Biography: life and films
Of the French New Wave directors, Jacques Rivette is the one who isleast understood and most neglected. His Nouvelle Vague cohorts -François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and EricRohmer - are all better known and somewhat easier to define, partlybecause their films have been more widely distributed, partly becausemore has been written about them. Rivette is, by contrast, anenigma, and he remains so even after you have watched many of hisfilms. More radical and daring than even that great filminnovator Jean-Luc Godard, Rivette was the most experimental and leastcommercially minded of the Nouvelle Vague pack. He was not onlyconcerned with finding new means of cinematic expression, to explorethe wider artistic possibilities of cinema beyond the purelycommercial. He also sought to use cinema as a scientistmight use a microscope, to explore some of the profound mysteries ofhuman experience, in particular the nature of reality and our abilityto differentiate fact from fantasy. There is an inherentlymetaphysical dimension to Rivette's cinema, a striving for truth whichgoes way beyond a mere desire to extend the aesthetics of the medium.
The son of pharmacist, Jacques Rivette was born on 1st March 1928 atRouen, France. His love for cinema came at an early age and wasbolstered when he read Jean Cocteau's published diary of the filming ofLa Belle et la bête. He made his first film, a short, in 1949, Aux quatre coins, just before hebegan his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. During his time atuniversity, he frequently attended a ciné-club in the rue Dantonof the Latin Quarter. It was here that he befriended Eric Rohmer,with whom he created La Gazette ducinema, a short-lived film review paper, in 1950. Compulsive film addicts, Rivette and Rohmer both set their sights onmaking a career in film criticism. In 1951, they joined the staffof the recently founded and highly influential Cahiers du Cinéma, wherethey met several other prominent young critics, some of whom (Jean-LucGodard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut) would, like them,go on to become film directors and form the main contingent of theFrench New Wave.
Jacques Rivette's first exposure to commercial filmmaking came when he workedas a trainee assistant on Jean Renoir's FrenchCancan and Jacques Becker's Ali Baba et les 40 voleurs in1954. His Nouvelle Vague debut came with his 1956 short film Le Coup du berger, which he shot inClaude Chabrol's apartment. His first full-length film was Paris nous appartient, made ina haphazard, amateurish way over a two-year period, from 1958 to1959. With its peregrinations through the streets of Paris, lackof narrative structure and philosophical ramblings, the film providedsomething of a template for the early films of the French NewWave. Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Rohmer were all influenced bythis film.
Having served a two-year stint as editor on Les Cahiers du cinéma,Rivette made his second film in 1966. Adapted from a book byDenis Diderot, La Religieuse is, in cinematicterms, the director's most conventional film, but it was also to be hismost controversial. Thought to be an insult to the CatholicChurch, the film was banned by the French Ministry of Information,although the ban was fiercely contested by Rivette's supporters and itpremiered at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. (Truffaut made a slyreference to the ban in his film Fahrenheit 451.) When thecensure was lifted in 1967, the film was released with an 18certificate and attracted an audience of nearly three million. When it received its international release, critics outside Francewondered what all the fuss was about.
The Nouvelle Vague's Craziest Experimentalist
After making a series of documentaries about the film director JeanRenoir for French television, Jacques Rivette made his first great experimentalfilm, L'Amour fou (1969). Anevocative portrait of a dying romance involving a director and hismuse, the film anticipates Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) butit has much deeper connotations. Taking his inspirationfrom the avant-garde theatre director Marc'O (Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin)and the growing trend in cinémavérité, Rivette experiments with a range ofcinematic styles to show how art (in this case a production of aGreek tragedy) is reflected in real life. The familiar notions ofsubjectivity and objectivity are thrown into abeyance as the filmweaves together various interpretations of the same reality, the onethat Rivette films, and the alternative filmed by a TV film crew withinthe film. The device of nested, inter-relating realities (the oldplay within a play idea) and the intimate connection between life andtheatre are recurring motifs in Rivette's work.
L'Amour fou was Jacques Rivette'sfirst determined attempt to free himself from the constraints ofcinema, and thereby unleash the power that was contained in the mostflexible and potent of all the arts. The most limiting of theseconstraints was the length of time that a film could be allowed to runfor. For purely commercial reasons, this had been set atabout two hours for the past three decades. However, from anartistic perspective, there is no reason why a film should not lastfive hours, or even fifty-five hours. Most people can comfortablysit and watch six or seven hours of insipid television in an evening,so why should they not view a single film of this length? Surely,if cinema is an art form, the length of a film should be contingent onthe statement it has to make, and not on a notional number ofscreenings it must have in a day in order to make a profit. Rivette was one of the very few filmmakers since the silent era to notlet himself be tyrannised by the runtime constraint, which is why mostof his films are comfortably over the two hour limit. Who elsewould even contemplate making a film that ran for more than twelvehours?
Rivette's fourth film Out One (a.k.a. Out 1: Nolie me Tangere) (1971)comes in at 12 hours and 40 minutes, easily the longest and mostexperimental film of the French New Wave. (As the title suggets,it was intended to be the antithesis of what was considered In at the time.) Partfiction, part documentary, this cinematic behemoth was inspired byBalzac's La Comédie humaineand paints a gloomy and disorienting picture of a world that has lostits ideals and risks become mired in violence and disillusionment inthe aftermath of the May 68 youth uprising. As in his previousfilm, Rivette links modern life with Greek tragedy through characterswho are rehearsing Greek plays, as if to remind us of the immutabilityof human behaviour across the centuries. It is a film which, withits ragged composition and rejection of structure, questions thevalidity of attempting to seek order in a chaotic universe. Cinema isone way that man has invented to impose order on the world and givestructure and a sense of logic to a series of events. In Out One, Rivette performs a kind ofinversion and uses cinema not to impose order but to make us aware ofthe disorder that surrounds us and the folly of trying to look forpatterns that are not really there. For commercial reasons,Rivette was obliged to make a cut down version of the film, Out 1: Spectre (1974), which ran toa mere three hours and 45 minutes, whilst retaining much of the essenceof the original film.
How Art and Dreams Relate to Life
After the Out One experiment,there is a gradual and very noticeable taming of Jacques Rivette's cinema, a slowtransition from the radical to the orthodox. This can be felt inhis in-between 1974 film Céline et Julie vont en bateau,which has the daring of Rivette's early films (some regard it as hismost innovative film) and the pleasing accessibility of his later, morecommercially minded films. As in Rivette's previous two films, Céline et Julie vont en bateauis an exploration of the illusory nature of reality. It involvestwo women (memorably played by Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier)who become friends and start to experience a strange recurring dream,in which they make repeated visits to an old house. In the end,they visit the house for real in order to avert a tragedy. Butcan it really be as simple as that? One of the odd things aboutthe film is the extent to which it appears to change on repeatedviewings, as if somehow the spectator's own experiences or state ofmind have the power to alter what is being projected onto the screen.What Céline et Julie vont enbateau shows us that we may not be as adept at distinguishingreality from imagination as we like to think. Even when we areconscious, we continue to dream, so who is to say what is real and whatis not?
Jacques Rivette's next half a dozen or so films are something of a mixed bag,lacking both the innovation of his early films and any real commercialinterest. The most interesting is Le Pont du Nord (1982), acompletely plotless variation on the mystery-thriller theme which hassome superficial similarities to Célineet Julie vont en bateau, once again dispelling the myth that ourlives can have any objective reality. Rivette's next significantfilm was La Belle Noiseuse (1991), hismost widely acclaimed work and winner of the Jury Grand Prize at theFestival de Cannes. Its languorous pace and four hour runtimedoes not prevent it from being the most satisfying and absorbing ofRivette's films (although the director did later release a cut-down twohour version to keep the distributors happy). One of cinema'smost spellbinding and insightful explorations of the creative process,the film is also a haunting study in the psychology of an artist. The sophistication of Rivette's mise-en-scène is well-matched bythe faultless performances from his three lead actors, EmmanuelleBéart, Michel Piccoli and Jane Birkin.
Love is Comedy, Love is Tragedy
La Belle Noiseuse is arguablyJacques Rivette's masterpiece, although his subsequent Joan of Arc diptych Jeanne la Pucelle (1994) is acomparable achievement. Far less showy and action-orientedthan most French historical films of the period, Rivette's two-partfilm holds our attention because it focuses less on historical eventsand more on Joan of Arc's inner transformation, from simple farm girlto intrepid warrior. Again, it is not the objective reality thatinterests Rivette, but the subjective experience, the inner world ofhis heroine - in particular, the conflict between her driven resolve tofulfil her divine calling and her very natural girly anxieties. Sandrine Bonnaire gives a superbly nuanced performance as the eponymousmaid of Orleans, as she would do in Rivette's subsequent Secretdéfense (1998), the director's one and only forayinto film noir thriller territory.
Following the lively comedy Va savoir (2001), a homage toJean Renoir's Le Carrosse d'or (1953),Jacques Rivette's cinema has taken on a much darker hue - moreintrospective, less stylised, more conventional. An unsettlingghost story, Histoire de Marie et Julien(2003) is yet another attempt to merge fantasy and reality and is,thorough Emmanuelle Béart's extraordinarily intense performance,one of Rivette's bleakest and most lyrical films. Ne touchez pas la hache (2007)is one of the director's more inspired literary adaptations (far morepalatable than his previous attempt at Wuthering Heights), a sombreportrait of impossible love, beautifully played by Jeanne Balibar andGuillaume Depardieu. In what was to be his final film, 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup(2009), Rivette revisits some of the themes of his earlier work(notably the connection between art and life) and delivers an enjoyableconcoction of road movie and rom-com. The onset of Alzheimer's disease brought a definitive end to Jacques Rivette's filmmaking career and resulted in his death at the age of 87 on 29th January 2016. Throughhis influence on today's auteur filmmakers the spirit of the French New Wave remains very much alive.
© James Travers 2012
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Filmography
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External Links
- For an in-depth biography with filmography and extensive bibliography visit sensesofcinema.com .
