Jacques Rivette
Encyclopedia
Jacques Rivette is a French film director
. His most well known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating
, La Belle Noiseuse
and the cult film Out 1
.
He was a member of the French New Wave
, a group that included Francois Truffaut
, Jean-Luc Godard
, Eric Rohmer
and Claude Chabrol
, who all began their careers as film critics at Cahiers du cinéma
in the 1950s and gained international recognition as film directors in the early 1960s. As a film critic, he expressed his admiration for popular American cinema, especially genre directors such as Robert Aldrich
, Howard Hawks
, Alfred Hitchcock
and Frank Tashlin
. As a film director, he is known for his long, complex plots that examine the clash between fiction and reality. Film critic Raphaël Bassan
, has said that Rivette is "the only filmmaker of the ex-New Wave — along with Godard — who keeps making truly personal work on the level of film, while his colleagues from the early days have long rejoined the ranks of the qualite francaise (mainstream French films)" Francois Truffaut said that the French New Wave happened because of Rivette and Marc Chevrie has called Rivette "vaguely legendary but largely unknown."
to Andre Rivette and Andree Amiard, a family "where everyone is a pharmacist." He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille
and briefly studied literature at the city's university before dropping out to become a filmmaker. Inspired by Jean Cocteau
's book on the making of La Belle et la bete, Rivette made his first short film, Aux Quatre Coins in 1949. He took the film to Paris in hopes of being accepted into the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, but failed his examination. In Paris, Rivette began frequenting Henri Langlois
's Cinémathèque Française
, where he befriended Éric Rohmer
, Jean-Luc Godard
, François Truffaut
, Claude Chabrol
, Luc Moullet
and other members of the French New Wave
. Rivette joined the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, and in 1950 began to write film criticism for the Gazette du Cinema, a small film journal he co-founded with Rohmer and Godard. During this time, he made two more short films, Le Quadrille (produced by and starring Godard) in 1950 and Le Divertissement in 1952.
Rivette began to write for Cahiers du cinéma
in 1952 with several other young critics whom he had met at the Cinémathèque and under the guidance of editor-in-chief Andre Bazin
. Rivette championed American directors of the 1940s and 1950s, specifically the work of Howard Hawks
, John Ford
, Nicholas Ray
, Robert Aldrich
and Fritz Lang
, as well as international directors such as Roberto Rossellini
and Kenji Mizoguchi
. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Rivette's writing was sometimes at odds with the philosophies of Bazin, such as a dismissal of realism and formalism that Bazin had championed in his film theories. Later in life he would reject the notion of the auteur theory
, stating that "there is no auteur in films and that a film is something which preexists in its own right. It is only interesting if you have this feeling that the film preexists and that you are trying to reach it, to discover it, taking precautions to avoid spoiling it or deforming it."
During this period Rivette also found work as an assistant for Jacques Becker
on the film Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and for Jean Renoir
on the film French Cancan
. He also worked on the early short films of his friends Truffaut and Godard, often as camera operator. With financial support from Claude Chabrol and French film producer Pierre Braunberger
, Rivette made the 35mm short film Le Coup du berger
(Fool's Mate). Written by Rivette, Chabrol and cinematographer Charles Bitsch, the film is about a young girl who receives a mink coat from her lover and must hide it from her husband, with spoken commentary by Rivette describing the action like moves from a chess game. Godard, Truffaut and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
appear in the film, which was distributed by Braunberger in 1957.
In June 1963, Rivette was made editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma
after Eric Rohmer resigned. Rohmer, always a political conservative, was increasingly at odds with his left-leaning contributors. Under Rivette's leadership, Cahiers changed from an apolitical film magazine to a Marxist magazine that examined the relationship between politics and modern culture. He remained in this position until April 1965, after which he would devote himself entirely to directing films and theatrical productions.
in 1957, Rivette and collaborator Jean Gruault
revised their story based on Rossellini's criticisms and wrote a new film. Using borrowed equipment, a loan of 80,000 francs from Cahiers du cinéma and short ends of film stock provided by Chabrol, the film was shot without sound in 1958, then post-synched and edited in 1959. Rivette could not find a distributor until 1961 and it was neither a commercial nor critical success. Despite being the first of his friends to begin work on a feature film, he was the last of the core members of the French New Wave (Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer) to have his feature film debut distributed.
Paris belongs to uss labyrinthine of a plot tells the story of Anne (Betty Schneider), a young Parisian student who, while rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare
's Pericles
, has to deal with the sudden death of the play's composer, a missing tape recording of the play's musical score, a secret society seeking world domination, an eccentric American journalist who may or may not be the one making the entire film up as it happens, the suicide of the play's producer and the mysterious death of her brother. Chabrol, Godard, Jacques Demy
, and Rivette all appear in minor roles.
Rivette's second feature film was La Religieuse (The Nun), based on the novel by Denis Diderot
. After directing a stage version in 1963, Rivette and collaborator Gruault worked on the script for three years, having to rewrite it three times in order to get approval by the French censors. Finally completed in 1966, the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival
. But because of the subject matter the French Ministry of Information blocked the films release for over a year on moral grounds. The publicity helped turn it into Rivette's only hit film. It is considered Rivette's most conventional and accessible film.
The Nun stars Anna Karina
as Suzanne Simonin, young French woman forced into a convent by her cruel family. After causing a scandal by refusing to take her vows at the strict convent, she is physically and psychologically tortured by both the nuns and her family. She attempts to persevere and escape from the convent all while dealing with her hateful mother, the empathetic mother superior of the convent, a usually absent lawyer, a lesbian nun and a sympathetic (but lustful) monk.
Rivette then created a series of documentaries on director Jean Renoir
for the French television series Cinéastes de notre temps, which aired in 1966 under the title Jean Renoir, The Master.
(Mad Love) in 1968. Frustrated with the conventions of filmmaking, Rivette wanted to create an improvisational atmosphere in the making of the film. He disposed of a script, shot list or specific direction and instead experimented with scenarios and bringing groups of actors together to create a pure film. The film has several layers, including a theatrical group rehearsing a production of Jean Racine
's Andromaque
(which would be filmed by a camera crew), a TV documentary crew that filmed the making of the film/ stage production, and a fictional story about the relationship between the stage director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon
) and his wife and lead actress (Bulle Ogier
). The film ends with an hour long argument between Kalfon and Ogier where they completely destroy their apartment and its contents. Shot in both 35mm and 16mm, the 252 minute film received positive reviews, but was released to the public as a much less praised 2 hour version. The experimentation of this film directly lead to Rivette's next, far more ambitious film.
Invigorated by his new filmmaking techniques, Rivette invited over forty actors (including Jean-Pierre Leaud
, Juliet Berto
, Michael Lonsdale
and Bulle Ogier
) to each develop an improvised character for a new film without interacting with each other or given a specific plot. He then developed a basic structure for what would become Out 1
. In April and May of 1971, Rivette shot over 30 hours of 16mm footage as his cast improvised a story involving conspiracy theories and theatrical rehearsals.
Out 1
stars Jean-Pierre Leaud as Colin, a Parisian con-artist who pretends to be a deaf-mute in order to hustle money. He begins to receive strange, anonymous messages which reference Lewis Carrol's The Hunting of the Snark
and Honoré de Balzac
's Histoire des Treize
(The Thirteen). Colin becomes obsessed with these messages and begins to believe that a real life utopian secret society, like the one described in Balzac's short story, exists and is contacting him. Thinking the messages contain coded instructions, Colin is led to a boutique. There he meets Frederique (Juliet Berto), a young thief with a habit of stealing mail. Together Colin and Frederique use some stolen letters to track down who they believe to be the secret group Thirteen. This leads them to a house by the sea where two different groups of actors are separately rehearsing for productions of Aeschylus
's Prometheus Bound
and Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes
.
Out 1
was shown only once in its 12 hour 40 minute original version, at Le Havre
in September 1971. Originally intended to be shown on television in 12 parts, Rivette was unable to find a distributor for the film and with help from Suzanne Schiffman
spent over a year editing the original down to a 260 minute version called Out 1:Spectre, released in 1974. At its best, the film has received rave reviews and become a cult film, occasionally being shown at film festivals and retrospectives throughout the years.
After abandoning an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera
, Rivette made his most critically regarded film, Céline et Julie vont en bateau
(Céline and Julie Go Boating/Céline and Julie Lose Their Minds). Rivette met with actresses and real life friends Juliet Berto
and Dominique Labourier
to develop two characters that they would like to play, then developed a plot and script with collaborator Eduardo de Gregorio. Unlike his previous two films, Rivette did not utilize improvisation during the filming, stating that the plot was carefully constructed ahead of time. Although the two titular characters do "go boating" in the film, aller en bateau is also French slang meaning "to be caught up in fiction" or "to be taken for a ride". Shot in five weeks during the summer of 1973, the film won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno International Film Festival
in 1974 and was an Official Selection at the 1974 New York Film Festival
. It was produced by Barbet Schroeder
and distributed by Schroeder and Eric Rohmer's company Films du Losange. In 1998, Entertainment Weekly
ranked the film 99 in a list of the 100 greatest films ever made and David Thomson
called it "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane
."
Filled with references to such literature and films as Alice in Wonderland, Jean Cocteau
and Marcel Proust
, Celine and Julie Go Boating
begins when Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian interested in the occult, notices Celine (Juliet Barto), a cabaret magician, drop her scarf and other objects as she frantically walks through the park. Julie retrieves the objects for Celine and they become fast friends, possibly even mystically bound. Together they begin to visit a mysterious "House of Fiction" where the exact same melodrama (based on two short stories by Henry James) play out every day, accumulating with the murder of a young girl named Madlyn by the bizarre Camille (Bulle Ogier
). Eventually Celine and Julie decide to rescue Madlyn and adopt the little girl in modern day Paris. On a boat in the real world, Celine, Julie and Madlyn pass by a boat filled with now frozen characters from the House of Fiction. The film ends full circle (but reversed), with Celine noticing a frantic Julie dropping objects in the park and chases after her.
Rivette then conceived and obtained funding for a series of four films called Scènes de la vie parallèle. With each film revolving around two female characters, Part 1 was to be a love story, Part 2 a fantasy, Part 3 an adventure and Part 4 a musical comedy. Rivette said that his intention for the film series was "to invent a new approach to film acting, where speech, pared down to essential phrases, precise formulae, would play the role of poetic punctuation. Neither a return to silent cinema nor a pantomime, nor choreography: something else, where the movements of the bodies, their counterpoint and inscription in the space of the screen, will be the basis of mise-en-scene." Rivette once again collaborated with Eduardo de Gregorio on the screenplays.
Rivette filmed Parts 2 and 3 of the series in quick succession in 1975. In Duelle
(a play on words roughly translated as Twhylight), the Queen of the Night (Juliet Barto) battles the Queen of the Sun (Bulle Ogier) over a magical diamond that will allow the winner to remain on earth, specifically modern day Paris. In Noroît
(another word play roughly translated as Nor'west), the pirate Morag (Geraldine Chaplin
), seeks revenge against the pirate Giulia (Bernadette Lafont
) for killing her brother. Noroît premiered in London in 1976, but was never distributed. Both films received mediocre reviews and caused problems for Rivette with the producer's of the series. Rivette then began filming Part 1 of the series, a love story starring Albert Finney
and Leslie Caron
. A few days into shooting Rivette suffered a nervous breakdown, and production of the series was abandoned. However Rivette's 2003 film The Story of Marie and Julien
was loosely based on what would have been Part 1.
Rivette finished the business deal for the Scènes de la vie parallèle series with the unrelated film Merry-Go-Round
. Rivette received word that Maria Schneider
wanted to make a film with him and actor Joe Dallesandro
, and Rivette accepted. Shot in 1978, but unreleased until 1981, the film is a detective story about a missing sister and a missing inheritance. Like his last two films, it received mediocre reviews.
In 1980 Rivette decided to return to his more improvisational style and remake Out 1
. Bulle Ogier
, the only original cast member available for the project, and her daughter Pascale Ogier
worked with Rivette on the characters as Rivette had done 10 years earlier to develop the film. Along with co-screenwriter Suzanne Schiffman
, they made the 30-minute short film Paris Goes Away as a kind of sketch for the eventual feature Le Pont du Nord
, which was distributed in 1982.
Le Pont du Nord
, like Celine and Julie Go Boating, stars Bulle and Pascale Ogier as two women who randomly meet and investigate a strange and surreal mystery together involving a strange package and several characters all named Max.
Love on the Ground
, released in 1984, was another film about a theatrical group and the blur between fiction and reality. Geraldine Chaplin
and Jane Birkin
star as two members of a theatrical troupe that are invited to appear in a new play that closely resembles the real life of its director, played by Jean-Pierre Kalfon
, and the mysterious disappearance of his wife.
Wanting to take a break from his experimental and complex style, Rivette next adapted Emily Bronte
's Wuthering Heights
. Based on the first part of the novel and set in 1930s southern France, Hurlevent
stars three unknown actors who were, unlike the William Wyler
and Luis Bunuel
versions, the correct ages for the characters they portrayed: Fabienne Babe as Catherine, Lucas Belvaux
as Roch (Heathcliff), and Oliver Cruveiller as Catherine's brother William. This was the first film in years where Rivette did not use his usual troupe of actors and technicians. It was released in 1985.
(Gang of Four), a film about four drama students and an all girl school who are each told a moral story about a friend in danger by a strange visitor who they all encounter separately. While this is going on the friends develop a vague conspiracy theory involving their teacher (Bulle Ogier
). The film was entered into the 39th Berlin International Film Festival
, where it won an Honourable Mention.
This film directly led to La Belle Noiseuse
(The Beautiful Troublemaker), Rivette's most acclaimed film of his later career. Loosely based on the Balzac
short story The Unknown Masterpiece
, the film depicts the relationship between a reclusive and uninspired painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), his wife and former model Liz (Jane Birkin
) and his new model Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart
) who rekindles his artistic inspiration. Both Liz and Marianne's boyfriend grow jealous of the relationship between artist and muse, but Marianne's presence compels Frenhofer to restart his long abandoned magnum opus
painting La Belle Noiseuse. The four hour film famously shows in real time the progress of the painting, one brush stroke at a time (provided in hand close up by French abstract painter Bernard Dufour
). The film won Rivette the Grand Prix
at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival
and his only César Award
nomination for Best Director.
Rivette then made two back to back films about the life of Joan of Arc
, Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles
, and Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons
. More interested in Joan as a French political hero on Earth than Joan as a mystical saint in heaven, Rivette's films greatly differed from previous well know interpretations of Joan from Carl Theodor Dreyer
, Robert Bresson and Otto Preminger
. Both films starred Sandrine Bonnaire
as Joan and were released in 1994.
The next fifteen years would be the most active of Rivette's career, with such internationally acclaimed films as Up, Down, Fragile
(1995), Top Secret
(1998), Va savoir
(2001), The Story of Marie and Julien
(2003), Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) and 36 Views from the Pic Saint-Loup
(2009).
He recently received some attention for the comment: "Cameron
isn't evil, he's not an asshole like Spielberg
. He wants to be the new De Mille. Unfortunately, he can't direct his way out of a paper bag."
, Jacques Rivette is one of the more experimental of the French New Wave
directors.
Rivette's films progress in unconventional ways—often following multiple plots that can be romantic, mysterious, and comic all at once and employing extensive improvisation
—and are often extremely long (Out 1
lasts 13 hours, although a 4½ hour version was later produced).
Due to the rare nature of Rivette's works, many DVDs (such as the Region 1 Facets release of Jeanne la pucelle, and every DVD release globally of Va savoir) are of these alternate, shorter edits of his films. The complete version of his two-part film Jeanne la pucelle was finally released by Artificial Eye on Region 2 DVD in the UK in 2009.
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...
. His most well known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Céline and Julie Go Boating is a 1974 French film directed by Jacques Rivette.Shot casually in a documentary style, we see a red-haired woman—we will learn that it is Julie --sitting on a bench in a pleasant but rather non-descript Parisian park. She is reading a book, we can see, on magic...
, La Belle Noiseuse
La Belle Noiseuse
La Belle Noiseuse is a 1991 film directed by Jacques Rivette and starring Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, and Emmanuelle Béart. Its title means "The Beautiful Troublemaker"...
and the cult film Out 1
Out 1
Out 1 is a 1971 film directed by Jacques Rivette, one of the major filmmakers of the French New Wave. Notorious for its unwieldy length of twelve hours and forty minutes, it is also referred to as Out 1: Noli me tangere...
.
He was a member of the French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
, a group that included Francois Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
, Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, Eric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher. A figure in the post-war New Wave cinema, he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma....
and Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol was a French film director, a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s...
, who all began their careers as film critics at Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
in the 1950s and gained international recognition as film directors in the early 1960s. As a film critic, he expressed his admiration for popular American cinema, especially genre directors such as Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich was an American film director, writer and producer, notable for such films as Kiss Me Deadly , The Big Knife , What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte , The Flight of the Phoenix , The Dirty Dozen , and The Longest Yard .-Biography:Robert...
, Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
, Alfred Hitchcock
Alfred Hitchcock
Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE was a British film director and producer. He pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in British cinema in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood...
and Frank Tashlin
Frank Tashlin
Frank Tashlin, born Francis Fredrick von Taschlein, also known as Tish Tash or Frank Tash was an American animator, screenwriter, and film director.-Animator:...
. As a film director, he is known for his long, complex plots that examine the clash between fiction and reality. Film critic Raphaël Bassan
Raphaël Bassan
Raphaël Bassan is a French film critic and journalist, who has specialized in experimental film and the history of cinema. He has also made three short movies.-Biography:...
, has said that Rivette is "the only filmmaker of the ex-New Wave — along with Godard — who keeps making truly personal work on the level of film, while his colleagues from the early days have long rejoined the ranks of the qualite francaise (mainstream French films)" Francois Truffaut said that the French New Wave happened because of Rivette and Marc Chevrie has called Rivette "vaguely legendary but largely unknown."
Early life and film criticism
Jacques Rivette was born in RouenRouen
Rouen , in northern France on the River Seine, is the capital of the Haute-Normandie region and the historic capital city of Normandy. Once one of the largest and most prosperous cities of medieval Europe , it was the seat of the Exchequer of Normandy in the Middle Ages...
to Andre Rivette and Andree Amiard, a family "where everyone is a pharmacist." He was educated at the Lycée Pierre Corneille
Lycée Pierre Corneille (Rouen)
The Lycée Pierre-Corneille is a school in Rouen, France. It was founded by the Archbishop of Rouen, Charles, Cardinal de Bourbon and run by the Jesuits to educate the children of the aristocracy and bourgeoisie in accordance with the purest doctrinal principles of Roman Catholicism...
and briefly studied literature at the city's university before dropping out to become a filmmaker. Inspired by Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
's book on the making of La Belle et la bete, Rivette made his first short film, Aux Quatre Coins in 1949. He took the film to Paris in hopes of being accepted into the Institut des Hautes Etudes Cinematographiques, but failed his examination. In Paris, Rivette began frequenting Henri Langlois
Henri Langlois
Henri Langlois was a French film archivist and cinephile. A pioneer of film preservation, Langlois was an influential figure in the history of cinema...
's Cinémathèque Française
Cinémathèque Française
The Cinémathèque Française holds one of the largest archives of films, movie documents and film-related objects in the world. Located in Paris, the Cinémathèque holds daily screenings of films from around the world.-History:...
, where he befriended Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer
Éric Rohmer was a French film director, film critic, journalist, novelist, screenwriter and teacher. A figure in the post-war New Wave cinema, he was a former editor of Cahiers du cinéma....
, Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, François Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an influential film critic and filmmaker and one of the founders of the French New Wave. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he remains an icon of the French film industry. He was also a screenwriter, producer, and actor working on over twenty-five...
, Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol
Claude Chabrol was a French film director, a member of the French New Wave group of filmmakers who first came to prominence at the end of the 1950s...
, Luc Moullet
Luc Moullet
Luc Moullet is a French film critic and filmmaker, and a member of the Nouvelle Vague or French New Wave. Moullet's films are known for their humor, anti-authoritarian leanings and rigorously primitive aesthetic, which is heavily influenced by his love of American B-movies.Though such influential...
and other members of the French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
. Rivette joined the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, and in 1950 began to write film criticism for the Gazette du Cinema, a small film journal he co-founded with Rohmer and Godard. During this time, he made two more short films, Le Quadrille (produced by and starring Godard) in 1950 and Le Divertissement in 1952.
Rivette began to write for Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
in 1952 with several other young critics whom he had met at the Cinémathèque and under the guidance of editor-in-chief Andre Bazin
André Bazin
André Bazin was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist.-Life:Bazin was born in Angers, France, in 1918...
. Rivette championed American directors of the 1940s and 1950s, specifically the work of Howard Hawks
Howard Hawks
Howard Winchester Hawks was an American film director, producer and screenwriter of the classic Hollywood era...
, John Ford
John Ford
John Ford was an American film director. He was famous for both his westerns such as Stagecoach, The Searchers, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath...
, Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray
Nicholas Ray was an American film director best known for the movie Rebel Without a Cause....
, Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich
Robert Aldrich was an American film director, writer and producer, notable for such films as Kiss Me Deadly , The Big Knife , What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? , Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte , The Flight of the Phoenix , The Dirty Dozen , and The Longest Yard .-Biography:Robert...
and Fritz Lang
Fritz Lang
Friedrich Christian Anton "Fritz" Lang was an Austrian-American filmmaker, screenwriter, and occasional film producer and actor. One of the best known émigrés from Germany's school of Expressionism, he was dubbed the "Master of Darkness" by the British Film Institute...
, as well as international directors such as Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
and Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi
Kenji Mizoguchi was a Japanese film director and screenwriter. His film Ugetsu won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and appeared in the Sight & Sound Critics' Top Ten Poll in 1962 and 1972. Mizoguchi is renowned for his mastery of the long take and mise-en-scène...
. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Rivette's writing was sometimes at odds with the philosophies of Bazin, such as a dismissal of realism and formalism that Bazin had championed in his film theories. Later in life he would reject the notion of the auteur theory
Auteur theory
In film criticism, auteur theory holds that a director's film reflects the director's personal creative vision, as if they were the primary "auteur"...
, stating that "there is no auteur in films and that a film is something which preexists in its own right. It is only interesting if you have this feeling that the film preexists and that you are trying to reach it, to discover it, taking precautions to avoid spoiling it or deforming it."
During this period Rivette also found work as an assistant for Jacques Becker
Jacques Becker
Jacques Becker was a French screenwriter and film director.Becker was born in Paris, in an upper class background. During the 1930s he worked as an assistant to director Jean Renoir during his peak period, which produced such cinematic masterpieces as Grand Illusion and The Rules of the Game...
on the film Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves and for Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
on the film French Cancan
French Cancan
French Cancan is a 1954 French musical film written and directed by Jean Renoir and starring Jean Gabin and María Félix.-Plot:Set in 1890s Paris, Henri Danglard is the owner of a cafe, which features his mistress, Lola, as a belly dancer...
. He also worked on the early short films of his friends Truffaut and Godard, often as camera operator. With financial support from Claude Chabrol and French film producer Pierre Braunberger
Pierre Braunberger
Pierre Braunberger was a French producer, executive producer, and actor.- Biography :Born into a family of doctors, Braunberger at the age of seven was already determined not have the same life as his father, and not to take up medicine as a career...
, Rivette made the 35mm short film Le Coup du berger
Le Coup du berger
Fool's Mate is a twenty-eight minute short film directed by Jacques Rivette. It stars Virginie Vitry as a wife cheating on her husband...
(Fool's Mate). Written by Rivette, Chabrol and cinematographer Charles Bitsch, the film is about a young girl who receives a mink coat from her lover and must hide it from her husband, with spoken commentary by Rivette describing the action like moves from a chess game. Godard, Truffaut and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
Jacques Doniol-Valcroze was a French actor, critic, screenwriter, and director...
appear in the film, which was distributed by Braunberger in 1957.
In June 1963, Rivette was made editor in chief of Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du cinéma
Cahiers du Cinéma is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs — Objectif 49 and...
after Eric Rohmer resigned. Rohmer, always a political conservative, was increasingly at odds with his left-leaning contributors. Under Rivette's leadership, Cahiers changed from an apolitical film magazine to a Marxist magazine that examined the relationship between politics and modern culture. He remained in this position until April 1965, after which he would devote himself entirely to directing films and theatrical productions.
1958-1968: Early film career
In the late fifties, Rivette began work on his feature film debut, Paris nous appartient (Paris belongs to us). After having a script rejected by Roberto RosselliniRoberto Rossellini
Roberto Rossellini was an Italian film director and screenwriter. Rossellini was one of the directors of the Italian neorealist cinema, contributing films such as Roma città aperta to the movement.-Early life:Born in Rome, Roberto Rossellini lived on the Via Ludovisi, where Benito Mussolini had...
in 1957, Rivette and collaborator Jean Gruault
Jean Gruault
Jean Gruault , is a French screenwriter and actor. He wrote 25 films between 1960 and 1995. He was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Screenplay for the 1980 film Mon oncle d'Amérique.He was born in Fontenay-sous-Bois, Paris....
revised their story based on Rossellini's criticisms and wrote a new film. Using borrowed equipment, a loan of 80,000 francs from Cahiers du cinéma and short ends of film stock provided by Chabrol, the film was shot without sound in 1958, then post-synched and edited in 1959. Rivette could not find a distributor until 1961 and it was neither a commercial nor critical success. Despite being the first of his friends to begin work on a feature film, he was the last of the core members of the French New Wave (Chabrol, Truffaut, Godard and Rohmer) to have his feature film debut distributed.
Paris belongs to uss labyrinthine of a plot tells the story of Anne (Betty Schneider), a young Parisian student who, while rehearsing for a production of Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's Pericles
Pericles, Prince of Tyre
Pericles, Prince of Tyre is a Jacobean play written at least in part by William Shakespeare and included in modern editions of his collected works despite questions over its authorship, as it was not included in the First Folio...
, has to deal with the sudden death of the play's composer, a missing tape recording of the play's musical score, a secret society seeking world domination, an eccentric American journalist who may or may not be the one making the entire film up as it happens, the suicide of the play's producer and the mysterious death of her brother. Chabrol, Godard, Jacques Demy
Jacques Demy
Jacques Demy was one of the most approachable filmmakers to appear in the wake of the French New Wave. Uninterested in the formal experimentation of Alain Resnais, or the political agitation of Jean-Luc Godard, Demy instead created a self-contained fantasy world closer to that of François...
, and Rivette all appear in minor roles.
Rivette's second feature film was La Religieuse (The Nun), based on the novel by Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie....
. After directing a stage version in 1963, Rivette and collaborator Gruault worked on the script for three years, having to rewrite it three times in order to get approval by the French censors. Finally completed in 1966, the film premiered at the Cannes Film Festival
1966 Cannes Film Festival
The 19th Cannes Film Festival was held on May 5-20, 1966. To honour the festival's 20th anniversary, a special prize was given.-Jury:*Sophia Loren *Marcel Achard *Vinicius de Moraes *Tetsuro Furukaki...
. But because of the subject matter the French Ministry of Information blocked the films release for over a year on moral grounds. The publicity helped turn it into Rivette's only hit film. It is considered Rivette's most conventional and accessible film.
The Nun stars Anna Karina
Anna Karina
Anna Karina is a Danish film actress, director, and screenwriter who has spent most of her working life in France. Karina is known as a muse of the director, Jean-Luc Godard, one of the pioneers of the French New Wave...
as Suzanne Simonin, young French woman forced into a convent by her cruel family. After causing a scandal by refusing to take her vows at the strict convent, she is physically and psychologically tortured by both the nuns and her family. She attempts to persevere and escape from the convent all while dealing with her hateful mother, the empathetic mother superior of the convent, a usually absent lawyer, a lesbian nun and a sympathetic (but lustful) monk.
Rivette then created a series of documentaries on director Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir
Jean Renoir was a French film director, screenwriter, actor, producer and author. As a film director and actor, he made more than forty films from the silent era to the end of the 1960s...
for the French television series Cinéastes de notre temps, which aired in 1966 under the title Jean Renoir, The Master.
1968-1985 Middle film career
His next film was L'amour fouL'Amour fou
L'amour fou is a 1969 movie directed by Jacques Rivette.L'amour fou follows the dissolution of the marriage between Claire, an actress , and Sebastien, her director . It is black and white with two different film gauges employed at different times throughout the film...
(Mad Love) in 1968. Frustrated with the conventions of filmmaking, Rivette wanted to create an improvisational atmosphere in the making of the film. He disposed of a script, shot list or specific direction and instead experimented with scenarios and bringing groups of actors together to create a pure film. The film has several layers, including a theatrical group rehearsing a production of Jean Racine
Jean Racine
Jean Racine , baptismal name Jean-Baptiste Racine , was a French dramatist, one of the "Big Three" of 17th-century France , and one of the most important literary figures in the Western tradition...
's Andromaque
Andromaque
Andromaque is a tragedy in five acts by the French playwright Jean Racine written in alexandrine verse. It was first performed on 17 November 1667 before the court of Louis XIV in the Louvre in the private chambers of the Queen, Marie Thérèse, by the royal company of actors, called "les Grands...
(which would be filmed by a camera crew), a TV documentary crew that filmed the making of the film/ stage production, and a fictional story about the relationship between the stage director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon
Jean-Pierre Kalfon
Jean-Pierre Kalfon is a French film and television actor.-Selected filmography:* The Rabbi's Cat * Parc * The Dreamers * Lulu * La Repetition...
) and his wife and lead actress (Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier is a French actress.Ogier's first appearance on screen was in Voilà l'Ordre, a short film directed by Jacques Baratier with a number of the then-emerging young singers of the 1960s in France, including Boris Vian, Claude Nougaro, etc.She worked with Jacques Rivette Bulle Ogier (born...
). The film ends with an hour long argument between Kalfon and Ogier where they completely destroy their apartment and its contents. Shot in both 35mm and 16mm, the 252 minute film received positive reviews, but was released to the public as a much less praised 2 hour version. The experimentation of this film directly lead to Rivette's next, far more ambitious film.
Invigorated by his new filmmaking techniques, Rivette invited over forty actors (including Jean-Pierre Leaud
Jean-Pierre Léaud
-Early years:Born in Paris, Léaud made his major debut as an actor at the age of 14 as Antoine Doinel, a semi-autobiographical character based on the life events of French film director François Truffaut, in The 400 Blows....
, Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto was a French actress. A member of the same loose group of student radicals as Anne Wiazemsky, she first appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and would go on to appear in many of Godard's subsequent films, including La Chinoise, Week End, Le Gai Savoir,...
, Michael Lonsdale
Michael Lonsdale
Michael Lonsdale , sometimes billed as Michel Lonsdale, is a French actor who has appeared in over 180 films and television shows....
and Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier is a French actress.Ogier's first appearance on screen was in Voilà l'Ordre, a short film directed by Jacques Baratier with a number of the then-emerging young singers of the 1960s in France, including Boris Vian, Claude Nougaro, etc.She worked with Jacques Rivette Bulle Ogier (born...
) to each develop an improvised character for a new film without interacting with each other or given a specific plot. He then developed a basic structure for what would become Out 1
Out 1
Out 1 is a 1971 film directed by Jacques Rivette, one of the major filmmakers of the French New Wave. Notorious for its unwieldy length of twelve hours and forty minutes, it is also referred to as Out 1: Noli me tangere...
. In April and May of 1971, Rivette shot over 30 hours of 16mm footage as his cast improvised a story involving conspiracy theories and theatrical rehearsals.
Out 1
Out 1
Out 1 is a 1971 film directed by Jacques Rivette, one of the major filmmakers of the French New Wave. Notorious for its unwieldy length of twelve hours and forty minutes, it is also referred to as Out 1: Noli me tangere...
stars Jean-Pierre Leaud as Colin, a Parisian con-artist who pretends to be a deaf-mute in order to hustle money. He begins to receive strange, anonymous messages which reference Lewis Carrol's The Hunting of the Snark
The Hunting of the Snark
The Hunting of the Snark is usually thought of as a nonsense poem written by Lewis Carroll in 1874, when he was 42 years old...
and Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
's Histoire des Treize
La Comédie humaine
La Comédie humaine is the title of Honoré de Balzac's multi-volume collection of interlinked novels and stories depicting French society in the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy .-Overview:...
(The Thirteen). Colin becomes obsessed with these messages and begins to believe that a real life utopian secret society, like the one described in Balzac's short story, exists and is contacting him. Thinking the messages contain coded instructions, Colin is led to a boutique. There he meets Frederique (Juliet Berto), a young thief with a habit of stealing mail. Together Colin and Frederique use some stolen letters to track down who they believe to be the secret group Thirteen. This leads them to a house by the sea where two different groups of actors are separately rehearsing for productions of Aeschylus
Aeschylus
Aeschylus was the first of the three ancient Greek tragedians whose work has survived, the others being Sophocles and Euripides, and is often described as the father of tragedy. His name derives from the Greek word aiskhos , meaning "shame"...
's Prometheus Bound
Prometheus Bound
Prometheus Bound is an Ancient Greek tragedy. In Antiquity, this drama was attributed to Aeschylus, but is now considered by some scholars to be the work of another hand, perhaps one as late as ca. 415 BC. Despite these doubts of authorship, the play's designation as Aeschylean has remained...
and Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes
Seven Against Thebes
The Seven against Thebes is the third play in an Oedipus-themed trilogy produced by Aeschylus in 467 BC. The trilogy is sometimes referred to as the Oedipodea. It concerns the battle between an Argive army led by Polynices and the army of Thebes led by Eteocles and his supporters. The trilogy won...
.
Out 1
Out 1
Out 1 is a 1971 film directed by Jacques Rivette, one of the major filmmakers of the French New Wave. Notorious for its unwieldy length of twelve hours and forty minutes, it is also referred to as Out 1: Noli me tangere...
was shown only once in its 12 hour 40 minute original version, at Le Havre
Le Havre
Le Havre is a city in the Seine-Maritime department of the Haute-Normandie region in France. It is situated in north-western France, on the right bank of the mouth of the river Seine on the English Channel. Le Havre is the most populous commune in the Haute-Normandie region, although the total...
in September 1971. Originally intended to be shown on television in 12 parts, Rivette was unable to find a distributor for the film and with help from Suzanne Schiffman
Suzanne Schiffman
Suzanne Schiffman was a screenwriter and director for numerous motion pictures. She often worked with François Truffaut. The 'script girl' Joelle, played by Nathalie Baye in Truffaut's Day for Night was based on Schiffman...
spent over a year editing the original down to a 260 minute version called Out 1:Spectre, released in 1974. At its best, the film has received rave reviews and become a cult film, occasionally being shown at film festivals and retrospectives throughout the years.
The Phantom of the Opera
Le Fantôme de l'Opéra is a novel by French writer Gaston Leroux. It was first published as a serialisation in "Le Gaulois" from September 23, 1909 to January 8, 1910...
, Rivette made his most critically regarded film, Céline et Julie vont en bateau
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Céline and Julie Go Boating is a 1974 French film directed by Jacques Rivette.Shot casually in a documentary style, we see a red-haired woman—we will learn that it is Julie --sitting on a bench in a pleasant but rather non-descript Parisian park. She is reading a book, we can see, on magic...
(Céline and Julie Go Boating/Céline and Julie Lose Their Minds). Rivette met with actresses and real life friends Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto
Juliet Berto was a French actress. A member of the same loose group of student radicals as Anne Wiazemsky, she first appeared in Jean-Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her, and would go on to appear in many of Godard's subsequent films, including La Chinoise, Week End, Le Gai Savoir,...
and Dominique Labourier
Dominique Labourier
Dominique Labourier is a French actress. She starred as Julie in Jacques Rivette's film Celine and Julie Go Boating. She has appeared in over 40 films since 1968...
to develop two characters that they would like to play, then developed a plot and script with collaborator Eduardo de Gregorio. Unlike his previous two films, Rivette did not utilize improvisation during the filming, stating that the plot was carefully constructed ahead of time. Although the two titular characters do "go boating" in the film, aller en bateau is also French slang meaning "to be caught up in fiction" or "to be taken for a ride". Shot in five weeks during the summer of 1973, the film won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno International Film Festival
Locarno International Film Festival
The Film Festival Locarno is an international film festival held annually in the city of Locarno, Switzerland since 1946. After Cannes and Venice and together with Karlovy Vary, Locarno is the Film Festival with the longest history...
in 1974 and was an Official Selection at the 1974 New York Film Festival
New York Film Festival
The New York Film Festival has been a major film festival since it began in 1963 in New York. The films are selected by the Film Society of Lincoln Center...
. It was produced by Barbet Schroeder
Barbet Schroeder
Barbet Schroeder is a Franco-Swiss movie director and producer who started his career in French cinema in the 1960s, working together with directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette.-Life and career:...
and distributed by Schroeder and Eric Rohmer's company Films du Losange. In 1998, Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly
Entertainment Weekly is an American magazine, published by the Time division of Time Warner, that covers film, television, music, broadway theatre, books and popular culture...
ranked the film 99 in a list of the 100 greatest films ever made and David Thomson
David Thomson (film critic)
David Thomson is a film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film.-Career:...
called it "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane
Citizen Kane is a 1941 American drama film, directed by and starring Orson Welles. Many critics consider it the greatest American film of all time, especially for its innovative cinematography, music and narrative structure. Citizen Kane was Welles' first feature film...
."
Filled with references to such literature and films as Alice in Wonderland, Jean Cocteau
Jean Cocteau
Jean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
and Marcel Proust
Marcel Proust
Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental À la recherche du temps perdu...
, Celine and Julie Go Boating
Celine and Julie Go Boating
Céline and Julie Go Boating is a 1974 French film directed by Jacques Rivette.Shot casually in a documentary style, we see a red-haired woman—we will learn that it is Julie --sitting on a bench in a pleasant but rather non-descript Parisian park. She is reading a book, we can see, on magic...
begins when Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian interested in the occult, notices Celine (Juliet Barto), a cabaret magician, drop her scarf and other objects as she frantically walks through the park. Julie retrieves the objects for Celine and they become fast friends, possibly even mystically bound. Together they begin to visit a mysterious "House of Fiction" where the exact same melodrama (based on two short stories by Henry James) play out every day, accumulating with the murder of a young girl named Madlyn by the bizarre Camille (Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier is a French actress.Ogier's first appearance on screen was in Voilà l'Ordre, a short film directed by Jacques Baratier with a number of the then-emerging young singers of the 1960s in France, including Boris Vian, Claude Nougaro, etc.She worked with Jacques Rivette Bulle Ogier (born...
). Eventually Celine and Julie decide to rescue Madlyn and adopt the little girl in modern day Paris. On a boat in the real world, Celine, Julie and Madlyn pass by a boat filled with now frozen characters from the House of Fiction. The film ends full circle (but reversed), with Celine noticing a frantic Julie dropping objects in the park and chases after her.
Rivette then conceived and obtained funding for a series of four films called Scènes de la vie parallèle. With each film revolving around two female characters, Part 1 was to be a love story, Part 2 a fantasy, Part 3 an adventure and Part 4 a musical comedy. Rivette said that his intention for the film series was "to invent a new approach to film acting, where speech, pared down to essential phrases, precise formulae, would play the role of poetic punctuation. Neither a return to silent cinema nor a pantomime, nor choreography: something else, where the movements of the bodies, their counterpoint and inscription in the space of the screen, will be the basis of mise-en-scene." Rivette once again collaborated with Eduardo de Gregorio on the screenplays.
Rivette filmed Parts 2 and 3 of the series in quick succession in 1975. In Duelle
Duelle
Duelle is a 1976 experimental fantasy drama directed by Jacques Rivette. The title is a play on words roughly translated as Twhylight. The film stars Juliet Berto as the Queen of the Night who battles the Queen of the Sun over a magical diamond that will allow the winner to remain on earth,...
(a play on words roughly translated as Twhylight), the Queen of the Night (Juliet Barto) battles the Queen of the Sun (Bulle Ogier) over a magical diamond that will allow the winner to remain on earth, specifically modern day Paris. In Noroît
Noroît
Noroît is a 1976 experimental adventure fantasy drama directed by Jacques Rivette. It is loosely based on Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy. The film stars Geraldine Chaplin and Bernadette Lafont as pirates...
(another word play roughly translated as Nor'west), the pirate Morag (Geraldine Chaplin
Geraldine Chaplin
Geraldine Leigh Chaplin is an English-American actress and the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.Chaplin first came to prominence for her Golden Globe-nominated role of Tonya in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago . She received her second Golden Globe nomination for Robert Altman's Nashville...
), seeks revenge against the pirate Giulia (Bernadette Lafont
Bernadette Lafont
Bernadette Lafont is a French actress and the mother of Pauline Lafont .Bernadette Lafont won the César Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for L'Effrontée...
) for killing her brother. Noroît premiered in London in 1976, but was never distributed. Both films received mediocre reviews and caused problems for Rivette with the producer's of the series. Rivette then began filming Part 1 of the series, a love story starring Albert Finney
Albert Finney
Albert Finney is an English actor. He achieved prominence in films in the early 1960s, and has maintained a successful career in theatre, film and television....
and Leslie Caron
Leslie Caron
Leslie Claire Margaret Caron is a French film actress and dancer, who appeared in 45 films between 1951 and 2003. In 2006, her performance in Law and Order: Special Victims Unit won her an Emmy for guest actress in a drama series...
. A few days into shooting Rivette suffered a nervous breakdown, and production of the series was abandoned. However Rivette's 2003 film The Story of Marie and Julien
The Story of Marie and Julien
The Story of Marie and Julien is a 2003 French drama film directed by Nouvelle Vague film maker Jacques Rivette. The film slowly develops from a drama about blackmail into a dark, yet tender, supernatural love story between Marie and Julien, played by Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz. Anne...
was loosely based on what would have been Part 1.
Rivette finished the business deal for the Scènes de la vie parallèle series with the unrelated film Merry-Go-Round
Merry-Go-Round (1981 film)
Merry-Go-Round is a 1981 film by Jacques Rivette, starring Maria Schneider and Joe Dallesandro....
. Rivette received word that Maria Schneider
Maria Schneider (actress)
Maria Schneider was a French actress. She was best known for playing Jeanne, opposite Marlon Brando, in the 1972 film Last Tango in Paris.-Career:...
wanted to make a film with him and actor Joe Dallesandro
Joe Dallesandro
Joseph Angelo D'Allesandro , better known as Joe Dallesandro, is an American actor, and Warhol superstar. Although he never became a mainstream film star, Dallesandro is generally considered to be the most famous male sex symbol of American underground films of the 20th century, as well as a sex...
, and Rivette accepted. Shot in 1978, but unreleased until 1981, the film is a detective story about a missing sister and a missing inheritance. Like his last two films, it received mediocre reviews.
In 1980 Rivette decided to return to his more improvisational style and remake Out 1
Out 1
Out 1 is a 1971 film directed by Jacques Rivette, one of the major filmmakers of the French New Wave. Notorious for its unwieldy length of twelve hours and forty minutes, it is also referred to as Out 1: Noli me tangere...
. Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier is a French actress.Ogier's first appearance on screen was in Voilà l'Ordre, a short film directed by Jacques Baratier with a number of the then-emerging young singers of the 1960s in France, including Boris Vian, Claude Nougaro, etc.She worked with Jacques Rivette Bulle Ogier (born...
, the only original cast member available for the project, and her daughter Pascale Ogier
Pascale Ogier
Pascale Ogier was a French actress.Born Pascale Marguerite Cécile Claude Colette Nicolas in Paris, she was the daughter of a musician father and actress Bulle Ogier. Pascale also chose an acting career, first with appearances on stage...
worked with Rivette on the characters as Rivette had done 10 years earlier to develop the film. Along with co-screenwriter Suzanne Schiffman
Suzanne Schiffman
Suzanne Schiffman was a screenwriter and director for numerous motion pictures. She often worked with François Truffaut. The 'script girl' Joelle, played by Nathalie Baye in Truffaut's Day for Night was based on Schiffman...
, they made the 30-minute short film Paris Goes Away as a kind of sketch for the eventual feature Le Pont du Nord
Le Pont du Nord
Le Pont du Nord is a 1981 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. The film stars Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale Ogier. It was released in France on 24 March 1982...
, which was distributed in 1982.
Le Pont du Nord
Le Pont du Nord
Le Pont du Nord is a 1981 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. The film stars Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale Ogier. It was released in France on 24 March 1982...
, like Celine and Julie Go Boating, stars Bulle and Pascale Ogier as two women who randomly meet and investigate a strange and surreal mystery together involving a strange package and several characters all named Max.
Love on the Ground
Love on the Ground
Love on the Ground is a 1984 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. The film stars Jane Birkin, Geraldine Chaplin, André Dussollier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon. It was released in France on 17 October 1984.-Plot:...
, released in 1984, was another film about a theatrical group and the blur between fiction and reality. Geraldine Chaplin
Geraldine Chaplin
Geraldine Leigh Chaplin is an English-American actress and the daughter of Charlie Chaplin.Chaplin first came to prominence for her Golden Globe-nominated role of Tonya in David Lean's Doctor Zhivago . She received her second Golden Globe nomination for Robert Altman's Nashville...
and Jane Birkin
Jane Birkin
Jane Mallory Birkin, OBE is an English-born actress and singer who lives in France. In recent years she has written her own album, directed a film and become an outspoken proponent of democracy in Burma.- Early life :...
star as two members of a theatrical troupe that are invited to appear in a new play that closely resembles the real life of its director, played by Jean-Pierre Kalfon
Jean-Pierre Kalfon
Jean-Pierre Kalfon is a French film and television actor.-Selected filmography:* The Rabbi's Cat * Parc * The Dreamers * Lulu * La Repetition...
, and the mysterious disappearance of his wife.
Wanting to take a break from his experimental and complex style, Rivette next adapted Emily Bronte
Emily Brontë
Emily Jane Brontë 30 July 1818 – 19 December 1848) was an English novelist and poet, best remembered for her only novel, Wuthering Heights, now considered a classic of English literature. Emily was the third eldest of the four surviving Brontë siblings, between the youngest Anne and her brother...
's Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights
Wuthering Heights is a novel by Emily Brontë published in 1847. It was her only novel and written between December 1845 and July 1846. It remained unpublished until July 1847 and was not printed until December after the success of her sister Charlotte Brontë's novel Jane Eyre...
. Based on the first part of the novel and set in 1930s southern France, Hurlevent
Hurlevent
Hurlevent is an adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Based on the first part of the novel and set in 1930s southern France, it starred three unknown actors: Fabienne Babe as Catherine, Lucas Belvaux as Roch , and Oliver Cruveiller as Catherine's brother William...
stars three unknown actors who were, unlike the William Wyler
Wuthering Heights (1939 film)
Wuthering Heights is a 1939 American black-and-white film directed by William Wyler and produced by Samuel Goldwyn. It is based on the novel, Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. The film depicts only sixteen of the novel's thirty-four chapters, eliminating the second generation of characters. The...
and Luis Bunuel
Wuthering Heights (1954 film)
Wuthering Heights is a film directed by Luis Buñuel. In 1931, Buñuel and Pierre Unik wrote a screenplay based on the Emily Brontë novel Wuthering Heights but were never able to get financing. The 1954 film was produced by Óscar Dancigers and costarred Irasema Dilián and Jorge Mistral as the Cathy...
versions, the correct ages for the characters they portrayed: Fabienne Babe as Catherine, Lucas Belvaux
Lucas Belvaux
Lucas Belvaux is a Belgian actor and film director. His directing credits include the Trilogie, consisting of three films with interlocking stories and characters, each of which was filmed in a different genre. The three films are Cavale, a thriller; Un couple épatant, a comedy; and Après la vie,...
as Roch (Heathcliff), and Oliver Cruveiller as Catherine's brother William. This was the first film in years where Rivette did not use his usual troupe of actors and technicians. It was released in 1985.
1985- present: Later film career
In 1988 Rivette received critical acclaim for his film La Bande des quatreGang of Four (film)
Gang of Four is a 1989 French drama film directed by Jacques Rivette. It was entered into the 39th Berlin International Film Festival, where it won an Honourable Mention.-Cast:* Bulle Ogier as Constance* Benoît Régent as Thomas* Fejria Deliba as Anna...
(Gang of Four), a film about four drama students and an all girl school who are each told a moral story about a friend in danger by a strange visitor who they all encounter separately. While this is going on the friends develop a vague conspiracy theory involving their teacher (Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier
Bulle Ogier is a French actress.Ogier's first appearance on screen was in Voilà l'Ordre, a short film directed by Jacques Baratier with a number of the then-emerging young singers of the 1960s in France, including Boris Vian, Claude Nougaro, etc.She worked with Jacques Rivette Bulle Ogier (born...
). The film was entered into the 39th Berlin International Film Festival
39th Berlin International Film Festival
The 39th annual Berlin International Film Festival was held from February 10 to 21, 1989.-Jury:* Rolf Liebermann * Leslie Caron* Chen Kaige* Vadim Glowna* Randa Haines* Vladimir Ignatovski* Adrian Kutter* Francisco Rabal...
, where it won an Honourable Mention.
This film directly led to La Belle Noiseuse
La Belle Noiseuse
La Belle Noiseuse is a 1991 film directed by Jacques Rivette and starring Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, and Emmanuelle Béart. Its title means "The Beautiful Troublemaker"...
(The Beautiful Troublemaker), Rivette's most acclaimed film of his later career. Loosely based on the Balzac
Honoré de Balzac
Honoré de Balzac was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of short stories and novels collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon....
short story The Unknown Masterpiece
Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu
Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu is a short story by Honoré de Balzac. It was first published in the newspaper L'Artiste with the title "Maître Frenhofer" in August 1831...
, the film depicts the relationship between a reclusive and uninspired painter Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), his wife and former model Liz (Jane Birkin
Jane Birkin
Jane Mallory Birkin, OBE is an English-born actress and singer who lives in France. In recent years she has written her own album, directed a film and become an outspoken proponent of democracy in Burma.- Early life :...
) and his new model Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart
Emmanuelle Béart
Emmanuelle Béart is a French film actress, who has appeared in over 50 film and television productions since 1972. Béart won a César Award for Best Supporting Actress in the film Manon des Sources . She has been nominated a further seven times for Most Promising Actress and Best Actress.- Early...
) who rekindles his artistic inspiration. Both Liz and Marianne's boyfriend grow jealous of the relationship between artist and muse, but Marianne's presence compels Frenhofer to restart his long abandoned magnum opus
Magnum opus
Magnum opus , from the Latin meaning "great work", refers to the largest, and perhaps the best, greatest, most popular, or most renowned achievement of a writer, artist, or composer.-Related terms:Sometimes the term magnum opus is used to refer to simply "a great work" rather than "the...
painting La Belle Noiseuse. The four hour film famously shows in real time the progress of the painting, one brush stroke at a time (provided in hand close up by French abstract painter Bernard Dufour
Bernard Dufour
Bernard Dufour is a French painter. He was notable for abstract painting after the Second World War, and later for portraits and human figures.- Life :...
). The film won Rivette the Grand Prix
Grand Prix (Cannes Film Festival)
The Grand Prix is an award of the Cannes Film Festival bestowed by the jury of the festival on one of the competing feature films. It is the second-most prestigious prize of the festival after the Palme d'Or...
at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival
1991 Cannes Film Festival
- Jury :*Roman Polanski *Férid Boughedir *Whoopi Goldberg *Margaret Menegoz *Natalia Negoda *Alan Parker *Jean-Paul Rappeneau *Hans Dieter Seidel *Vittorio Storaro...
and his only César Award
César Award
The César Award is the national film award of France, first given out in 1975. The nominations are selected by the members of the Académie des arts et techniques du cinéma....
nomination for Best Director.
Rivette then made two back to back films about the life of Joan of Arc
Joan of Arc
Saint Joan of Arc, nicknamed "The Maid of Orléans" , is a national heroine of France and a Roman Catholic saint. A peasant girl born in eastern France who claimed divine guidance, she led the French army to several important victories during the Hundred Years' War, which paved the way for the...
, Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles
Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles
Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles is a 1994 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. It chronicles the Life of Joan of Arc and was followed by Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons.-Cast:*Sandrine Bonnaire as Jeanne d'Arc...
, and Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons
Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons
Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons is a 1994 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. It chronicles the Life of Joan of Arc and follows the first film Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles.-Cast:*Sandrine Bonnaire as Jeanne d'Arc...
. More interested in Joan as a French political hero on Earth than Joan as a mystical saint in heaven, Rivette's films greatly differed from previous well know interpretations of Joan from Carl Theodor Dreyer
The Passion of Joan of Arc
The Passion of Joan of Arc is a silent film produced in France in 1928. It is based on the record of the trial of Joan of Arc. The film was directed by Carl Theodor Dreyer and stars Renée Jeanne Falconetti...
, Robert Bresson and Otto Preminger
Saint Joan (1957 film)
Saint Joan is a 1957 British-American film adapted from the George Bernard Shaw play of the same title about the life of Joan of Arc. The restructured screenplay by Graham Greene, directed by Otto Preminger, begins with the play's last scene, which then becomes the springboard for a long flashback,...
. Both films starred Sandrine Bonnaire
Sandrine Bonnaire
Sandrine Bonnaire is a French actress, who has appeared in more than 40 films including Hollywood movies.Bonnaire was born in the town of Gannat, Allier, in the Auvergne region. She was born into a working-class family, the seventh of eleven children. Her acting career began at the age of 16 in...
as Joan and were released in 1994.
The next fifteen years would be the most active of Rivette's career, with such internationally acclaimed films as Up, Down, Fragile
Up, Down, Fragile
-Cast:* Marianne Denicourt - Louise* Nathalie Richard - Ninon* Laurence Côte - Ida* André Marcon - Roland* Bruno Todeschini - Lucien* Wilfred Benaïche - Alfredo* Marcel Bozonnet - Man in the stairway* Philippe Dormoy - Le complice de Ninon...
(1995), Top Secret
Top Secret (1998 film)
-Cast:*Sandrine Bonnaire as Sylvie*Jerzy Radziwilowicz as Walser*Grégoire Colin as Paul*Laure Marsac as Véronique / Ludivine*Françoise Fabian as Geneviève*Christine Vouilloz as Myriam...
(1998), Va savoir
Va savoir
Va savoir is a 2001 French romantic comedy-drama film directed by Jacques Rivette. It stars Jeanne Balibar, Marianne Basler, Hélène de Fougerolles, and Catherine Rouvel. In the normal version, Va Savoir is 154 minutes...
(2001), The Story of Marie and Julien
The Story of Marie and Julien
The Story of Marie and Julien is a 2003 French drama film directed by Nouvelle Vague film maker Jacques Rivette. The film slowly develops from a drama about blackmail into a dark, yet tender, supernatural love story between Marie and Julien, played by Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz. Anne...
(2003), Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) and 36 Views from the Pic Saint-Loup
36 Views from the Pic Saint-Loup
36 Views from the Pic Saint-Loup is a 2009 French-language drama film directed by Jacques Rivette. It was screened in the main competition at the 66th Venice International Film Festival.-Cast:* Jane Birkin as Kate* Sergio Castellitto as Vittorio...
(2009).
He recently received some attention for the comment: "Cameron
James Cameron
James Francis Cameron is a Canadian-American film director, film producer, screenwriter, editor, environmentalist and inventor...
isn't evil, he's not an asshole like Spielberg
Steven Spielberg
Steven Allan Spielberg KBE is an American film director, screenwriter, producer, video game designer, and studio entrepreneur. In a career of more than four decades, Spielberg's films have covered many themes and genres. Spielberg's early science-fiction and adventure films were seen as an...
. He wants to be the new De Mille. Unfortunately, he can't direct his way out of a paper bag."
Themes and style
With Jean-Luc GodardJean-Luc Godard
Jean-Luc Godard is a French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic. He is often identified with the 1960s French film movement, French Nouvelle Vague, or "New Wave"....
, Jacques Rivette is one of the more experimental of the French New Wave
French New Wave
The New Wave was a blanket term coined by critics for a group of French filmmakers of the late 1950s and 1960s, influenced by Italian Neorealism and classical Hollywood cinema. Although never a formally organized movement, the New Wave filmmakers were linked by their self-conscious rejection of...
directors.
Rivette's films progress in unconventional ways—often following multiple plots that can be romantic, mysterious, and comic all at once and employing extensive improvisation
Improvisation
Improvisation is the practice of acting, singing, talking and reacting, of making and creating, in the moment and in response to the stimulus of one's immediate environment and inner feelings. This can result in the invention of new thought patterns, new practices, new structures or symbols, and/or...
—and are often extremely long (Out 1
Out 1
Out 1 is a 1971 film directed by Jacques Rivette, one of the major filmmakers of the French New Wave. Notorious for its unwieldy length of twelve hours and forty minutes, it is also referred to as Out 1: Noli me tangere...
lasts 13 hours, although a 4½ hour version was later produced).
Features films
- 1961 Paris Belongs to Us (140 minutes)
- 1966 The NunThe Nun (film)The Nun is a 1966 French drama film directed by Jacques Rivette and based on the novel of the same title by Denis Diderot.-Plot Summary:...
(140 minutes) - 1968 Mad LoveL'Amour fouL'amour fou is a 1969 movie directed by Jacques Rivette.L'amour fou follows the dissolution of the marriage between Claire, an actress , and Sebastien, her director . It is black and white with two different film gauges employed at different times throughout the film...
(252 minutes) - 1971 Out 1: Don't Touch MeOut 1Out 1 is a 1971 film directed by Jacques Rivette, one of the major filmmakers of the French New Wave. Notorious for its unwieldy length of twelve hours and forty minutes, it is also referred to as Out 1: Noli me tangere...
(750 minutes), Out 1: Spectre (60 minutes) - 1974 Celine and Julie Go BoatingCeline and Julie Go BoatingCéline and Julie Go Boating is a 1974 French film directed by Jacques Rivette.Shot casually in a documentary style, we see a red-haired woman—we will learn that it is Julie --sitting on a bench in a pleasant but rather non-descript Parisian park. She is reading a book, we can see, on magic...
(192 minutes) - 1976 DuelleDuelleDuelle is a 1976 experimental fantasy drama directed by Jacques Rivette. The title is a play on words roughly translated as Twhylight. The film stars Juliet Berto as the Queen of the Night who battles the Queen of the Sun over a magical diamond that will allow the winner to remain on earth,...
(121 minutes) - 1976 NoroîtNoroîtNoroît is a 1976 experimental adventure fantasy drama directed by Jacques Rivette. It is loosely based on Cyril Tourneur's The Revenger's Tragedy. The film stars Geraldine Chaplin and Bernadette Lafont as pirates...
(145 minutes) - 1981 Merry-Go-RoundMerry-Go-Round (1981 film)Merry-Go-Round is a 1981 film by Jacques Rivette, starring Maria Schneider and Joe Dallesandro....
(157 minutes) - 1981 Le Pont du NordLe Pont du NordLe Pont du Nord is a 1981 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. The film stars Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale Ogier. It was released in France on 24 March 1982...
(131 minutes) - 1984 Love on the GroundLove on the GroundLove on the Ground is a 1984 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. The film stars Jane Birkin, Geraldine Chaplin, André Dussollier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon. It was released in France on 17 October 1984.-Plot:...
(170 minutes, unapproved cut- 127 minutes) - 1985 HurleventHurleventHurlevent is an adaptation of Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights. Based on the first part of the novel and set in 1930s southern France, it starred three unknown actors: Fabienne Babe as Catherine, Lucas Belvaux as Roch , and Oliver Cruveiller as Catherine's brother William...
(130 minutes) - 1988 The Gang of Four (140 minutes)
- 1991 La Belle NoiseuseLa Belle NoiseuseLa Belle Noiseuse is a 1991 film directed by Jacques Rivette and starring Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin, and Emmanuelle Béart. Its title means "The Beautiful Troublemaker"...
(240 minutes), La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento (120 minutes) - 1994 Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The BattlesJoan the Maiden, Part 1: The BattlesJoan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles is a 1994 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. It chronicles the Life of Joan of Arc and was followed by Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons.-Cast:*Sandrine Bonnaire as Jeanne d'Arc...
(160 minutes) - 1994 Joan the Maiden, Part 2: The PrisonsJoan the Maiden, Part 2: The PrisonsJoan the Maiden, Part 2: The Prisons is a 1994 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. It chronicles the Life of Joan of Arc and follows the first film Joan the Maiden, Part 1: The Battles.-Cast:*Sandrine Bonnaire as Jeanne d'Arc...
(176 minutes) - 1995 Up, Down, FragileUp, Down, Fragile-Cast:* Marianne Denicourt - Louise* Nathalie Richard - Ninon* Laurence Côte - Ida* André Marcon - Roland* Bruno Todeschini - Lucien* Wilfred Benaïche - Alfredo* Marcel Bozonnet - Man in the stairway* Philippe Dormoy - Le complice de Ninon...
(169 minutes) - 1998 Top SecretTop Secret (1998 film)-Cast:*Sandrine Bonnaire as Sylvie*Jerzy Radziwilowicz as Walser*Grégoire Colin as Paul*Laure Marsac as Véronique / Ludivine*Françoise Fabian as Geneviève*Christine Vouilloz as Myriam...
(173 minutes) - 2001 Va savoirVa savoirVa savoir is a 2001 French romantic comedy-drama film directed by Jacques Rivette. It stars Jeanne Balibar, Marianne Basler, Hélène de Fougerolles, and Catherine Rouvel. In the normal version, Va Savoir is 154 minutes...
(154 minutes, preferred cut- 225 minutes) - 2003 The Story of Marie and JulienThe Story of Marie and JulienThe Story of Marie and Julien is a 2003 French drama film directed by Nouvelle Vague film maker Jacques Rivette. The film slowly develops from a drama about blackmail into a dark, yet tender, supernatural love story between Marie and Julien, played by Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz. Anne...
(151 minutes) - 2007 Ne touchez pas la hache (137 minutes)
- 2009 36 Views from the Pic Saint-Loup (84 minutes)
Short films and television work
- 1949 Aux quatre coins - (lost)
- 1950 Le Quadrille - (lost)
- 1952 Le Divertissement
- 1956 Le Coup du bergerLe Coup du bergerFool's Mate is a twenty-eight minute short film directed by Jacques Rivette. It stars Virginie Vitry as a wife cheating on her husband...
- 1966 Jean Renoir, The Master, Parts 1-4, episodes from the TV series Cinéastes de notre temps
- 1980 Paris Goes AwayLe Pont du NordLe Pont du Nord is a 1981 French film directed by Jacques Rivette. The film stars Bulle Ogier and her daughter Pascale Ogier. It was released in France on 24 March 1982...
- 1995 One of Ninon's AdventuresLumière and CompanyLumière and Company was a collaboration between 41 international film directors in which each made a short film using the original Cinématographe camera invented by the Lumière brothers....
, part of the omnibus film Lumiere and Company)
Alternative versions of his films
In order to increase circulation, Rivette edited shorter versions of several of his films with distended running times. The shorter cuts of "Out 1" (called "Spectre") and "La Belle noiseuse" (called "Divertimento") were pieced together from alternate takes. The short film "Paris s'en va" is a collection of re-edited footage from "Le Pont du Nord", during which we hear a narrator read the rules for a popular board game. "Paris s'en va" was made for the 1984 portmanteau film "Paris Seen By... 20 Years Later" though it was not included in the final film. While shorter versions exist of "L'Amour fou", "L'Amour par terre", "Jeanne la pucelle", and "Va Savoir" (the longer version is known as "Va Savoir+"), it is currently unclear how much of a role Rivette played in creating these alternate cuts.Due to the rare nature of Rivette's works, many DVDs (such as the Region 1 Facets release of Jeanne la pucelle, and every DVD release globally of Va savoir) are of these alternate, shorter edits of his films. The complete version of his two-part film Jeanne la pucelle was finally released by Artificial Eye on Region 2 DVD in the UK in 2009.
Further reading
- Jonathan RosenbaumJonathan RosenbaumJonathan Rosenbaum is an American film critic. Rosenbaum was the head film critic for the Chicago Reader from 1987 until 2008, when he retired at the age of 65...
, ed. (1977) Jacques Rivette: Texts and Interviews; trans. by Amy Gateff and Tom Milne. London: BFI Publishing - Hélène Frappat : Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris: Cahiers du Cinéma, 2001
- De Pascale, Goffredo, ed. (2003) Jacques Rivette, Milano: Il Castoro
- Douglas Morrey, Alison Smith: Jacques Rivette (French Film Directors), Manchester University Press, 2010.