative in movie form at all, but a series of celluloid set-pieces only linked together by the glue-stick of the film editor. Is this what Robb-Grillet means? That fictional narratives have *zero* existence outside what is explicit? If so, they are not narratives at all, but random pastiche to which we wrongly ascribe coherence.