The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (354 page)

She was nominated six times for supporting actress—but never won:
All About Eve, The Mating Season, With a Song in My Heart, Pickup on South Street
(that was four years in a row), and then for
Pillow Talk
and for the unlikable mother in
Birdman of Alcatraz
.

Jacques Rivette
, b. Rouen, France, 1928
1960:
Paris Nous Appartient/Paris Belongs to Us
. 1965:
Suzanne Simonin, La Religieuse de Diderot
. 1968:
L’Amour Fou
. 1971:
Out One
(unreleased). 1973:
Out One: Spectre
(abridged version). 1974:
Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau/Céline and Julie Go Boating
. 1975:
Duelle/Twhylight
. 1976:
Noroit/ Nor’west
. 1981:
La Pont du Nord
. 1983:
Merry Go Round
. 1984:
L’Amour par Terre/Love on the Ground
. 1986:
Hurlevent
. 1989:
La Bande des Quatre/The Gang of Four
. 1991:
La Belle Noiseuse
. 1994:
Jeanne la Pucelle
. 1995:
Haut Bas Fragile/Up, Down, Fragile
. 1998:
Secret Défense
. 2000:
Va Savoir
. 2003:
Histoire de Marie et Julien
. 2007:
Ne Touchez Pas la Hache
. 2009:
36 Vues de Pic Saint-Loup
.

The informed filmgoer might not leap to support the contention that Rivette is the most important filmmaker of the last thirty-five years. After all, Rivette has made films blatantly outside the conventional scheme. Even
La Religieuse
—which was made according to industrial traditions—was once banned in France. Eventually it shrugged off the disapproval of authorities, and it may be the Rivette film that most people have seen, but it is the least interesting and characteristic because it conforms to so many normal procedures. It is based on a script and a celebrated work of literature. It dutifully reinvents Diderot through costume, furnishings, and proper locations. Actors and actresses are cast in set parts and given dialogue to learn and speak. The film is professionally appealing, no matter the human ugliness of its subject. Indeed,
La Religieuse
was made for the art-house audience it shocked in France and rather bored elsewhere. All of which has little to do with Rivette’s significance.

That importance rests in the uncompromising way that he has identified the future of film as something other than the two-hour work shown to paying audiences in special buildings, and telling tidy stories. There is a scene in
Paris Nous Appartient
where a group of young people at a party watch the Tower of Babel sequence from Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
. Apart from its place within the film, the scene captures that all-embracing atmosphere of the New Wave that exists, probably, among any band of people intent on film.

In addition, Rivette used people in darkness examining some bright display as an example of the way we must judge life in terms of its performance. Film for Rivette is less art form or entertainment than the unstable coinage of communication and experience. Thus, he has regularly deprofessionalized it. That party sequence has film being shown informally, in the way one might put on a record or pick up a book. And the use of an extract without context hints at the greater power of the audience at private shows: power to show a film in any order, to show one reel over and over again, to deconstruct a work as a reader may a book.

Films could be of any length. The excerpt from
Metropolis
runs perhaps three minutes; another film might last three days. Rivette’s films have tended toward the latter. The regular production system would protest at such expense. But film stock is the cheapest item in any production. It is the skilled labor to make it glamorous, exact, or “professional” that multiplies the costs. Like Warhol, Rivette can make a long film on a cost-scale and with a sort of collaboration that defies commercial cinema.

The intuition of that capacity coincided with the way TV ate up cinema’s audience, and with a critical reappraisal of the nature of film. Rivette was a member of the
Cahiers du Cinéma
group of writers anxious to turn into filmmakers; he alone among them continues to make films as an “amateur” that take their personality from intense but unresolved artistic aspiration.

He worked as assistant to Jacques Becker and Renoir and led up to
Paris Nous Appartient
with four shorts:
Aux Quatre Coins
(50);
Quadrille
(50);
Le Divertissement
(52); and
Le Coup de Berger
(56). As a writer, he proclaimed American cinema and the comprehensive mise-en-scène of Stroheim, Rossellini, Murnau, and Lang. His articles remain essential reading whenever he was dealing with a director who fully engaged him. As well as having a fine response to film as language, Rivette was conscious of the “retirement” around 1958–60 of Fritz Lang and of the bold venture into documentary of Rossellini.

History may show that the feature form was exhausted by 1960, waiting to be transformed by diversity and experiment. Rivette had praised the luminous portrait of betrayal in
Beyond a Reasonable Doubt
and the juxtaposition of spontaneity, documentary, and theatricality in
Viaggio in Italia
. Predictably, his own work went in pursuit of stylistic plainness and thematic obsession. For Rivette had reached the conclusion that it is the medium that is fantastic; that imagery on a screen—what Sartre called “the frenzies of a wall”—is so potent that the style need not be assertive or florid.

His first feature was made piecemeal, from 1958 to 1960, with borrowed equipment and as funds accumulated. Naturally, its scenario changed during that period, but as the surface details fluctuated so its preoccupation deepened.
Paris Nous Appartient
has been attacked for its pretentiousness, its slackness, and its willful mystification. All those charges have substance, but they are side effects of Rivette’s attitude to meaning and his willingness to be open to chance in the way that the camera is open to whatever transpires in front of it. His films reproduce life’s pressure to decide about people on the evidence available.

Paris
is a beautiful expression of the amateur passion for film. Its long time in the making became an aspect of its subject; its vicissitudes were subtly mirrored in the “story” of the movie. For in his debut, Rivette began to define a bond between fiction and a modern myth: the uneasiness that we are victims of a great conspiracy. At one level, the film is as sensitive an account of Paris as Franju’s documentaries; it is also a picture of a restless creative group—the filming is reflected in the situation of the film, an abortive production of Shakespeare’s
Pericles
. The immediate themes ride above a pervasive mood of disorganization to the point of breakdown. For this Paris is the universal metropolis; it looks forward to
Alphaville
, just as it quotes from Lang—in which our sense of meaning is undermined and justified by an infinite but imprecise conspiracy.

That owed something to Mabuse and the fear of nuclear disaster. But it also anticipated the paranoia that rippled outward from Kennedy’s assassination, irrational urban violence with a vague political background, the Pentagon papers, the Howard Hughes fraud, and the raveling together of Watergate. The haphazard conditions under which the film was made, and the frequent gap between intellectual aspiration and professional appearance, only added to its menace. Years before Godard, Rivette seemed to be saying, “Art is no guarantee of integrity or meaning.… Any film is victim of interpretation.… It is not mine and cannot comfort me.”

Indeed, one could not attribute the film to Rivette alone, in the way that film critics dignify cinema by treating it as the work of an author. The
Cahiers
group had played a large part in persuading the world that directors were instrumental. But Rivette saw how far that was already an archaic notion, about to be superseded by improvisation that allowed some authorship to actors and some to limbo.
Paris Nous Appartient
was 140 minutes and often of a professionally unacceptable visual quality: it looked like snapshots, and thus its poetry arose casually and furtively.

L’Amour Fou
was 256 minutes, with 35mm sequences and rougher 16mm material cut together. Its topic was the relationship between a man and wife (producer and actress) rehearsing Racine’s
Andromache
. Simultaneously, they are being filmed for a TV cinema verité documentary. This strain (like that on Jane Fonda in the Drew-Leacock movie) forces the actress out of the play, to be replaced by the husband’s former mistress. Again, the setting is Paris and the focus is a dramatic production; again the real subject is the evanescence of human contact.
L’Amour Fou
pursues the dying relationship more closely than Rivette usually examines specific characters, and is oddly anticipatory of
Last Tango in Paris
. But its chief actor was in fact a stage producer preparing
Andromache
, and there was indeed a TV film being made of the proceedings. Clearly, now, Rivette’s preoccupation was the interplay of fact and fiction.

L’Amour Fou
had trouble in distribution. A two-hour version was insisted on by producers and given a wider showing than the original. This only encouraged Rivette’s extremism. For TV, or even for the coming cassette audience, he made
Out One
, running twelve hours and forty minutes, and never shown properly without technical breakdown.

Two years later, Rivette cut out of it (or from its cloth)
Out One: Spectre
, which runs for four hours and twenty minutes. The prodigality of length must not obscure its enormous achievement.
Spectre
is an enquiry into the ceremonies we make of order and disorder, and it is largely free of the looming melodramatic menace in
Paris
. It concerns the inept efforts of two eccentric outsiders—Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto—to fathom the extent and purpose of an apparently dormant cabal of thirteen. Melodrama seeps away as the film grows longer. The rationale of such length is to hint at the vast entropic vagueness of reality. And the motif of the film is the obsessive, hopeless, comic, and possibly tragic human duty to detect significance in that wildness. Its effect is to reveal a constant, undiscriminating coincidence or doubling going on in the world, regardless of the pretty little affinities that artists and madmen concoct to give form to their works. It is as if Rivette felt an implicit tendency to simile or synchronicity in events that was like a virus.

Once more the film grows out of theatre groups: two rival concerns, preparing but never producing
Prometheus
and
Seven Against Thebes
. The documentarylike account of rehearsal merges intriguingly with the fictional undertones in the improvised scenes between the “real” people. The method is minimal: long takes, a sense of unchosen camera positions, an unadorned image. Only the assembly of scenes admits to shape, and here there is a most complex design of groups, characters, movie, and stills that is the more absorbing because of the way it aspires to a wider disorder.

Out One: Spectre
defies final judgment, but redefines our expectation of cinema. Of course, it is a folly, an absurd, self-indulgent monster. But it is a film that declares the readiness of cinema to replace rather than represent life. And it had to be made before Rivette could make
Céline and Julie Go Boating
, which I take to be the most innovative film since
Citizen Kane
.

It deals with two girls—Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier—who exist only to the extent that they conspire in each other’s effort to make the world fictional. Through their own imaginative conviction, they visit a haunted house where a solemn melodrama is forever being played. This is also like a movie palace where one film runs forever, and the melodrama is like an RKO women’s pic of circa 1949. Céline and Julie double as the maid in this little story. After every visit to the house, they come away stunned and possessed, but with a sweet in their mouths that enables them to relive the story.

Eventually, they go to the house together and try to avert the conclusion of the tale—the killing of a child. This involves breathtaking sequences of themselves—like people from a Rouch movie—in the same images as the very composed and made-up creatures of, say,
Slightly Scarlet
. They take the child away into what had seemed reality but is now revealed as only one more closet of the imaginary.

I make great claims for
Céline and Julie
. It is a comedy, and that is liberty after the ominousness of Rivette’s earlier work. Its length is a balance between the cinema movie and the
Out One
infinity of length. It is a commentary on the history of cinema. It is a generous reconciliation with literature through fiction, and whereas
Kane
was the first picture to suggest that the world of the imagination was as powerful as reality,
Céline and Julie
is the first film in which everything is invented.

Repeated viewings of
Céline and Julie
have only cemented my claims for it: in terms of a summation of classical narrative cinema that has itself amounted to a mythology ready to be reworked by actors, directors, and writers, and in a form that dissolves every notion of duration in cinema. Above all,
Céline and Julie
asserts fiction as a freedom, not just a kind of remedial service or pleasure. It pursues humor, idiosyncrasy, and exhilaration and provides a way of seeing how old-fashioned such concepts as comedy and melodrama have become.

However, I must confess that Rivette’s subsequent work—often with the same people, and embarking from the same enchanted ground—is chic, gloomy, and insubstantial. The exhilaration has been replaced by a mystical patterning that is too subject to the occult and all the old melodrama.
Duelle
is so claustrophobic and so pat that one is reduced to admiring pictorial grace. I remain hopeful that such decorative games could become tempting sports with more vigor, and a more dynamic group assault on the possibilities of a picture. That is how Rivette’s scrupulous survey of Paris uncovered a magic realm: the magic in cinema lies within reality, and should not be imposed on it.