JACQUES RIVETTE
Paris Belongs to Us (1961)
...and Rivette makes more and more sense. What a debut! Despite its proto-digressive nature it feels like it emerged from Rivette intact and fully formed in a way most of the other Cahiers' debuts do not. Its Paris is also one completely not like the other debuts, not just shot around far different looking locations (interior and out, the roof top, train ride, and outdoor theatre backed by apartment windows being the most inspired) but also a mostly empty one. This aligns with the most startling aspect of the film: the game-playing and mysteries of later Rivette are here far from the whimsical tone of, say, Celine and Julie Go Boating or the languid exploration/elaboration of Out 1, but are rather as sinister as a film about a cute, wayward youth looking for a mystery (or a job, or a murderer, or tape, or a sister, or a…) around 1960s Paris can be. This is conjured most strongly by specific references (McCarthy, exile, Hiroshima) but is also rooted in the mise-en-scene, Rivette's already developed conflict between on-camera realism and presented fictions (Daniel Crohem's "American" feels most obviously like Rivette directed him to imitate American crime films), the silvery empty Paris with its multitude of interchangeable, cramped apartments, and the fluid social circles. And Rivette ties his usual search-for-the-mystery plot with a nicely archetypal existential search for meaning from the lead protagonist, Betty Schneider, who is a perfect and wonderful cipher (what happened to her?). It is about as playful as a grim film can be (or visa-versa). Already existent are the hints at mysticalism, Françoise Prévost as the fully-contained mystery woman, and plays-within-the film. This may be the first New Wave film where I really feel the influence of a Cahiers-admired director, as the traces of Fritz Lang are everywhere over this film. All together really quite unexpected.

L'Amour Fou (1969)
Like Out: 1, this combines all my love for and frustration with Rivette's work. In the end, since his films have some of the strongest after-burn of any I've ever seen, I always end up loving them...long after I was actually sitting in the theatre for 4 hours. Anyway, having just seen a Ford film before this I was actually struck by the Fordian aspect of the plot rather than the Langian. Namely, this is that Bulle makes the decision to leave the production of her husband's play, and her disconnection from that dynamic community results in her paranoia and her quick rejection of her marriage. Rivette counterpoises scenes of the marriage's downward cycle of break-ups and brief sexual, and eventually idealistic, reunions with footage of the husband acting in and directing a play, a section of the film that itself is counterpoised with 16-mm documentary footage of the rehearsal shot by a director independent of Rivette. As usual, the editing of these rehearsals and the general improvisation of the cast are very oblique. I think my frustration with this side of Rivette is that everyone seems to be struggling to enunciate something, but it feels like Rivette never gave anyone an idea of what they should be struggling towards (or maybe these are particularly difficult films to subtitle and translate). The result of this is that instead of seeing people work their way towards eventually saying something in their own way (i.e. improvise a scene), we are instead seeing them enact this very working. We see the process of a scene but it is stripped almost entirely of actual useful content beyond the spectacle of the work. (Jonathan Rosenbaum in his introduction said he thinks Rivette eventually found simply the idea acting interesting in itself, which in this connection makes sense.) Anyway, the husband/director's struggle with his community to reform Racine's play, find a way to live it, to make it work, is contrasted by Bulle's isolation and inability to similarly improvise and find meaning around her, which hints at Rivette's work to come where the women must pair up to get things done, to create. Fascinating, raw stuff. This combines with Paris Belongs to Us and Le Pont du Nord as really showcasing Rivette’s pessimistic side; although they don’t seem it after first, the three films are incredibly bleak and despairing in their world.

Out 1: Spectre (1971)
The thing I'm discovering about Rivette films (this is my fourth) is that I never seem to enjoy them in the moment but they make me retroactively enjoy the previous film of the director's I saw much more. Thus, as I was sitting through this extremely rare film to see film, I couldn't help but wishing I was actually watching Celine and Julie Go Boating. There is much of formal interest here, but little actual enjoyment for me. I do indeed love the idea of juxtaposing free form expression (embodied by the improvising characters in the theatre troupes) and the desire to have a structure, meaning, and plot (signaled by Leaud's delightful conspiracy mongering), but the film hardly needs the 4 hour+ length to explore this idea. I somehow got the feeling I would enjoy this more either as a 90 minute film or as the original 12 hour version.

Out 1: Noli me tangere (1971)
Half of my intuition about the 4 hour Spectre cut of this film was correct: it works perfectly at near-13 hours (whether it would work at 90 minutes is an unanswerable question). This is a mammoth work and there is too much to talk about coherently, and since there have appeared several NYC-area blog posts detailing the basics of what the movie is about, I'm only going to make several scattered observations.//Although this film parodies systems and schematiziation, I find Léaud and Berto’s characters to be somewhat binary opposites; I see him as an earth-bound mortal and her as one of Rivette’s many goddess figures. This latter element is keyed by her tower-like apartment which seems to have a panoptical view of Paris, as well as more subtly in her constant descent and ascents into this tower, and the loneliness that comes from this. Her search and motivation in the film is much more abstract and otherworldly than Léaud’s, which is why her death at the end of the film seems somewhat of a triumph, her attaining morality (which she got from exchanging blood with Renaud, another mortal!).//Three characters have breakdowns by the end of the film, but only Ogier’s character gets the kind of expressive mise-en-scène that will appear in Rivette’s next film, her signaled by the use of mirrors and empty spaces. Likewise, we actually see the abyss or void open inside/before the character in the long sequence, all shot from very similar set-ups but fragmented by many other takes interspersed via cuts to black, where she repeats lines and Ogier-the-actress seems almost in a trance, unable to determine where her character is going. Lonsdale gets a less affecting but more playful and logical scene, where a breakdown on the beach turns out to be simply the actor fooling his acting friends…but then it dips back into ambiguity. Crucially, the breakdown of Léaud that Rivette cut from the film because it was too personal remains a major causality problem, as there are several moments when we see the actor/character on the brink (these are when he makes the lightening sound effects, when he mimes a wall between himself and Ogier, and finally the near total splintering of a cohesive character when he approaches Bernadette Lafont seeking Ogier and descends into vast silences, an odd dialog about seeking a princess, and the first significant post-production manipulation of the soundtrack, playing some of, first Lafton’s dialog backwards, and then Léaud’s. But the next time we see the guy, he says he has escaped the paranoia and has recovered. This jump is a bit unfortunate because I think he is the film’s most loved and obviously most necessary character, and his arc needs to be the most intact.//The main problem I had with Spectre—that the improv stuff creating “non-meaning” being tedious and juxtaposed against Léaud and Bert’s conspiracy searching for “meaning” being fun and inspired—was not nearly as much evident in the extended cut, though some of the experiments of the rival theatre troupes does get exhaustive. Instead, the effect of such game-like, often raw experimentations with ways of getting into characters, connecting to other actors, finding a way to stage a play or dramatic situationcome off like a shaggier but more authentic version of the premise behind Duelle, that here is cinema seen from the inside out. Out 1 seems to have two of a theoretical three stages of cinematic production, that (1) of the abstract and ragged elements of actors/characters, direction, and narrative, some working and some that fail, that try to sync and find expression, which is much of the first half of the film’s theatre troupe dynamic, followed by (2) moving this kind of free-form improvisation onto a very bare bones and create-and-effect-as-you-go-along narrative, that of Léaud and Berto. The third and presumably final step would be a finished, “clean,” and hermetic narrative film where these, the building blocks that congealed behind the scenes, have been elided or, perhaps even worse, purposefully covered up.

Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
I have to admit that my tolerance for some of Rivette's improvisational dicking around is often quite low (like the scene of Celine telling her friends about her American friend), even when I know deep down that Rivette's magic is all about the potential and the possibilities of the on-camera drama. Which is why this movie is so brilliant of course, as the titular girls explore each other by finding a shared mystery and exploring it as if it were a movie—an on-camera drama (theatre or a movie? Who can tell). Can comedy get any more meta-funny than when they start trying to incorporate themselves into the drama they've been watching but only partially followed, blowing lines, entering at the wrong time, and finally, triumphantly realizing that the movie goes on despite their interpretations and interaction? Until, that is, they find out their mystical sense of play and strength of conviction can effect the dramatic world! What an amazing development. (This should be compared directly to the girl’s investigation in Paris Belongs to Us, where she is repeatedly encouraged to take action to save a life, but remains somewhat foggy and indecisive in what exactly she should be doing.) That it works in this film (work in the sense that the idea is not ridiculous inside the form of the film) is precisely because Rivette is using this loose, improvisatory style that is so open, free, and whimsical. And perhaps it does not work in that film (work in the sense of dramatically work, the girl saves no one) is because Rivette is working with a more schematic over-structure, under the Shadow of Lang.

Duelle (1976)
I think Rivette is simply not a director for me. He is brilliant, but the way he thinks about cinema has yet to jive with my understanding of it, leading me to almost always feel like I am looking at a work through a foggy mirror, the context obscured, the references opaque, the motivation mysterious. (Or maybe its because I can only view his films on battered, heavily red-tinted prints from the 1970s.) At the same time, I also feel like Rivette intuitively gets to the core of some aspect of cinematic representation, something to do with the magic espoused simply by putting things in front of a camera. I wish I could be more articulate about it. This particular film is better than some of the others I've seen. From what I understand, the plot is like that of a noir, but Rivette shifts the focus away from the male protagonist and onto two Goddesses who manipulate the plot through various secondary characters. As the male character says at one point, it is like looking at a weaving from the reverse side: the shaggy mechanism and machinations of the plot at brought to the forefront as the means of making a movie are mystically revealed.

Noroît (1976)
Part of the same series as Duelle, and more fun because of its pirate-based setting than the other, but the director seems more interested in moving his characters around the castle, tracked by beautiful camerawork, than using much story or character. The result is highly abstract, though continually intriguing. The film gets momentarily, and surprisingly, tense and gripping when there is staged a Hamlet-like play-within-the-movie that, with Rivette's snaking camerawork, breaks into and out of the drama of the movie and sparks one in a series of murders. The ending is pretty lame though.

Le Pont du Nord (1981)
A fascinating and troubling revision of the Celine and Julie scenario; gone is most of the airy whimsy and instead a pervasive but typically opaque atmosphere of political and social menace and hopelessness that is less abstract than almost any Rivette I’ve seen except the shorter Out 1’s post-1968 weight. Instead of using the game playing and self-created conspiracies as lively inspiration or ways of connecting (both Bulle and Pascale are notably less in sync than the girls of Celine and Julie), their obscure threat seems wispily dangerous. Paris-under-construction, the constant flight from place to place (and homelessness), the endless rifing through terrible news headlines, the creepy links between the love interest and the overwatch-agents, and most especially Bulle’s obscure past as a radical (and maybe terrorist) that she is trying to forget, all point to a stronger sense of real menace amongst the seeming coyness of both the girls and Rivette’s scenario (again, other than Out 1 this feels his most improvised movie). As usual, the film often gets bogged down in trying to figure out where to go next, at what speed and by what route, but much makes it worth while, including the honey of an ending, where Pascale gets distracted from her fear of the conspiracy by taking lessons in kata shadowboxing from an agent in front of a ruined factory.

Love on the Ground (1984)
Crystallizes that elegant style Rivette experimented with in the 1970s with Duelle and Noroît, moving away from handheld camera work and using elegant, Preminger-like tracking shots to negotiate real spaces. The technique on the whole seems to give his movies a created sense of stylization, hinting at a hermetic-ness that never really is there. This is an often boring dramatization of a particularly neat idea, of taking a troupe of actors who stage plays in real apartments and have them rehearse a drama in a house that turns out to be a re-enactment of a past incident, characteristically weaving between identities, theatrical and cinematic drama, magic, doubles, mirrors, and dreams, and real life, memories, and art. Jane Birkin is an unlikely but particularly successful Rivette heroine, but the investment of the girls inside the film seem less secure and rich, and as such the movie resembles more an enactment of a cine-dramatic idea than that of real characters exploring that idea. Although IMDB doesn't list it, I heard there is actually a 3-hour version of this that explores the women's sex lives more.

Hurlevent (Howling Wind/Wuthering Heights) (1985)
It seems almost too easy to criticize this very unexpected adaptation by Rivette as feeling like the stultified period drama that takes place in the mystery house of Celine and Julie Go Boating, but indeed it does feel as if everyone except Sandra Montaigu is stuck in a vapid drama. Or maybe that there are just too many different kinds of actors stuck in the same drama, as a side actor like Olivier Torres seems self-aware in his fey distance from the material, just as Montaigu’s maid/housekeeper/servant character blends the self-awareness of that type in social satire with a weariness and extra-textual consciousness that seems to almost leap out of the diegetic story. Alas, the central lovers are too perfunctory and bland (though it is nice to see them so young and childish, as they are in the book), and it is only in Rivette’s incredibly inspired use of dream sequences, which begin, halve, and end the film, that places their normalcy in a subtly oneiric environment that becomes incredibly suggestive. The most surprising of these is when Rivette uses a dream sequence to elide three years time in the drama, and the most successful is the finale that suggests a true emotionality and spirituality that on the whole feels evacuated from the film. It really is hard to get a grip on what exactly the movie is about, since the ellipses keep time at a distance, the navigation of space is purposely maze-like (except the wonderful run through the hillscape), and the general irascibility of half the characters does the same for them; the Heathcliff character (here, “Roch”) seems a vortex of cruelty which sucks everything around it down a hole of unhappiness, self-destruction, and hatred. This again revels in the much darker side of Rivette than I had previously experienced.

Gang of Four (1988)
While watching this it at first took me a while to warm to it, as my initial impression was that Rivette was rehashing and watering down some of his earlier works, taking the cross-cutting and interpolation of theatre from several of his previous films (specifically L'Amour fou and Out: 1, but also Paris Belongs to Us to a degree; Love on the Ground doesn't count so much because its theatre is within the drama of the film rather than stage-bound) and pollinating it with the playful female adventuring and camaraderie of Celine and Julie Go Boating and Le Pont du Nord. But as with all the Rivette films I love, this one grows organically as its characters respond both individually and eventually somewhat collectively to the vague threat of paranoia (a number of female theatre students all live under the same roof and a single man introduces himself to them each with a different persona, trying to ferret out mysterious information about a wayward and potentially unstable friend and classmate of theirs). As usual, what is both frustrating and thrilling about Rivette's film world is that the "action", the suspense, and the meat of the plot all take place behind the scenes and is only vaguely insinuated; in fact, usually what amounts to plot in the film is quite often simply what the characters choose to believe is happening or not. So what makes this different than Rivette's other films in the same vein? Well for one there are multiple female characters rather than a central couple, which allows the scenario to achieve a level of complexity and complex, interactive individuality that the director's dymanic-duos don't always suggest (more than any other film of his, this group reminded me of a Howard Hawks film), each girl granted the space to form her own past and her own present desires, break away from the group or stick together. That the film also vaguely swirls around displaced romantic love is also refreshing, but the ending of the film reminds me that even though Rivette is amongst the most playful of directors, has one of the lightest touches, thrives on a feeling of the impromptu, of the imagination in real spaces, of the power of his actors/characters to investigate and help create the world around them, the world inevitably is far darker than this style and tone initially suggest, as the choice between finding paranoid connections to everything or letting the world splay out into chaos become equally bleak choices. And this has perhaps Rivette's most cryptic ending as well...

Secret défense (1998)
Oh Rivette, how can I ever stay mad at you? Even the two (!) films of yours I didn't like (Hurlevent and Love on the Ground) I strongly want to re-see and re-consider. I watched this 166 minute film over three consecutive, fragmented viewings and despite my boredom and lack of engagement I still really liked it. My impression is that this is the Rivette film where the least amount of plot actually happens, as if the director were moving towards a narrative style that is all acting and actorly motion and no story whatsoever (a three hour train ride with the protagonist just sitting there, moving about the cabin, etc. seems not only probable but suggested by this movie). It takes a thriller like set-up (a murder in the past, Sandrine Bonnaire's tough-minded investigation of it in the present, an accidental murder, the cover-up, the reveal, and a final murder) and spaces it out through a very strict and surprisingly paradoxical allegiance to Hollywood continuity editing taken to an extreme (Bonnaire travels to the countryside to murder someone, but instead of eliding the trip Rivette spends something like 20 minutes tracking her get on the train, sit on the train, change trains, drink on the train, be hit on on the train, etc.) and yet through this extremity having an Ozu-like allegiance to all the dead narrative space between plot points and action. In an appreciative if somewhat limited reading/praising article for the film, Jared Rapfogel writes this descriptive gem of the film: "The heart of the story consists of each action's echo...", except I would rephrase it as the heart of the narrative consists of each action's echo. And that's what this film is, and what my suggestion of the film moving towards a kind of cinema where nothing happens: an echo chamber. No Rivette film has felt so empty of people or society. This has been perhaps the first Rivette film I've seen that really highlights for me the director's vision of cinema as theatre, as all the drama in this film, all the story and plot points and interaction could easily have been stage bound, yet Rivette's expression of the movement of these characters pushing the material into something cinematic. And I haven't even tried at a strict reading of the grim plot, praised Bonnaire's unusually (for a Rivette heroine) interior performance, her steadfastness, or the film's seemingly arbitrary ending (like the best of Rivette, the movie could go on forever but the filmmaker and his actors had to stop the cycle)...

Va Savoir (2001)
My second time seeing this (the shorter "non-director's cut") after watching it in the theatre and my reaction surprisingly has not differed even though it was my first Rivette and I've seen more of his films since: the movie feels oddly, if not purposefully, lightweight. A better description might be that the film is like a screwball comedy told in slow motion with characters who are a bit more aware of the import and consequences of their screwballery than in the classic genre. On the plus side, the playfulness I like so much in Rivette's 1970s films seems ingrained into the very essence film, giving it the over-all screwball feel, but on the negative side there are few of the magical, singular moments of playfulness that those earlier films surprised one with. Great acting from the central couple, Rivette's direction is inspiring as usual, but the script, for this cut at least, is a bit pffft. Jeanne Balibar's escape to the rooftops is a marvel of how special you can make a moment by shooting it as if it were nothing special at all. (I'm tempted to buy the UK poster of the film simply because it quotes from this, my favorite, scene.)

The Story of Marie and Julien (2003)
I cringe a bit looking back on my pretty-near baffled review of this film, the first Rivette I ever saw (the review can be found here, scroll down to the bottom), though the description of the movie holds up somewhat: this is the closest what I like to call Rivette's "magical" qualities of mise-en-scene—which in Duelle, Noroît, Le Pont du Nord, and this film turn specifically to a kind of loose mysticism involving goddesses—gets to a true ghostliness. And like Kurosawa Kiyoshi, whose films have a great deal of aesthetic commonality to late, "elegant" Rivette, the director is unusually suited for the feeling. Even back when I was likewise baffled by Celine and Julie Go Boating I kept describing Rivette as having an intangible, intuitive grasp of cinema as a kind of magical sense play. I would have to perform a more in-depth study of his films to actually back up this description with evidence, but I would casually say that this feeling probably has something to do with the director's interest in theatre as a way of exploring cinema, and visa versa, so that, meta-ically speaking, there is often something uncanny about the drama of Rivette's film, a sense that they are existing as two things at once, as a kind of theatrical investigation in front of the camera and of the camera encompassing this investigation and pushing it farther, transforming it into something else. This can lend a sense of fantasy to ordinary or banal scenes, a feeling accented in the director's films that employ more natural and unshowy handheld camerawork. Of course, this film is far from the kind of obvious uses of theatre that the director has employed in the past using actors and theatre troupes inside the diegesis, and instead has more in common with Secret défense and his most recent film, Don't Touch the Axe, which see theatre in the movement of characters (here probably between dream, death, and life; in Secret défense the literal distances and trips traveled and the empty time and space between plot events; and presumably in the recent film in the mores of socially-acceptable flirtation within closed social spaces). These later films embrace the artifice of normative, conventional cinema much more, especially in the use of fluid camera movements on tracks and supple, rich shadows, though it should be noted that Rivette often, if not always, undercuts the hermeticism such artifice implies by drawing attention to it, perhaps most often with top-down, "theatre"-like light sources. Actually, perhaps the best example in the entire history of cinema of wonderfully self-acknowledged artifice is the cat in the film, Nevermore, who hardly has a scene where he is not staring at the camera or transfixed by the off-camera boom mike.

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