Jacques Rivette

Biography: life and films

Of the French New Wave directors, Jacques Rivette is the one who is least understood and most neglected. His Nouvelle Vague cohorts - François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer - are all better known and somewhat easier to define, partly because their films have been more widely distributed, partly because more has been written about them. Rivette is, by contrast, an enigma, and he remains so even after you have watched many of his films. More radical and daring than even that great film innovator Jean-Luc Godard, Rivette was the most experimental and least commercially minded of the Nouvelle Vague pack. He was not only concerned with finding new means of cinematic expression, to explore the wider artistic possibilities of cinema beyond the purely commercial. He also sought to use cinema as a scientist might use a microscope, to explore some of the profound mysteries of human experience, in particular the nature of reality and our ability to differentiate fact from fantasy. There is an inherently metaphysical dimension to Rivette's cinema, a striving for truth which goes way beyond a mere desire to extend the aesthetics of the medium.

The son of pharmacist, Jacques Rivette was born on 1st March 1928 at Rouen, France. His love for cinema came at an early age and was bolstered when he read Jean Cocteau's published diary of the filming of La Belle et la bête. He made his first film, a short, in 1949, Aux quatre coins, just before he began his studies at the Sorbonne in Paris. During his time at university, he frequently attended a ciné-club in the rue Danton of the Latin Quarter. It was here that he befriended Eric Rohmer, with whom he created La Gazette du cinema, a short-lived film review paper, in 1950. Compulsive film addicts, Rivette and Rohmer both set their sights on making a career in film criticism. In 1951, they joined the staff of the recently founded and highly influential Cahiers du Cinéma, where they met several other prominent young critics, some of whom (Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut) would, like them, go on to become film directors and form the main contingent of the French New Wave.

Jacques Rivette's first exposure to commercial filmmaking came when he worked as a trainee assistant on Jean Renoir's French Cancan and Jacques Becker's Ali Baba et les 40 voleurs in 1954. His Nouvelle Vague debut came with his 1956 short film Le Coup du berger, which he shot in Claude Chabrol's apartment. His first full-length film was Paris nous appartient, made in a haphazard, amateurish way over a two-year period, from 1958 to 1959. With its peregrinations through the streets of Paris, lack of narrative structure and philosophical ramblings, the film provided something of a template for the early films of the French New Wave. Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol and Rohmer were all influenced by this 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 by Denis Diderot, La Religieuse is, in cinematic terms, the director's most conventional film, but it was also to be his most controversial. Thought to be an insult to the Catholic Church, the film was banned by the French Ministry of Information, although the ban was fiercely contested by Rivette's supporters and it premiered at the 1966 Cannes Film Festival. (Truffaut made a sly reference to the ban in his film Fahrenheit 451.) When the censure was lifted in 1967, the film was released with an 18 certificate and attracted an audience of nearly three million. When it received its international release, critics outside France wondered what all the fuss was about.

The Nouvelle Vague's Craziest Experimentalist

After making a series of documentaries about the film director Jean Renoir for French television, Jacques Rivette made his first great experimental film, L'Amour fou (1969). An evocative portrait of a dying romance involving a director and his muse, the film anticipates Bernardo Bertolucci's Last Tango in Paris (1972) but it has much deeper connotations. Taking his inspiration from the avant-garde theatre director Marc'O (Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin) and the growing trend in cinéma vérité, Rivette experiments with a range of cinematic styles to show how art (in this case a production of a Greek tragedy) is reflected in real life. The familiar notions of subjectivity and objectivity are thrown into abeyance as the film weaves together various interpretations of the same reality, the one that Rivette films, and the alternative filmed by a TV film crew within the film. The device of nested, inter-relating realities (the old play within a play idea) and the intimate connection between life and theatre are recurring motifs in Rivette's work.

L'Amour fou was Jacques Rivette's first determined attempt to free himself from the constraints of cinema, and thereby unleash the power that was contained in the most flexible and potent of all the arts. The most limiting of these constraints was the length of time that a film could be allowed to run for. For purely commercial reasons, this had been set at about two hours for the past three decades. However, from an artistic perspective, there is no reason why a film should not last five hours, or even fifty-five hours. Most people can comfortably sit 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 on the statement it has to make, and not on a notional number of screenings 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 not let himself be tyrannised by the runtime constraint, which is why most of his films are comfortably over the two hour limit. Who else would even contemplate making a film that ran for more than twelve hours?

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 most experimental 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.) Part fiction, part documentary, this cinematic behemoth was inspired by Balzac's La Comédie humaine and paints a gloomy and disorienting picture of a world that has lost its ideals and risks become mired in violence and disillusionment in the aftermath of the May 68 youth uprising. As in his previous film, Rivette links modern life with Greek tragedy through characters who are rehearsing Greek plays, as if to remind us of the immutability of human behaviour across the centuries. It is a film which, with its ragged composition and rejection of structure, questions the validity of attempting to seek order in a chaotic universe. Cinema is one way that man has invented to impose order on the world and give structure and a sense of logic to a series of events. In Out One, Rivette performs a kind of inversion and uses cinema not to impose order but to make us aware of the disorder that surrounds us and the folly of trying to look for patterns 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 to a mere three hours and 45 minutes, whilst retaining much of the essence of 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 slow transition from the radical to the orthodox. This can be felt in his in-between 1974 film Céline et Julie vont en bateau, which has the daring of Rivette's early films (some regard it as his most innovative film) and the pleasing accessibility of his later, more commercially minded films. As in Rivette's previous two films, Céline et Julie vont en bateau is an exploration of the illusory nature of reality. It involves two 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. But can it really be as simple as that? One of the odd things about the film is the extent to which it appears to change on repeated viewings, as if somehow the spectator's own experiences or state of mind have the power to alter what is being projected onto the screen. What Céline et Julie vont en bateau shows us that we may not be as adept at distinguishing reality from imagination as we like to think. Even when we are conscious, we continue to dream, so who is to say what is real and what is 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 commercial interest. The most interesting is Le Pont du Nord (1982), a completely plotless variation on the mystery-thriller theme which has some superficial similarities to Céline et Julie vont en bateau, once again dispelling the myth that our lives can have any objective reality. Rivette's next significant film was La Belle Noiseuse (1991), his most widely acclaimed work and winner of the Jury Grand Prize at the Festival de Cannes. Its languorous pace and four hour runtime does not prevent it from being the most satisfying and absorbing of Rivette's films (although the director did later release a cut-down two hour version to keep the distributors happy). One of cinema's most 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 by the faultless performances from his three lead actors, Emmanuelle Béart, Michel Piccoli and Jane Birkin.

Love is Comedy, Love is Tragedy

La Belle Noiseuse is arguably Jacques Rivette's masterpiece, although his subsequent Joan of Arc diptych Jeanne la Pucelle (1994) is a comparable achievement. Far less showy and action-oriented than most French historical films of the period, Rivette's two-part film holds our attention because it focuses less on historical events and more on Joan of Arc's inner transformation, from simple farm girl to intrepid warrior. Again, it is not the objective reality that interests Rivette, but the subjective experience, the inner world of his heroine - in particular, the conflict between her driven resolve to fulfil her divine calling and her very natural girly anxieties. Sandrine Bonnaire gives a superbly nuanced performance as the eponymous maid of Orleans, as she would do in Rivette's subsequent Secret défense (1998), the director's one and only foray into film noir thriller territory.

Following the lively comedy Va savoir (2001), a homage to Jean Renoir's Le Carrosse d'or (1953), Jacques Rivette's cinema has taken on a much darker hue - more introspective, less stylised, more conventional. An unsettling ghost 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 more palatable than his previous attempt at Wuthering Heights), a sombre portrait of impossible love, beautifully played by Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume 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 enjoyable concoction 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. Through his influence on today's auteur filmmakers the spirit of the French New Wave remains very much alive.

Filmography

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External Links

• For an in-depth biography with filmography and extensive bibliography visit sensesofcinema.com
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