A member of the legendary Cahiers quintet, Jacques Rivette was a critic before a filmmaker. Reading his early criticism, though, it’s clear he thought in images from the start, even in words, emphasizing closed complex circuits of mise-en-scene, the better to...
[more]A member of the legendary Cahiers quintet, Jacques Rivette was a critic before a filmmaker. Reading his early criticism, though, it’s clear he thought in images from the start, even in words, emphasizing closed complex circuits of mise-en-scene, the better to form meaning. However, he trains one eye to remain (if not always, then perpetually) turned out towards the other place beyond the frame, the film, the cinema. And so his films go: strict sets of space made to look elsewhere. Rivette’s main tactical trope is The Theatre. We don’t have to believe his assertion that “Every film is about the theatre,” but we may better understand his films by starting there. Indeed: Rivette’s interest in life’s theatricality starts there, from Paris Belongs To Us (1960) onwards—up through his most recent film, 2007’s rightly-lauded Ne Touchez Pas La Hache—and begins to take full cinematic shape in L’amour fou (1969), about a troupe attempting to put on a show, which fails, of course, and devolves into its main couple locking themselves in a room to play out the traps of love as play, as a play, as a failure to reach that other utopic place.
The mythic 13-hour Out 1 from 1971, which only recently had its American “premiere” at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image in 2007, foregrounds this interest in process as integral to film as much as to theatre. As you endure its length, you can see their creation unspool, see how much got built on-the-fly. It seems to build and destroy itself at every turn or as parallel lines converge, however brief. It hunts for itself, as B. Kite writes: “So Out 1 faced a tall task in living up to its legend, and the fact that it so splendidly does so is due in no small part to the fact that a matched quest for ineffable order forms its narrative spine, a spine attenuated almost to the point of nonexistence at times but surprisingly resilient.” Looking at his later films, such as Ne touchez pas la hache, one can see these trajectories continued—and continually investigated—with heft. It’s commonly argued this reaches its nearly-light-hearted apogee in what remains his most famous (and iconic) film: 1973’s Celine et Julie vont en bateau, an everyday hall of mirrors that zigzags through all Rivette’s concerns: play, theatre, fiction, women, masks, how to distend or interrupt life’s march to the finish line with some grace and some fun.
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