Jacques Rivette

From criticism to the camera

Rivette came from Rouen to Paris and threw himself into film more completely than almost anyone in his circle. He wrote for Éric Rohmer's La Gazette du cinéma and then for Cahiers du cinéma, and in 1963 succeeded Rohmer as its editor-in-chief, steering the magazine toward politics and modern thought before leaving the post in 1965.[2]

His first feature, Paris Belongs to Us, was shot over several years on almost no money and released in 1961. It reached the screen only because François Truffaut's company, Les Films du Carrosse, and Claude Chabrol's Ajym Films helped finish it; Jean-Luc Godard appears in a brief cameo. Its story of a theatre troupe rehearsing a doomed production, shadowed by a vague conspiracy, set the pattern for much of his later work.[1]

The banned film

In 1966 Rivette adapted Diderot's novel The Nun, with Anna Karina as a young woman forced into a convent against her will. French authorities banned it before release, and the ban became a public fight over censorship that reached the government. The film was eventually allowed to open, and the affair marked Rivette as a director willing to provoke the state.[1]

Duration and improvisation

From the late 1960s Rivette made the films he is now known for, built on rehearsal and chance rather than a fixed script. L'Amour fou (1969) ran over four hours; Out 1 (1971) ran roughly thirteen, and was almost never shown at full length. Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), lighter and more playful, followed two women into a haunted house and became his most loved film.[1]

Theatre runs through all of it. Actors rehearse, plays fail to open, and the line between performance and life keeps blurring. Rivette let scenes find their own length, which is why his films ask more time and patience than most, and why other directors return to them.

Late recognition

He reached his widest audience late. La Belle Noiseuse (1991), a nearly four-hour film about a painter, his model, and an unfinished canvas, won the Grand Prix at Cannes; Va savoir (2001) was warmly received. Among the New Wave directors Rivette remained the least commercial and the most admired within the art, a filmmaker other filmmakers study.[1]

Rouen, and an education at the Cinémathèque

Jacques Pierre Louis Rivette was born at Rouen, in Normandy, on 1 March 1928, the son of a pharmacist. He watched Jean Cocteau shoot Beauty and the Beast near the town in 1945 and decided on films.[1]

He founded a film club in Rouen, made a short on 16mm, and came to Paris in 1949 at twenty-one. He failed the entrance examination to IDHEC, the state film school, and never held a formal qualification in the subject.

What he had instead was the Cinémathèque française. He went daily, and it was there, and in the Latin Quarter film clubs, that he met Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol. Before directing he worked as an assistant to Jean Renoir and Jacques Becker, and in 1956 made a short, Le Coup du berger, in Chabrol's flat.[3]

De l'abjection

In June 1961 Rivette published an essay in Cahiers du cinéma called De l'abjection. It attacked a single camera movement in Kapò, a concentration-camp film by Gillo Pontecorvo, in which the camera tracks in to compose the body of a woman who has thrown herself onto the electrified wire.[2]

His argument was that the movement was indecent. Framing the death as a beautiful image was a moral act by the director, not a technical one, and it disqualified the film.

The piece is among the most quoted in French film criticism, and the question it opened has never really closed. Directors and critics still return to it whenever a film is accused of making suffering look good.

The cycle that collapsed

In the mid-1970s Rivette planned a set of four connected films under the title Les Filles du feu, to be shot in sequence with overlapping casts.

He completed two of them, Duelle and Noroît, both released in 1976. He collapsed during the third and the cycle was abandoned. He did not work for two years.[1]

He returned with Merry-Go-Round, shot in 1978, and then in 1981 made Le Pont du Nord, in which two women cross Paris as though the city were a board game laid out on the ground.

The last films

Jeanne la Pucelle, released in 1994, tells the story of Joan of Arc in two parts running about five and a half hours, with Sandrine Bonnaire in the title role. It is a deliberately plain account, with no visions shown and no music over the battles.[1]

The Duchess of Langeais, in 2007, adapts Balzac. His final film, Around a Small Mountain, came out in 2009 and runs eighty-four minutes, the shortest thing he ever made.[1]

Out 1 came back into circulation in 2015, restored and shown at full length for the first time in more than forty years, a few months before he died.

Death

Jacques Rivette died in Paris on 29 January 2016, aged eighty-seven, after several years with Alzheimer's disease. He is buried in the Montmartre cemetery.

He had made twenty-nine films across five decades. The obituaries settled on the same summary: the least seen of the New Wave directors, and the one the others rated most highly.