"There
is a moment in Mozart where the music suddenly seems to draw inspiration only
from itself, from an obsession with a pure chord, all the rest being but
approaches, successive explorations, and withdrawals from this supreme position
where time is abolished. All art may perhaps reach fruition only through the
transitory destruction of its means, and the cinema is never more great than in
certain moments that transcend and abruptly suspend the drama."—Jacques
Rivette, on Roberto Rossellini (1955)
For more than five decades we have chased history and shadows to come to terms
and fully catch up to the beauty, mystery and astonishing work of the acute and
transfixing artist, Jacques Rivette. His cinema—mysterious, enveloping and poetic—invited a form of surrender.
Yes, the films were long and diffuse but colored and shaded by a sensual and
tactile urgency, like the jump cuts in "La belle noiseuse" or the
rapturous musical numbers of "Up, Down, Fragile," that achieved a
lilting buoyancy and possessed a remarkable tenderness and feeling.
Now this major figure is gone. His death, at the age of 87 on Friday, was
confirmed by the French Minister of Culture. His loss is a significant one, for
art and for its history. Few major figures devoted so much of their energy and
work to explicating the meaning, texture and complex visions of other great
directors.
Of the five
signature figures of the French New Wave—Jacques Rivette, Francois Truffaut,
Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer—Jean-Luc Godard is now the only surviving
filmmaker. At the seminal French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma, Rivette wrote
commanding and brilliant studies of Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, Nicholas
Ray, Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger and Ingmar Bergman. Of the founding members of
the French New Wave who started as critics, Rivette marked the purest
distillation of the movement's intellectual passions and artistic impulses.
He directed 23 features, a couple of documentaries and several shorts. He
worked with his idol, Jean Renoir, as an assistant on the director's
"French Cancun," and later made a beautiful multi-part documentary
about the French master.
His most
inventive and sustained artistic period encompassed the improvisational flair
and stylistic experimentation of "L'amour fou" (1968), his 13-hour
landmark "Out 1" (1971), "Celine and Julie Go Boating"
(1974) and "Duelle" and "Noirot" (both 1976).
His final film, "Around a Small Mountain," about a circus troupe, was
a serene and melancholy portrait of performance and art. I met this extraordinary
man once, at the Berlin Film festival in 2007 when he premiered "Don't
Touch the Axe," his severe and beautiful adaptation of Balzac's "The
Duchess of Langeais." Wiry and serious, he projected a soulful
otherworldliness.
He was always a director who evaded popular acceptance because of his working
methods and style. He naturally appealed more to other directors and
cinephiles. As his most perceptive and greatest American champion, Jonathan
Rosenbaum pointed out, Rivette never showed much interest or aptitude in
presenting his work to a wider public. He was intensely private about his
personal life.
Directors revered him. "Rivette is a unique filmmaker: lonely, personal
and cut off from any kind of trend or fashion," French director Bertrand Tavernier
told me in an interview for a 2007 profile. Rivette greatly influenced Martin
Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Susan Seidelman and Richard Linklater (the names of the
characters played by Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke in the "Before"
trilogy, Celine and Jesse, are a tribute to Rivette's masterpiece, "Celine
and Julie Go Boating").
His writing deeply informed the style and themes of his films, evident from his
first feature, "Paris Belongs to Us." His fascination with doubles,
dreams and labyrinths showed the influence of Hitchcock, his shadowy and
nocturnal plots fixated on confinement and loss suggestive of Lang and his
recurring use of breakdown or instability echoing Orson Welles's European
projects such as "Mr. Arkadin" or his adaptation of "The Trial."
He was born in Rouen in 1928, the child of a pharmacist. He developed at an
early age a fascination with film and theater. He arrived in Paris in 1949, and
he haunted the cine-clubs and the screenings of the Cinematheque Francais. He
took in everything. "Rivette was more of a cinema nut than any of
us," Truffaut wrote in his memoir. With Eric Rohmer, he founded a film
magazine, Gazette du cinéma. In 1952, Rivette began his distinguished and
invaluable career at Cahiers du cinema (he served as the editor from 1963-65).
The
rehearsal space has been central to Rivette's body of work. He transforms the
frame, conjuring a triangulated, free-floating desire involving the actors,
their art and their audience. The most sculptural of directors turns his work
into a dance, granting his actors great freedom in shaping the part, adding
pieces of their own lives that acquire an immediacy and spontaneity, even if it
somkehow threatens the verisimilitude, like the way Jane Birkin and Geraldine
Chaplin break off their speech patterns and suddenly switch to speaking English
in "Love on the Ground"
In Rivette's works, actors are frequently active collaborators. He often
credits them for their contributions to the scenario that reflects his innate
humanity and egalitarian spirit that acknowledges the camaraderie and group
portrait. I interviewed Michel Lonsdale about the experiences of making "Out
1":
"Rivette
compared it to Japanese Noh theater, plays that go on for 12 or 15 hours. He
said, ‘Oh, yes, people go to sleep, they go out and have lunch and come back.
It's beautiful. The [Out 1] script was only a long piece of paper. It'd say,
‘Something meets somebody else and somebody else.' Rivette was very calm. He
didn't have much to say to us. He just said, ‘Improvise.'"
Even for the
most industrious and committed of Rivette acolytes, finding and discovering his
work has always constituted a kind of forensic investigation. The vast majority
of features he directed have been materially inaccessible. His greatest
achievement, "Out 1," had its formal American theatrical premiere last
fall, some four and a half decades after Rivette shot the original material in
1970.
Following
its long-delayed American theatrical debut, "Out 1" has just been issued in a
Blu-ray and standard box set by Carlotta Films and Kino Lorber. Criterion is
publishing a Blu-ray of "Paris Belongs to Us," on March 8th. (The film has been
available on the label's streaming channel at Hulu.) The director's 1980 film,
"Le pont du nort," was also just published. At the moment we only know of
Jacques Rivette's work in fragments and shards. The act of witness and
experience, central to his art, is now the ultimate in memory and reclamation.
