There is a strong parallel, in form and in theoretical basis, between the writing of Gertrude Stein and Alain Robbe-Grillet's film L'Année dernière à Marienbad. The power and depth of the film demonstrate that Gertrude Stein's theory failed only because it was applied in the wrong medium; Robbe-Grillet's combination of images with words brings out its full artistic possibilities. That his work should so re-create hers, bringing out its latent value, is more fortuitous than a matter of conscious influence, but both artists spring to some extent from common modern tendencies in art and literature. Robbe-Grillet's critical essays share many conceptions with Gertrude Stein's, and would have led to an art as impenetrable as hers if he had followed his own prescriptions closely, but his repetition of word patterns accompanied by image patterns gives Marienbad that which Tender Buttons and A Novel of Thank You lack. Marienbad rises to the level of metaphor, and gives a dramatic meaning to the art without time, without plot, without character, and without outcome, that Gertrude Stein put forward in the early twentieth century.