Jacques Rivette

Contemporary Film Directors

by Mary M. Wiles

As a pioneer of the French New Wave, Jacques Rivette was one of a group of directors who permanently altered the world's perception of cinema by taking the camera out of the studios and into the streets. His films, including Paris nous appartient, Out 1: Noli me tangere, Céline et Julie vont en bateau--Phantom Ladies Over Paris, La belle noiseuse, Secret défense, and Va savoir are extraordinary combinations of intellectual depth, playfulness, and sensuous beauty.

 

In this study of Rivette, Mary M. Wiles provides a thorough account of the director's career from the burgeoning French New Wave to the present day, focusing on the theatricality of Rivette's films and his explorations of the relationship between cinema and fine arts such as painting, literature, music, and dance. Wiles also explores the intellectual interests that shaped Rivette's approach to film, including Sartre's existentialism, Barthes's structuralism, and the radical theater of the 1960s. The volume concludes with Wiles's insightful interview with Rivette.

Genres: Film

179 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many, many years my tendency was to call Robert Bresson the Greatest Filmmaker of All Time (or even the Greatest Artist of All Time) and Jean-Luc Godard the Second Greatest Filmmaker of All Time. If asked, as I of course was only very rarely, to tell you was in third place, I tended to say that there were a whole bunch of very fine directors tied for third. Jacques Rivette would have been one of those directors. Over the course of the last few years ... this has changed. Rivette has risen in my estimation to a new status of preeminence, joining Bresson and Godard at the top in something like a Trinity of Revered Ones. What changed? Well, even as recently as 2012, when Maryl M. Wiles published her book on Rivette for the University of Illinois Press series on “Contemporary Film Directors” edited by James Naremore, a lot of Rivette’s most important films were difficult or impossible to see. Among such unavailable films, Wiles lists the two features from the uncompleted tetralogy SCÈNES DE LA VIE PARALLÈL (these would be DUELLE and NOROÎT) as well as MERRY-GO-ROUND, the feature that comes directly after them. In 2017 those three films came out in a lovely Blu-ray box set from Arrow Video. Wiles had to travel to New York for a one-off two-day screening of the long (approximately-thirteen-hour) version of OUT 1. A genuine pilgrimage. I happen to be looking right this minute at my copy of the 2016 Carlotta box set containing a whole bunch of disks over which are presented both the long version of OUT 1 (NOLI ME TANGERE) and the shorter (still over four hour) version (SPECTRE). Criterion also put out a Blu-ray of Rivette’s monumental debut feature PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT (PARIS BELONGS TO US) in 2016. Yes, indeed, 2016 and 2017 were very good years to be a long-suffering Jacques Rivette fan. Being afforded a chance to finally see, and study carefully, these remarkable masterpieces did not only bring me deeper into Rivette, revolutionizing my whole personal hermeneutics of cinema, it may well have shifted the earth’s very axis. All of the films mentioned above are truly among the most important in my pantheon, though they entered my life far later than I would have preferred. I fell in love with Rivette’s CÉLINE ET JULIE VONT EN BATEAU, far and away his most popular film, as a teenager. It remains along with Vera Chytilová’s DAISIES (a direct influence upon it) among my favourite films to show female friends and lovers, as I have done most recently less than a month ago. The only other Rivette from the 60s and 70s I saw as a young film student watching two or three movies a day for about six years (as an undergraduate and then a grad student) was his 1966 adaptation of Denis Diderot’s LA RELIGIEUSE starring Anna Karina. I did see and adore his 2001 film VA SAVOIR during its theatrical run in Ottawa. Amusingly, when I defended my master’s thesis in 2004, I recall that the professor Mark Langer, who was not my advisor but was on my defense committee (and who I knew well and had studied with), asked me before the interrogation proper could commence, in affable Mark Langer fashion, if I had seen anything good recently, and I raved enthusiastically at length about Rivette’s SECRET DÉFENSE which I had just watched with my girlfriend on DVD, especially amusing in hindsight considering the thesis I was defending was so exactingly cold in its consideration of cinema and “cool” media more generally. Later, during a period of harrowing mental health travail, I had an experience so intense it was nearly religious seeing 2007’s Balzac adaptation NE TOUCHEZ PAS LA HACHE (THE DUCHESS OF LANGEAISE) during its Calgary theatrical run. Last year I had the opportunity to draw key parallels between Joseph McElroy’s sprawling epochal literary masterpiece WOMEN AND MEN and OUT 1, NOLI ME TANGERE in my Goodreads review of McElroy’s novel, and this past May was able to discuss with eighty-four-year-old bassist and avant-garde music legend Barre Philipps his significant contribution to MERRY-GO-ROUND. In such ways does an artist one admires start to take on an exalted status over time. As of August 2019, there are only three Rivette features I have not seen (in addition to longer versions of films like VA SAVOIR that very few people have seen). It is 1969’s L’AMOUR FOU that remains the most painful lacuna. I hope to see this rectified in due course. Though I have read a tremendous number of books on Robert Bresson and Jean-Luc Godard, alone for so long as they were at the top of my list of masters, Mary M. Wiles’ JACQUES RIVETTE book for University of Illinois Press is the first work of serious scholarship I have ever read on Rivette, and its about goddamn time, to be sure. It is a very fine book, thick with considerations of key influences and routinely leaning into considered analyses of the “close reading” variety. I have taken an absolutely outrageous amount of notes during my reading of the book, and will not have anything close to adequate space in this review to cover everything I thought was important or of surpassing interest. I am going to have to relegate all of those notes to a document and store it in the bowels of my MacBook, there to be made use of should occasion arise. I will simply use the space available for this review to pursue something of a liminal tracing. In her introduction, Wiles begins by commenting on the fact that for much of its short history the cinema has sought to distinguish itself from theatre (this was a central concern of a director like Robert Bresson, as stated repeatedly in his book NOTES ON THE CINEMATOGRAPH, and also figures, as Wiles reminds us, in François Truffaut's monumentally influential essay “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema”). Wiles sees Rivette as entirely at odds with this tendency (contra a "certain tendency"), and tells us she intends to look at various distinct “dimensions” of theatricality mobilized throughout Rivette's body of work, demonstrating how they are deployed in what we might call diverse, though interrelated, strands therein. She goes on to remark that “it becomes evident that Rivette’s authorial signature is not merely discernible in the way in which theatricality inflects his films, but also in the manner in which women’s lives are portrayed.” She avers that the fact that Rivette preferred the credit “mise-en-scène” instead of “director” to deignate his work on his own films reflects “his deeply held conviction that film is a collective, rather than a solitary, endeavor.” Wiles also hints at a revolutionary undercurrent in Rivette’s work, a subject she broached in a conversation she had with him in 2009 in the café at (appropriately) Place de la Bastille. The sections of the book group Rivette’s feature films into seven distinct theatrical categories (following a short section on his early short films and time writing for CAHIERS DU CINÉMA as one of the pupative vanguard members of the Nouvelle Vague): 1) “From Shakespeare to Sartre” (PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT); 2) “From the Literary Text to the Tableau” (LA RELIGIEUSE, HURLEVENT, both versions of LA BELLE NOISEUSE); 3) “A Revolution in Realism, Reflexivity, and Oneiric Reverie” (L’AMOUR FOU, both versions of OUT 1); 4) “Sounding Out the Operatic (DUELLE, NOROÎT, MERRY-GO-ROUND, LE PONT DU NORD); 5) “Reenvisioning Genres” (HAUT BAS FRAGILE, JEANNE LE PUCELLE, SECRET DÉFENSE, VA SAVOIR); 6) “An Occult Theatricality”: (CÉLINE ET JULIE VONT EN BATEAU, L’AMOUR PAR TERRE, LA BANDE DES QUATRE, HISTOIRE DE MARIE ET JULIEN); 7) “Returning, Departing” (NE TOUCHEZ PAS LA HACHE, 36 VUES DU PIC SAINT-LOUP). Naturally, as regards films exploring theatricality, Rivette’s work incorporates or is influenced by existing theatrical traditions and individual theatrical works, many of which Wiles discusses in relation to the individual films: Shakespeare, specifically PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE; Sartre’s LES MAINS SALES; “the subcultural, communal student ethos of the Théâtre National Populaire”; Jean Gruault’s version of Diderot’s LA RELIGIEUSE which Rivette first directed for the stage at the Studio des Champs-Élysées; movement and frenzy, psychodrama and improvisational workshops; classical theatre (SEVEN AGAINST THEBES and PROMETHEUS BOUND) with “meaning factored out” (the legacy of Antonin Artaud’s work with the Ancient Greeks); Cyril Tourneur’s THE REVENGER’S TRAGEDY and its radical staging by Artaud; “taxi-dance hall” phenomenon prevalent in the United States in the aftermath of the First World War (a phenomenon whose perceived danger was, at the time, connected to its incorporation of a commingling of “classes and ethnicities”; Aeschylus’s ORESTEIA and Jean Giraudoux's variation in the form of the play ELECTRE; Pirandello’s COME TU MI VUOI and Italian commedia dell’arte; avant-garde theatre director Peter Brook’s African “carpet shows”; music hall or club performance; Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, Molière; and, in his final film, 36 VUES DU PIC SAINT-LOUP, the unique theatrical space of the circus tent. André Bazin advocated for the retention of the “locus dramatis” of theatre precisely so the cinema could assert its radical break in relation to that which had preceded it. Bazin was a pathbreaking critic, scion of CAHIERS DU CINÉMA, godfather the French Nouvelle Vague, and a man to whom Rivette was extremely close. Rivette saw the cinema as dealing in “truth, with means that are necessarily untruthful.” He saw performance as a polyvalent subject in and of itself. “Rivette relies on theatrical staging to give human priority to the dramatic structure of his film.” Theatrical ritual (and primitive rites) can serve to indulge a return to myth which interjects itself as a radical break with the thrust of industrial modernity and its image culture. The only emancipatory forces available in the modern world may be “primitive” ones (embodied in myth, iterations of expressive communal solidarity, “prophetic music”), available to be incorporated, especially starting with OUT 1, into a violent cinema of “permanent revolution” wherein it is collaborative process itself that liberates by virtue of an occult, ritualistic power in contravention of order and control. Already in PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT, Rivette’s debut feature, a production of Shakespeare PERICLES exists in the context of a nebulous conspiratorial system of control “no longer visible or identifiable” and the corresponding “threat of co-option by capitalist speculators.” In 1989’s LE BANDE DES QUATRE, an avowedly political film in part commenting on the then contemporary Roger Knobelspiess affair et cetera, the nominal villain, the “false seducer” Thomas, perhaps the double of Porbus from LA BELLE NOISEUSE (and other men who see the work of art as a product available for exploitation), represents the forces Rivette said terrified him in a contemporaneous interview: “the State, Money, the Police, the Party…” Theatre contains its emancipatory potential (there is the metaphorical key in LE BANDE DES QUATRE that unlocks “feminine potential”), but the state apparatus also has its theatre (perhaps especially at the level of the judicial)—theatre of a profoundly malevolent sort. The earlier LA RELIGIEUSE—a film that Wiles says rhymes “theatrical staging” with “ideological staging of institutions”—culminates in a institutionally brutalized woman’s suicide, itself presented as “a chilly parody of a theatrical exit.” In the later NE TOUCHEZ PAS LA HACHE, adapted from the second novella in Balzac’s HISTOIRE DES TREIZE (and thus is dialogue with the universe of OUT 1), the two leads engage in nefarious courtship rituals that are not born of amorous fervour, but rather a compulsion to possess (analogous to the vilified figures in previous films who have seen art as something to posses). NE TOUCHEZ PAS returns to the tableaux approach of LA RELIGIEUSE and an “ossified theatricality associated with the social and cultural codes of the day.” The competitive seducers become their own metteurs en scène, though to utterly destructive ends. It is because of this that Rivette’s next and final film, 36 VUES, seems like a sublime apotheosis: it finds a circumspect male suitor—“metteur en scène/psychoanalyst/conspirator”—helping Jane Birkin’s circus aerialist character, who has literally inherited a circus, liberate herself from the “ghosts” of her past by way of a “carnivalesque ritual.” The emancipatory is collaborative and expressive, it disrupts productively and is characterized by rituals in which women attain self-possession through the ongoing attainement of a destabilizing performative rapture. Female agency and female solidarity are celebrated precisely for their power to subvert presiding (heteronormative, patriarchal) constraints. Rivette did not simply see cinema as a new way to express the emancipatory possibilities inherent to theatrical collaboration. Rivette’s early criticism excelled at (and is celebrated for) assessing “the profound interrelation between the arts.” He was a proponent of the idea that cinema is an “impure” art combing elements of literature, theatre, music, painting, and sculpture. Wiles exhaustively details numerous influences that are not confined to theatrical traditions, such as (a short list): Matisse; 18th century painter Jean-Honoré Fragonard and rococo more generally; Balthus’s india ink illustrations; Giotto’s ancient tableau THE RESURRECTION (NOLIE ME TANGERE, 1303-1306); composer Pierre Boulez’s system of “total serialization” (from Boulez, Rivette also adopts concepts of “the maze,” “guided chance,” and “a universe of relative forms”); 19th century poet Gérard de Nerval’s LES FILLES DU FEU (from which the uncompleted tetralogy takes its name); the Paul Verlaine poem from which L’AMOUR PAR TERRE takes its name; Debussy; improvised music; folks songs of the Middle Ages; and operas of various kinds. Duration: cinema and painting are actually both temporal processes (as Bazin has written about with great specificity and as is represnted so magnificently in LA BELLE NOISEUSE). This applies equally to music. Rivette himself is quoted as saying: “The work is always much more interesting to show than the result. I can watch a coppersmith in a Roquier film for three hours. A caldron, even if it is the most beautiful in the world, I will have viewed from all angles in three minutes.” Like the other young critics who went on to comprise the vanguard of the Nouvelle Vague—the men Bazin called half-jokingly the Hitchcocko-Hawksians—Rivette brought elements from Hollywood cinema to his work, such as a radical quasi-Situationist spin on Hawks’s MONKEY BUSINESS in a bravura sequence from L’AMOUR FOU, leitmotifs from Fitz Lang’s MOONFLEET in NOROÎT, or tropes and chronotopes from DOUBLE INDEMNITY and and various Hitchcock films in SECRET DÉFENSE, his film policier version of the Electra myth. Rivette first became passionate about the idea of making films because of Jean Cocteau, especially after having read the diaries Cocteau kept detailing the making of 1946’s LA BELLE ET LA BÊTE, and came to be inspired by Jean Renoir and Jean Rouch, in whom “realism” becomes about “chance.” Rivette changed course after interviewing Renoir for JEAN RENOIR LE PATRON in 1966. He says he found in Renoir “a cinema which does not impose anything, where one tries to suggests things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue at every level, with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet, where the act of filming is part of the film itself.” And of course we need to insist on the primacy of the great 19th century novelist Balzac. The paranoid/conspiratorial world of PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT and the labyrinth of history and the city itself (Alfred Delvau: ���the Sphinx called Paris”), traversed by travelling players and variations of the “protean criminal,” leads to the looser, more exploratory post-JEAN RENOIR LE PATRON experiment of OUT 1, in which the domain of conspiracy is imported and extrapolated from the three Balzac novellas comprising HISTOIRE DES TREIZE (THE THIRTEEN). Note that “occult power” figures into the realm of the conspiratorial in Balzac’s preface to HISTOIRE DES TREIZE, and leads down the path of the films of SCÈNES DE LA VIE PARALLÈL, only DUELLE and NOROÎT having been completed at the time. These two films borrow from Celtic myth, depicting magical rites and duels that feature “phantom goddesses” (of Sun and Moon) existing in the brief inter-realm of the quarantaine (a "festival" period when the can freely walk the earth and interact with mortals). The 2003 masterpiece HISTOIRE DE MARIE ET JULIEN was supposed to be part of the mid-seventies cycle, but Rivette, suffering from “nervous exhaustion,” had to abort production. That the film that finally emerged in 2003 deals with a revenante (spirit doomed to return) played by Emmanuelle Béart reciting the “geis, a magical incantation derived from Celtic druidism,” and performing the “geste interdit” (gesture of prohibition), may cause one to muse that sinister occult forces may have interceded somewhere along the line. A very Rivettian supposition! At any rate, it is indeed lovely to consider, in the manner Wiles encourages us to, the last shot of Rivette’s last film, the cinematographer in this case decades-long-collaborator William Lubtchansky’s daughter Irina, a “quiet image of a full moon suspended between two peaks illuminating the landscape bellow—the sanctified space of medieval myth where sadness is appeased and serenity restored.” Could there by anything more apt than Rivette’s cinema reaching its ultimate fruition suspended in the quarantaine? I could and suppose I will close by mentioning some things Wiles did not and could certainly have touched on. You would think Guy Debord and the Situationists could have been considered beyond a fleeting mention (along with more on the schisms of May '68 in general). Surely the René Clair of ENTR'ACTE and SOUS LES TOITS DE PARIS is important for Rivette. In discussing the "protean criminal," Paris the labyrinthine "Sphinx," and the incorporation of these elements into experiments with serialization, I do not know how you can possibly avoid discussing Louis Feuillade. Still, really, the University of Illinois "Contemporary Film Director" volumes are intended to be compact and fleet. I suppose you cannot possibly touch on everything, especially when the director about whom you are writing seems so keen on touching on nearly everything himself. I will not fault the book for these omissions. What they testify to above all else is my own intense stimulation and exitement. The whole idea with good scholarship is that the ardent are called upon to take these things and run with them. And I like that she throws in a little Lacanian jazz when untangling HAUT BAS FRAGILE. You know, I am always pleased to see Kaja Silverman in somebody's bibliography. I studied film around the turn of the century, dig? A little dollop of psychonalytic theory is like honey to me.

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

a helpful guide thru the heady filmography of one of the best to ever do it. the best because of his erudition, his ambition, his heart, his relentless zeal for experimentation, his status as "king ally". in this book we get the low down on probably most of the very arcane and old theatre and literary and linguistics(?) and film references good old jacques uses to create his cinema. every film of his is based on some other much older material, rivals and ousts jean luc in at least this respect. for this reason understandably SOME of the movies can be dry or repetitive, BUT to me at least miss wiles' ardent research helps explain a lot of the head scratching moments i continue to have with the work. dips into my number one critical bugaboo of long recounting of plot for each film but does so in a constructive way at least . knowing jacques got into the film game because of cocteau's diary of a film, knowing he saw dames du bois du boulogne on his first day in paris, factoids like this very very intriguing. good stuff

[Tom Newth · Rating 4 out of 5]

totally too short, but some good stuff here