Jacques Rivette and French New Wave Cinema: Interviews, Conversations, Chronologies 1789761867, 9781789761863

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
Acknowledgments
Chronology
Introduction
INTERVIEWS
André Bazin & Jacques Rivette, “Two Characters
in Search of Auteurs: A Discussion about
the French Cinema”
Louis Marcorelles, “Jacques Rivette and Paris nous appartient”
Jean-Luc Godard & Jacques Rivette,
“Hiroshima, notre amour”
Louis Marcorelles, “Interview with Jacques Rivette”
Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, &
Sylvie Pierre, “Time Overflowing”
Jacques Rivette & Jean Narboni, “Montage”
Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-André Fieschi, & Eduardo de
Gregorio, “Jacques Rivette: Interview”
Carlos Clarens & Edgardo Cozarinsky,
“Jacques Rivette”
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky, & Gilbert Adair,
“Phantom Interviewers over Rivette”
William Johnson, “Recent Rivette”
John Hughes, “The Director as Psychoanalyst”
Serge Daney & Jean Narboni, “Interview with Jacques
Rivette”
Jacques Rivette, “Press Conference at Cannes”
Frédéric Bonnaud, “The Captive Lover”
Mary Wiles, “Jacques Rivette: Interview”
Hélène Frappat, “Secrets and Laws”
Liza Béar, “Jacques Rivette: Va savoir”
Valérie Hazette, “Hurlevent: Rivette’s Adaptation of
Wuthering Heights”
Jacques Rivette, “On Don’t Touch the Axe”
Jean-Marc Lalanne & Jean-Baptiste Morain,
“The Secret Art”
Bibliography (English Language)
Filmography
Index

Citation preview

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Jacques Rivette and French New Wave Cinema

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Jacques Rivette and French New Wave Cinema Interviews, Conversations, Chronologies

JAMES R. RUSSO

LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS

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Introduction and organization of this volume copyright © James R. Russo 2023. Further information regarding the original publication of the Interviews is provided in the Acknowledgments. The right of James R. Russo to be identified as Author and Organizer of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2023 by Liverpool University Press 4 Cambridge Street Liverpool L697ZU

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. The back cover illustration is from the film Out 1 (1971). British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data To be applied for.

Paperback ISBN 978-1-78976-186-3 eISBN 978-1-78284-798-4

Typeset & designed by Sussex Academic Press, Brighton & Eastbourne.

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Contents

Acknowledgments Chronology Introduction

vii viii 1

INTERVIEWS

André Bazin & Jacques Rivette, “Two Characters in Search of Auteurs: The French Cinema” (1957)

14

Louis Marcorelles, “Jacques Rivette and Paris nous appartient” (1958–59)

22

Jean-Luc Godard & Jacques Rivette, “Hiroshima, notre amour” 25 (1959) Louis Marcorelles, “Interview with Jacques Rivette” (1963)

33

Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, & Sylvie Pierre, “Time Overflowing” (1968)

38

Jacques Rivette & Jean Narboni, “Montage” (1969)

76

Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-André Fieschi, & Eduardo de Gregorio, “Jacques Rivette: Interview” (1973)

93

Carlos Clarens & Edgardo Cozarinsky, “Jacques Rivette” (1974)

110

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky, & Gilbert Adair, “Phantom Interviewers over Rivette” (1974)

121

William Johnson, “Recent Rivette” (1974–75)

134

John Hughes, “The Director as Psychoanalyst” (1975)

149 v

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CONTENTS

Serge Daney & Jean Narboni, “Interview with Jacques Rivette” 158 (1981) Jacques Rivette, “Press Conference at Cannes” (1991)

173

Frédéric Bonnaud, “The Captive Lover” (1998)

177

Mary Wiles, “Jacques Rivette: Interview” (1999)

179

Hélène Frappat, “Secrets and Laws” (1999)

191

Liza Béar, “Jacques Rivette: Va savoir” (2001)

221

Valérie Hazette, “Hurlevent: Rivette’s Adaptation of Wuthering Heights” (2003)

225

Jacques Rivette, “On Don’t Touch the Axe” (2007)

238

Jean-Marc Lalanne & Jean-Baptiste Morain, “The Secret Art” (2007)

241

Bibliography Filmography Index

248 252 266

vi

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to the following publishers, journals, organizations, and individuals for permission to reprint: Amy Gateff; Berlin Film Festival; British Film Institute; Cahiers du Cinéma; Craig Keller; David Phelps; estates of John Hughes and Tom Milne; Film Comment; Film Quarterly; Harvard University Press; Les Inrockuptibles; Joseph Coppola; Kent Jones; La Lettre du cinéma/Gallimard; Liz Herron; Liza Béar/Boston Globe; Louisa Shea; La Nouvelle Critique; Sight and Sound; Srikanth Srinivasan; University of Illinois Press; Valérie Hazette; and Yolanda Broad.

vii

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Chronology

1928: On March 1, Jacques Pierre Louis Rivette is born in Rouen, Seine-Maritime, France, to André Rivette and Andrée Amiard. Educated at the Lycée Pierre-Corneille; begins a licence de lettres in Rouen but never finishes. 1948: Shoots his first short film, Aux quatre coins (On Four Corners)—silent, in 16mm—in Rouen’s Côte Sainte-Catherine section. Moves to Paris. Submits Aux quatre coins to the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, but is not accepted by the school. 1950: Takes courses at the Sorbonne, but begins frequenting screenings at Henri Langlois’s Cinémathèque Française instead of attending classes. At the Cinémathèque, meets Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, and François Truffaut. Also attends screenings at the CinéClub du Quartier Latin, run by Éric Rohmer. Begins to write film criticism for the Gazette du Cinéma, founded by Rohmer. Makes the short, silent 16mm film titled Le quadrille (The Quadrille, starring Godard). 1952: Makes another short, silent 16mm film, Le divertissement (The Entertainment). 1953: Begins writing film criticism for Cahiers du Cinéma and continues to contribute to Cahiers until 1969. 1954: Having worked as an assistant to Jacques Becker and Jean Renoir, serves as cinematographer on Truffaut’s short film Une Visite and Rohmer’s short Bérénice. 1956: Makes the 35mm short sound film Le Coup du berger (A Fool’s Mate). 1961: Release of first feature-length film, Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us). Sutherland Trophy of the British Film Institute. 1963: Directs Denis Diderot’s La Religieuse (The Nun) at a theater in Paris. Becomes the editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma, in which role he serves until 1965. Separates from his first wife, Marilù Parolini; they eventually divorce. viii

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CHRONOLOGY

1967: Release of the film of La Religieuse. Makes Jean Renoir, le patron (The Boss), a series of three documentaries on director Renoir for the French television series Cinéastes de notre temps. 1969: Release of the feature L’Amour fou (Mad Love). Sutherland Trophy of the British Film Institute. 1971: Release of the feature Out 1: Noli me tangere (Out 1: Touch Me Not). 1974: Release of Spectre, an alternate, shorter version of Out 1. Release of Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating). Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno International Film Festival. 1975: Suffers nervous breakdown. 1976: Release of the features Duelle (Twilight) and Noroît (Northwest Wind). 1982: Release of the feature Le Pont du Nord (North Bridge). 1983: Release of the feature Merry-Go-Round. 1984: Release of the feature L’Amour par terre (Love on the Ground). 1985: Release of the feature Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights). 1989: Release of the feature La Bande des quatre (Gang of Four). FIPRESCI (International Film Critics’) Award at the 39th Berlin International Film Festival. Directs both Racine’s Bajazet and Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice at a theater in Paris. 1990: Subject of the two-part television documentary Jacques Rivette: Le veilleur (The Night Watchman), directed by Claire Denis. 1991: Release of the feature La belle noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker). Grand Prize of the Jury at the Cannes Film Festival. 1994: Release of a two-part film about the life of Joan of Arc titled Jeanne la pucelle: 1. Les Batailles; 2. Les Prisons (Joan the Maiden: The Battles and The Prisons). 1995: Release of the feature Haut bas fragile (Up, Down, Fragile). Contributes short segment titled Une aventure de Ninon (Ninon’s Adventure) to the anthology film Lumière et Compagnie (Lumière & Company), made to celebrate the centenary of Auguste and Louis ix

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CHRONOLOGY

Lumière’s first film program in 1895. 1998: Release of the feature Secret défense (Top Secret). 2001: Release of the feature Va savoir (Who Knows?). 2003: Release of the feature Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Story of Marie and Julien). 2007: Release of the feature Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe, a.k.a. The Duchess of Langeais). 2008: Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Marries his second wife, Véronique Manniez. 2009: Release of the feature 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (Around a Small Mountain). 2016: Dies from complications of Alzheimer’s disease on January 29. Buried in Paris’s Montmartre Cemetery on February 5.

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Jacques Rivette and French New Wave Cinema

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Introduction

Jacques Rivette (1928–2016), who emerged in the 1950s, along with Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, as one of the primary filmmakers of the French New Wave, is the most underappreciated (and under-screened) of this legendary group. Rivette’s deliberately challenging, super-sized films defy easy assimilation, and demand a level of attention unusual even for his compatriots’ works. In addition to being considered difficult, however, Rivette’s body of work is also possibly the richest of the New Wave era, possessing an intellectual inquiry and searching humanity unmatched in the French cinema of his time. He also managed the difficult trick of producing relevant and unusual films for fifty years, from Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us, 1961) to 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (Around a Small Mountain, 2009). Rivette was a product of the postwar milieu of movie-love in Paris. In the days when the young lions of the New Wave were busy railing against ‘‘Le Cinéma du papa’’ in magazine articles and attending allnight screenings of Frank Tashlin and Jerry Lewis movies at La Cinémathèque Française, Rivette was quite the keenest cinephile of them all. As a young film enthusiast, he joined forces with the group of critics who would come to form the legendary film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. From the start of his career, Rivette alternated between his twin loves of criticism and filmmaking, ultimately creating a selfknowing form of filmmaking that was critically aware of its own place in film history. While much of Rivette’s best work remains for the most part unseen, his six-decade career reveals a body of films that may be the most spectacular of all the French New Wave generation. Jacques Rivette was born on March 1, 1928, in Rouen. In 1950, in Paris, he became involved with the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin and contributed articles to its bulletin, the Gazette du Cinema, edited by Rohmer. During this period, Rivette also directed his first short films, Aux Quatre Coins (On Four Corners, 1948), Le Quadrille (The Quadrille, 1950), and Le Divertissement (The Entertainment, 1952). His friendship with Rohmer led him to the nascent Cahiers du Cinéma, edited by André Bazin and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze. During the years 1

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INTRODUCTION

1952 and 1953, as the core of the Cahiers group formed, anchored around the quintet of Rivette, Rohmer, Godard, Truffaut, and Chabrol, Rivette turned to writing for Cahiers primarily about the American cinema of the 1940s and 1950s. In these pieces he argued against the staid French “cinema of quality” in favor of the lusty, unbridled American filmmaking he admired; Rivette championed Howard Hawks, John Ford, Nicholas Ray, and Fritz Lang, seeing them as representatives of a specifically American vitality. The Cahiers critics were all aspiring filmmakers, and craved to translate their ideas about movies into filmmaking of their own. Rivette had worked as an assistant to Jacques Becker and Jean Renoir, and when Truffaut and Rohmer made their first shorts, he served as their cameraman. Then in 1958—before Truffaut, Godard, or Rohmer and second only to Chabrol—Rivette began shooting his first feature-length film. Short on funding, he made Paris nous appartient over the next two years, utilizing borrowed equipment, bits and pieces of film stock, and the spare time of his performers. The story concerns a group of artists rehearsing a performance of Shakespeare’s Pericles (1608), and the film functions simultaneously as a realistic depiction of bohemian Parisian life at the end of the 1950s and a genuinely frightening, modernist, alienated view of a world where everything is either part of a vast conspiracy or is utterly unrelated to anything. Paris nous appartient is undecided about which possibility is more frightening, but its free-floating paranoia looks back to highmodernist antecedents like Kafka and Borges while anticipating the paranoid cinema that has come to dominate the contemporary Hollywood blockbuster. Many of Rivette’s preoccupations and recurrent themes are prominent in this first feature. Paranoia and conspiracy, magic, mazes, and mystery, are constants in his films, as is the sustained focus on the relationship between theatrical expression and unscripted, everyday life. Rivette’s self-conscious meditations on the nature of cinema, as well as life, in L’Amour fou (Mad Love, 1969), Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974), La Bande des quatre (Gang of Four, 1989), Secret défense (Top Secret, 1998), and Va savoir (Who Knows?, 2001), among others, are all tempered through the medium of theater. Indeed, the subject matter of Rivette films is often rehearsal itself: they explore the process of creation, rather than the finished artefact itself. Rivette structured four of his films around the rehearsals of plays: the aforementioned L’Amour fou, Paris Belongs to Us, Out 1 (1971), and L’Amour par terre (Love on the Ground, 1984). As Pirandello knew, theater (being a naturally reflexive form) 2

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INTRODUCTION

is more concerned with questions of illusion and reality, lies and truth, than any other art, and Rivette’s characters in these films sort out the painful truth about themselves in the process of arduously preparing for performance such plays as Pericles and Racine’s Andromache (1667), as well as Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (457 B.C.) and Seven against Thebes (467 B.C.). Rivette, like Shakespeare, sees all the world as a stage, with the constant presence of the theatrical in his work a reminder of the inherent theatricality of human emotion and expression. This theme runs as an undercurrent through all of Rivette’s films, helping to structure and organize the otherwise disparate narratives of his various works. He returns repeatedly to a group of dramatic souls, working creatively and experiencing life together, but driven apart by love, jealousy, or a fear of the world’s conspiratorial powers. His films are always about the relationship among various individuals existing in the complexity and opacity of lived experience. Life outside the social, interpersonal, “theatrical” realm is like the actor’s existence offstage—ultimately too wispy and ephemeral to perceive or be perceived. From 1963 until 1965, Rivette was editor-in-chief at Cahiers du Cinéma, having replaced fellow New Waver Rohmer. During his tenure, he guided Cahiers toward a broadened interest in the political implications of contemporary culture. Rivette served as a middle ground between the two phases of Cahiers, from the aggressively depoliticized magazine of the 1950s toward the Marxist orientation it adopted after May 1968. His September 1963 interview with semiotician Roland Barthes stands as the best articulation of the new Cahiers position, defining a political role for the art of film without abandoning the magazine’s original, unstinting love for the cinema. Rivette shared Barthes’s well-chronicled suspicion of authors, and he was also a fervent ‘‘intertextualist’’: his films abound in references to other books and films. Lewis Carroll, Aeschylus, Balzac, Shakespeare, and Edgar Allan Poe are all liable to be thrown into the melting pot of movies. Rivette’s second film, released in 1967, was a surprising departure, as it adapted Denis Diderot’s famous Enlightenment novel, La Religieuse (The Nun, 1796), for the screen. Rivette cast Godard’s wife and muse, Anna Karina, in the main role of Suzanne Simonin. The film is a faithful adaptation of Diderot’s novel, in which a young woman is cast by her father into a life of torment in a French convent, where she battles for her freedom. La Religieuse has its powerful moments, and Karina’s performance is exemplary, but the film suffers from a 3

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INTRODUCTION

mannered, studied quality unusual to Rivette’s body of work. In a sense, La Religieuse is a throwback to the “cinema of quality” of the 1940s, wholly stylized and mostly predictable, a crowd-pleasing film with none of the blazing, white-hot ingenuity that marks the best of Rivette’s work. Still, the film was a succès de scandale of sorts upon its release, being banned for two years for its unsympathetic portrayal of the tyrannical rule of the Catholic Church (and allegorically, one could say, of the Gaullist government then in power in France). After La Religieuse was briefly banned (although it did make money) on account of its perceived anticlericalism, Rivette decided to abandon conventional narrative cinema. Unlike Godard, who never managed to fully overcome the cult of personality (even Tout va bien [All’s Well, 1972] and his other post-1968 collaborations with JeanPierre Gorin are inevitably treated as the great Jean-Luc’s personal statements), Rivette easily evolved a kind of collective cinema, where the director’s role was on a par with that of the actors. He gave his actors the task of improvising dialogue and character and let the narrative stumble into being. Rivette found this haphazard and risky working method infinitely preferable to rigidly conforming to a preconceived script. As a result, his films rarely appear polished and finished. Rivette’s next two films were not widely distributed, and are still difficult to see, but continue and deepen the complication, even subversion, of film narrative begun with Paris nous appartient. L’Amour fou follows a producer and actress, husband and wife, who are rehearsing Racine’s play Andromache—whose production stops short of opening night. The protagonists are also the subjects of a television documentary, and Rivette’s film switches between 35 and 16mm to reflect the separate projects. As part of Rivette’s vigorous dedication to realism, he hired a real crew to shoot the documentary, and had the actors genuinely rehearse the play. Over the course of the film, the difficulties in staging the production cause the woman to leave her husband. The fragility of human relationships—one of Rivette’s favorite topics—is central to the film, as is the fragile relationship between fact and fiction, reality and storytelling. These concerns form the core of Rivette’s later work, with the latter essential to Céline et Julie vont en bateau and the former crucial to Va savoir. His fourth film is the nearly legendary Out 1: Noli me tangere (Out 1: Touch Me Not, 1971). Close to thirteen hours in length, and shown in its entirety only once, this was for some time essentially a lost work, replaced by the later, 260-minute version, Out 1: Spectre (1972). Out 1: Noli me tangere was restored in Germany in 1990 and 4

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INTRODUCTION

shown again at the Rotterdam and Berlin Festivals shortly thereafter. It disappeared again into obscurity until 2006, when it was screened at the Vancouver International Film Festival. Out 1: Noli me tangere was restored by Carlotta Films in 2015 and made its American theatrical premiere at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in the same year. This version has now been released on DVD and Blu-ray in the United States, while Arrow Films has released it in both formats in the United Kingdom Based on the 1899 narrative by Honoré de Balzac, Out 1: Spectre (my focus here) concerns thirteen seemingly unconnected individuals living in Paris who form a secret society—or do they? Here Rivette takes his own theory of direct cinema as far as it will go, as the film opens as a documentary; only very gradually does the director allow a fictional narrative to emerge through the interaction of the large, collective cast. Two loners, played by Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre Léaud, join forces in an attempt to grasp the nature of the secret society or conspiracy, but ultimately they fail. A parable about storytelling, and our human need for such unifying plots in the face of seemingly total disconnection, Out 1, while a difficult work, is tremendously important to Rivette’s career as a whole. It offers mystery without answer, horror without pacification, nothingness without cease. Going further in self-annihilating narrative than any director before him, Rivette seemed to have nowhere to go after Out 1. With Céline et Julie vont en bateau, however, he found a way forward, and created one of the most astonishing films of the post-New Wave era. His first two films, Paris nous appartient and La Religieuse, were shot using a written script, and left Rivette disappointed, while L’Amour fou, which was partially scripted, was somewhat more successful. This encouraged Rivette to make Céline et Julie vont en bateau without a script altogether, and to work out the details during shooting with his two lead actresses, Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier. Céline (Berto) and Julie (Labourier) are two women who meet while playing a game of cat-and-mouse in summertime Montmartre, quickly becoming inseparable; they stumble into an enchanted “house of fiction,” in which the same story plays itself out, day after day. In the house, two women’s bitter fight over the love of the same man ultimately results in the tragic death of the man’s young daughter. Céline and Julie take turns playing the young girl’s nurse until her demise, and at day’s end, after deliriously stumbling out of the house, they return to their apartment with magical candies that, when sucked, can bring back with total recall the day’s events. The duo ultimately save the girl from her endlessly looping fate, but Céline 5

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INTRODUCTION

et Julie’s stunning final sequence questions the difference between the reality of the house of storytelling and the two women’s own reality (via the candies)—or fiction. It is upon this rather questionable framework that Rivette builds a highly innovative film in which everything appears to be invented, including reality. Rivette’s film is multifaceted in its cinematic re-education of viewers. Céline et Julie vont en bateau presents its audience with a vision of what is cinematically possible, filtered through a study of the rigidity of the forms of the past. This begins with issues of film length and respect for the audience. Rivette rejects the notion of the democratic principle whereby filmmakers are encouraged to continue making rehashes of the same ideologically nonsensical fluff, due to a history of filmgoers’ paying their money to see such films. The tradition of rigid adherence to the ninety-minute to two-hour time frame, enforced by the laws of free-market capitalism, is exploded by Rivette. As a maker of films of epic duration, he refuses to confine himself to these arbitrary lengths, or to the even more arbitrary, if unspoken, rules about demands on subject matter and mise-en-scène. Instead, Rivette extends the lengths of his films to a point beyond necessity, where it is understood that the film’s length, in and of itself, is a statement about the system the director works in and rebels against. Rivette furthers this impression by seemingly wasting the first twenty minutes of Céline et Julie vont en bateau extending the opening chase beyond any narrative obligation. He has thus expressed his belief in the ideal cinema as one of ordeal: namely, a cinema that challenges its viewers to break through mainstream, middlebrow notions of narrative and cinematic technique, into a wider view of acceptable filmic topics and methods. Céline et Julie works off this premise, challenging its viewers with the relatively sparse narrative in its opening sequences in order to prepare them for the breakthrough of the film’s second half, in which the pleasures of storytelling are superbly—at times, whimsically—explored. Like Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles), Céline et Julie vont en bateau is dedicated to reordering cinematic narrative and pulling film structure away from its standard, expository framework. Where Welles’s masterpiece revealed a world in which everyone had his own story, none more dependable than any other, Céline et Julie depicts a world that is itself a story. Céline and Julie are classic spectators of such narratives—spectators who ultimately cross the line from observation into action. Rivette collapses these distinctions by the film’s close, leaving us unsure of any firm footing from which to watch from a distance. Narrative, Rivette seems to say, is always a process of 6

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INTRODUCTION

involvement, creating entanglements or connections that cannot easily be loosened. The detached spectator is nothing but a fiction. The next period of Rivette’s career, between Céline et Julie vont en bateau and the renewed triumphs of La Bande des quatre and La belle noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker, 1991), is for the most part disappointing. Duelle (Twilight, 1976) was pictorially lovely, while La Pont du Nord (North Bridge, 1982) and L’Amour par terre featured continued reflections on the relationship between art and reality. In comparison to the peaks of Rivette’s filmmaking, however, these films (also Noroît [Northwest Wind, 1976], an experimental adventure fantasy loosely based on Cyril Tourneur’s The Revenger’s Tragedy [1606]; Merry-Go-Round [1980], a crime drama starring Maria Schneider and Joe Dallesandro; and Hurlevent [1985], a version of Emily Brontë’s 1847 novel Wuthering Heights) are mere footnotes. Rivette’s second wind as a filmmaker came with the release of La Bande des quatre in 1988. The plot concerns a number of drama students as they encounter the same mysterious man, who tells them each a different story about a friend in danger. The inherent theatricality of the drama students plays into the movie’s aura of dramatized, yet unresolved, menace, a large-scale conspiracy (never adequately explained though overtly connected to the group’s drama teacher [Bulle Ogier]) that owes a significant debt to Out 1 and Paris nous appartient. The final result features a similar, two-pronged approach that hints both at the vast entropic vagueness of reality and at the obsessive, hopeless, comic, and possibly tragic duty of human beings to detect significance in that muddled vagueness. La Bande des quatre intentionally creates more mystery than it can account for, leaving a buzzing sensation of forces outside our understanding, operating in modes beyond our comprehension. Rivette’s films are directly related, in this aspect, to an American literature of paranoia, best exemplified by Thomas Pynchon and Don DeLillo, where conspiracy is so pervasive that it becomes essentially invisible. A stray comment in La Bande des quatre about the painter Frenhofer and his masterpiece La belle noiseuse spawned the 1991 film of the same name, leading Rivette fans themselves to wonder about a pervasive conspiracy between the master’s own films. Starring New Wave regular Michel Piccoli as the painter, with Emmanuelle Béart and Jane Birkin as the two women in his life, this four-hour miniature epic is remarkable in its concision. Frenhofer, a painter who has lost his creative spark, discovers in Béart a model who inspires him. Frenhofer’s wife (Birkin) grows jealous of this intrusion into her and her husband’s enclosed universe, and the boyfriend of this “belle 7

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INTRODUCTION

noiseuse” feels similarly about her relationship with his idol Frenhofer. The film burrows deeply into its subject, focusing intently, for long moments, on the process of painting. No other film on the subject so intensely records the small failures and advances of creation, with whole minutes ticking by during which the only audible sound is that of pencil on paper, or brush on canvas. La belle noiseuse is a meditation on the artist’s relationship to the surrounding world, as well as on the complexities of artistic inspiration. Never fully satisfied with merely one agenda per film, Rivette also crafts here a fully realized portrait of two couples, and two ways of life, colliding—with unexpected, life-altering repercussions. La belle noiseuse is the first fully realized offering of Rivette’s mature period, succeeding the impassioned yet sketched social portraits of his early films with something quieter and more deeply grasped. There is now a sense of experience succeeding intellect as the guiding force of his films, and this holds true for the works following La belle noiseuse. Viewing this picture as a partly autobiographical work, one can see traces of Rivette himself in Frenhofer: the older artist as he desperately grasps in the darkness for some lost fount of inspiration, and discovers instead the small pleasures of the craft itself as a new creative talisman. Rivette also released a two-hour version of the film, titled La belle noiseuse: Divertimento, constructed out of alternate takes, which appeared to be intentional self-mutilation. The question of how a film dedicated to sustained contemplation of its subject could be reduced to half its original length without losing much of its force remains unresolved by this truncated version. It is mostly of interest to devoted buffs of La belle noiseuse and Rivette “completists.” His next work was the two part Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Maiden, 1994), a retelling of the life of Joan of Arc that deliberately avoided the mannered approach of such earlier Joan chroniclers as CarlTheodor Dreyer (1928), Robert Bresson (1962), and Otto Preminger (1957). This Jeanne, starring Sandrine Bonnaire, downplayed the metaphysical, miraculous aspect of Joan’s ascendance, focusing instead on the political machinations and social mores of the other characters. Jeanne la pucelle is ultimately less than scintillating, but is still of significant interest as Rivette’s response to the Dreyer-Bresson school of filmmaking. Rivette’s interest is in this world, not the next, and even when faced with a narrative of such significant spiritual quality as Joan of Arc’s (his film seems to say), his story will remain firmly rooted in the poetics of mortal life. Haut bas fragile (Up, Down, Fragile, 1995), a musical set in Paris, followed and amounted to an enjoyable romantic-comedy romp, 8

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Rivette style. This film and the subsequent one, the mystery-thriller Secret défense, seem in retrospect to be dress rehearsals for Rivette’s next picture, the masterful Va savoir. Borrowing Haut bas fragile’s frothy, swooning tone and melding it with Secret défense’s investigatory, vaguely menacing aura, Rivette created a unique brew in Va savoir, another in Rivette’s long series of uncategorizable and brilliant works. It is simply a stunning, and yet another peak in Rivette’s exceptional career. A theatrical couple of long standing run into romantic difficulties in Va savoir, and during their separation they each encounter the puzzling and enticing world that surrounds them. Ugo (Sergio Castellitto) and Camille (Jeanne Balibar) find love and intellectual stimulation, but also an irredeemable ugliness (even in their fantasies) that is difficult to stomach. Rivette’s facility for stunning imagery is fluid as ever, from Balibar’s escape to the freedom of Parisian rooftops to the theatrical cunning of the closing sequence. Va Savoir also continues his fascination with the theatrical— the couple are an actress and director, and the film is punctuated with the performance of their production of a 1930 Pirandello play titled As You Desire Me. (In true Rivette style, a 220-minute version of the film, entitled Va savoir+, was released in France in 2002 and featured extended sequences of the Pirandello play.) After Va savoir, Rivette made Histoire de Marie et Julien (Story of Marie and Julien, 2003), a ghost story inspired by nineteenth-century French fantasy literature and using the primary convention of the genre: that people who die in emotional distress, or without finishing an important task, may become ghosts. There are similarities here both to Cocteau’s Orphée (Orpheus, 1950) and to Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), as the film slowly develops from a drama about blackmail into a dark, yet tender, supernatural (or dreamily logical) love story between Marie and Julien, played by Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz. As in Rivette’s earlier La belle noiseuse, the main themes in Histoire de Marie et Julien are romantic longing, impermanence, and identity (artistic or otherwise), but this later film adds the subjects of mortality, chance, and destiny. Rivette followed Histoire de Marie et Julien with his final two films: Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe, a.k.a. The Duchess of Langeais, 2007) and 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (Around a Small Mountain, 2009), The first is based on Balzac’s 1834 novel of the same name and stars Jeanne Balibar and Guillaume Depardieu as a couple involved, in early-nineteenth-century Majorca, in a tormented, frustrating relationship. At times plodding and dialogue heavy, Ne 9

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touchez pas la hache is nevertheless a rewarding period-dissection of class and gender relations. Rivette’s final picture, 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup—his shortest feature at eighty-four minutes—is a mystery about another couple: a reticent woman (Jane Birkin) with a buried past who is returning to her role as a tightrope-walker in her family’s traveling circus, and a well-meaning man (Sergio Castellitto) who in the end runs away with the circus—and the woman. Not accidentally, Rivette once likened (in the Cahiers du Cinéma of February 1989) the role of the filmmaker to that of an acrobat on a high wire above the void, which (the acrobat on the high wire, or the void itself?) he described as the very soul of cinema. Rivette’s ability to shape-shift in films such as these, to discover new modes of self-expression and reflection, is what kept him a vibrant and relevant filmmaker for fifty years. His films, like many of the New Wave works, seem to have avoided the aging process entirely, remaining as playful, fresh, and quietly spectacular as the day they were made. His body of work as a whole is truly astonishing, and, in hindsight, his oeuvre may be the most impressive of the French New Wave. Moreover, Céline et Julie vont en bateau itself may be the best film to emerge from the post-New Wave era, even as Paris Belongs to Us (1961) is one of the best pictures to emerge from the New Wave itself. To be sure, Rivette was hardly the most prolific director, and the length of his films has often counted against him. Nonetheless, his clinical, self-reflexive essays in film form, coupled with the sophisticated games he played in the ‘‘house of fiction,” reveal him as a cinematic purist whose commitment to the celluloid muse hardly diminished from the heady days of the early 1950s to the end of his career. So “pure” was Rivette that he preferred very long, quasi-theatrical takes, which facilitated a fluid and dynamic approach to transitioning from one composed image to another (as opposed to an abrupt and cutting procedure). He often effected such transitions through what one can think of as the “Rivette spiral,” where the camera is simultaneously moved in an arc and rotated in the same direction (frequently zooming at the same time). The director will begin a shot with, say, a static image of one character on the left side of the screen, and then he will execute one of his characteristic spirals that finally lands on a second static image of another character on the right side of the screen. The labyrinthine mansion interiors that Rivette favored are the perfect venue for this simultaneously realistic and sleight-of-hand technique. In sum, Jacques Rivette now holds a distinctive position in the history of French filmmaking. Initially he made films that challenged 10

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the opposition between theatricality and realism, fabricating a singular aesthetic that was perceived to be at odds with a film movement acclaimed for its spontaneity and freedom from convention. His later films went on to exceed those of his New Wave contemporaries in their experimentation with reflexive theatricality, serial form, invented or mythical reality, and extended duration, pushing far beyond the boundaries imposed by conventional narrative. Beyond inspiring the New Wave movement and continuing to reflect, and reflect on, its central tenets, Rivette’s enduring contribution to the history of film is unquestionably evident in his sensitive (never didactic) treatment, in strong roles for actresses, of the histories and destinies of women. Most Rivette movies, for example, pass the Bechdel test (do two named female characters talk about something other than a man?), and many of them fail the reverse Bechdel test (do two named male characters talk about something other than a woman?). There are no Rivette films that focus substantially more on male characters than female characters. (Some are fairly balanced, including Out 1 and Histoire de Marie and Julien, but more are female-centric.) Rivette treats actresses (and actors) as creative collaborators, developing their characters and dialogue through improvisation; actresses are therefore sometimes credited as cowriters. Female characters are typically formidable, even imposing: they are scientists, directors, private investigators, pirates, and gangsters. A number of Rivette’s films—among them Céline et Julie vont en bateau, Le Pont du Nord, and La Bande des quatre—focus on bonding and friendship between women, while several others, including La belle noiseuse, Jeanne la pucelle, and La Religieuse, take up hard-hitting feminist themes, During the six decades of his career, however, Rivette struck a subtle balance not only between female and male characters, but also between political and personal obsession, truth and fiction, art and life, past and present, between creative block and artistic collaboration, theater and cinema, and psychological dissolution and mental health, in films that, in addition to having influenced such contemporary filmmakers as Claire Denis, Jim Jarmusch, Olivier Assayas, and David Lynch, continue to redefine the art of cinema around the world. Jacques Rivette and French New Wave Cinema: Interviews, Conversations, Chronologies is aimed at cinephiles or film buffs, scholar-teachers, and students with an interest in world cinema in general and French cinema in particular. But, just as important, the book is also aimed at those educated readers with an interest in the practice of both film directing and arts journalism. The interviews, 11

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chronicles, and statements contained herein have not been edited from the form of their initial publication (except in the case of excerpts, and except for the correction of factual or grammatical errors throughout). Consequently, the reader will sometimes encounter repetition of both questions and answers. In the editor’s belief, however, noticing the same questions’ being asked and the consistency (or inconsistency) of the responses, in their unexpurgated form, will prove of value to readers.

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André Bazin & Jacques Rivette, “Two Characters in Search of Auteurs: A Discussion about the French Cinema” From “Six personnages en quête d’auteurs: débat sur le cinéma français,” Cahiers du Cinéma, 71 [May 1957]: 16–29, 85–90. Translated by Liz Heron.

André Bazin: “The present situation of French cinema.” That implies both its evolution and the present conjuncture. Rivette, you’re the one with the most radical and decided opinions on the subject. Jacques Rivette: It’s not exactly an opinion, more a way of formulating the subject. I think that French cinema at the moment is unwittingly another version of British cinema, or to put it another way, it’s a British cinema not recognized as such, because it’s the work of people who are nonetheless talented. But the films seem no more ambitious and of no more real value than what is exemplified in the British cinema. Bazin: What, in your opinion, defines the mediocrity of British cinema? Rivette: British cinema is a genre cinema, but one where the genres have no genuine roots. On the one hand there are no self-validating genres as there are in American cinema, like the Western and the thriller (run-of-the-mill Westerns have a value independent of the great Westerns). There are just false, in the sense of imitative, genres. Anyway, most of them are only imitations of American imitations. And on the other hand British cinema isn’t an auteur cinema either, since none of the films have anything to say. It’s a cinema that limps along, caught between two stools, a cinema based on supply and demand—and on false notions of supply and demand at that. They believe that’s the kind of thing the public wants and so that’s what it gets, but in trying to play by all the rules of that game they do it badly, without either honesty or talent. Bazin: The essential characteristic of American cinema is that unexceptional films, those commercial films that are its principal ingredient, are precisely genre films. American cinema thrives 14

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financially if the genres thrive. Production can keep going at an average or even above-average rate as long as there are good genres. The weakness of the European film industries is that they are incapable of relying on genres for current production. In French pre-war cinema, even if there wasn’t exactly a genre, there was a style, the realist film noir. It’s still around but it’s diversified, and I’m afraid that one of the problems of French cinema may arise from its inability to sustain good basic genres that thrive, the way they do in America. Rivette: I think what you say opens out onto something fundamental, since in fact I think it’s impossible to do anything worthwhile in European cinema (not just French cinema, but English and Italian as well) except from that premise, i.e. the non-existence of basic genres. One then has to resign oneself to exceptions. That means admitting from the outset that there can’t be any good European films, far less great ones, unless one decides not to make use of “genre” subjects, since every genre is essentially doomed to failure. You could say that in spite of their great successes, Henri-Georges Clouzot, René Clément, and Jacques Becker failed because they thought that finding a style was all it took to create a new soul for French cinema. It’s quite clear, by contrast, that Italian neorealism wasn’t first and foremost a search for a style. It became a style; but it was part of a conception of the new world. I defy anyone (and I think everyone would agree) to find any conception of the world in Clouzot’s films, or Becker’s, or Clément’s. At very best it would be a conception of the world that is banal, literary, and twenty or thirty years out of date. I think we implicitly agree on the name for the evolution of the socalled great directors: it’s called academicism. This academicism isn’t serious in itself. For example, academicism is less of a serious problem in the American cinema—when King Vidor made War and Peace [1956] we were very clear beforehand about the limits imposed on him by Paramount, Dino De Laurentiis, and the whole super-production system. What is serious in the latest films of Becker and Clément is that it’s an academicism to which the directors acquiesced. And one even wonders whether they aren’t actually seeking it out. The ideal for French cinema would to be to have, on the one hand, super-productions made by directors like Jean Delannoy or Jean-Paul Le Chanois (people who are suited to that kind of thing and who do it well, so that a film that costs 500 million brings in 800 or even more, which is after all what everyone wants), and on the other hand talented directors who would refuse to involve themselves in such deals, which can in no way be profitable for them, and who have the kind of moral 15

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integrity to be satisfied with films—let’s say costing 100 million— which don’t need foreign markets to avoid making a loss, but with which they could really create auteur works. These two spheres would have to coexist and would also have to be quite clearly separate. That’s exactly what is happening in Italian cinema, which also has its crises but stays in better health because there is never any confusion between Ulysses [1954, Mario Camerini], or all the other superproductions, and the school of Roberto Rossellini, Cesare Zavattini, Vittorio De Sica, and Michelangelo Antonioni, all of whom, although they disagree on a lot of issues, have never compromised. The only exception is Luchino Visconti, in making Senso [1954], but it’s quite clear that this is a purely formal exception, since Visconti just got as much as he could out of the producer, like Max Ophüls with Lola Montès [1955] and Jean Renoir, to some extent, with Elena et les hommes [Elena and Her Men, 1956]. But at heart Italian cinema has never let itself be taken over. In France, by contrast, what we’ve been witnessing over the past two or three years is the disintegration of what we regarded as the core of French cinema. People like Becker, Clément, and Clouzot have successively let themselves be swallowed up by the all-devouring super-productions. I don’t know why: for love of either money or international fame. And now you might as well say that there is nobody. There’s only one filmmaker left who hasn’t sold out, and that’s Robert Bresson. He’s the only one. And there are some youngsters [Alexandre Astruc and Roger Vadim, whose Les Mauvaises Rencontres (Bad Liaisons, 1955) and Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (And God Created Woman, 1956), respectively, were both important precursors of the French New Wave], but there hasn’t exactly been time yet for temptation to come their way. Perhaps they’ll give in, too, when the time comes? There’s no way of knowing. Why such a desire to conquer the world on the part of some directors? That’s precisely the cause of the disaster. On the contrary, we should be trying above all to maintain French audiences and only conquer the world as an indirect consequence. From the moment we start trying to manufacture international stars, from the moment we aim at making international films, nine times out of ten we’ll fall flat on our faces. Bazin: I think there’s some truth in both points of view—a cinema based on stars and a cinema rejecting conventional attitudes to acting, as the two coexist in, for example, Italian cinema. I mean that there is a certain kind of film, with a particular cinematic importance, which 16

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is based on the star. It’s quite obvious that French cinema before the war was built round Jean Gabin. There’s an essential and profound connection between the scripts, the style of the films, and Gabin. It’s indisputable. But on the other hand you could give ten examples where the star is a disaster. You have to judge the phenomenon in context. I think we’re agreed in assuming that it’s not in the direction of the international super-production, where the star has a fundamental role, that French cinema has most chance of progress. This will happen by rediscovering a way of capturing the inspiration of talented people, and that ought not to happen independently of acting but with acting at a level beyond that of the star. Rivette: In fact, Gabin wasn’t an actor, he was something else. He wasn’t an actor, he was someone who brought a character into French cinema, and it wasn’t only scripts that he influenced but mise-en-scène as well. I think that Gabin could be regarded as almost more of a director than Julien Duvivier or Jean Grémillon, to the extent that the French style of mise-en-scène was constructed to a large extent on Gabin’s style of acting, on his walk, his way of speaking or of looking at a girl. It’s also what gives the great American actors their dynamism, actors like Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, or James Stewart. For instance, Anthony Mann’s mise-en-scène is definitely influenced by James Stewart’s style of acting. Now, I can’t see any actor in France at the moment who has that power of his own to go beyond just acting. Bazin: I’m wondering now whether pre-war cinema, which did in fact demonstrate quite exceptional thematic and inspirational unity, whichever directors were involved, could be linked up with the upand-coming literature of that time. It’s normal for there to be a time-lag between a literary generation and its passage into cinema. For instance existentialism, which is out of date in literature, could have brought us (I don’t think it will now) the equivalent of the pre-war film noir, whose relationship to surrealism Roger Leenhardt has clearly shown. [Leenhardt posited the foundation of pre-war French cinema as coming out of a union between a French literary movement symbolized by Eugène Dabit (post-1914 populism) and a movement close to it, bordering on surrealism, represented by Jacques Prévert and Jean Aurenche.] Rivette: I’m concerned with scripts themselves. I think that what is said about Fellini could apply just as well to the American filmmakers, in spite of the credits, for as we now know for sure there isn’t a single 17

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one of the great American directors who doesn’t work on the scenario himself right from the beginning, in collaboration with a scriptwriter who writes the screenplay for him and does the purely literary work that the director himself couldn’t do with the same formal skill but which is nevertheless in accordance with his own directives (not simply under his supervision but following the direction he gives to it). And that’s why in Cahiers du Cinéma we’ve chosen to defend directors like Alfred Hitchcock rather than William Wyler, and Anthony Mann rather than Fred Zinnemann, because they are directors who actually work on their scenarios. And that’s precisely the new element that they’ve introduced over these last ten years. The question of the pure scriptwriter is thus out of date. Bazin: It’s out of date in psychological terms. It’s possible that the evolution of the cinema is moving in the direction of the directorauteur working on the scenario with the scriptwriter or scriptwriters. But it matters very little to me whether there are scriptwriters as such— what does matter is that the scriptwriter should exist as a function. What we come back to in fact isn’t the problem of people, but the problem of inspiration and themes. American cinema is just about inexhaustible in the richness of its themes; that’s just not the case in France. Before the war there were thematic continuities. Now we have to ask ourselves what they are. The great unity there was before the war has split in all sorts of directions. But one characteristic remains, of context though not of subject matter: that is, beyond psychology, a particular novelistic vision of the world. Films like Becker’s Casque d’or [Golden Helmet, 1952] or Édouard et Caroline [1951] are works that, without any specific literary origins, seem to me very French and very “post-war.” Leenhardt’s Les dernières vacances [The Last Vacation, 1948] is also a very post-war film. Similarly, Clément’s Jeux interdits [Forbidden Games, 1952] or Bresson’s Journal d’un curé de campagne [Diary of a Country Priest, 1951]. While they vary widely in style, atmosphere, and theme, they have in common a sharper sense of humanity than anything in prewar cinema, as well as a capacity for analysis that is close to literature. I’m afraid we’re losing this, and it’s the only capital we’ve got. Rivette: In any case, there’s no point in looking to comedy, which will always be a limited sphere; nor to films adapted from the novel, which was hopeful seven or eight years ago but is now out of date. The only possibility left for French cinema would be in films that although not social (I’m not happy with that word) at least take up a position, 18

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analogous to Italian post-war cinema. But why have people failed to recognize this possibility until now? I think it’s too easy to blame it on censorship and the producers. It’s only because the few French directors who have made statements to the press like “I’d like to make social films” are, in reality, people who have been corrupted. I think that Claude Autant-Lara, Clément, and Clouzot are all sickening, to the extent that they could have made those films if they had been willing to work in the same conditions as Rossellini, Federico Fellini, or Antonioni, with thirty or forty million francs, perhaps having to film in the street and being pushed for time. Only they don’t want to. What they want, on the one hand, is to go on making money, and on the other to go on making prestige films. It’s quite obvious that Clouzot, when he says that he wants to make a film about Indochina and a 300-million-franc film, at one and the same time, will never manage either, and anyway has probably never really wanted to. All he did was strut about in front of journalists and acquire a good reputation for himself as a filmmaker with courage. Then he makes Les Diaboliques [The Devils, 1955]. But if Clouzot had really wanted to make that Indochina film he could certainly have found thirty million. He wouldn’t have had to worry about advance censorship and his film would probably have passed anyway. After all, the Italian filmmakers also have censorship and producers and distributors. They have still found a way of saying quite a lot. We haven’t seen Carlo Lizzani’s films in France. But I imagine that Lizzani didn’t say straight out, “I am a Communist and I want the revolution to come.” He implied it, but in a way clear enough for him to say what he wanted to say. Yet Clouzot, Clément, and Autant-Lara (I keep coming back to these three names because they are the three who are most guilty) didn’t want to take that risk. Because they are cowards, because—I repeat—they are corrupted, corrupted by money. In a word I think that what is most lacking in French cinema is a spirit of poverty. Its only hope now lies in other directors—not those three anymore (for if they once had the opportunity to say something they let it go by), but new directors taking those risks making films with twenty or thirty million, perhaps even less, and filming with whatever turns up, without putting their scripts forward for approval by the censors and perhaps without even putting them to the producers and the distributors. I think that is the only hope for French cinema. I also think that if Pierre Boulle’s novels had been adapted for the cinema it wouldn’t have been much of a step forward, because they are literature whose inspiration goes back some fifty years. If you stop at that point you’re not going very far. It would be a new type of acad19

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emicism but it would still be academicism—leftist academicism, anarchist academicism, academicism of the absurd. But while John Huston has had his moments, I can’t see why in France we should start by taking him as an example. We need to go further. As for Huston in America, he is finished in the way that you can say Joseph Conrad’s novels date from fifty years ago. To do now in the cinema what people were doing elsewhere fifty years ago is pointless. The only possibility that the cinema has of doing something important is in not following literature, whether it’s the literature of fifty or fifteen years ago (as pre-war French cinema unfortunately did—while Mac Orlan [a.k.a. Pierre Dumarchey] or Francis Carco was being adapted, it was the novels of André Malraux, Georges Bernanos, and the early novels of Jean-Paul Sartre that were most important in France). But it’s not a question of following the literature of a few years ago. It’s perhaps not even a question of trying to keep up with new literature: the real function of the cinema should be to go further than literature. It has been said that American cinema had drawn its essential strength from the American novel. But what I see is that the adaptations of the great contemporary novelists by American filmmakers have with rare exceptions only produced mediocre films. Quite the contrary, American cinema has developed, alongside American literature, personal themes and a personal vision of the world that are not particularly close to those of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway and are even in certain respects very distant. What precisely constitutes the greatness of the American film is that it has drawn a parallel with the American novel, but these are two lines that do not intersect; they advance side by side. Bazin: I think that you’re digressing a bit from the specific problem of French cinema. It’s not absolutely necessary to establish whether French filmmakers should or shouldn’t derive the inspiration for their themes from the literary patrimony. Both methods could be useful. If they aren’t it’s because American cinema actually has themes outside literature. It is perhaps greater because it has in itself enough sociological inspiration to draw on. It is very possible that for historical reasons French cinema has none, and perhaps the novel offers a greater source of inspiration, but it isn’t really important. The problem is to find out whether there is material or not. In any event, there’s no inevitability about a direct relationship between a given society and the cinema, although that’s the case in America and in Italy. I don’t think, either, that there’s any direct rela20

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tionship between the French novel and French society. It goes beyond just cinema. It’s perhaps because at this stage in the development of society and of French art the connection can’t be made. Should one seek themes related to contemporary reality at any price? That’s what Le Chanois and André Cayatte did. We can see the outcome of that. It isn’t exemplary. What’s more, it’s not enough just to have a good, rich sociological foundation. There must be extremes. In Italy, unemployment fulfills the role of fate and destiny. Three-quarters of Italian neorealism is founded on fear, social fear. American society is polarized by two things that figure importantly: money and luck. In France it’s not material that’s lacking, but the possibility of drama inherent in it. That doesn’t mean that in France there aren’t numerous problems: wars in Indochina or in Algeria, the housing shortage, etc. Rivette: You certainly can’t take up the housing shortage or racism or the war without relating them to a wider context. And you won’t be able to do it so long as you go on believing that French society evolved in the last twenty years, which I think is absurd. The first duty of a French filmmaker should be to try to see what are the most fundamental new elements in society over the last few years. And then he could handle anyone of those issues, because he would have the key. Why haven’t we found the key? Because we haven’t even looked for it. Bazin: For each individual the key will be political or moral, while it should in fact be beyond politics and morality. Rivette: Bresson, for his part, corresponds to a literary reality in France. But that is his reactionary aspect. There have been very great reactionary writers, but there have also been, and not so long ago, Bernanos and Malraux. While we have the equivalent of Jacques Chardonne, for instance, in French cinema, why don’t we have the equivalent of Bernanos or Malraux?

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Louis Marcorelles, “Jacques Rivette and Paris nous appartient” From Film Quarterly, 28.1 [Winter 1958–59]: 34.

Paris has served as a background for all sorts of pictures—for love stories, gangster films, and travelogues; for Cinerama. Today it is the setting for a modest but at the same time highly ambitious first feature from one of the young talents of the French cinema, Jacques Rivette. His age: thirty; his profession: has seen all films, especially American ones. With François Truffaut, he is the most characteristic representative of Cahiers du Cinéma’s young team of critics. Two years ago Rivette made a film based on a short story, Le Coup du berger, with young professional actors. The title indicates the character of the film: a kind of game or hoax. A young married woman, intending to deceive her husband and bring home a mink coat given her by her lover, is caught in her own trap; the husband, less simple than she imagined, arranges that the famous mink ends up on the shoulders of his charming sister-in-law. Rivette developed this anecdote with icy elegance, a lordly detachment, and extreme visual formalism. The producer of the film was Claude Chabrol (director of Le Beau Serge [Handsome Serge, 1958], his own first film), who lent his flat for the shooting. With Paris nous appartient, Jacques Rivette has embarked on a feature production, undertaken under rather special conditions. The title is inspired by a reflection of the writer Charles Péguy—that Paris belongs to those who spend the summer there preparing for the winter season. A troupe of young actors, directed by Gianni Esposito, spend the summer working on a new production, Shakespeare’s Pericles [1609], without money and against professional advice. A young student (played by Betty Schneider) joins them. But difficulties spring up, enthusiasm crumbles, intrigues proliferate, and little by little the group falls apart. They all imagine themselves to be victims of a secret conspiracy, to which the silent, empty Paris of August lends its disquieting face. Involved with the troupe are émigrés of all kinds—Russians, Spaniards, a young French-American woman, an American intellectual in flight from McCarthyism. The film ends tragically with several deaths, including the suicide of the young director, who might have been saved by the girl’s love. 22

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The script itself is by Rivette and the actor Jean Gruault, and most of the actors are professionals. Betty Schneider, for instance, appeared in Alex Joffé’s Les Fanatiques [A Bomb for a Dictator, 1957]and Jacques Tati’s Mon Oncle [My Uncle, 1958]; Gianni Esposito played in Jean Renoir’s French Cancan [1955]. Others in the cast include Tatiana Moukhine and François Maistre, both well-known in Parisian avant-garde theaters, and Jean-Claude Brialy, the young leading actor of Le Beau Serge. The cameraman is Charles Bitsch, another youthful French critic. No one, incidentally, will receive any payment until after the film is shown. Shooting, which began at the end of July 1958, was completed in November of the same year. The locations cover the places frequented by young intellectuals—Pont des Arts, Saint-Sulpice, university restaurants, a café near the Place de l’Étoile. Interiors have been filmed mostly in hotel rooms, rented when necessary, and at the Théâtre du Châtelet. The shooting script was planned to leave room for improvisation during filming and consisted only of a breakdown into scenes with some dialogue. Rivette says, however, that a good deal of the dialogue was rewritten during shooting, with improvisation from the actors. Of necessity, no dialogue was recorded on the set and the film will be entirely post-synchronized. This, according to Rivette, leaves a certain area of freedom and allows him to pick up any mistakes. “In some respects,” Rivette adds, my film will be in the spirit of 16mm production. I know that it will please only one person in ten. But I haven’t made it with any provocative intention . . . I believe that the basic material of the plot is infinitely malleable, and I’d be prepared—if absolutely necessary—to make compromises here rather than in anything concerning the characters. I had first written an original subject for Roberto Rossellini—a sort of modern version of Sophocles’ Antigone [441 B.C.], set in the Cité Universitaire among the student population and dealing also with racial tensions. This couldn’t be filmed, and although I’ve entirely reworked the subject in my new script, I have kept two or three scenes and characters, such as the young girl and the American exile.

The characters in his film, Rivette claims, “are all tragic puppets, taking themselves too seriously, living in a sort of dream world and sickened by the real world, which they can’t reform.” His idea was 23

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to show Paris as a melting pot, a meeting point for different people, races, ideas. No producer was prepared to touch the subject, and in filming it we’ve worked together as friends. The stock has been bought from day to day, with help from Cahiers du Cinéma, François Truffaut, my own family; the camera was borrowed from Claude Chabrol. Now we still have the big job of synchronization, all the heavy expenses of the laboratory.

Rivette’s own interest in the cinema dates, he says, from about twelve years ago, when he read Jean Cocteau’s diary of the shooting of La Belle et la Bête [Beauty and the Beast, 1946]. Directors he particularly admires are Orson Welles (“for his ability to jump across time and space”) and Renoir (“for his art of blending characters”). “Today,” Rivette adds, “the French cinema has come to a turning point. Before the war only Renoir, Jean Vigo, and Abel Gance had created an authentic French cinema. At present one can think of six or seven talents whose films demand serious consideration.” Jacques Rivette himself is typical of a new generation with a new conception of the cinema. He will succeed or not according to whether his intransigent idealism can adapt itself to the material circumstances of this most terrible of the arts. “The renewal of the French cinema,” wrote his friend François Truffaut, “cannot be brought about through the promotion of assistant directors who have become bored, resigned, domesticated . . . but only through the arrival of young intellectuals who feel themselves to be artists and not artisans . . . directors such as Louis Malle, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Baratier, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda.” Now Jacques Rivette and Claude Chabrol have each made a feature film, Alain Resnais has just made his own first full-length picture, in Japan [Hiroshima, mon amour, 1959], and François Truffaut is himself preparing a feature, Les Quatre cent coups [The 400 Blows, 1959]. A new idea of the cinema does indeed seem to be growing in France.

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Jean-Luc Godard & Jacques Rivette, “Hiroshima, notre amour” From “Hiroshima, notre amour,” Cahiers du Cinéma 97 [July 1959]: 1–18. Translated by Liz Heron.

Jean-Luc Godard: You can say that the very first thing that strikes you about Hiroshima, mon amour [Hiroshima, My Love, 1959] is that it is totally devoid of any cinematic references. You can describe Hiroshima as William Faulkner plus Igor Stravinsky, but you can’t identify it as such-and-such a filmmaker plus such-and-such another. Jacques Rivette: Maybe Alain Resnais’s film doesn’t have any specific cinematic references, but I think you can find references that are oblique and more profound, because it’s a film that recalls Sergei Eisenstein, in the sense that you can see some of Eisenstein’s ideas put into practice—and, moreover, in a very new way. Godard: When I said there were no cinematic references, I meant that seeing Hiroshima, mon amour gave one the impression of watching a film that would have been quite inconceivable in terms of what one was already familiar with in the cinema. For instance, when you see India [1959, Roberto Rossellini] you know that you’ll be surprised, but you are more or less anticipating that surprise. Similarly, I know that Jean Renoir’s Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier [The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment, 1959] will surprise me, just as his Elena et les hommes [Elena and Her Men, 1956] did. However, with Hiroshima I feel as if I am seeing something that I didn’t expect at all. Rivette: For its part, Toute la mémoire du monde [All the Memory in the World, 1956] is without doubt the most mysterious of all Resnais’s short films. Through its subject, which is both very modern and very disturbing, it echoes what Renoir said in his interviews Cahiers du Cinéma, that the most crucial thing that’s happening to our civilization is that it is in the process of becoming a civilization of specialists. Each one of us is more and more locked into his own little domain, and incapable of leaving it. There is no one nowadays who has the capacity to decipher both an ancient inscription and a modern scientific formula. Culture and the common treasure of mankind have become the prey of the specialists. I think that was what Resnais had in mind 25

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when he made Toute la mémoire du monde. He wanted to show that the only task necessary for mankind in the search for that unity of culture was, through the work of every individual, to try to reassemble the scattered fragments of the universal culture that is being lost. And I think that is why Toute la mémoire du monde ended with those higher and higher shots of the central hall, where you can see each reader, each researcher in his place, bent over his manuscript, yet all of them side by side, all in the process of trying to assemble the scattered pieces of the mosaic, to find the lost secret of humanity: a secret that is perhaps called happiness. Resnais’s great obsession, if I may use that word, is the sense of the splitting of primary unity—the world is broken up, fragmented into a series of tiny pieces, and it has to be put back together again like a jigsaw. I think that for Resnais this reconstitution of the pieces operates on two levels. First on the level of content, of dramatization. Then, I think even more importantly, on the level of the idea of cinema itself. I have the impression that for Alain Resnais the cinema consists in attempting to create a whole with fragments that are a priori dissimilar. For example, in one of Resnais’s films two concrete phenomena that have no logical or dramatic connection are linked solely because they are both filmed in tracking shots at the same speed. Godard: You can see all that is Eisensteinian about Hiroshima, mon amour because it is in fact the very idea of montage, its definition even. Rivette: Yes. Montage, for Eisenstein as for Resnais, consists in rediscovering unity from a basis of fragmentation, but without concealing the fragmentation in doing so: on the contrary, emphasizing it by emphasizing the autonomy of the shot. It’s a double movement—emphasizing the autonomy of the shot and simultaneously seeking within that shot a strength that will enable it to enter into a relationship with another or several other shots, and in this way eventually to form a unity. But don’t forget, this unity is no longer that of classic continuity. It is a unity of contrasts, a dialectical unity as G.W.F. Hegel and Jean Domarchi would say. (Laughter.) To speak for a moment of Elena et les hommes, Elena is an adult woman in the sense that the titular female character played by Ingrid Bergman is not a classic character, but one of classic modernism, like Roberto Rossellini’s. Elena is a woman to whom sensitivity matters, instinct and all the deep mechanisms matter, but they are contradicted by reason, the intellect. And that derives from classic psychology in 26

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terms of the interplay of the mind and the senses. While the Emmanuelle Riva character in Hiroshima, mon amour is that of a woman who is not irrational, but is not-rational. She doesn’t understand herself. She doesn’t analyze herself. Anyway, this is a bit like what Rossellini tried to do in Stromboli [1950]. But in Stromboli the Bergman character was clearly delineated, an exact curve. She was a “moral” character, instead of which the Emmanuelle Riva character remains voluntarily blurred and ambiguous. Moreover, that is the theme of Hiroshima, mon amour: a woman who no longer knows where she stands, who no longer knows who she is, who tries desperately to redefine herself in relation to Hiroshima, in relation to this Japanese man, and in relation to the memories of Nevers that come back to her. In the end she is a woman who is starting all over again, going right back to the beginning, trying to define herself in existential terms before the world and before her past, as if she were once more unformed matter in the process of being born. Godard: So you could say that Hiroshima, mon amour is Simone de Beauvoir—a Beauvoir that works. Rivette: Emmanuelle Riva’s acting takes the same direction as the film. It is a tremendous effort of composition. I think that we are again locating the schema I was trying to draw out just now: an endeavor to fit the pieces together again; within the consciousness of the heroine, an effort on her part to regroup the various elements of her persona and her consciousness in order to build a whole out of these fragments, or at least what have become interior fragments through the shock of that meeting at Hiroshima. One would be right in thinking that the film has a double beginning after the bomb; on the one hand, on the plastic level and the intellectual level, since the film’s first image is the abstract image of the couple on whom the shower of ashes falls, and the entire beginning is simply a meditation on Hiroshima after the explosion of the bomb. But you can say too that, on another level, the film begins after the explosion for Emmanuelle Riva, since it begins after the shock that has resulted in her disintegration, dispersed her social and psychological personality, and which means that it is only later that we guess, through what is implied, that she is married, has children in France, and is an actress—in short, that she has a structured life. At Hiroshima she experiences a shock, she is hit by a “bomb” that explodes her consciousness, and for her from that moment it becomes a question of finding herself again, re-composing herself. In the same 27

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way that Hiroshima had to be rebuilt after atomic destruction, Emmanuelle Riva in Hiroshima is going to try to reconstruct her reality. She can achieve this only through using the synthesis of the present and the past, what she herself has discovered at Hiroshima and what she has experienced in the past at Nevers. Godard: That line that keeps being repeated by the Japanese man at the beginning of the film, “No, you saw nothing at Hiroshima”—it has to be taken in the simplest sense. She saw nothing because she wasn’t there. Nor was he. However, he also tells her that she has seen nothing of Paris, yet she is a Parisian. The point of departure is the moment of awareness, or at the very least the desire to become aware. I think Resnais has filmed the novel that the young French novelists are all trying to write, people like Michel Butor, Alain Robbe-Grillet, François-Régis Bastide, and of course Marguerite Duras. I can remember a radio program where Bastide was talking about Ingmar Bergman’s Wild Strawberries [1957] and he suddenly realized that the cinema had managed to express what he thought belonged exclusively in the domain of literature, and that the problems that he, as a novelist, was setting himself had already been solved by the cinema without its even needing to pose them for itself. I think this is a very significant point. The profoundly literary aspect perhaps also explains the fact that people who are usually irritated by the cinema within the cinema, while the theater within the theater or the novel within the novel don’t affect them in the same way, are not irritated by the fact that in Hiroshima, mon amour Emmanuelle Riva plays the part of a film actress who is in fact involved in making a film. Rivette: It is the same intellectual strategy as Pierre Klossowski used in his first novel, La Vocation suspendue [The Suspended Vocation, 1950]. He presented his story as the review of a book that had been published earlier. Both are a double movement of consciousness, and so we come back again to that key word, which is at the same time a word in vogue: dialectic, a movement that consists in presenting the thing and at the same time an act of distancing in relation to that thing, in order to be critical—in other words, denying it and affirming it. To use the example in Hiroshima, mon amour of the actual march of people carry placards, instead of being a creation of the director, it becomes an objective fact that is filmed twice over by the director. For Klossowski and for Resnais the problem is to give the readers or the viewers the sensation that what they are going to read or to see is not 28

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an author’s creation but an element of the real world. Objectivity, rather than authenticity, is the right word to characterize this intellectual strategy, since the filmmaker and the novelist look from the same vantage-point as the eventual reader or viewer. Since we are in the realm of aesthetics, and in light of the earlier reference to Faulkner, I think it just as pertinent to mention again the name that in my opinion has an indisputable connection with the narrative technique of Hiroshima, mon amour: Stravinsky. The problems that Resnais sets himself in film are parallel to those that Stravinsky sets himself in music. For example, the definition of music given by Stravinsky—an alternating succession of exaltation and repose—seems to me to fit Alain Resnais’s film perfectly. What does it mean? The search for an equilibrium superior to all the individual elements of creativity. Stravinsky systematically uses contrasts and simultaneously, at the very point where they are used, he brings into relief what it is that unites them. The principle of Stravinsky’s music is the perpetual rupture of the rhythm. The great novelty of The Rite of Spring [1913] was its being the first musical work where the rhythm was systematically varied. Within the field of rhythm, not tone, it was already almost serial music, made up of rhythmical oppositions, structures, and series. And I get the impression that this is what Resnais is aiming at when he cuts together four tracking shots, then suddenly a static shot, two static shots, and back to a tracking shot. Within the juxtaposition of static and tracking shots he tries to find what unites them. In other words, he is seeking simultaneously an effect of opposition and an effect of profound unity. Godard: It’s Pablo Picasso, but it isn’t Henri Matisse. Rivette: I find it is even more Georges Braque than Picasso, in the sense that Braque’s entire oeuvre is devoted to that particular reflection, while Picasso’s is tremendously diverse. Orson Welles would be more like Picasso, while Alain Resnais is close to Braque to the degree that the work of art is primarily a reflection in a particular direction. Godard: When I said Picasso I was thinking mainly of the colors. Rivette: Yes, but Braque too. He is a painter who wants both to soften strident colors and make soft colors violent. Braque wants bright yellow to be soft and Édouard Manet wants gray to be sharp. Well now, we’ve mentioned quite a few “names,” so you can see just how cultured we are. Cahiers du Cinéma is true to form, as always. (Laughter.) 29

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Godard: There is one film that must have given Alain Resnais something to think about, and what’s more, he edited it: La Pointe Courte [1955, Agnès Varda]. Rivette: Obviously. But I don’t think it’s being false to Agnès Varda to say that by virtue of the fact that Resnais edited La Pointe Courte his editing itself contained a reflection on what Varda had intended. To a certain degree Varda becomes a fragment of Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker too. [Resnais and Marker had shared direction, script, and commentary credits on Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die, 1950–53), a short film about the decline of black African art brought about by contact with Western civilization; Marker also collaborated on Resnais and André Heinrich’s short film Le Mystère de l’Atelier 15 (The Mystery of Workshop 15, 1957), contributing the film’s commentary.] Godard: When Resnais shouts “Action,” his sound engineer replies “Saturn” [“ça tourne,” i.e. “it’s rolling”]. (Laughter.) Another thing— I’m thinking of an article by Roland Barthes on Claude Chabrol’s Les Cousins [1959], where he more or less said that these days talent had taken refuge in the right. Is Hiroshima, mon amour a left-wing film or a right-wing film? Rivette: Let’s say that there has always been an aesthetic left, the one Jean Cocteau talked about and which, furthermore, according to Raymond Radiguet, had to be contradicted, so that in its turn that contradiction could be contradicted, and so on. As far as I’m concerned, if Hiroshima, mon amour is a left-wing film, it doesn’t bother me in the slightest. Obviously, since if Resnais is ahead of his time he does it by remaining true to Eisenstein’s October [Ten Days that Shook the World, 1928], in the same way that Picasso’s Las Meninas [The Maids of Honor, 1957] is true to Velazquez. It’s right to talk about the science-fiction element in Resnais, by the way. But it’s also wrong, because he is the only filmmaker to convey the feeling that he has already reached a world that, in other people’s eyes, is still futuristic. In other words, he is the only one to know that we are already in the age where science fiction has become reality. In short, Alain Resnais is the only one of us who truly lives in 1959. With him the term “science fiction” loses all its pejorative and childish associations because Resnais is able to see the modern world as it is. Like the science-fiction writers he is able to show us all that is frightening in it, but also all that is human. Unlike the Fritz Lang of 30

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Metropolis [1927] or the Jules Verne of Cinq cents millions de la Bégum [The Begum’s Fortune, 1879], unlike the classic notion of science fiction as expressed by a Ray Bradbury or a H. P. Lovecraft or even an A. E. van Vogt—all reactionaries in the end—it is very obvious that Resnais possesses the great originality of not reacting inside science fiction. Not only does he opt for this modern and futuristic world, not only does he accept it, but he analyzes it deeply, with lucidity and with love. Since this is the world in which we live and love, then for Resnais it is this world that is good, just, and true. Resnais is sensitive to the current abstract nature of the world. The first movement of his films is to state this abstraction. The second is to overcome this abstraction by reducing it through itself, if I may put the matter that way: by juxtaposing with each abstraction another abstraction in order to rediscover a concrete reality through the very act of setting them in relation to one another. Godard: That’s the exact opposite of Rossellini’s procedure—he was outraged because abstract art had become official art. [See the interview with Rossellini in Cahiers du Cinéma, 94 (April 1959).] So Resnais’s tenderness is metaphysical, it isn’t Christian. There is no notion of charity in his films. Rivette: Obviously not. Resnais is an agnostic. If there is a God he believes in, it’s worse than St. Thomas Aquinas’s. His attitude is this: perhaps God exists, perhaps there is an explanation for everything, but there’s nothing that allows us to be sure of it. Godard: Like Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Stavrogin [from Demons, 1872], who, if he believes, doesn’t believe that he believes, and if he doesn’t believe, doesn’t believe that he doesn’t believe. Besides, at the end of the Hiroshima, mon amour, does Emmanuelle Riva leave, or does she stay? One can ask the same question about her as about Agnès in Robert Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne [Ladies of the Park, 1945], when you ask yourself whether she lives or dies. Rivette: That doesn’t matter. It’s fine if half the audience thinks that Emmanuelle Riva stays with the Japanese man and the other half thinks that she goes back to France. I don’t think it really matters at all, for Hiroshima, mon amour is a circular film. At the end of the last reel you can easily move back to the first, and so on. Hiroshima is a parenthesis in time. It is a film about reflection, on the past and on the present. Now, in reflection, the passage of time is effaced because it is 31

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a parenthesis within duration. And it is within this duration that Hiroshima is inserted. In this sense Resnais is close to a writer like Jorge Luis Borges, who has always tried to write stories in such a way that, on reaching the last line, the reader has to turn back and re-read the story right from the first line to understand what it is about—and so it goes on, relentlessly. With Resnais it is the same notion of the infinitesimal achieved by material means, mirrors face to face, series of labyrinths. It is an idea of the infinite but contained within a very short interval, since ultimately the “time” of Hiroshima can just as well last twenty-four hours as one second.

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Louis Marcorelles, “Interview with Jacques Rivette” From Sight and Sound 32.4 [Autumn 1963]: 168–173.

Louis Marcorelles: Mr. Rivette, you began as a critic after the war. Why were you so strongly pro-American? Jacques Rivette: In 1950 we approached it from a rather different angle, but in the end the results were much the same. At that time, in Europe at least, the American cinema was not so much under-estimated as actually despised. It was a kind of critical duty to attack it, and everyone ran down Hollywood commercialism, Hollywood banality, Hollywood imbecility. It seemed to us—to François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, myself—that this American cinema was in fact a good deal more intellectual, than the European cinema that was always being held up as an example to it. We felt that all kinds of directors, not only the recognized “Hollywood intellectuals” like Joseph L. Mankiewicz, but the so-called commercial moviemakers like Howard Hawks and Alfred Hitchcock, were producing films much more intelligent than those made in Europe by our Autant-Laras, Delannoys, and De Sicas. It may have been a subtler kink of intelligence, so to speak, because it expressed itself through style and behavior rather than through the usual outward signs. Marcorelles: I suppose it was as a reaction against the critics’ tendency to talk exclusively in terms of themes and subjects that people pounced so wildly on the whole idea of mise-en-scène. Rivette: That’s just it: a reaction. If we made such a point of mise-enscène years ago, this was done deliberately to stimulate controversy and to rehabilitate the idea that cinema is also something that one sees on the screen. But over the last few years the conception has been so widely abused that one is finally driven to explain exactly what one meant. It is not simply a matter of talking about the fascination of the image one sees on the screen, but of understanding how mise-en-scène is an expression of the intelligence of the director. The term covers, that is to say, not only the position of the camera, but the construction of the script, the delivery of the dialogue, and the handling of the actors. Mise-en-scène, in fact, is simply a way of expressing what in other arts would be called the artist’s vision; and a novelist’s vision 33

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obviously does not depend solely on where he places an adjective, or how he builds a sentence—it also depends on the story he is telling. When we made claims for Preminger, or Hawks, or Hitchcock, it should have been evident that it was their personal vision of the world we wanted to bring home to audiences. But the whole conception has been abused to the point of imbecility, and it is now used to suggest that so long as the camera movement can be called sublime, it makes no difference if the story is fatuous, the dialogue idiotic, and the acting atrocious. This, it seems to me, is the exact opposite of everything we fought for under the banner of mise-en-scène, when we insisted on the importance of establishing a film’s authorship. Marcorelles: Even after the war, apart from André Bazin and yourself, there wasn’t much more than a single magazine, L’Écran Français. Rivette: But L’Écran Français did exist, over and above the fact that Bazin, Alexandre Astruc and Roger Leenhardt wrote for it from time to time. The very fact that here was a periodical, appearing each week, which at least tried to bring critical judgment to bear on all the films shown, helped to create a climate of opinion. You could say the same of Cahiers du Cinéma. The magazine is open to criticism, God knows. But by the very fact that it has appeared every month for the last ten years, it has created a whole generation of filmgoers in love with the cinema (drunk on it, one might say). This would never have happened if Cahiers du Cinéma hadn’t existed. Now things have gone a stage further. There is a much larger audience with critical awareness, and this has resulted in the formation of little chapels of opinion that hate each other and then love each other again, which survive just a few months before splintering off and reforming in new alignments. One may find it a bit juvenile, but a least it’s evidence of a passionate concern with the cinema that would have been inconceivable ten years ago. In 1950, Truffaut, Godard, and I, and a few others, met at the Cinémathèque Française. We became friends simply because there was no one else; we were the only people who went there every evening. Marcorelles: What do you feel about the state of criticism today, particularly as it has developed out of the influence of Cahiers du Cinéma? Rivette: I believe less and less that it’s the critic’s job to deliver verdicts. 34

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Distinctions between major and minor works of art are made not so much by contemporary critics as by the artists of the next generation, who say, “Of our predecessors, we recognize such-and-such as our masters, even if we travel a different road from theirs. The rest can be relegated to history.” I believe this is a law that has been proved again and again by the history of art, and proved again by the history of the cinema. Take a classic case. It was the early twentieth-century painters and not Paul Cézanne’s contemporary critics, who claimed that he was the greatest painter of the late nineteenth century; the critics then followed this lead and gave their sanction. In the same way a positive critical contribution was made, if not by directors, at any rate by apprentice directors, who said that F. W. Murnau was more important than G. W. Pabst or the other filmmakers whom the historians had previously rated Murnau’s equal. And the historians have already come round to confirming this judgment, or are in the process of doing so. In the histories of ten or fifteen years ago, Murnau is given much the same space as Robert Wiene. In future, Murnau will have to have ten pages against a paragraph for The Cabinet of Caligari [1920]— which is an important film, all the same—plus a footnote for the rest of Wiene’s work. Kenji Mizoguchi, too, was in France singled out by a few directors who recognized him as their master; critics and historians will have to follow suit. Marcorelles: Do we possess all the criteria necessary to draw up a scale of values? Do you feel, for instance, that a history of the cinema is practicable at present? Rivette: Yes, if one excludes the last ten years. To write the history of these ten years would obviously be a fascinating task, but it is equally obvious that he closer one comes to the present day, the more one gets tangled up in polemic and personal preferences. I’m judging from my own experience of re-seeing at the Cinémathèque Française the films that I first saw in 1950 or so. Murnau, Erich von Stroheim, D. W. Griffith are still great; the unimportant films still look unimportant. But when one comes to films made over the last decade, I find that some that I didn’t properly understand at the time now look remarkable, while others which I admired seem worthless. It isn’t easy to make an objective assessment of something that is close to you. For example, I saw Alain Resnais’s Muriel [1963] a few days ago. I’m glad I wasn’t asked for an opinion on it right away, because I have since seen it a second time; and I realize that my opinion after a first viewing would have been a mixture of polemic, bile, and prejudice 35

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about the sort of film I expected from Resnais. It’s difficult to absorb a new film straight away, because one begins by superimposing on it the film one expected, which one wanted to see, and even which one wanted to make oneself. All these barriers must be set aside before one can see the film that is actually there on the screen, and only then can one decide whether or not the director has succeeded on his terms rather than yours. A certain distance is absolutely essential. Spontaneous reactions are all very fine, but they tell you more about the critic than about the film. Marcorelles: Do you feel there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the splintering of criticism around 1955 (with resultant deification of mise-en-scène by some factions, and the deification of the actor by others) and the confusion now reigning in the French cinema? Rivette: The whole question of the scriptwriter is closely linked to the idiotic mythology that has grown up recently round the idea of the director as complete creator, a youthful genius who can do anything and everything, and which has resulted in an influx of directors of startling incompetence. Obviously we of the Cahiers team, with Truffaut as chief spokesman, were responsible for this myth, but we were writing at a time when polemical, shocking statements like “anybody can make a film” were a necessary reaction against the rigid stratification that was then strangling the cinema. It was a completely closed shop, in which the director spent fifteen years moving from third assistant to second assistant, and finally to assistant director, before getting anywhere; and the writer worked through the same process. The reaction was inevitably violent and uncompromising: all kinds of extreme positions were taken up. And, since 1959 and the birth of the New Wave, all these attitudes have been taken much too literally. Marcorelles: It seems to me that the innovations of the New Wave are summed up in Godard’s work, and that he stands for the most vigorous new ideas in the cinema. Do you agree? Rivette: It’s difficult in a general discussion suddenly to turn to individual cases . . . but of all the new directors, Godard seems to me by far the most talented. In spite of all the paradoxes and apparent contradictions in his work, he is a coherent and deeply reflective artist; and it would be extremely dangerous for anyone less intelligent and less sure-footed to try to follow in his footsteps. Resnais, on the other 36

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hand, works more through conscious calculation than intuition, and for that reason he is probably a safer model for the embryonic director to follow. Resnais makes filmmaking look difficult, the result of a huge amount of patience and effort—which of course it is. Godard makes it all seem so easy. It’s a pity that À bout de souffle [Breathless, 1960] helped to create this particular myth, which the rest of Godard’s work really doesn’t support, but which again influences critics and wouldbe directors. Marcorelles: What about the older directors whom the new generation admires so much? Hitchcock, for example. Rivette: One would have to be totally blind to cinema not to recognize Hitchcock’s total mastery. At the same time, though, his direction is often misleadingly praised at the expense of script and story construction, as though it were something existing independently. One gets the impression that when Hitchcock is preparing a film he works out his camera movements at the same time as his story details, resolving his problems of clarity and economy in both fields simultaneously. His films are never pure visual brilliance: they go a lot deeper than that. Marcorelles: Mr. Rivette, what do you feel about the opportunities for filmmaking at present? Rivette: Even in the best of times it is all a matter of luck. There is no law of society that says it is one’s right to make a film, or that one may make a film. If one manages to make a film, fine; if not, then one really has nothing to complain about. It is normal not to make films. Marcorelles: Didn’t the cinema once reach a sort of state of grace, which it has lost today? Rivette: Yes . . . but since it is lost, it isn’t worth talking about.

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Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, & Sylvie Pierre, “Time Overflowing” From Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 204 [Sept. 1968]: 6–21. Translated by Amy Gateff.

Cahiers du Cinéma: What gave you the idea of making L’Amour fou? Jacques Rivette: The film didn’t start with an idea; it’s difficult to answer that. Cahiers: Had you been thinking of it for a long time? Rivette: No, it was simply a question of making a film within certain given economic circumstances. Georges de Beauregard kept on saying, “Do you know someone who might have a script that we could shoot for forty-five million francs?” I vaguely looked around; I think I even sent him one or two guys, but he didn’t like their scripts. So finally I told him I had one. And that’s when I started trying to think what could be filmed for forty-five million francs. Which meant there had to be very few actors and very few changes of scenery. Cahiers: In the end the film cost more than forty-five million francs. Rivette: No, not the shooting. It’s the editing that took it over the limit. In the end L’Amour fou is approximately a sixty-million-franc film— which, for an “official” production, is still not very much per minute. Cahiers: Was shooting in five weeks imposed by the forty-five-millionfranc limit? Rivette: Yes, with that amount it had to be shot in Paris with a small crew, very few changes of scenery, and actors who weren’t too hard to please. As I had also had a vague but strong desire to make a film with Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon ever since I had seen Les Bargasses [1965, Marc’O, a.k.a. Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin], I soon thought of them, without being able to tell whether the idea of the story about a couple made me think of them or vice versa.

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Cahiers: Is it also because of this allusion to Marc’0’s company and productions that L’Amour fou is a film about the theater? Rivette: Every time I start to think about a film—the ones that have been made as well as those that haven’t—I always think that the subject I’ve got is only going to make a little short film, at the most, and I’m always looking for things to fill it out, at least to manage an hour and a quarter. That’s what led me to think of the theater. Then another major reason was that I hadn’t forgiven myself for the way I had shown the theater in Paris nous appartient, which I find too picturesque, too much seen from the outside, based on clichés. The work I had done on La Religieuse at the Studio des Champs-Élysées had given me the feeling that work in the theater was different, more secret, more mysterious, with deeper relationships between people who are caught up in this work, a relationship of accomplices. It’s always very exciting and very effective to film someone at work, someone who is making something; and work in the theater is easier to film than the work of a writer or a musician. Cahiers: The main character in L’Amour fou is a man of the theater, but to what extent was Jean-Pierre Kalfon really the director of Andromaque [1667, Jean Racine]? Did he, for instance, choose his actors himself? Rivette: Before writing anything at all I had talked about it to JeanPierre, because the first thing I needed to know was whether he agreed to the idea of actually being the director. I suggested Andromaque to him, first of all because there wouldn’t be any copyright problems and then also because, if we were going to take a classical play, it would be just as well to take one with an archetypal situation so that, even in bits and pieces, the audience would be able to find its way around slightly. He reread it and agreed. And then, yes, the idea was that he would choose whatever actors he wanted and direct Andromaque in accordance with his own ideas. We had to agree only on the actress who would play Hermione, since she was also to play the part of Marta; but actually it was he who brought me Josée Destoop, as well as almost all the others. For Phoenix, he hadn’t found anyone, so I suggested Michel Delahaye. It all happened very simply, through more or less chance meetings: it was mainly—or rather three-quarters—a question of making up a friendly little group, which Didier Léon and Claude-Eric Richard later joined spontaneously.

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Cahiers: And are you the one who chose Michèle Moretti? Or was she part of the group? Rivette: With her, it happened just before shooting took place. I had found her very good in Les Bargasses and Les Idoles [1968, Marc’O, a.k.a. Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin]. I like the way she lived, in relation to the others in the group, but there wasn’t any part for her either in Andromaque or in the script; at the last minute, I suggested that she be Jean-Pierre’s assistant, and that part turned out to be quite important, even though it wasn’t at all planned or premeditated. She is what makes it a major part, because whatever happened with her was interesting. On the other hand, there were parts which were meant to be important that became less so, because they just happened not to work—like the role of Puck. Cahiers: Was the only reason for choosing Andromaque the necessity of choosing a play where the audience could orient themselves easily? It seems to us that there are certain analogies, certain correspondences, between the subject of Andromaque and the situation in L’Amour fou. Were these analogies clear to you when you were writing the script? Rivette: Of course the choice of Andromaque was not completely naive. The possibilities of analogy—if I may say so—between Andromaque and L’Amour fou were so striking when we reread the play that Jean-Pierre and I decided from the start to avoid any terribly obvious comparisons between Racine and what we were doing. It was really too facile and was becoming rather annoying. During all the filming and then again during the editing, we didn’t force ourselves constantly to eliminate every juxtaposition that appeared, but we never looked for them and when they seemed really too obvious or too much of a cop-out, we always tried to break them up. They had to remain two parallel entities, with even the echoes from one to the other remaining accidental. The guiding principle was to let things happen by themselves without ever forcing them, to be there as a witness. Cahiers: André Labarthe was telling us that you used a certain phrase of Jean Renoir’s as a motto during the shooting: that the director should pretend he’s asleep. Rivette: Yes, the three weeks I spent with Renoir filming the programs for Cinéastes de notre temps [TV, 1964–72], right after shooting and finishing La Religieuse, made quite an impression on me. After a lie, 40

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all of a sudden, here was the truth. After a basically artificial cinema, here was the truth of the cinema. I therefore wanted to make a film, not inspired by Renoir, but trying to conform to the idea of a cinema incarnated by Renoir, a cinema that does not impose anything, where one tries to suggest things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue at every level—with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet—where the act of filming is part of the film itself. What I liked most about this film was enjoying myself shooting it. The film itself is only the residue, where I hope something remains. What was exciting was creating a reality that began to have an existence of its own, independently of whether it was being filmed or not, then to treat it as an event that you’re doing a documentary on, keeping only certain aspects of it, from certain points of view, according to chance or to your ideas, because, by definition, the event always overwhelms in every respect the story or the report one can make out of it. I always used to find shooting a drag—something awful, a nightmare. I liked to think about the film before doing it; I liked to edit it once it had been filmed; but the filming itself always took place in poor conditions. This was the first time that the shooting was not only not hell, but was even a most exciting time. And also there was no continuity problem: the original idea of the film led immediately to conversations, with Jean-Pierre, with Bulle, with Marilù Parolini, with everyone we met for one reason or another in any connection with the project. All these conversations quite naturally led up to the point when Jean-Pierre started doing readings of Andromaque with people he had chosen. Then, gradually, it became the first day of shooting, when Jean-Pierre calmly continued the readings or began setting things up on the impetus of the previous week’s work. In the evenings, we stayed together—we didn’t leave each other’s sides for five weeks—talking not necessarily about the film but about everything else around it, and everything fell into place; then the next day, filming, we would continue the previous night’s conversation. The editing was just a continuation, the same thing with different people, with the editors and sometimes with people from the film who came along to see me, and the conversation continued. My memory is of one long, uninterrupted conversation. What L’Amour fou was, was a subject of conversation among us; and not necessarily with words: with silences as well, listening to records or going to see a film. For example, we all went to see Marnie [1964, Alfred Hitchcock] again when we had nearly finished shooting, and not only did we have the feeling that Hitchcock had already filmed the whole subject of 41

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L’Amour fou and beyond, but afterwards this vision of Marnie integrated itself into the film for us. I think that is how it’s fun to make a film; otherwise, it has no interest. The relationships between people at the shooting and in the film are not necessarily the same—to some extent it’s acting. For example, with Labarthe, we would have secretive little conspiracies, we would agree that he should interview one person or another and go at it in one way or another. Sometimes that wouldn’t produce any results and he’d try again two days later from another angle. Similarly, after JeanPierre and his cast had been rehearsing for an hour or two while we had been standing around with our arms folded, all of a sudden we decided to set up a little rail in one corner and to film. But it could just as easily have been fifteen minutes earlier or fifteen minutes later. I intervened as little as possible in Jean-Pierre’s work; in any case, he hated me to. The only challenge was to try to sum up in six days of shooting what should have taken three weeks. Obviously, that had an effect on the film: that’s what led us to use external aids, like the percussion instruments. At one point, since Jean-Pierre wanted to make his actors say the lines in a certain way, he started stressing according to the breaks in the ideas, then marking these breaks by clapping his hands, and it took only two days before they went from there quite naturally to the idea of gongs. But if we had really had three weeks, we could have got to the stage where the gongs would have been eliminated, because they were only a means, one stage in the process. Cahiers: Despite the shortened time, one gets an impression of ripening, or a slow, regular, continual progress in the way the play is directed. Rivette: Yes, the shots that I kept, which were only a small proportion of what we filmed, in 35 or 16mm, are put together in approximately chronological order; but one’s main impression is of a progression in the fatigue of the actors. At the beginning, they are fresh, as they are still under the illusion that they will get to play Andromaque at the end of the week; while three or four days later, they know very well that they never will. And they really were frustrated about it, since they’d all thrown themselves into it with a desire to play for real, before an audience. Luckily for him, Jean-Pierre’s part went on, and he threw himself into it that much more completely—all the more because his directing of Andromaque had suddenly been taken away from him. The others were left a bit at loose ends; they came to the 42

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shooting of the rest of the film and wandered around while we continued filming, even if they didn’t have any special reason to be there. Cahiers: How exactly did the filming of the more “intimate” scenes take place? Rivette: The “theater” part was to come first, so that Jean-Pierre and the actors could rehearse a little before the shooting started, so that they wouldn’t start completely from scratch on the first day. We started out making the film purely as a documentary, first trying to get used to the system of filming with two cameras, and it was only after two days—after getting used to the collaboration between the Mitchell camera and the Caméflex Éclair-Coutant, having got all the crew and the actors used to each other, filming a lot quietly, from corners, and intervening as little as possible in the work of the play—that we started to bring in “acted” scenes (Bulle’s departure), while trying to keep as much as possible the same documentary spirit; that is, by planning only the outlines of the scene, what the cameras would do, the “tactics” of the moment to be filmed, but never premeditating the details, or how the shot should end, which was almost always left very open and depended a lot on people’s moods during each take. I only said to cut when there was really nothing else that could be done, and it was often the end of the reel that took care of deciding how to end the shot, instead of me. Then, after that, when we went into the flat, we tried to keep this documentary tone as much as possible; we tried never to hurry things, and the main way we did this was by filming chronologically and by anticipating. That made it possible to discuss each evening the next day’s shooting, any points that were still not clear, and any we would try to decide on a bit ahead of time—at least to plan the basic ideas—and any we preferred to decide on or improvise during the shooting. Cahiers: Was the dialogue scripted? Rivette: Not usually, and if it was, always at the last minute. Cahiers: During the documentary scenes of the “first week,” what was Kalfon doing? Was he directing a play, or was he acting in a film? Rivette: He was directing a play. The film was an intruder that was keeping him from directing Andromaque as peacefully as he wanted 43

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to, interrupting his work and annoying him prodigiously. At the beginning, he enjoyed the interviews with Labarthe but then, after a while, they annoyed him too, because they intruded on his rapport with the actors and forced him to talk in the abstract. But I insisted on continuing to do them: if he was going to be persecuted by the cinema, it might as well be filmed; that made it more interesting. Cahiers: And Labarthe was trying to put together a program? Rivette: He was trying. He had just a little trouble, since he doesn’t know the theater as well as the cinema; he didn’t always know what questions to ask Jean-Pierre to get him talking. Labarthe’s program, in principle, is the 16mm film, when it’s all put together at its true length (between two and three hours): it is much more serene than the other. It is only of the people working, and never leaving this work, and of them as they talk about it. In the 35mm film, I kept only things that were related to the character of Sebastien. Cahiers: Were Kalfon, on the one hand, and Labarthe on the other, actually planning to put on the play and the program? Rivette: Jean-Pierre really wanted to do it; he gave up the idea only because he wasn’t completely happy with the actors and he hadn’t found a place to do it. In any case, he had already directed several plays a few years ago; I haven’t seen any of them, and I didn’t even know— he’s the one who told me. And it was only afterwards that I learned that Michèle Moretti had actually been his assistant for some of the plays he directed. Cahiers: Where did the idea come from to have Labarthe and his crew make this 16mm documentary? Rivette: It comes from the television programs on Renoir, from Cinéastes de notre temps, and from my great admiration for most of the programs in that series. It’s an idea that came to me very quickly, for practical reasons: I knew that we would have very little time to devote to filming the theatrical part, and from the start I wanted to have a lot of material for editing, which made it impossible to do with only the Mitchell. Then I thought it would be fun to do with two very different systems at once and to introduce the very crude fiction— which is not meant to fool anyone—of the television documentary within the film. The idea of using Labarthe as the interviewer came 44

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largely from the role that the character of Marta was to play. She was to have a position; in other words, never to intervene in the dramatic progression but nonetheless to be a very strong pivotal character. She therefore needed some background, so we had to give her a past; but since she could never reveal it herself, it had to be under questioning. I did take a lot of it out during editing, because it was becoming too systematic. Cahiers: In the final analysis, this haphazard system of having Kalfon direct a play and Labarthe and Étienne Becker film a program seems to have been completely premeditated and to play a very specific role. Rivette: In the beginning, the idea was just to have as little as possible to do, to get myself as much rest as possible, to have only to chat with people a bit and then sit back and enjoy myself. When I hit upon an idea that got other people to do the work, I was thrilled. Étienne was taking the initiative; he knew that sometimes he was supposed to orient himself in one direction rather than another, but he was really very free: he filmed what he liked by his own methods, sometimes just little bits and sometimes lining the reels up one after the other if he thought it was worth it. And the last three days we filmed separately with the two crews, one after the other, which made it possible to film from midday to midnight and gave Labarthe and Becker more latitude, since they no longer had to take into account the other crew’s position; that’s how we got the best bits of the documentary on Andromaque. There is one part that I kept only very short excerpts of in the film: the nearly continuous rehearsal of the last scene; it lasts more than an hour and, as is, is really quite good. Cahiers: So it isn’t just a coincidence that Kalfon also seems to hate the idea of interfering, that he seems to want his actors to do everything themselves. Rivette: That comes from the conversations we had over a period of three months before starting to film, about Racine, about Roland Barthes, about actors, about directing. And we were in complete agreement about this idea of non-interference as our guiding principle: the idea that the director must not only not be a dictator but must not be a father-figure either. Cahiers: But, apart from these explanations about convenience or laziness, what is striking is the infinite number of combinations the 45

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three elements make possible—the 16mm camera, the 35mm camera, and the theater. Rivette: But that’s also a lazy man’s solution, because all we had to do was to decide from the start on the idea of using these three elements, and then it developed all by itself. In any case, I’m beginning to think more and more that films are decided upon beforehand and that, if the principles you base yourself on are right, then it carries on by itself, developing these principles. If not, if you start out not necessarily with the wrong ideas but, shall we say, with more abstract ideas, it means that you’re giving yourself a terrible lot of work every time, to lift a ton by two millimeters at a go, and that this fantastic output of energy gives only a meager result. It’s more pleasant to work in such a way that things multiply instead of dividing. Cahiers: Then you are opposed to François Truffaut’s theories, according to which the shooting goes counter to the script, the editing goes counter to the shooting, etc. Was there a stage for you where something went counter to what preceded it? Rivette: I am not at all opposed to that theory, but instead of saying “goes counter to,” I would rather say “criticizes.” We spent most of our time criticizing: nothing was ever assumed or taken for granted. When filming a scene, sometimes we did it just as it was planned, and sometimes we changed it completely. It wasn’t a matter of being for or against; it was spontaneous calling into question, which happened as a matter of course. In any case, there was actually no idea of separate phases, but rather of a continuity, of successive moments, all different, of the same thing—moments that, because they were different, always required different attitudes and, because of that, certain adjustments from one to the other. Cahiers: But you never had this feeling of a battle against or of a grappling with the cinema, which most directors have or seem to have? Rivette: And which I had myself to a terrifying extent when I made my first two films; that’s what made me think that it certainly couldn’t be the right way to make films. But this was the first time I didn’t have that feeling. Cahiers: The idea of taking material that is not completely your own and then transforming it and using it in a different way, so that 46

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everything has an effect on everything else—this is very similar to a certain kind of music. Rivette: Yes. Well, it’s obvious; you can’t help thinking of things like that. But I tried not to think about it too much. During the shooting, we tried, not to exhaust all the possibilities there were, because that is useless and impossible, but to use what we could, within the five weeks we had at our disposal, to put across the idea of this great number of inherent possibilities. Cahiers: Precisely. Faced with this inexhaustible situation, with the 16mm and 35mm cameras, you must have realized very quickly that your film was going to be very long. Rivette: No, because I had absolutely no idea what I would feel like keeping when I edited it. Of course I sensed that I wouldn’t be short of material to edit, but I didn’t know at all what proportion of it I would keep. Cahiers: How much 35mm had you filmed altogether? Rivette: About 25,000 meters. The first end-to-end screening of the 35mm lasted about four hours; then we tightened it up a bit, since the film now lasts four hours and twelve minutes, with about half an hour of 16mm. Cahiers: Everything that was a tiny bit risky, which went off in all directions during the shooting, comes together perfectly and certain things appear to be completely premeditated—the connecting points between the 16mm and the 35mm, which create a very rich dialectic of sorts. Rivette: It was an easy dialectic to plan. If you start with the fact that you’re filming with two cameras, you have a good chance of having good connecting points; but you also get some surprises, which are very instructive. Cahiers: And did you have a clear idea beforehand of the general outline? Rivette: The original idea was that here were three weeks in the life of two people. The first work to be done was to talk with Jean-Pierre and 47

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Bulle about their points of view and what they thought would be the reactions of the characters they were to play. In the original text, for example, there was a lot missing about Claire, but I knew it was missing. So one evening when the three of us were talking, one of us— I really don’t remember which anymore—after twenty ideas that we threw out, came up with the idea that she should be looking for a dog. Cahiers: The idea of the dog wasn’t in the thirty-page scenario? Rivette: In the thirty-page one, yes, but not in the ten-page one. At the start, the film actually consisted of three sentences, on which Beauregard, and then Bulle and Jean-Pierre, gave me their agreement. I then wrote ten pages to have a basis for starting discussions; it’s at that stage that the conversations with Bulle and Jean-Pierre and the work with Marilù took place. Then we decided to make up a sort of calendar of their life day by day, almost hour by hour, for those three weeks; and it’s that calendar that I then rewrote in thirty pages, in a slightly more literary form, so that it could be read. When we filmed, this was the calendar we followed, doing the opposite of some of the things that were written down, if necessary, and changing the emphasis of some things and clarifying others. For example, the scene where Sebastien rips up his clothes came to us during discussions the night before the first day of shooting: I only knew, in a completely abstract way, that at that point we needed a scene that reversed relations between Claire and Sebastien, where the “madness” that had inhabited the character of Claire would be taken up by Sebastien. Cahiers: So you knew what your characters were doing, day by day. But in the film, the fitting in of their respective timetables doesn’t alternate regularly; there are long passages only about the theater or only about Claire, during which one feels that something is happening with the other. Rivette: All the construction details were re-studied during the editing; but the film was edited day by day and the idea of the calendar was retained. Cahiers: Yes, but they aren’t felt to be days, more like pure durations of time. Rivette: That’s why there are only a few indications of dates. Originally I had planned to mark every day, and then we thought that, 48

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after all, it would be good to lose once in a while a precise idea of time and not to have indicators all through, but still to give them from time to time so that you can feel a deadline coming, like the end of one month and the beginning of the next: the last “dramatic” day is a thirty-first and the day after, the first, is the day on which the circle is completed. But between one day and the next, there is always black leader. Cahiers: There is still one point when the idea of days disappears completely, to be replaced by the idea of a duration, when we find ourselves in exactly the same situation as Kalfon, and that’s when he learns of the suicide attempt of Claire, whom we had forgotten about. Rivette: At that point, I didn’t want any particular effect; I wanted people either to forget about her or, on the contrary, to think about her and to wonder what she is doing during this long passage when we lose sight of her. There are still little allusions to her from time to time: Jean-Pierre’s phone call at the bistro, the fact that she is spending the night at Marta’s place. But both reactions remain possible, for different people: that’s part of the audience’s freedom. I wanted some “free” spaces of time, where people could occasionally forget completely the passage of time and then pick it up again in fits and starts. That’s why I kept all the indications of time from the 16mm film, as when Jean-Pierre says, “There are only two weeks left” or “only one week.” I also tried, at the beginning, to make the audience think they’re on board for three weeks, but I didn’t really succeed— this only comes across very faintly. In any case, this time of three weeks is arbitrary, too; it could just as well be a picture of what could happen between the two of them in three months. Cahiers: To get back to the theater, one gets the impression that the actors haven’t completely rehearsed Andromaque, that they are always going back over the same scenes. Rivette: Yes, it just happened that they rehearsed some scenes more than others because they knew them better. And also there are some that were less interesting for the film. In particular, the fact of coming back again and again to the same scenes created rhymes of sorts within the film: the first meeting between Pyrrhus and Andromaque, or Hermione’s entrance. The last two acts are rather sacrificed because they hadn’t rehearsed them as much. But none of that was premeditated. What I kept in are the most interesting parts from a visual point 49

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of view and with regard to Sebastien, rather than with regard to Racine. Cahiers: How did you decide at exactly what points to bring in the 16mm? Rivette: Whenever I felt like it, without any general rule. The principle is that the 16mm camera is the only one that has the right to see the actors in close-ups. Cahiers: What we have isn’t a film within a film, but the cinema filming the theater and filmed by the cinema. That creates the curious impression that the 16mm camera is taking the cinema’s share over completely and that the 35mm camera doesn’t exist except as a transparent filter. Rivette: I’m glad that’s the impression one gets, because, precisely, the 35mm camera is giving a complete “cow’s eye view” of things. In a strict sense, it’s the person who came in on tiptoe, the intruder who doesn’t come too close because he’ll get yelled at if he comes any closer, who watches from the corners, who looks down from the balcony, always hiding a bit. It has its oppressed voyeur side to it, like someone who can never come up as close as he would like to, who doesn’t even hear everything. The Mitchell and the Coutant are two opposite forms of indiscretion, a passive one and an active one, one sly and one bossy; but it’s the same idea, that reality is pre-existing, when it is not being filmed as well as when it is. Cahiers: That gives a strange effect, because in the scenes where there is a mixture of 16 and 35mm, it’s the 16mm that comes off as being cinema, with clear sound; and when it’s the 35mm, we have the impression of watching a play, of being in the audience. In the flat, because there is only the 35mm, you no longer have the impression of watching a play, of being in the audience. Rivette: Yes, that’s what I wanted, to some extent, and that’s why I tried to make the 35mm cameras as invisible as possible. We track only three times inside the flat, for completely functional reasons. And the whole technical crew felt very oppressed during the whole shooting, precisely because of that, because I wanted the 35mm camera to be nothing but a completely neutral recorder. I had practically no dealings with anyone but the actors; it was with them that I decided which 50

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way to take a scene; then afterwards, I would say, “Let’s put the camera here” and “Action!,” checking a bit to see whether what I wanted to show was in frame. Quite often, towards the end, when we were shooting in a great hurry, Alain Levent even did the framing himself. I placed my trust in the technicians but my dialogue was solely with the actors. In any case, the role of the 16mm camera wasn’t really premeditated. Of course I had seen that it came across as “cinema.” And I was even sort of pleased when Jean-Pierre talked about having seen the rushes of Labarthe’s program. At one point, I’d even thought of filming him looking at those rushes; then I changed my mind—since he was saying it anyway, there was no need to film it. Cahiers: You talk about a film within a film, but actually it is more a film outside a film. When you see a camera in a film, you usually get the impression that it is an element of the film that you’re watching. But here, on the contrary, one gets the impression that there is a generalized sickness called the cinema and that it all centers itself in the 16mm camera. The 35mm camera, which was the intruder, isn’t any longer; we no longer “feel” it, and now it’s the 16mm that gives a strong impression of being the intruder. Rivette: That is, to the extent that the 16mm camera is active, while the 35mm camera tries to be as passive as it can be, with even a hypocritical side to it. From time to time it moves around a bit, but independently of what it is filming, in accordance with a principle that I didn’t invent, of setting up the movement of the camera completely independently of what is being filmed and then letting the camera operator take care of adapting them to each other. But as I said, it’s an old trick. And I never did that inside the flat. Cahiers: Moreover, there is a very “shocking” moment when you see 16mm shots somewhere other than the theater, at Marta’s place. It makes you feel as though it’s a scandal, as though Labarthe had entered into the 35mm film; you even wonder for a minute whether he might be Marta’s lover. Rivette: That was just a little bit that I put in right at the end of the editing; it’s the continuation of the interviews with Marta that were begun at the theater, in the dressing room, then in the stalls and then in the bistro. When I edited, I dropped the interview at her place because it didn’t add anything; or rather, it added too much. But I felt 51

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like keeping those shots for purely visual reasons. I wanted to have something between Bulle’s telephone call to Marta, asking to meet her, and Bulle’s going into the bistro; and since it would have been a bad place to have more theater, it had to continue with the idea of Marta. So those shots were just put in to have a break; obviously, when it was screened, we realized the enormity of it, but since we hadn’t really chosen to have it like that, we left it, as something we had just learned. But uncertainty is still permitted. Every second time I see the film, I get the impression that Labarthe is trying to make his way into Marta’s life, that he is making an opening gambit. Then other times I get the feeling he is just there to continue his documentary, because Marta interests him professionally and not because he has noticed that she seems to be unattached at the moment. Cahiers: Actually, the uneasiness is mainly caused by the fact that these shots are in 16mm and that at this point they concern the “fiction” and connote “film,” while usually they connote “theater.” Rivette: In any case, it is kept in solely in order to have spaces of time, oppositions of décors and of characters; while the oppositions of material are just submitted to. I couldn’t do any more about whether it was 16mm or 35mm, so I had to accept it as a fact that was independent of my will, like the atmosphere of unplanned noise due to using direct sound. All of that is part of the material we have to work from, which we must take as it is. My only thought during the editing was that certain things existed that had been filmed, that some film existed and that editing consisted in knowing not what you would like to have said, but what the film itself said, which might bear no relation to what you had planned. Editing is seeking the affinities that come to exist between those various moments in film that otherwise exist completely on their own. The fact that at one time there was a camera in front of some people, which made them act in a certain way—everything they may have thought or said or done at that time no longer has any importance. It is dead and gone; the only thing that counts is what remains, and what remains is a crystallization of it, which is the rushes. And I never tire of looking at the rushes; I can spend days and days with them before I start to edit, and the first splice always feels like a sacrilege. Because we are doing them violence in forcing them to be set out in one order rather than another. That’s also why I like to take a very long time editing, so that there is time to go round and round and to go back to the shots that have been cut, the re-takes, the outtakes, and to try to 52

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understand what they have to say as well. It’s the moment when you pass from the stage of raw recorded reality into the dimensions of a film: that’s the point where you have the greatest responsibility, because that is when the film—whether you like it or not—is going to start to “say” something. But it, itself, must say it, not me nor anyone else. For L’Amour fou, it was very exciting, because on that basis there was enough to play with for a good long time. I was ready to demolish completely the original order of things—and some things that weren’t really planned for any specific place when we were shooting got moved all around. We had fun moving them about until they seemed to be in place, until they seemed to want to stay where they were. I had started by putting together the main 35mm skeleton in the same order as the scenario, and it was dreadful, terribly boring. Then I waited for the blown-up 16mm without touching a thing, letting the film sleep for almost two months. Then we started out again, reconstructing it little by little on the basis of extracts of the 16mm film; without the 16mm, the film couldn’t be put together: it was nothing. We might have got there in the end, but we would certainly have had to cut out a lot for it to be worth watching. The 16mm brought in suspense. And when Louis Marcorelles accuses me of having been a traitor to the spirit of 16mm and to cinéma-vérité and going over to the Hitchcock camp, he’s right. It’s actually cinéma-vérité completely turned away from its deepest nature and placed in the service of an idea of the cinema that may basically be closer to Hitchcock than to Renoir. The suspense brought in by the 16mm made it possible to give the shots back the power they had in the rushes and that they lost in the end-to-end; some shots still didn’t get back the strength they had in the rushes. But in every film, whether it is very mise-en-scène-like or very documentary, I’ve always noticed this wasting away of strength with regard to the rushes. Cahiers: Is that a condemnation of editing? Rivette: No, I do think one must edit. I think that everyone has been tempted to show the rushes to people as they are—Jean-Luc Godard, Jean Eustache, Philippe Garrel, and certainly in the past Jean Renoir— but for the time being, I still think it would be an unprofitable, easy way out and that rushes left as they are would gradually wither away and die. Cahiers: When you talk about suspense brought in by the 16mm, you 53

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aren’t just thinking about what relates to the “fiction,” but also about the very nature of the 16mm within the 35mm. Rivette: Yes, the 16mm kept the 35 going, visually and dynamically. It was a different quality of image and in a different gear. For example, the second week—which is the part of the film that centers round Claire—was a complete failure in the end-to-end. And suddenly, by tiny injections of 16mm, it began to have a meaning. It can’t really be explained: there was just too much 35mm at once. The only time that the 16mm film would have been incongruous is during the two days that Bulle and Jean-Pierre spend together in the flat: the idea there is to have everything on the same level for half an hour. Cahiers: For what happens during those two days, had you written something down? Rivette: No, nothing. In the thirty pages of the scenario, there was just: “At this point, there is a scene that will be whatever it will be,” or something like that. We filmed it in one day, at the end of the filming in the flat. We had talked about this passage among ourselves, but not very much; it was a sort of reward we were saving for the last, which we were almost afraid to talk about. At the start, we were going to have two or three days, then we got behind and we had only one day of shooting left, so that it was absolutely wild when we did it. The same lighting for everything, the camera moving about at top speed in all directions, shots where all of a sudden everyone had to hide because Jean-Pierre was moving in a direction that hadn’t been planned at all, and Levent only just managed to catch him. All we knew was that these two days would be based on the idea of childishness—two days when they are brother and sister—regression to childhood. We even felt like going a lot further in that direction, right into scatological humor, with a really childish spirit. There are still a few things left in that vein, like “kaka-pipi” written on the wall, but it’s very slight. We didn’t have time to take it further. In any case, the basic idea was: they are four years old. Thinking about it later, as it’s the idea behind Monkey Business [1952, Howard Hawks]. I mention that Jean-Pierre was full of ideas in this area. He also wanted to pay homage to Laurel and Hardy with a yogurt-andcottage-cheese duel, but unfortunately there wasn’t enough time to film it. They were very tired at the end of all this nearly constant action and, since they were tired, we filmed tiredness, but that hadn’t been planned at all. They had used up so much energy scribbling on the 54

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walls and rolling in the sheets and demolishing the door! After that, all I had to do was to bring the Mitchell camera over in front of them and film their exhaustion. Cahiers: At that time, had you seen Daisies [1966, Vera Chytilova]? Rivette: No, not yet. In any case, it really is the custard pie of the socalled new cinema. Since then I’ve seen lots of them: Herostratus [1967, Don Levy], The Happening [1967, Elliott Silverstein], Sept jours ailleurs [1969, Marin Karmitz]. And yet destruction is the oldest theme of the cinema: it’s Mack Sennett, it’s burlesque. These are the things you necessarily come back to—all the more so since we weren’t for a minute trying to be original. We were doing what obviously had to be done, what went without saying. They felt like covering themselves in paint, so they did. Cahiers: But all of that is rhythmically punctuated by violent and repeated sexual acts that go against the idea of a “return to childhood.” Rivette: Yes, there were times when Jean-Pierre began to forget the basic assumption. Although, infantile sexuality . . . Cahiers: In any case, quite often during the film there is a very clear mother-child relationship between them. Rivette: Yes, that happened all by itself, like something so obvious that it wasn’t worth bothering to plan. We even cut out or decided not to film some things on that subject. At the end, when Jean-Pierre is alone in the flat, we had planned that he would actually be in the fetal position, and then we didn’t do it because it wasn’t necessary. Cahiers: But there is already an allusion to that in the film when Yves Beneyton plays the death of Orestes. Rivette: Yes, and—precisely—that happened all by itself during the rehearsals. It wasn’t worth repeating. Cahiers: What do you think of the way the actors play Racine? Rivette: I must admit that the fact Racine is recited in a very abrupt, often awkward manner gives it extraordinary power. Otherwise, for 55

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it to come across, it would have to be played magnificently by brilliant actors. But here I find that there is a sort of brutality in the Racine line that turns up suddenly, hesitantly, when you least expect it. Cahiers: There is a completely barbarous side to Andromaque itself as a play; it isn’t at all a fine and elegant drama and all the other clichés one could utter about Racine. Rivette: Exactly, the play has an extraordinary savagery. At the start, our idea was to take an old stand-by from the French repertory, even though we knew, having read Barthes, that Racine was, well, really something. And then, when we re-read the play, we found it fantastic; even Dennis Berry and Yves, who at the start would have preferred to do a play by Antonin Artaud, for example, got all enthusiastic as soon as readings began. For Jean-Pierre and myself, this contact of the actors, word by word, with the text, which is marvelous, was a revelation. That’s what’s exciting in this sort of work: it’s when you’re forced to follow the lines word for word that you realize each line is full of incredible wickedness and savagery and clarity and daring. Racine really is a mad writer, one of the great sick authors of French literature. A true performance of Racine would be as nearly unbearable as the Living Theatre’s Antigone [1967–69]; but by completely different means, without playing at all on physical actions. And really, what would be ideal would be for the words to have the same violence as the actions in the Living Theatre’s plays: words that hurt, that torture. What also struck us, right from the first reading, was to what extent Andromaque is a play about regression. It starts with men, who are talking about politics, and continues with women who start to talk about their love problems and then, little by little, the adult characters disappear and the fifth act is really the act of the enfants terribles, which can only lead to childish actions, to suicide and madness. And when Michèle and Jean-Pierre talk about the “unplayable” side of Racine, they really did mean it. They said in front of the cameras what we had been saying to each other every evening. Cahiers: Had you thought about Hitchcock when you were making the film? Rivette: Beforehand, very little. I knew that certain bits should be filmed from a sort of Hitchcock-like point of view, but I thought they would make up a sort of nasty tangle quite independent from the rest 56

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of the film; and they even frightened me a bit, during and afterwards, because I had no idea whether they would clash with the rest. Apart from which I didn’t think about him anymore until the day we went to see Marnie again, when we had almost finished filming, when the relations, so to speak, seemed obvious to us. But it may be that any film we might have gone to see in the mood we were in would have struck us in the same way. When it’s like that, you project onto everything that you come across. Cahiers: Was this intensity that the theater has throughout the film, and which almost counterbalances what is going on between Kalfon and Bulle, actually intended? Rivette: Yes, I wanted the two things to be as interesting as each other, equally if possible. The story is about someone who is torn between two places, two separate enclosures, one where he rehearses and the other where he is trying to save—so to speak—the couple that he forms with his wife, without anyone’s being able to tell whether it is because the couple is not working out that the play is not working out, or vice versa. In fact, for him, it’s all connected; he is caught in a muddle, being pushed into a corner from both sides. Cahiers: Listening to you, one gets the impression that Sebastien is the main character. Rivette: It’s true, he is the central character. But in the same way that there is a balance for him between the theater and the flat, I wanted there to be a balance between the two of them. But the point of departure was that we were to see her only in relation to him. What we see of Claire is perhaps only Sebastien’s own idea of her: there are passages about her, especially towards the end, where one may think that he is imagining it all. In any case, it is necessarily a man’s idea of a woman. For me, what crystallized matters at the beginning was the idea of Luigi Pirandello’s life, because he lived for fifteen years with a wife who was mad. The scene with the pin comes straight from Pirandello’s life. I had read it three months before in the program notes of one of his plays that I’d been to see—She Wanted to Find Herself [1932], I think. Obviously, the same thing that had taken fifteen years couldn’t happen in three weeks; it couldn’t have the same weight or the same meaning, and I didn’t feel I had the strength, or even the desire, to make a film where the woman would really be mad. So this would only be a crisis, a bad patch, as everyone has. And that’s when it became 57

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clear that she would be no more mad than he was, and that even of the two, he was clearly the one who was more sick. The main feeling was also expressed in a sentence from Pirandello that I happened to find when I was reading a bit before starting to write anything at all, which I had even copied out at the beginning of the scenario: “I have thought about it, and we are all mad.” It’s what people commonly say, but the beauty is precisely in stopping to think about it. Cahiers: This transfer of madness from one character to another comes from Lilith [1964, Robert Rossen], as well. Rivette: Yes, of course, but Lilith is a film that cuts across so many preoccupations that we all have . . . I noticed that after a few days. I realized that I was also kind of doing a remake of Lilith. But actually I thought about ten different films. One must never hesitate to plagiarize. There again, Renoir is right. Cahiers: What function do you give to the three scenes of rehearsals at Sebastien’s flat? Rivette: I think these are rather important scenes, because it is the intrusion of the theater upon Claire, while excluding her even more, apart from the fact that she isn’t participating in the play. Not only is she pushed out of the theater, but the theater comes and chases her right into her refuge. Cahiers: Apart from records and the transistor radio, there is only one moment in the film when there is music, just before the end, at a point that is unlike any other part of the film. Did you decide in advance to place it at that spot, when Sebastien is taking a long walk by himself, and only at that spot? Rivette: I really valued this passage at the end of the film when JeanPierre comes back out, when we should have a feeling of false liberation and where this feeling of liberation would gradually subside. I would have liked to do some more clever things at that point, playing on changes of location or changes of lighting, night falling. I couldn’t. I had to film quite simply Jean-Pierre walking, with a few silly transition shots so that it could be edited. And in any case, it was a musical moment. So I felt like having music there and not elsewhere. On the one hand, I knew it was a film that had to play on total realism of sound, with maybe a few very brief punctuations, which I decided to 58

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drop after talking about it to Jean-Claude Éloy, because he convinced me it would just be useless “boom-boom-booming.” And then, just because there wasn’t any music at all, I thought there had to be some important music at some point, because all rules should be broken once; also, I wanted the music to take off, to have the passage really soar and go beyond the rest, to the other side. I wanted this passage not only to have music, but, to borrow a term from Pierre Boulez, to have music that was the carrying wave, with the image being a simple accompaniment, almost accidental, with no importance. Cahiers: That’s precisely the impression one gets: that during the filming this passage was conceived as being accompanied by music. Rivette: It didn’t exactly seem indispensable when we were shooting, but very quickly that changed, as soon as we had started editing, as soon as I started talking with Jean-Claude. At first, I had planned to have tiny bits of music here and there in the film and then suddenly a great burst, a block of music that would then subside completely at the end. When the music comes, dialogue has already been dead for some time: there was Françoise’s telephone call to announce Claire’s departure, then the conversation between the two of them at the station, where the degree of reality is already becoming more improbable, and then a few more indistinct lines in the dressing room, and Jean-Pierre’s muttering when he is walking along humming a theme from Otis Redding. After the music, all that is left consists of pure sounds, and at the end the cries of a child, which are completely accidental and not at all premeditated, recorded in synch with the last shot. The music had to come not last, but next to last. Cahiers: In the same way that Sebastien’s walk is also a false ending? Rivette: Right from the start, this film is full of false endings. It is a film that won’t stop ending. That’s why it lasts so long. Cahiers: But there is music at another point in the film: when Sebastien is sleeping, before the scene with the pin. One hears a sort of spluttering. Rivette: That isn’t instrumental music—it’s Zen priests. And that comes back in several places, but I wanted it to be very faint and it got a bit lost during the re-recording: it really is on the edge of perception, almost like infra-sound. During the titles, for example, the sound of 59

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the train changes into Zen priests, with a few gusts of folk music, drops of water, and all these elements going round in a loop. All that is very roughly inspired by Telemusik [1966, Karlheinz Stockhausen], obviously. Because formally the great ambition of the film was to seek an equivalent in the cinema for Stockhausen’s recent research: this mixture of what is constructed and what is by chance, which also necessarily implies duration. And the other musical “model” for the film—but this one is even more distant, unfortunately—was Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band [1967]. Cahiers: Was it Igor Stravinsky for Paris nous appartient? Rivette: No, Béla Bartók. This slightly decadent romanticism, this aspect that was meant to be grating, was intentional. The origin of Paris nous appartient—and this may seem a bit pretentious or even monstrous—was the Budapest crisis at the end of 1956. Just after Le Coup du berger, I’d written some scripts that Roberto Rossellini was to produce, of which, luckily, none was filmed, and it’s one of those that I went back to and modified completely, six months later, in the spring of ’57. It seems idiotic, but because of that, Paris nous appartient was connected with Bartók. Cahiers: How do you now see Paris nous appartient? Rivette: I haven’t seen it again for a long time, and I’m very much afraid of seeing it again. I wanted too much to film it to be able to disown it, but with perspective on it I am very unhappy about the dialogue, which I find atrocious. I still like the idea of the film, including the naïve aspects of it; I like the way it’s constructed, the way the characters go from one décor to another and the way they move among themselves. I don’t even mind the fact that the plot is rather unpolished, but the style of the dialogue and the resulting style of acting bother me prodigiously. I thought when I was writing it that it was counter to Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost, but I realize that it’s the same thing—dialogue for effects, in the worst sense of the term. The lines are saved by certain of the actors; some make them worse— but they are terribly pleased with themselves, and I can’t stand that anymore. Even the theater scenes are conventional, and that’s what made me want to show the theater in another way. In any case, that’s nothing special. All films are about the theater, as there is no other subject. That’s choosing the easy way, of course, but I am more and more convinced that one must do the easy things 60

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and leave the difficult things to pedants. If you take a subject that deals with the theater to any extent at all, you’re dealing with the truth of the cinema: you’re carried along. It isn’t by chance that so many of the films we love are first of all about that subject, and you realize afterwards that all the others—Ingmar Bergman, Renoir, George Cukor (the good ones), Garrel, Jean Rouch, Jean Cocteau, Godard, Kenji Mizoguchi—are also about that. Because that is the subject of truth and lies, and there is no other in the cinema: it is necessarily a questioning about truth, with means that are necessarily untruthful. Performance is the subject. Taking it as the subject of a film is being frank, so it must be done. Cahiers: Isn’t that a bit like taking the cinema directly as the subject of the cinema? Rivette: There have been many attempts in the cinema to make films on the cinema and it doesn’t work as well; it is more laborious and comes off as affectation. It doesn’t have the same force, maybe because there is only one level. It’s the cinema contemplating itself, whereas if the cinema looks at the theater, it is already contemplating something else: not itself but its elder brother. Of course, this is another way of looking at itself in a mirror, but the theater is the “polite” version of the cinema. It’s the face it takes when it is communicating with the public; a film crew itself is a conspiracy, completely closed in upon itself, and no one has yet managed to film the reality of that conspiracy. There is something infamous, something profoundly debauched, about cinema work. Maybe it should be filmed in a more critical manner, or a more violent manner, the way Garrel films his “scene of the crime.” In any case, it’s very difficult. Even 8½ [1963] stops before the film is begun; the fact that Marcello Mastroianni may be about to start shooting his film forces Fellini to end his. Cahiers: Independently of all that, don’t you think that modern film directors—or those who have always been modern, like Renoir—are more and more interested in something in between the theatrical setting and the setting as it comes into modern cinema? When you see Persona [1966, Ingmar Bergman] or Garrel’s films, you can’t help asking yourself about the setting. Rivette: Whether the setting is pre-existent? Whether the film is an exploration of the setting? All I can say, empirically, is that in L’Amour fou, if the décors had been different, everything would have 61

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been fundamentally different, and first of all there is an operation of taming and exploring these two décors. We tried to show the flat in different dramatic situations: familiar, strange, tidy, messy, demolished, welcoming, hostile; and, on the contrary, to show the theater décor as completely immobile, since it is totally artificial. We were quite comfortable in that décor, because it was very large and very cozy at the same time. You could feel the lines of force in that place, which I really liked; each time I went back there, I felt good. While in the flat, everything completely depended on what you made of it. Cahiers: In the first and the last shots, with the stage and the blank screen, one gets the impression that the setting is tending to absorb the film, that space is devouring . . . Rivette: Precisely: nothing will have taken place but the place itself. Besides that, this beginning and ending were done to tie up the parcel, to try to find a bit of an equivalent—a purely functional one, based on the theater—to the beginning and ending of Persona. That is also what I still like about Paris nous appartient, the labyrinth that the décors create among themselves, the idea that one brings away from the film of a sort of series of settings with relationships between them—some cut off, others communicating, others that are optional itineraries—and people moving about like mice inside these labyrinths, ending up in culs-de-sac or caught face to face. Then at the end it all disappears and there’s nothing left but this lake and some birds flying away. In that, the setting is very, very different from the setting at the start—unlike L’Amour fou. Cahiers: . . . or that space is creating this cyclical aspect, in that we see Kalfon listening to the tape recorder at the beginning and at the end. Rivette: We could have made a film that would simply count off the days of the calendar, from the first day to the last, but I also felt like having it form a circle, and the easiest way was the old trick of the flashback. Cahiers: But which doesn’t play the role of a flashback at all. Rivette: No, purely playing the role of a reminder. It’s a sort of homage to Stravinsky, since it’s the beginning and ending of lots of Stravinsky, especially The Flood [1962] or Canticum Sacrum [1955], with the beginning and the end being mirror images of each other. Moreover, 62

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afterwards, I realized that lots of things mirrored each other in the film; that’s why it doesn’t bother me in the slightest to have an interval, because that accentuates the mirror effect. The two days Jean-Pierre spends in the theater and the two days he spends shut in the flat, the two conversations with Michèle, with Marta-Herminone, and with Puck—lots of things are echoes of each other. There are even some that I accentuated a bit once I had decided there should be an interval. Cahiers: That’s what Michel Delahaye very elegantly calls the bow-tie structure. Thus, the interval becomes a very important point in the film. Rivette: Oh yes, for me the most important point is when everyone goes to take a leak. Cahiers: At what point did you decide on that? Rivette: As soon as I saw the first complete rough-cut version straight through. I got the feeling that, physically, it was unbearable. That was also the reaction of the two editors, and I thought it should be taken into account: we realized that we had followed the first hour fine, the second fairly well, that we completely lost interest in the third hour, and that little by little interest revived during the last hour. But one hour was completely lost because of physical fatigue. The interval is also the point where we pretend to be nice to the viewer and to give him back his freedom. So he does whatever he wants; if he wants to go away, he goes. And I do hope that there will be people who leave, maybe not quite half the audience, but let’s say a quarter or a fifth of them, if only to prove that I was right to include an interval. It should be like in the theater, where you can leave in the middle—which I do, very often. On the other hand, I would like those who stay to stay right through to the end; I even think the doors ought to be locked. Going to see a film must be a contract—an act and a contract. And one of the clauses of the contract is that they have the right to leave during the interval but not at any other time. Cahiers: Have you tried to shorten the film? Rivette: I very soon saw that in any case it would be more than three hours long. But I think its present length—four hours and twelve minutes—is just about the right length and just about the maximum 63

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length as well. I have the feeling that there are only five minutes’ leeway in either direction, that it would have been wrong to go on longer. Cahiers: Weren’t you tempted to film Andromaque straight through? Rivette: At the start, this is what was planned. The actors thought they were actually going to play Andromaque on the last day, after six days of rehearsals; and we were to film it with two cameras. We gave up the idea because the actors weren’t ready and, in any case, we wouldn’t have had enough film. Cahiers: Would you like to film a theater performance or a play? Rivette: I think all directors have wanted to do that but no one ever has. But what would be interesting in filming a play wouldn’t be filming it but directing it—and maybe writing it. Cahiers: So how do you see La Religieuse between those two films and in relation to the play that you staged? Rivette: As a seductive error. At first, I felt like doing it only as an adaptation, in order to get people to know the book; then there was directing the play, and I felt like filming the play and sometimes wanted to see passages of it become a film while still remaining within a theatrical performance. I had even talked to Beauregard about it, but he didn’t agree at all; so I cheated a little, which means that for me it remains a film about a play. I wanted to play on the fact that there were some very theatrical passages, which were intentionally played for a theatrical effect, and that sometimes it became more just physical action and therefore became cinematic. But the edges are too blurred and the theater passages are more like unsuccessful cinema; it only shows a little in the way the actors play, and especially in the manner of filming, which is very frontal in the “theater” parts. Cahiers: But you weren’t able to indicate the presence of the theater explicitly or at length? Rivette: I did it in little things: the three knocks at the beginning, the opening scene where I wanted the spectators at the ceremony to seem like a theater audience and the ceremony to be filmed as if it were a performance—things like that. But that wasn’t enough; we would have 64

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needed twice as much time and twice as much money. It’s really a film that suffers from trying to seem expensive, when actually it is a film that was done on the cheap, put together with bits of string, where we were constantly up against financial problems. It’s a perfect example of an undertaking where you try to retain your original intentions, but where you end up retaining only one out of ten and that one loses its meaning. The only thing that was fun was the problem of the décors, which were done on the opposite principle from that of Paris nous appartient. We had to completely build two imaginary convents, with bits of walls, corridors, stairways, filmed here and there within a fortykilometer radius of Avignon: every time Anna goes through a doorway or we change shots, it means a jump from Villeneuve to the Pont du Gard. It was really like a puzzle, with our joining up the pieces with lighting tricks, doors opening, changes of gear, things like that. But the place exists only on the screen, in the film: it is the movement of the film that creates the décor. The origin of La Religieuse was mainly music, the ideas of Boulez— though very badly assimilated. The idea was that each shot had its own duration, its tempo, its “color” (that is, its tone), its intensity, and its level of play. But most of the time I didn’t manage to make all these elements clear because we had first of all to keep filming, and we really filmed whatever we could, however we could. Cahiers: One gets the impression—it particularly struck Jean-Marie Straub—that the film was worked on a great deal during editing. Rivette: No, the editing was done very carefully but very quickly. The real editing was the preparation and the shooting. Afterwards, we put the shots end to end, making sharp cuts and cutting the sound very short. From the start, I had planned to have very elaborate sound because it would help me to accentuate the breaks from one “cell” to the next. The original idea of La Religieuse was a play on words: making a “cellular” film, because it was about cells full of nuns. Cahiers: How did you work with Jean-Claude Éloy? Before shooting the film? Rivette: After shooting. Very closely. I knew basically before shooting that this or that shot would be put to music and would only make sense if it lasted exactly the same length of time as a piece of music. Then, at the Moviola, we looked at the film together, shot by shot, and with Denise de Casabianca and Jean-Claude we discussed together the 65

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entire sound construction of the film, not only where there was music but also where there wasn’t. The soundtrack thus became an entire score. In any case, the idea was that we would try to have as little music as possible, to relieve it with atmosphere, with more or less made-up sounds, in varying degrees from pure direct sound to pure music, with all the other variations in between, such as real sounds mixed together, slowed down, backwards, with percussion instruments, more or less clear loops of music at varying speeds. And when we really had no other choice, Jean-Claude agreed to write music for that part. The idea was that we would be as stingy as possible with the music, but that there would be music throughout, and that its role would become more and more pronounced and clear as the film progressed, with the principal piece of music being just before the end, during the big scene between Anna Karina and Francisco Rabal. This is the real ending of the film, the scene where Suzanne Simonin suddenly understands— and where the spoken word is completely caught up in the music and becomes an element of it. Cahiers: Did Éloy see his music in relation to a particular shot as forming a global cell, or did he base it on one of those elements of the shot that you were talking about—timbre, pitch . . . ? Rivette: He wrote all the music with an eye to this main musical passage, with the rest all consisting of developments of certain parts of that main passage, written more for one instrument than another, depending upon the shot and also depending upon the real sound that we had, which we always kept beneath the music. All the sounds were noted and integrated into his score. Cahiers: There is a marked resemblance between the character of Suzanne as you have described her—a character who is deluded during nine-tenths of the film and who understands everything at the end— and that of Claire. Rivette: You know, without trying to impose “Rivettian” themes, one could say the same thing about the woman in Le Coup du berger or of Anne in Paris nous appartient. It was only on the last day of mixing that it suddenly struck me, and I finally understood why I’d been wanting to make La Religieuse for so long, when I realized that it was a repetition of Paris nous appartient: exactly the same subject, with better dialogue! And even Le Coup du berger, as well: in that one, I wanted to try to give as much weight as possible to an everyday anec66

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dote, in such a way that the end would almost be felt to be tragic. It was greatly inspired by Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne [Ladies of the Park; 1945, Robert Bresson], obviously; and the dialogue attempted to take its inspiration from Cocteau—who is the great secret inspiration of French film directors, what Lola Montès [1955, Max Ophüls], Truffaut, some Godard, and now Garrel have in common. It took me five years to make La Religieuse and I filmed it with much more perspective and coolness, quite certainly, than if I had done it straight away. The idea wasn’t to do an adaptation but that there was no auteur at all. More and more I think there is no auteur in films and that a film is something that pre-exists in its own right. It is only interesting if you have this feeling that the film pre-exists and that you are trying to reach it, to discover it, taking precautions to avoid spoiling it or deforming it. And that’s why it is so nice to make a film like L’Amour fou, where we could talk among ourselves about the film the way we would talk about someone who wasn’t there but whom we would like to see. After a while, La Religieuse was no longer an adaptation of Diderot at all: I got the feeling that I had so completely assimilated the novel that it no longer existed as a literary work—I was really trying to rediscover Suzanne Simonin. Of course there was a preexisting text, but precisely, it existed as a text, as a reality that was completely independent of the existence of an author named Diderot; and it was something that had to be accepted with its variations, its reality as a written text, contradicting any idea of fiction (which was, at the same time, connected to the switch from the first person to the third person), all the while knowing that what I wanted to get at was also something beyond this text, as it is also beyond the film. And Anna was the medium for that. Cahiers: Isn’t that a very different point of view from that of the miseen-scène of the play? Rivette: Yes, I think it came just after the play, as a reaction. I knew from the start that Anna would be playing the part, but it became much stronger with the play, where she saved the whole miserable botched-up show. I had never seen that happen in the theater. The temptation was to try to do the same thing again in a film, but that wasn’t possible; and, doing the film, we suffered from the fact that there wasn’t the same excitement as in the theater. But the film had to be this hostile and disagreeable thing, this machine that imprisons Suzanne.

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Cahiers: One feels this commitment in the visual elements, especially the metallic aspect of the color. Rivette: That’s the only idea I had of it to start with. I knew I wanted contrasts to be as violent as possible; then again, when we printed, we tried to accentuate the hardness of the image even more. We didn’t quite manage, first of all because we would have needed arc lights and also because Eastman color is always very pretty and pastel. We should have printed in Technicolor to have really hard blacks or blues. Cahiers: One thing that is present in your first three films but absent from L’Amour fou is money. Rivette: At the start, I had expected the money question to come up, at least for the theater, and then we were fed up, we felt like going wild. It was obvious to us that these were people who were pretty broke, even though they were lucky enough to live in a fairly big flat— but I think they rented it furnished. It’s quite clear that they are camping there—and they have a little money because he puts on plays occasionally and she acts from time to time. I had planned to have a guy come and bother her occasionally, and remind her that they’d have to start on such-and-such a date, that they’d have to hurry, etc., but then the idea of shooting these scenes seemed so boring. Cahiers: Tell us about your work with Bulle Ogier. Her acting is very different here from what it is in Marc’O’s Les Idoles. Rivette: I played particularly on her anxiety; I spent most of my time making sure she wasn’t too sure of herself, that she hadn’t learned her dialogue too well. Most of the time, she starts with a text—in which, by the way, there are as many of her ideas as of mine—a text that she has read a certain number of times, but not completely assimilated. So there were great differences from one take to the next. Cahiers: A lot of people who have seen the film are very surprised to learn that Bulle and Kalfon aren’t a couple in real life. Rivette: It seemed to me that it would be impossible to make a film about a couple played by two actors who didn’t already know each other quite well; but, on the other hand, I would have found it very difficult to make it with two actors who were a real couple. It was already partially a psychodrama, where they have necessarily given 68

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some of themselves, and if they were a real couple doing that together, I would have felt very guilty and quite upset. I was lucky that there was a certain complicity between them in real life and a shared vocabulary. Cahiers: Do you believe that the cinema is useful? Or that a revolutionary cinema can exist? Rivette: I think revolutionary cinema can only be a “differential” cinema, a cinema that questions all the rest of cinema. But in France, in any case, in relation to a possible revolution, I don’t believe in a revolutionary cinema of the first degree, which is satisfied with taking the revolution as its subject. A film like Terra em transe [Entranced Earth; 1967, Glauber Rocha], which does take the revolution as its subject, is also really a revolutionary film; it’s always stupid to make assumptions, but I don’t think that such a cinema could exist in France now. Films that content themselves with taking the revolution as a subject actually subordinate themselves to bourgeois ideas of content, message, expression. While the only way to make revolutionary cinema in France is to make sure that it escapes all the bourgeois aesthetic clichés: like the idea that there is an auteur of the film, expressing himself. The only thing we can do in France at the moment is to try to deny that a film is a personal creation. I think Playtime [1967, Jacques Tati] is a revolutionary film, in spite of Tati: the film completely overshadowed the creator. In films, what is important is the point where the film no longer has an auteur, where it has no more actors, no more story even, no more subject, nothing but the film itself speaking and saying something that can’t be translated: the point where it becomes the discourse of someone or something else, which cannot be said, precisely because it is beyond expression. And I think you can get there only by trying to be as passive as possible at all the various stages, never intervening on one’s own behalf but rather on behalf of this something else that is nameless. Cahiers: But that is something that very often happens, for example in Bergman, even though he is on the contrary very active, a real demiurge. Rivette: That’s true, but I still get the impression that Bergman is someone who writes scripts without asking himself questions about the meaning of what he is writing. People have often talked about the 69

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commonplace elements in Persona, for example; but what is important in Persona is precisely that beyond all those elements that Bergman started off with, he hasn’t kept that “something else” from coming through. Maybe it’s precisely because he doesn’t question what he feels like filming that he does film in that way. In a sense, he accepts being only an intermediary; Bergman’s films are something completely different from Bergman’s vision of the world, which interests no one. What speaks in Bergman’s films isn’t Bergman but the film, and that’s what is revolutionary, because that is what seems to me to question very deeply everything that justifies the world as it is and as it disgusts us. Cahiers: But don’t we then end up back with the idea of an auteur strong enough to let the film speak for itself? Rivette: Not necessarily—I think there are a lot of methods. Bergman’s “genius” is a method, but the absence of genius can also be just as effective a method. The fact of being a collective, for example. Cahiers: Don’t you think that’s a myth? Rivette: No, I don’t think so. Of course I know that the effect would have been completely different with Bulle and Jean-Pierre and a different director, apart from any question of talent or anything else. It has nothing to do with that; it’s an aggregate of almost physical or biological reactions; it has nothing to do with intelligence. Maybe there is one more point to mention about Bergman: the fact that he works with his “family,” with the same people, that he doesn’t write his scripts in the abstract and then afterwards wonder: “Who on earth could I use? Sophia Loren isn’t free; I know, I’ll take Liv Ullmann.” It’s like Renoir, who wrote scenarios only for people he’d chosen beforehand. Maybe it’s only at that level that a collective can exist. In any case, Renoir is the person who has understood the cinema best of all, even better than Rossellini, better than Godard, better than anyone. Cahiers: What about Rouch? Rivette: Rouch is contained in Renoir. I don’t know whether Renoir saw Rouch’s films, but if he saw them, I’m sure that, first of all, he’d find them “stunning,” and that on the other hand he wouldn’t find them stunning at all. Rouch is the force behind all French cinema of the past ten years, although few people realize it. Jean-Luc Godard 70

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came from Rouch. In a way, Rouch is more important than Godard in the evolution of the French cinema. Godard goes in a direction that is only valid for himself, which doesn’t set an example, in my opinion. Whereas all Rouch’s films are exemplary, even those where he failed, even Les Veuves de quinze ans [The Fifteen-Year-Old Widows, 1965]. Jean-Luc doesn’t set an example: he provokes. He provokes reactions, either of imitation or of contradiction or of rejection, but he can’t strictly be taken as an example. While Rouch or Renoir can be. Cahiers: Do you believe that a cinema that takes directly political elements for its theme has the power to mobilize people? Rivette: Less and less. I believe more and more that the role of the cinema is to destroy myths, to demobilize, to be pessimistic. Its role is to take people out of their cocoons and to plunge them into horror. Cahiers: One can do that very well using the revolution as a theme. Rivette: Yes, but on the condition that the revolution is just a theme like any other. The only interesting film on the May “events” (obviously, I haven’t seen them all) is one about the return to the Wonder Factory, filmed by students at IDHEC [L’Institut des hautes études cinématographiques, the French Institute of Cinema]—because it is a terrifying and painful film. It’s the only film that was really revolutionary. Maybe because it’s a moment when reality is transforming itself at such a rate that it starts to condense a whole political situation into ten minutes of wild dramatic intensity. It’s a fascinating film, but one couldn’t say that it mobilizes people at all, or if it does, it’s by provoking a reflex reaction of horror and rejection. Really, I think that the only role of the cinema is to upset people, to contradict structures that pre-shadow certain ideas: it must ensure that the cinema itself is no longer comfortable. More and more, I tend to divide films into two sorts: those that are comfortable and those that aren’t. The former are all vile and the others positive to a greater or lesser degree. Some films I’ve seen, on Flins or Saint-Nazaire [two major factories where there were strikes and sit-ins in May 1968], are pitifully comfortable; not only do they change nothing, but they also make the audience feel pleased with themselves. It’s like Humanité [France’s Communist newspaper] demonstrations. Cahiers: Obviously, it’s difficult to believe in political films that think that by showing “reality,” reality will denounce itself. 71

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Rivette: I think that what counts isn’t whether it is fiction or nonfiction, it’s the attitude that the person takes at the moment when he is filming; for example, whether or not he accepts direct sound. In any case, the fiction is actually direct sound, because there is still the point when you are filming. And with direct sound, ninety times out of a hundred, since people know they are being filmed, they probably start to base their reactions on that fact, and so it becomes almost superfiction. All the more so because the director then has complete freedom to use the material that’s been filmed: to tighten up, to keep the long bits, to choose, not to choose, with the sound faked or not. And that is the real political moment. Cahiers: Do you think the filmmaker takes a moral position with regard to what he is filming? Rivette: Without any doubt, that’s all there is. First, with regard to the people he is filming, and then again with regard to the audience, in the way he chooses to communicate to them what he has filmed. But all films are political. In any case, I maintain that L’Amour fou is a deeply political film. It is political because the attitude we all had during the filming and then during the editing corresponds to moral choices, to ideas on human relationships, and therefore to political choices. Cahiers: Which are communicated to the audience? Rivette: I hope so. The will to make a scene last in one way and not in another: I find that a political choice. Cahiers: So it’s a very general idea of politics. Rivette: But politics is extremely general. It’s what corresponds to the widest-ranging point of view one can have regarding existence. La Marseillaise [1938, Jean Renoir] is a film that is directly political, but so very different from a film like Toni [1935, Renoir], which is indirectly political, and even from Boudu sauvé des eaux [Boudu Saved from Drowning; 1932, Renoir], which doesn’t seem to be political at all. While actually Boudu is a completely political film: it is a great film of the left. Almost all Renoir’s films are more or less directly political, even those that are the least explicitly political, like Madame Bovary [1934] and Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier [The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment, 1959]. I think what is most important politically is the attitude the film72

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maker takes with regard to all the aesthetic—or rather, so-called aesthetic—criteria that govern art in general and cinematic expression, in triple inverted commas, in particular. One can refine down afterwards, within the choices one has made, but that is what counts first of all. And what counted first of all for us, for Jean-Pierre and myself, him for Andromaque, me for the film, was the rejection of the idea of entertainment, and on the contrary the idea of an ordeal either imposed on or at least proposed to the viewer, who is no longer the comfortable viewer, but someone who participates in common work—long, difficult, responsible work something like delivering a baby. But it’s a sort of work that always has to be done again, this work of denying entertainment. There is a perpetual co-opting taking place or that always might take place, of the preceding stage, which is immediately taken up from an aesthetic point of view or a contemplative point of view: the prudent distance of people who won’t let themselves be caught twice, which is the basic attitude of all Western audiences. And it is precisely the fear of always being co-opted that makes this desire to deny entertainment limitless. Films like Bergman’s or like Godard’s are actually only superficially co-opted by this sort of Parisian habit, which makes it possible to take films in by saying, “Oh, yes, of course, the theme of the absence of God,” and various other stupid remarks like that. This superficial co-opting does oblige the director to go further in the following film, to try once and for all to show that it isn’t a question of the absence of God or anything else, but of being suddenly confronted with everything one rejects, by will or by force. Cahiers: What do you think of Garrel’s films, from that point of view? Rivette: In my opinion, they correspond exactly to what one should expect of the cinema today. That is, that a film must be, if not an ordeal, at least an experience, something that makes the film transform the viewer, who has undergone something through the film, who is no longer the same after having seen the film. In the same way that the people who made the film really offered up troubling personal things, the viewer must be upset by seeing the film; the film must make his habits of thought go off their beaten tracks, so that it can’t be seen with impunity. Cahiers: But, precisely, intelligent people who don’t like Garrel accuse him of having a conception of art as a “primal scream” and of making 73

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films that aren’t very far from Hitchcock’s, a cinema of fascination, a hypnotic cinema that, in the end, seems very old-fashioned. Rivette: I wondered quite a bit whether one could create a “distanciated” cinema, and basically I don’t think so. The cinema is necessarily fascination and rape, that is how it acts on people; it is something pretty unclear, something one sees shrouded in darkness, where you project the same things as in dreams: that is where the cliché becomes true. Cahiers: What about Straub? Rivette: That’s another sort of fascination, which is not contradicted by the intellectual tension he requires, but on the contrary is connected to it—actually very similar to the great amount of work we sometimes do in a dream in order to follow it. But fantasy is not necessarily fascination; it can have lots of dimensions. Cahiers: What is sure is that we are attacking a whole conception of the cinema based on communication and ease of communication. Rivette: Which is actually theater. It is admirable, but I believe it’s incompatible with what the cinema is becoming—literally, in any case. Cahiers: But in American cinema there’s an abundance of examples— Ernst Lubitsch, the Chaplin of Monsieur Verdoux [1947]—based on the fact that you could tell people things while seeming to tell them something else. Rivette: Maybe it’s everything that, for the time being, seems to be impossible, not because it was harmful or bad in itself, but because it has been co-opted; it’s become docile. Cahiers: Can’t we just say, “Because it was ineffectual.” Rivette: It really has been co-opted in the same way that Racine is coopted by the Comédie Française. And one can try to save it, but first of all you have to change the rules of the game. Cahiers: Are you constantly aware of references when you are filming?

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Rivette: No, not at all, really. In any case, not clearly. I just try to follow the logic of what is happening. Cahiers: Why the title, L’Amour fou? Rivette: It’s purely a play on words; it’s based on the multiple meanings of the word fou. It’s obviously in homage to André Breton and to everything he represents. It’s a nice title. Cahiers: And what are you doing now? Rivette: I’d really like to be able to finish editing the 16mm film on the rehearsals: to have another film as a footnote to the film. What might be fun now would be to watch the film, then to watch the 16mm film, then to watch the film again. I think that would give a different idea of everything that happens in Andromaque, and maybe in the rest as well. It’s also the only way to justify the idea of a “shortened version”: propose to the viewer a different angle of vision on the same original reality and see what happens, what that modifies, how perspectives change.

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Jacques Rivette & Jean Narboni, “Montage” From Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 210 [March 1969]: 16–35. Translated by Tom Milne.

Jacques Rivette: Let’s take the notion of montage as a connecting thread, a notion that today becomes central to the consideration of other matters than cinema (cf. the fact, for instance, that Eisenstein can be cited on an equal footing with leading literary theorists and practitioners); and on this basis to view or re-view a certain number of films, regrouping, arranging, “superimposing” them, and from this superimposition (as with patterns) to try to discover the common grounds and the differences. Jean Narboni: We should envisage films within three characteristic types of situation with regard to montage: 1. Films dependent on “montage texture”: films based on montage as the instrument of a dialectic and of a discourse. 2. Films that do not seem to establish themselves in relation to montage as creative work, in which montage is not present as a dominant effect, but in which the apparent absence of montage at the creative stage may conceal various montage maneuvers: whether the employment, to maximum effect, of a small number of liaisons between lengthy shots, or whether the displacement of the work of montage by means of other hinges in the cinematic combinative than those of montage properly speaking (through the articulation within the shot itself). 3. Films based, as in 1, on a creative work of montage, but that use it less for its power to carry meanings than, on the contrary, for its power to block them. The montage serves, in other words, a preoccupation with obscuring or even banishing the meaning. In this last category, the montage principles of underground or “undergroundish” cinema should of course be considered. Here a veritable passion for montage seems to derive less from a concern to give the film a poetic structure, than from a terrorist desire for atom-using, for exploding the very notion of an oeuvre. Montage, rapid by preference, thus is used as a means (among others) to a “systematic derangement” of the discourse. Rivette: In practice, then, alongside a characteristic example—Sergei 76

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Eisenstein’s The General Line [a.k.a. The Old and the New, 1929]; and it was only for practical reasons that D. W. Griffith’s Intolerance [1916] could not be screened—a number of trail-blazing films from the last ten years can be brought together: About Something Else [1963, Vera Chytilova], Made in USA [1966, Jean-Luc Godard], Méditerranée [1963, Jean-Daniel Pollet], Machorka-Muff [1963, Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet], Not Reconciled [1965, Straub & Huillet]. After these, following the hypothesis whereby the resurgence of montage over the last ten years began with the emergence of direct methods, two key stages in “direct cinema,” we have Shadows [1959, John Cassavetes] and Pour la suite du monde [For Those Who Will Follow; 1963, Pierre Perrault & Michel Brault]. (Jean Rouch is omitted only through unavoidable circumstances.) Finally, to put our thesis to the test, if indeed there was such a thing as a thesis, we shall consider the antithesis of two supreme achievements of the so-called “classical” cinema: Kenji Mizoguchi [Princess Yang Kwei-Fei, 1955] and Carl-Theodor Dreyer [Gertrud, 1964]—though it might equally well have been Jean Renoir, John Ford, or Roberto Rossellini. Even through its title, Chytilova’s film also poses a question (questions). It is remarkable, actually, how almost all the titles of these films are “signifiers” of their functioning: About Something Else, of course, but also The Old and the New (which is at work, and in conflict, in each sequence, each cell, each frame), Not Reconciled (true of each shot, locked in on its own cognizance: deliberate banishment of compromise from the world of Konrad Adenauer, tranquil rejection of a sham harmony). Intolerance, Made in USA, Pour la suite du monde, Méditerranée (“sea surrounded by land”): each of these titles is like a “directions for use” for the film. Whereas Gertrud and Princess Yang Kwei-Fei are merely labels (though it would certainly be easy to find not only Renoir or Rossellini, but also Ford or Dreyer films with ambivalent titles like this, more or less clearly indicating the same awareness of form as being the “content of form”). The ambition behind this grouping, in any event, was in effect to attempt, in a rather hazardous (indeed aleatory) manner, a “montage of films”: to interrelate, by means of these examples, different approaches to methods of structuring film, and to see what these connections and continuities might produce. Originally we stated or implied a sort of methodological a priori, distinguishing between all films’ having in common that they went through the editorial stage as a creative stage, and the rest; or to put it another way, between directors who “make” the film essentially during shooting (and in the pre-planning: for example Ford and 77

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Renoir), and those for whom this work of writing or strategy and the actual shooting are merely the accumulation of material (a working stock) that is subsequently subjected to scrutiny anew, and only acquires its order and meaning in the editing room (Rouch and Perrault as well as Godard and Eisenstein): two families that we weren’t comparing in quality but opposing—provisionally at least— in an attempt to understand more clearly. Narboni: With regard to the famous montage “effects,” we ought to reconsider this term and its usage very carefully and precisely in order to avoid perpetuating the errors and vague notions still evoked by any “edited” film. If by “montage effects” we mean manufactured devices, extraneous ornamentation, rhetorical tricks, then the term should be applied strictly to films that use them as such, which reduce to pure formula and cliché what constituted the foundation stone and not just the trimmings of the great Soviet silents (Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, Alexander Dovzhenko), which are unquestionably beyond reproach in this matter in that they considered montage as a dynamic creative process. By including all films where montage plays a primordial role in the same debatable category, one risks falling into the same error that led to the long-held view that a poetic discourse was merely a prose discourse with something extra—the poetic flavor or effect, in fact. But if one examines a film like Gertrud, apparently remote from the preoccupations of montage, one realizes that montage is very much present, though as a screening effect, a mask, and that it can intervene in a film as a creative process equally well through its ineffable effacement as through its attested presence (a process that has nothing to do with the “transparent montage” of the American cinema, for example). Godard’s comparison of montage to a heartbeat may be profitably recalled to pursue the analogy by saying that, just as the cardiac function alternates diastole and systole, silences—large and small—and sounds, so montage is as effective in its pervasions as in its voids, in its absences as in its traces. Rivette: This is why it was essential to see Chytilova’s film again right away: a film in which the role played by montage-manipulation is quite obvious, where one sees quite clearly how both detail (plastic and dynamic) and the effect of each splice have been systematically rethought on the Moviola; but above all a film where the work of montage at this primary level (the level of micro-structures) has manifest repercussions on the “thought” of the film as a whole (what 78

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musicians call “the grand form”) and vice versa: each incessantly gearing itself on the other. So the film functions as the irregular alternation, the “matching” of two autonomous films, or of two hypergeneric sequences, each one being governed at every level by its own formal laws, not only insofar as methods of mise-en-scène, camera attitudes and directing the actors are concerned, but also in its own internal montage. This said, what makes About Something Else particularly interesting is to see how this principle in fact works not purely and simply as the alternation of two parallel actions, as merely the sum of the two, but as a multiplication of each “level” by the other: and this without any interference or reference from one to the other, but on the contrary through the independence that is affirmed at every moment, re-established, reconstituted, re-created by each of them; it is through an incessant process of rejection, much more than through “connections,” that the micro-formal web organizes itself: the act whereby the montage effectively becomes a productive process is sustained here by a rigorous system of deception. At the same time, the interlacing of the plots is not so much what arouses the interest (the participation) as what blocks it, frustrates it (deprives it of its dividend by threatening its capital) by its displacement of the referent—of the relation, of “the real”—to their manipulation. Hence the full scope that subsequently arises for space– time distortions, without any possibility of verification from the narrative: one can equally well feel that Chytilova makes too much of these or too little. A fictitious or fictional space–time, strictly nonpsychological (nothing to do with the imaginary according to Alain Robbe-Grillet), the continuum of the film is opening, like space (on the stage) and time (on magnetic tape) for someone such as Merce Cunningham, but it is not pre-existent here and therefore doesn’t have to be filled; it is nothing other than a void, and like the imprint of a fossil, is left gaping by the decay of the old narrative and representational space–time. The extremism of this systematic classification, by montage, could be quite well represented by a film like Taylor Mead’s European Diary [1967], which, filmed image by image, can save itself the bother of an editing stage and be edited as it is shot. The extreme rapidity of the liaisons goes so far as to prohibit even perception of each shot . The spectator, ruthlessly left all at sea, is gripped by a dizzying monotony. But then another discourse may perhaps establish itself (if the spectator brings a certain good will to it, or helps out with a certain protective conscience), not in the film but in the spectator himself, on 79

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the strength of infra-perceived fragments of the film—like those complicated, overabundant dreams that are immediately forgotten on waking. Opposite perspective: Andy Warhol’s (more) celebrated (than seen) Chelsea Girls [1966]. Absolute non-montage, since the film is merely the alternation or juxtaposition (ordered by chance) of reels exactly as they left the camera, uncut and including both unforeseen accidents and reel-ends; and yet the simple fact of projection, therefore of the successions and the simultaneity (through the coexistence of the two screens) of raw shots, creates montage: different each time, but inescapable. As though one couldn’t leave the circle, as if it were impossible to break the montage’s seal. With someone like Cassavetes the use of montage is very different: naturalistic. (As you, Mr. Narboni, rightly say, Cassavetes’ work is “natural expressionism.”) What has to be expressed is edginess, doubts, hesitations, illuminations, fleeting and contradictory expressions, lassitudes, irritations, idle moments and bursts of activity succeeding one another as they do in life. The montage becomes the privileged means: the instrument of touch. And the phrase is used only barely metaphorically: in painting, a touch of green brings a realistic contradiction to red—one of those contradictions brought to life out of respect for life. It isn’t a question of nuance (nothing is more assertive than nuance), but rather of a war waged, by tremors and hesitations, on meaning in its living inexactitude. Perhaps we should now abandon this area of a priori classifications for the moment, and make the leap into trying to see what these classifications “mean,” what they correspond to in the activity of the films themselves. One very soon realizes, in fact, that as soon as one wants to make a rather closer analysis of the “work” of one of these films (work of the filmmaker on the film, operation of the film on the “reader”), one has to begin by carefully examining the categories to which it is usually subordinated. In the case of Made in USA, for instance, the now generally accepted notion of “collage” has first to be challenged: not to deny it, but in order to try to understand better how the collage worked in this case and what particular form of collage Godard’s method derived from. For what distinguishes his films from those of Chytilova, Eisenstein, or Pollet is that with him one feels there was (or used to be) an earlier state of the film, an inference the others do not permit. In Made in USA Godard leaves the impression of an earlier film, rejected, contested, defaced, torn to shreds: destroyed as such, but still “subjacent.” The film only functions in relation to simultaneous refer80

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ents, more or less tacit but proliferating, encroaching on each other so that they themselves ravel up and weave the entire filmic texture, since ultimately one can feel that there is nothing, no phrase, shot or movement, that is not a more or less “pure” citation or referent: the important thing being, during the course of the film, not to try to identify all these referents, which would be both impossible and pointless, but to realize (to see within the perspective of the idea) that everything is referential, though the referents are set with traps and dissembled, deconsecrated, by an operation that is literally “terrorist.” The initial impulse of the film, what one can probably think of as the point of departure for Godard’s activity, is in fact a montage idea: what happens if one “edits” together, if one combines some lousy série noire novel with the Ben Barka [Moroccan politician, murdered in Paris in 1965] affair: not of course the “reality” of the affair, which I don’t know, which escapes me, but as I might have read about it in the papers, as I might reconstruct it, imagine it, from a collage of newspaper cuttings; hence, a montage of two “texts” (but also a shredding of the pretexts). A reading of the film proper, which offers itself as “completed,” must in a sense retrace this movement by de-montage and, through a deciphering of both the tattered remains of the thriller plot and the echoes of political coordinates (a task itself embroiled, obstructed, frankly presented as unfeasible), finally attain—later, and likely after re-viewing—a level where the film becomes immediately legible as it unfolds on the screen. Almost all of Godard’s films function, as a matter of fact, through the embroilment of subtexts. In Le Mépris [Contempt, 1963], for instance, The Odyssey [8th century B.C., Homer], Fritz Lang, Alberto Moravia’s 1954 source novel itself, Cinecittà Studios. In Méditerranée, on the other hand, Pollet makes use of the fascination exerted by a more or less comparable ideological background: bullfighting, ruined Greek temples, Egyptian statues, the sea. But, he wants to use each of these elements as a word closed in on itself, loaded with the full charge of its potential meaning, whereas with Godard now, most of the time, he baulks at any clear and distinct expression of the “word;” and increasingly, moreover, the reference for each citation is, if not false, at least falsified: whereas in the early films quotations still played their traditional role, presented openly with an indication of the source and its traditional connotations, nowadays the fragmentation of his referents constitutes the texture and the very matter of the film, and in a certain sense, its end. Narboni: Méditerranée is an exemplary case. Among the films we 81

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selected, in fact, it established precisely the question around which our choice was organized, since it is an interrogation of montage, a question endlessly put and put again to montage: when, how, why pass from one thing to another? How does the montage work in Méditerranée, what is its role, its function, its mechanism? Precisely, it seems to me, in the area of effacing the meanings and connotations with which the content of the shot is charged even before the film starts. Selecting a limited number of shots revolving around the Mediterranean, Pollet edits and organizes them, introducing and rearranging them in a process designed gradually to make them equivalent in value, to equalize them in their symbolic importance. Eisenstein himself was of course trying to convey a meaning by and in his films, which wasn’t simply the meaning of the film as meaning, as self-designation, but the meaning of Communism itself. What places him incomparably higher than the other propagandist filmmakers is that he himself set out in quest of this meaning—which, as a Marxist filmmaker, he controlled—dismembering and reconstituting it, sweeping the spectator along with him, and thus verifying Karl Marx’s words (which he quotes in Notes of a Film Director [1946]) on the necessity for the investigation of truth itself to be true, on the means as part of the truth just as much as the result, on investigation as deployed and dispersed truth reuniting in the result. Inasmuch as Pollet declares war on the meanings that weigh down the shots in Méditerranée with their whole cultural weight, he tends to adumbrate nothing but the film as meaning, to say nothing in the film but the work of the film. Rivette: There is also the fact that the idea of meaning is “progressivist” in the context in which Eisenstein worked, whereas it functions in a reactionary way—as “truth”—in Pollet’s context (which is also ours): Eisenstein produces a film in a milieu where meaning is still relatively innocent (and they take this “relative” strictly into account), whereas in our case, whether we like it or not, meaning is invariably taken up by the commercial market, accessory to the ideology of exchange. And one mustn’t forget how Eisenstein has very consciously implemented his own “text” through the perversion and transposition of an earlier text. Griffith was the first to draw the inferences from his historical situation, he made the first great synthesis (The Birth of a Nation [1915]) of the implicit and random “discoveries” of his predecessors; but his masterstroke remains that, having just completed The 82

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Mother and the Law [1919]), a film reflecting an unconsciously reactionary liberal ideology, he immediately adopted it as the mother cell and motor element of his next film, Intolerance: the very fact of interlacing four “stories” into a single flow, of imposing the same law on four periods, of gradually substituting the single course of the film for the succession of stories (a “gesture” of revelation/annulment that absolutely dominates the whole final reel), literally turns the meanings of the Ur-film upside down. It is this “intuition” of Griffith’s that Eisenstein, in full awareness, chose to adopt; perfecting in the light of Marxism what Griffith had only been able to portend within a bourgeois ideology, he undertook precisely the same operation with respect to this intuition as Marx did in relation to G.W.F. Hegel, and through a systematic refraction and inversion of its data, gave the postDickensian guilty liberal conscience its full meaning as a class struggle. Narboni: When Dreyer borrowed the thematic and construction of Intolerance to make Leaves from Satan’s Book [1920], he reconstituted a film with four different and quite distinct stories, chronologically told, failing to recognize the possibilities of reactivation, contamination, and subversive interaction that the intermingling of the stories offered to Griffith. The latter is a typical example in film history of someone capable of producing a form or a concept without being able to formulate the theory of that concept correctly, and this is because the historical present in which he existed, the cultural and ideological text he inherited from his period, furnished him with neither the means nor the terrain, or even the need. Rivette: Yet as everyone knows, this “theory” of montage—though its practice persists after a fashion here and there—whether American (but Griffith remained isolated; Erich von Stroheim and King Vidor were already playing the “stage” card—sound cinema, in other words) or Soviet (Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko), was virtually wiped out by the arrival of sound, despite the celebrated Soviet manifesto of 1928 [“Sound and Image”]. Yet on the basis of speech (Alain Resnais, Godard) or of “direct” (Rouch, Richard Leacock, Perrault, and many others), the “resumption” of Griffith/Eisenstein has been gradually taking place over the last ten years: diffuse, often confused or barely conscious, but representing a collective will to reactivate the idea of montage on the basis of—and in terms of—the knowledge acquired over the thirty intervening years. Implicitly with Griffith, then explicitly with Eisenstein and with all filmmakers who endeavor to be even moderately lucid as to the 83

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meanings of their work, to think through the montage is to think through the criticism of a pre-existing text: of a “datum” that is itself—and this is what the process of the textual operations reveals— in fact only a fabrication. Hence this working hypothesis: if all coherent thought concerning montage is de facto critical thought, doesn’t any form of rejection or disregard of montage imply a theological mentality, in other words acceptance of the world as it is, and if not resignation, at least passive contemplation of the being there purely as presence, involving neither history nor mediation, with all the concepts of permanence and fate bound up with this ideology? Of course to say that montage and critical thought go together may simply seem tautological; but what must be stressed is that it is the material work, the concrete manipulation of montage (as soon as this goes beyond the level of continuity and ellipsis, the narrative level of “stylistic tricks”), that “generates” this work of critical thought, and this at all levels of the film, including some the filmmaker probably hasn’t considered: any questioning of the superstructures reverberates a shock on the level of the infrastructures. Another consequence: this critical movement is not limited to the results of its functioning in the film, for the film preserves it intact through the course of its development, not as an imprint (a fixed “montage effect”) but as a dynamic (montage as act) affecting the spectator as such; so it becomes impossible for him to abandon himself comfortably to the telling of a story, to the representation of a fable or pseudo-reality: he must, if he wants to read the film, assume responsibility in his turn for this critical work; if he wants to see the film, he must fulfill this responsibility. Narboni: But the practice of montage as absolute manipulation, as an all-powerful technique of all-purpose arrangement, has long been— and continues to be—held as authoritarian, manipulative of the spectator on whom it supposedly imposes a series of univocal and unquestionable meanings. Broadly speaking, this was the attitude that lay behind the theories of André Bazin, who was more responsive to the cinema of deep focus or the sequence-shot as being, to his way of thinking, more respectful both of the freedom of the spectator—whose eye and understanding are thereby not subjected to a strictly programmed course—and of the “ambiguity of reality.” We realize today that when he wrote, “In analyzing reality, montage assumed, through its very nature, a unity of meaning in the dramatic event,” Bazin was right insofar as the work of someone like Vsevolod Pudovkin is concerned—where the fragmentation of scenes, the breaking down into shots, never had any purpose other than carrying 84

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analysis to its extremes, dislocating a situation in order to dramatize or magnify it—but not Eisenstein, for whom it was a question each time of “involving the spectator in the course of a process productive of meaning.” The integration of montage with visual space that Bazin recognized as the mark of modern cinema can be found in many Eisenstein scenes and many of his writings, just as Eisenstein’s formula, “the number of intervals determining the tensional pressure,” could perfectly well apply to the examples on which Bazin based his analyses (William Wyler’s films, the kitchen sequence in The Magnificent Ambersons [1942, Orson Welles], which were constructed on the principle of potential voltage difference and of the slow dramatic charge in the shots). The freedom allowed to the spectator in these films was never more than whatever freedom—guided, oriented between certain poles and strong-points perfectly disposed at intervals within the shot—the filmmaker chose to grant him, before finally imposing a predetermined meaning that, because of his delay in conjuring it, might seem to have been discovered by the spectator himself. Here one finds the most extreme contradiction in Bazin’s analyses, preoccupied on the one hand by a belief in the ambiguity of reality, and on the other by the conviction that an international language exists, a natural and hidden meaning to things that the cinema does not have to produce, whose advent it need only—by virtue of its own perception and persistence— apprehend. Rivette: Historically, in fact, this notion of cinema as transparent, which can be resumed in the Renoir/Rossellini/Bazin trilogy, was itself established in reaction to a generalized “perversion” (perversion in the ordinary sense, bourgeois perversion) of Eisensteinian practice; for what was Pudovkin doing if not simply adopting the husk of Eisenstein’s theoretical principles and placing them at the service of storytelling, in tow to narrative? The montage effect is no longer “utilized” except to lend greater effectiveness to a narrative subordinated to the development of character. By way of Pudovkin, this compromise and this caricature of the “art of montage” was taken over by whole areas of the commercial cinema. (One may note how at the same time and in the same way—with the same finality orienting the same process—G. W. Pabst was instrumental in effecting the liquidation of expressionism in favor of the aesthetic of mise-en-scène as a formal bluff that even today still governs the entire European and Hollywood cinema: René Clément, Otto Preminger, Grigory Chukhrai, Francesco Rosi.) This technique of manipulating “reality,” 85

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where the director is the more or less invisible master, quickly ceased to be the art of montage to become the art of découpage (and concomitantly, of “framing” and the “direction of actors.”) It was in fact against dictatorship in this area that Renoir or Rossellini took a stance and not against montage, which with them is more of a censored area, a “blank”: the fact that the filmmaker no longer has any need to go to his cutting room, no longer feels this need, leads them in practice—and unconsciously, it would seem—to reinvest a part of this montage-thought at the construction level, and more particularly at the stage of actual shooting. (Cf. the role of the sequence-shot or the mobility of the camera with these filmmakers or Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Mizoguchi—in contrast to the more generalized analytic technique—in the structuring of levels and formal conflicts.) So one might, very schematically, distinguish four moments: the invention of montage (Griffith, Eisenstein), its deviation (PudovkinHollywood: elaboration of the techniques of propaganda cinema), the rejection of propaganda (a rejection loosely or closely allied to long takes, direct sound, amateur or auxiliary actors, non-linear narrative, heterogeneity of genres, elements or techniques, etc.), and finally, what we have been observing over the last ten years, in other words the attempt to “salvage,” to re-inject into contemporary methods the spirit and the theory of the first period, though without rejecting the contribution made by the third, but rather trying to cultivate one through the other, to dialectize them and, in a sense, to edit them. Narboni: Eisenstein, Pudovkin: today we must no longer think of the opposition between them in the generally agreed terms, categories and relationships—intellectual montage/lyrical montage, cinema-cry/ cinema-song, dominant creativity/dominant theory—but according to their particular conceptions of the dynamics of cinema as revealed in their films and clarified in their writings. Here a decisive text must be quoted: “The basic element of Soviet cinema, its specific problem, is montage. Montage is neither a means of showing or narrating, fragment by fragment as a mason stacks up bricks (Lev Kuleshov), nor a method for developing an idea through a succession of shots (Pudovkin’s lyrical principle). The idea must result from the clash between two independent elements.” From this we can see very clearly what differentiates Eisenstein’s filmic écriture, or writing—successive transformative effects whose motor elements are linked by dynamic signs of correlation and integration, where the operations actualized are multiplicative and productive, where the collision between two 86

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elements engenders, through a crucial leap, a new concept—from that of Pudovkin, a chain of shots each in turn carrying a single idea in a simple process of summation. What therefore distinguishes a multidimensional space and time, structured according to the principles of a complex polyphony, a signifying purpose, a volume in constant expansion, a scenography, from a spuriously dialectic linear time? I shall borrow a question and answer from Louis Althusser: “How can a dialectic be late? Only on condition that it is the other name for a consciousness” . . . “there is—in the strict sense—no dialectic of consciousness opening, by virtue of its own contradictions, onto reality itself . . . For the consciousness attains reality not through its internal development but through a radical discovery of the other than self.” It is this other of the consciousness that Pudovkin never attained. A film like Mother [1926], for example, centered on a central character, a consciousness embodying within itself all the circumstances of the drama, quite unjustifiably assumes the mask of a dialectical and Marxist film inasmuch as Pudovkin’s cinema was subject to a simple narrative logic that prevented it from bringing multiple, discontinuous temporalities—merely time governed by a uniform successiveness—into play. Rivette: All of which leads us to re-examine this theme of the “awakening consciousness” and to expose its complicity with the method whereby Pudovkin “progresses” in his work only by following the thread of an idea that runs through the film like a watermark, and which is never produced by the shots, merely transmitted by them. If we compare Mother and The General Line (The Old and the New), it can be seen that the former tells the story (is the narrative) of a character whose view of the world is gradually modified by accumulations from the various phases and circumstances of the plot (a story such as Ford, for example, could tell—better—in The Grapes of Wrath [1940]; in counter-verification, see Bertolt Brecht’s 1931 version of the same Maxim Gorky text); whereas the latter makes us witness, and collaborate in, a metamorphosis through a series of mutations of the “mediator-protagonist” who punctuates the course of the film, and who is no longer a character but a node of forces and acts—actor (acted on/acting)—and functions in the organization of the sequences like a word being transformed and exhausting all its possibilities one after the other: a consciousness no longer central, which never at any moment reflects or dominates the situation in its entirety, but is presented each time as an effect of the dynamic of the film. No “scene” shows or demonstrates a particular stage (conscious 87

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and considered) in the peasant woman’s “long and hard road”; it is praxis alone that modifies her state; it is because the tractor breaks down that she makes (that she undergoes) the decisive qualitative leap: she is then at a stage Z corresponding to the final point in her evolution as a peasant (by jumps from the “alienated peasant” stage to that of “enlightened peasant”), the tractor stops, the mechanic rips up her skirt, stripping her of the rags of her present condition, to use the strips as rags (which thus have a part in cleaning the engine), and there is here a sudden, unexpected leap: she is a tractor-driver. (And the whole end of the film is simply montage of herself with herself: her successive aspects matching with the image of her “final” (within the term of the film) transformation. The character, far from subjecting the logic of the narrative to the laws of its thought processes, is produced by the transformational mechanism of the sequences. Narboni: It is inconceivable that this discontinuity in the evolution shown in the peasant woman was a secondary discontinuity, achieved as an afterthought by eliminating intermediary stages and linking passages that had been filmed, that it was intended as something in the order of an ellipse or stylistic effect. It could happen with Eisenstein that during shooting, with a view to montage and with an idea in mind, he accumulated considerably more filmic material than he intended to retain; he frequently left possibilities open for unforeseen articulations, new concatenations, valences to be saturated; while editing, he might breach and leave gaps in a continuity previously filmed, retaining only certain stages of a movement, moments of a trajectory, highlights of a situation: but it is inconceivable, in this particular case of the peasant woman in The General Line (The Old and the New), that he could have filmed it with the genesis of her evolution faithfully respected in its continuity. His strict application of the Marxist theories of the leap, of the sudden break as a revolutionary moment of total renewal, undoubtedly prohibited him from doing so. Rivette: A detour, whereby we might perhaps come back to the problematic of the relationship between “direct” and montage; for a film like Pour la suite du monde shows very clearly how Perrault (like Rouch) was very soon able to go beyond the stage of montage as simply selecting and ordering material by definition overabundant in relation to the “projected” film, and how the film, over and above its value as a document, acquires a poetic quality only insofar as this material is reworked throughout in very precise formal patterns, while at the same time itself suggesting these patterns and informing them 88

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dialectically; this both on the level of shot-to-shot relationships, and in the structuring of the film in movements (musical) and chapters (fictional or thematic). Which is even more explicit in Le Règne du jour [The Times That Are; 1967, Pierre Perrualt], just as the creative intervention of montage is more flagrant in La Chasse au lion à l’arc [Hunting the Lion with Bow and Arrow; 1965, Jean Rouch] than in Jaguar [1967, Rouch] or Moi un Noir [I, a Black; 1958, Rouch]: the latter are closer to the chronicle form, the former to the epic form. Another point, arising from the preceding, another similarity: just as montage looms large on the horizon even at the pre-shooting stage for Eisenstein (all the more so during the shooting, if only in the sometimes systematic use of multiple cameras), so the direct filmmaker accumulates matter for the montage, with a view to the re-examination of this raw material and its destruction as such. This attitude plays the same motor role with Cassavetes, even though it is within a dramaturgical perspective (but a dramaturgy exposed, radically undermined, by the use of such material: deflected and turned inside out) that it performs its task of intercepting the “text” (the pre-text at this stage, in its first state of “eruption,” closely scrutinized by the meaning). Contrariwise, in the case of Not Reconciled, one can see that the montage is detailed with absolute precision, how Straub has tightened or loosened each liaison, played on variations of tempi and so on—in other words, materialized the principle of the film on the Moviola— but also how only what was strictly necessary in view of the “anticipated” film was shot, how the film therefore pre-existed its matter from the moment of its écriture; yet at the same time one must note how this work of condensation, choice, and re-ordering was in fact effected on the basis of an extensive source material (i.e., Heinrich Böll’s text Billiards at Half-Past Nine [1959], which here undergoes an operation of reduction, dislocation, and conversion that no longer has anything to do with what is normally called “adaptation”): here, therefore, the preparatory work of écriture functions as montage. Moreover, Straub imposes on the spectator (the virgin spectator viewing the film for the first time, at any rate, but also in part at subsequent viewings) an obscurity in the language, which seems willfully indirect, apparently unaware of him as the addressee (even if he nevertheless, though tacitly, fulfills his task), and which prevents him from direct attainment of the “knowledge” it seemed to be entrusted with bringing him. The film functions before him as a dream, one might say, as the product, of an unconscious (but whose unconscious? Does it belong to the literary text? To fifty years of German history? Straub? 89

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The “characters” in the film?), whose structure comprises only multiple re-crossings and literal echoes, the ultimate play on words and/or images, all the informational elements also being annexed to the puzzle, though dislocated, secreted, shuffled: for instance, the central monologue by the mother (who is, not by chance, at the point where all the components of the fasces converge and diverge), discourse of a space–time where all times and all spaces are collided and compounded (reabsorbed by a process of montage/mixing). Now, it was a very similar problematic that faced us when we reviewed Gertrud: if Dreyer’s film, more “logical,” in any case more chronological, doesn’t function formally as a dream, it nevertheless also prescribes an “oneiric” vocabulary: at once the telling of a dream and a session of analysis (an analysis in which the roles are unceasingly changing: subjected to the flow, the regular tide of the long takes, the mesmeric passes of the incessant camera movements, the even monotone of the voices, the steadiness of the eyes—always turned aside, often parallel, towards us, a little above us—the strained immobility of the bodies, huddled in armchairs, on sofas behind which the other silently stands, fixed in ritual attitudes that make them no more than corridors for speech to pass through, gliding through a semiobscurity arbitrarily punctuated with luminous zones into which the somnambulists emerge of their own accord). So, two films that impose, by converging routes, the same analogy between their functioning (their operation) and “all” that is implied by the word unconscious; but, at the same time, two films where the basic work seems to have taken place at the level of the intention and the écriture (with Straub, pulverization of the original text; with Dreyer, condensation and “concentration” of this text); but films, finally, where the moment of the montage “acts” as the fulfillment of this work, and also as an intervention by the arbitrary. Now, this “enigmatic” function of montage, constant with Dreyer, always operates in his work through the “imposition” of gaps (marks of censorship?): cf. how the beginnings and ends of each shot in Master of the House [1925, Carl-Theodor Dreyer] are systematically interrupted, chopped, cut off, in the movement (invariably lacunary in part), each articulation “false” by a few frames; cf. even more so, the whole of La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc [1928, Dreyer] and how, from Vampyr [1932, Dreyer] to Ordet [The Word; 1955, Dreyer], Dreyer arrests and cuts off almost all his camera movements en route; cf. finally, in Gertrud, the three or four cut-ellipses at the junctures of two long takes, tranquilly intervening within the supposed continuity of the scene: tantalizing cuts, deliberately disturbing, which mean that 90

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the spectator is made to wonder where Gertrud “went”; well, she went in the splice. And perhaps it is through this deliberate desire to introduce, at the montage stage (instead of limiting himself to having it recopy the pre-shooting text, or like Robert Bresson limiting it to a role that is above all “musical”), into the écriture, no matter how precise and closely controlled it may have been in the earlier stages, these cuts, these ruptures, these leaps—this irrational—that the “passage” of the unconscious, trapped by the literal game, is effected. Narboni: The reference to music just made in connection with Bresson may also be applied to all of Straub’s films, which are so rife with preoccupations tending in this direction, so essentially a search for possible homologies. One might cite, more or less at random, the distribution and proportioning of tempi, the alternation of zones of tension and release, of dense nuclei and silent expanses, the complex and variable interplay of autonomy and interdependence among the “cells,” the composition in large blocks or pinpoint elements, the combination of solidly built structures with other “freer” ones, and finally, the application of the principle never belied by Igor Stravinsky, the rejection of expressivity. Let us recall the terms, equally valid for all of Straub’s films, in which Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote about Machorka-Muff: “What interested me above all in your film was the composition of the filmtime—it is closely related to music. You have achieved good durational proportions between the scenes where the events are almost without movement—how astonishing that a film that is relatively taut and brief should have the courage of slow tempi, pauses, rests—and those where they are extremely fast—how dazzling to have chosen for these the newspaper cuttings displayed at all angles on the screen. What’s more, the relative density of the changes of tempo is well done. You have let each element arrive at its own irreplaceable moment; and there is no ornamentation. ‘Everything is essential,’ as Anton Webern said in similar circumstances (but everything in its time, one should add). I like the sharpness of the film, the strangely flashing movement of the camera in the street scenes, and the empty walls of the hotel room on which the camera comes to rest for long periods, that bareness from which it cannot break away. I also like the “unreal” condensation of time, and yet one never feels hurried. Progress is only possible on that ridge between truth, concentration, and that sharpening which penetrates by burning into our perception of reality.” Valid for the twenty-minute account of a day in the life of a West German officer—a day particularly rich in incident—these remarks 91

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could apply equally well to the treatment, to the transformation, into fifty-five minutes of film of fifty no less busy years of German history (Not Reconciled), or of thirty years of intense musical creativity into an hour and a hair’s flow of images and sounds (The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach [1968, Jean-Marie Straub]). One can simply try to discover the function assigned by Straub to this treatment of time: what is the rhyme or reason for this combination of overloaded signifying nodes, saturated with information (sometimes to the limits of our capacity for assimilation, our speed in deciphering them), with the pauses, the “sustained notes,” the empty fringes, the blemishes and “unnecessary” temporal effusions, the vacant passages (which can come at the beginning or the end of a shot, and sometimes exercise a shot in its entirety, in the insistence on its progression)? Rivette: And a purely formal suspense: what is the shot going to be? And not: what is going to be in the shot? At the same time, this desire to empty certain shots, to have a shot filled with information followed by one that seems to offer none, or, likewise, the proliferation of false information at certain points (false because non-referential in the context of the film, non-”informative”: false trails where the reader’s memory and powers of concentration lose their way—the mass of proper names, the paprika . . .)—all this seems to me to form part of what enables Machorka-Muff to function as an account of the unconscious. The film must be over before its reading (its re-reading) can be started; the telling of the dream must be finished so that the analysis, setting aside all non-literal matter, can discover the recurring, genuinely significant elements, together with the slips of the tongue, the masks, the metamorphoses, the censorships.

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Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-André Fieschi, & Eduardo de Gregorio, “Jacques Rivette: Interview” From La Nouvelle Critique, 244.63 [April 1973]: 65–74. Translated by Tom Milne.

Nouvelle Critique: What is the origin of Out 1 (its place in relation to your earlier films)? What part is played by doubt and certainty—or premeditation and chance, for that matter—in the initial stages of a project like this? Jacques Rivette: It’s a sort of offhand synthesis, treated deliberately offhandedly, of contradictory things I had been more or less thinking about for more or less a long time. There was the desire I’d had before La Religieuse, and which was aggravated by the filming of La Religieuse, to make a film that, instead of being predicated on a central character presented as the conscience reflecting everything that happens in the action, would be a film about a collective, about a group, though in what form I didn’t know exactly. One of the only things I did know was that it wasn’t going to be set in Paris, but rather in a small provincial town. I had a group of young men and women, fluctuating since the film was to cover three months, six months, a year, with the theoretical notion—a little too theoretical, actually—that the point was the variations within the group, so that eventually, by the end of the film, the people wouldn’t be the same ones as at the beginning. All the members of the group had changed and their relationships had become completely different, with the group’s then becoming something else again. Finally the idea was left up in the air because I couldn’t find an anchoring point for it. Another desire I had, at variance with the first, was one that came to me much later, possibly in thinking about Méditerranée [1963, Jean-Daniel Pollet] and that type of film. It certainly also came to me in connection with About Something Else [O necem jinem; 1963, Vera Chytilova] and other films based on this principle of parallel narratives. This was the desire to make a film that would be made up not just of two interlocking films but of several, a whole series. Although it isn’t a good film, or maybe because of that, I don’t really know, I had been struck by André Cayatte’s La vie conjugale [Anatomy of a Marriage: Jean-Marc ou La vie conjugale, 1964/Françoise ou La vie 93

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conjugale, 1964]. What I liked about it was that when you saw the first film, you thought it was awful, but when you saw the second it began to be interesting. Above all, seeing the second one made you want to see the first again. I very much wanted to make a series of films referring back and forth to each other. I set out from all these ideas, and when shooting began, it was with the intention of filming material inspired by quite separate characters, so that there would be four completely different “threads” at the outset. Yet I did not know—I should have known, but I’d avoided asking myself the question—how this material would be edited together. Ultimately, perhaps it would have had to be edited in the form of films independent of each other but referring back and forth, along the lines of La vie conjugale. Instead of having two films showing both sides of the same story, however, there would have been at least three films whose relationship to one another wouldn’t have been just positive and negative, right side and wrong side. But this wasn’t a carefully blueprinted project; on the contrary, it was a sort of amorphous mixture of more or less bygone impulses that had coagulated in this way. Anyway, a week before shooting began, I was faced by the need to find some way of representing all this. The situation was becoming urgent if we weren’t to waste the six weeks’ filming provided for by the budget, so we had to have a planned shooting schedule. I spent two days with Suzanne Schiffman. For a whole afternoon she asked me questions, saying, “Tell me everything you know.” So I told her roughly what I knew, the characters, remembering what each actor had said, what he wanted to do, what we’d talked about in each case. Suzanne scribbled all this stuff down, filling up thirty or forty pages in a notebook. Then we looked at each other and we said: what are we going to do with all this? We tried to take each character in turn, but nothing came of that, then suddenly I think it was she who had the great idea: we must draw up a bogus chronology—because, after all, a story does unfold in time—indicating an arbitrary number of weeks and days on the vertical lines, and the names of the characters going the other way. From that moment it was very odd, but this sort of grid influenced the film a lot. The great temptation was not to fill in all the squares, of course, but when you saw from the document that Colin, say, was meeting somebody or other, you thought: well now, why shouldn’t he meet soand-so as well? Our idea throughout wasn’t so much to have one character meet another, Colin and Thomas, or one actor another, Jean-Pierre Léaud and Michel Lonsdale, and so forth. But it seemed a 94

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pity not to have this or that actor there at the same time and to have them confront each other for at least twenty minutes to see whether anything happened between them. After that it became like a game, a crossword puzzle. Actually, it was all done very quickly. Whereas L’Amour fou brought into play two individuals and (centering on Jean-Pierre Kalfon) a group of people particularly coherent as a group (being basically the theater company of Marc’O [a.k.a. Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin] at that time), by contrast with this I wanted to play on a more heteroclite, more heterogeneous casting; to play on the heterogeneity. In fact, from my point of view, this heterogeneity turned out to be much less flagrant than I’d originally planned. NC: And afterwards, when filming was completed, what was it like compared to your prior idea (or ideas)? Rivette: To our way of thinking, the diagram indicated possibilities; it was a way of starting off a film that could be even longer and which could be continued, where the various strands were brought together from a plot that could be continued, with new characters still to turn up later on. We had made up a possible list of all the actors who might be interested in working on a project like this. The ending was deliberately inconclusive. I’d asked Suzanne to plan the work schedule so that during the last few days of shooting, corresponding roughly to the last week in our chronology, we wouldn’t be trapped by the grid in everything concerning the ending; this way we could change, rearrange if need be, depending on what happened during earlier filming. In the end I suddenly felt—and Suzanne and the actors eventually agreed—that instead of leaving the story suspended, I wanted to pretend to end it, to make it (relatively speaking) a film with a conclusion. I realized I wouldn’t want to carry on with the continuation six months or a year later. It was with this in mind that I filmed the ending, whereas when we were preparing the film it was with a view to continuing it afterwards. That’s one thing that happened. Another was that when we started the editing with Nicole Lubtchansky, faced by all these rushes, we started by sorting them out according to a rough chronology. I still didn’t know whether I might not follow the principle of separate films during editing, but then, as we were putting it together, we soon began wanting one particular scene to come after another. We quickly realized that it didn’t cut together in any old way, in any order. For instance, if you put Juliet Berto’s scenes one after another, or did that with Jean-Pierre Léaud’s 95

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scenes or Michel Lonsdale’s—something we never did, actually—it was obvious that they had to be broken up by each other, and that there was in fact another continuity in the intersection of the strands that we had to follow or find. NC: How exactly does the method you used differ from the traditional conceptions of cinema that are still dominant? Several more or less established notions are shaken up here in a pretty radical way: “the director,” “the script,” “the actor,” and so on. How? Rivette: Time was, in a so-called classical tradition of cinema, when the preparation of a film meant first of all finding a good story, developing it, scripting it and writing dialogue; with that done, you found actors who suited the characters and then you shot the picture. This is something I’ve done twice, with Paris nous appartient and La Religieuse, and I found the method totally unsatisfying, if only because it involves such boredom. What I have tried since—after many others, following the precedents of Jean Rouch, Jean-Luc Godard, and so on—is to attempt to find, alone or in company (I always set out from the desire to make a film with particular actors), a generating principle that will then, as though on its own (I stress the “as though”), develop in an autonomous manner and engender a filmic product from which, afterwards, a film destined eventually for screening to audiences can be cut, or rather “produced.” Now, under all this, there are several myths that should of course be flushed out one after the other and be challenged. The first aspect one very often stumbles up against, and about which there is enormous confusion, is the mythology, the myth of what has been called direct cinema—of what has even been called, in an even greater misusage, cinéma-vérité. Well, I don’t think there is any point in putting cinéma-vérité on trial all over again: it’s a word, a formula, which has been applied completely mistakenly, because even the films for which this formula was invented were far from corresponding to what the term implies. It isn’t worth pursuing, so let’s just stick to the term “direct cinema”: it’s more ambivalent, it’s more adaptable. People have long been aware now, though they weren’t always, that “cinéma direct” . . . we won’t say equals “cinema lie,” but that it has at any rate nothing to do with notions of real or false. It’s a technique, not just like any other but a technique all the same, which produces artifice by means other than those of traditional mise-en-scène, but which does, through its very function, produce artificiality. This artificiality is simply designated differently from other cinematic 96

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artificialities. But there is no innocence, no candor, no spontaneity attached to direct filming. NC: Knowing all that, you use this method anyway. Why? Rivette: Precisely because that’s where direct cinema becomes exciting: from the moment you realize it’s a creator of artifice (and not, I repeat, of lies). But one which, by comparison with the traditional method, is more directly in touch with that particular artifice which constitutes the act of mise-en-scène, of filming. When I say this, I’m probably exaggerating. It is quite clear that the borderline between direct cinema and the cinema of mise-en-scène is a false one, like the old Lumière-Méliès border. What you can say, in fact, is that there you have the two ends of the chain, but it doesn’t part anywhere in the middle; you get from one end to the other through a whole series of detours, surprises, circumstances demanding adaptability. In any case, in the two films I’ve made since, I’ve never felt any desire to use a technique in any purist sense. On the contrary, what interested me—and if I make any more films, this is the direction in which I’d like to go—was to see how, within the direct-cinema method, that method could be used more “impurely.” Because, in my case anyway, it never is direct cinema properly speaking; it remains a technique very closely akin to mise-en-scène. To begin with, I’ve always worked with actors, with a comparatively precise canvasscenario as a starting-point, and with a normal technical crew. These are not at all the “wild” conditions of someone like Pierre Perrault (Pour la suite du monde [For Those Who Will Follow, 1963], Le règne du jour [The Times that Are, 1967], Les voitures d’eau [The River Schooners, 1968]), or Rouch when he made La chasse au lion à l’arc [Hunting the Lion with Bow and Arrow, 1965]). NC: Isn’t there an attempt to effect a renewal of fiction here, in the shifting of responsibilities from you to the actors? Rivette: Yes. NC: Nevertheless, a threshold of intervention still exists. Rivette: The myth in this sort of filmmaking is of a creative collectivity in which everyone is happy and spontaneous and everybody “participates.” I don’t think this is true. Quite the contrary, the atmosphere is usually relatively tense, because nobody knows where they are, 97

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everyone is exhausted, filmmaker, actors and technicians are all in a muddle. Nobody really knows what is going on. I think the only possible attitude in situations like this—it’s what I’ve always tried to do, in any event—is to adopt a perspective that is beyond good or bad. You must virtually refuse, for the time being, to judge what is being shot. There are moments when you feel you’re letting everything just go by passing on to the next bit, and others where I suddenly find myself sticking on a detail: it has to be just so, at this particular moment the character has to say such-and-such, etc. NC: Out 1 seems to be constructed contrary to any established dramaturgical principle. The strictly fictional elements, for example, take a long time to appear. Rivette: We asked ourselves this question. Nothing simpler, if we’d wanted, than to do what is almost always done in films, which is to kick off with strong dramatic elements, after which you can get the exposition out of the way. It’s the old device the cinema has used almost since the beginning: any narrative activity requires the prior disposition of a certain number of elements; by interlacing these elements with each other, crisis situations can then be reached that constitute what is traditionally called the story proper, the motor element. This is a necessity dating from the origins of all dramatic or narrative forms, and each period, each means of expression, has resolved it in a different way. Even in L’Amour fou, where it was time that created the action, which was the action—more so than in Paris nous appartient—we started in a small way, on a minor crisis: the sequence in which Bulle Ogier walks out of the company. We deliberately made the sequence rather flat, however, not dramatizing it at all. Coming back to Out 1, Suzanne and I decided we wouldn’t use the good old method and that we’d start . . . in documentary fashion would be putting it too strongly, but at any rate without any dramatic elements. And since Balzac’s Histoire des treize [1833–39] was used in the film, we thought: all right, we’ll have an exposition in the manner of Balzac. Comparatively speaking, of course, but the dramatic interest of the first three or four hours is purely in the description, not so much of the settings as of the actor-characters, their variously interesting or uninteresting jobs, their different social spheres. And within this pseudo-documentary (almost documentary in certain sequences involving Lonsdale’s theatrical group, which were shot as reportage), the idea was that the fiction gradually proliferates. We start off with the reportage—it’s phony, of 98

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course, set up, but presented more or less as reportage—with the fiction slipping in very stealthily at first, but then beginning to proliferate until it swallows everything up and finally autodestructs. This was the principle governing the whole of the end, where we linger on the remains, the refuse left, you might say, after fiction has been at work like this. NC: The film makes use of a large number of pre-existing texts. Rivette: This was one of the main ingredients of the thirteen-hour version, one of the few things mentioned in the five pages we gave to the Commission du Centre national du Cinéma in requesting our advance. Actually, it remained more an intention than a fact in the film as things turned out. A lot of texts vanished en route. But others came to us along the way, ones I hadn’t thought of, which I discovered during the editing. Among the pre-existing texts there was Balzac, there were the two Aeschylus plays [Seven Against Thebes (467 B.C.) and Prometheus Bound (479–424 B.C.)], which produced results, more or less. In theory they were to proliferate. There was Torquato Tasso [1790, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe], of whom little remains. The one who came along very late but became very important was Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark [1876]. NC: And Louis Feuillade? Rivette: Feuillade, of course, but I wasn’t thinking so much of film texts. I’d reread Les Misérables [1862, Victor Hugo] a year previously, so what I had in mind was the nineteenth-century popular novel—Les Mystères de Paris [1842, Eugène Sue] rather than Feuillade. Even what we borrowed from Balzac hinges on three or four archetypes of the popular novel. There is, for instance, the idea of people living on the fringes of society, whether because they are labeled as “artists” or because they indulge in “marginal” activities like Jean-Pierre Léaud or Juliet Berto, or because they really are marginal, like the secret society of the Thirteen. And the other old standby element is the secret message. As we used it, it’s Jules Verne rather than Edgar Allan Poe. What I wanted was a message that could be subjected to successive readings, as in Captain Grant’s Children [1867–68, Verne]. It’s all very reminiscent and not very serious, but at the same time the mainspring of the film, the desire to make it, lay in the amusement of writing these messages. It’s one of the few things I did in the film. I didn’t 99

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write the dialogue, but I did take great pleasure in writing these messages. NC: They are motor elements in the film, not just accessories. Rivette: Yes, but they’re decentralized motors that you don’t see. NC: Rather like your own position? Rivette: Exactly. NC: What is the film about, ultimately? Rivette: In fact, it’s about too much rather than too little. To begin with, play in all senses of the word was the only idea: the playing by the actors, the play between the characters, play in the sense that children play, and also play in the sense that there is play between the parties at an assembly. This was the basic principle, implying a relative interdependence between the elements, and a relative distance maintained by the actors between themselves and the characters they were playing. I discussed this from the start with Michèle Moretti, with Bulle, with Lonsdale, in order to counteract the spuriously “lived” aspect of L’Amour fou: each actor had to play an extremely fictional character and theoretically maintain a considerable distance between himself and that character. In the event, there really was “play” between the actors and the characters they were playing, and at the same time they revealed a hundred times more things about themselves than if they had been identifying with these fictional characters or were supposed to be playing their own “characters.” NC: Actors, one constantly feels, could never speak a written text in this way. Rivette: One great difference between the thirteen- and four-hour versions is that in the thirteen-hour version, and not the other, we deliberately retained a number of fluffs here and there in the final cut, because there were things among these fluffs that we liked, that we found moving, that preserved the slightly perilous aspect of the project, the feel of walking on a tightrope. We left in some passages where the actors repeat themselves or get muddled, which we could have cut out. It wouldn’t always have been easy, but we could have: you always can. Similarly with the very long “reportage” sequences 100

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on Lonsdale’s group: either you kept them integrally or you cut them out entirely. There are several I didn’t include at all, but those we did put in are there in their entirety. NC: In a film of normal length, the fluffs would have looked like nulls in any case, but the film establishes other criteria for judgment. If the generative element in the thirteen-hour version is the duration itself, what is it in the four-hour version? This shorter version appears, by contrast, to be very much edited in the classical sense of the term. Rivette: I wanted, without knowing how, to make a film quite different from the other. I asked Denise de Casabianca first of all to spend a fortnight alone with the twelve-hour-and-forty-minute film, getting to know it a little, because there was no other material. Having done that, she made a first rough cut. And it was immediately apparent that you were still held by the fictional center, which proved to be much tighter, much more compelling than I’d thought, and that there weren’t umpteen solutions—there were only two. Either we could do something extremely arbitrary, with flagrant ruptures in time, breaking up the chronology, a sort of Robbe-Grillet montage. Or we could play the game of a seeming narration, which was after all the game played by the material, thus keeping a seeming chronology, no matter how patchy and wobbly it might sometimes be. At which point the whole center of the film dug its heels in completely; and this four-and-a-quarter hour version was edited from the center outwards. We couldn’t really touch this center, because there is a moment, one single shot even, in which almost all the fictions intersect, as if all these lines had to pass through a ring. This shot we put squarely in the middle: it comes just before the intermission. Having done so, we then had to keep everything relating directly to this shot before and after. After that, of course, we were a little more at liberty for the two ends: the first and last hours. The interesting thing with the four-hour-and-fifteen-minute version was to use this material that incorporated a good deal of improvisation in as precise, as tight and as formal, a manner as possible. To try to find as many formal principles as possible, visible or invisible, for getting from one shot to the next. Some are very obvious, others happened by chance and we noticed only afterwards. NC: How should one envisage the spectator relationship in Out 1? And what is your opinion concerning what you were saying about the impossibility or “distanciation” in the cinema, with reference to Out 101

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1, and the very strong identification factor that operated—partly in a negative way—in L’Amour fou? Rivette: The relationship to the thirteen-hour film is a relationship totally falsified at the outset by the fact of the performance. Even in L’Amour fou this came into play for the spectator to a certain extent— the idea of going into an auditorium and getting out four-and-a-quarter hours later—but at least it kept within reasonable limits, it was still feasible, only a little longer than Gone with the Wind [1939, Victor Fleming], though without the bonus of the Civil War. Whereas twelve hours and forty minutes . . . it may not be the first time a film has run for so long, but at any rate the only equivalent in my opinion—and even then it isn’t so long—is when Henri Langlois shows a Feuillade serial at the Cinémathèque Française, starting at six in the evening and going on till one in the morning, with three little breaks. It is obvious that the first two hours of Out 1, for example, are bearable only because one knows one has embarked on something that is going to last for twelve hours and forty minutes. We impose three-quarters of an hour of hysteria from Lonsdale’s group on people, something that can be done only under these conditions. Ideally, I still hope the film can be shown. It wasn’t in any way intended to be a difficult film, except perhaps in its length and the fact that there are moments one can call longueurs. Otherwise—perhaps it’s hypocritical, but it’s a hypocrisy I cling to—everything that might loom as an obstacle or flaunt its difference is rejected. Perhaps this is also a weak point, since these are often the things that certain spectators latch on to. In theory I can very well imagine the film being shown in cinemas; but precisely because it is so long, there wouldn’t be any point except in suitable cinemas where people can be not too uncomfortably seated, where they can breathe, and that are big enough to house a sizeable audience. The film is 16mm, but it was made with the big screen in mind: it has a meaning on the big screen that it wouldn’t have on the small screen. Even visually it is composed of elements implying a massive image—a monumentality is putting the matter too grandly but that’s it nevertheless. This struck me at each of the screenings we had for television with five or six people present. Even if people liked it, I felt that the relationship to the film was wrong, because it is first and foremost theater. It is performances up there on the screen, mise-en-scène in the theatrical sense of staging rather than in the film sense. NC: How could one define the particular narrative form that interests 102

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you here? Or to put it more generally: how does this film contribute along with other films (which ones, in your opinion?) to the attempt, fairly widespread in spite of everything even though still very limited, to bring about a renewal of fiction, and indeed of the cinema as a whole? Rivette: What I’d like is to discover a cinema where the narrative element doesn’t necessarily play the driving role. I don’t say it would be completely eliminated, I think that’s impossible: if you throw narrative out the door, it comes back through the window. What I mean is that in the cinema I have in mind it wouldn’t be in the driving seat, and the principal priorities on the screen would be purely spectacular ones, in the strict sense of the word. That’s why, when I say I’d like this film to be shown on a big screen with an audience of 500 people, it isn’t at all because the film tells a story where spectators are caught up by a plot, as in a Hitchcock film; my motive is purely plastic, allied to a certain status of the image and the sound. But let’s talk in general about the cinema I’m after, of which there are better examples around at the moment: examples of films that impose themselves on the spectator through a sort of domination of visual and sound “events,” and which require the screen, a big screen, to be effective. In the final analysis, all the films that have impressed me recently are films in which, in very different ways, this fact of a narrative spectacle comes into play: Federico Fellini, Miklós Jancsó, Werner Schroeter’s Salome [1971]. And for me it’s very important even in films where this “spectacular” quality seems less obvious, as in Othon [Les yeux ne veulent pas en tout temps se fermer, ou Peutêtre qu’un jour Rome se permettra de choisir à son tour (Eyes don’t want to stay shut all the time, or Perhaps one day Rome will let herself choose at her turn); 1970, Jean-Marie Straub], or Le moindre geste [The Slightest Gesture; 1971, Jean-Pierre Daniel & Fernand Deligny], or Jacques Tati’s films, of course. These are films that impose themselves visually through their monumentality. I’m using the word monumental simply because I can’t think of another word offhand. What I mean is that there is a weight to what is on the screen, and which is present on screen as a statue might be, or a building or a huge beast. And this weight is perhaps what Roland Barthes would call the weight of the signifier, though I wouldn’t go to the stake on that. These are films that tend towards the ritual, towards the ceremonial, the oratorio, the theatrical, the magical—not in the mystical so much as the more devotional sense of the word, as in the celebration of Mass. Technique and Rite [La tecnica e il rito,1972], as Jancsó has 103

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it, is a good definition. These words should be explored to try to see what lies behind them: rite or ceremony or monument. One would probably first find what Barthes and Jean Ricardou have been pointing out for years: in films, as in texts and in theatrical performances, the accent should be placed on the elements in which the spectacle itself (or the fiction) is represented. But this isn’t enough to account for the element of violence, of affirmation without evidence, of erotic power, which I’m trying to express when I talk of monumentality and when I think back on these few films. NC: The spectator at Out 1 finds himself faced by a vast, very unusual “machinery.” What does this machinery set in motion? Rivette: A film is always presented in a closed form: a certain number of reels that are screened in a certain order, a beginning, an end. Within this, all these phenomena can occur of circulating meanings, functions and forms; moreover, these phenomena can be incomplete, not finally determined once and for all. This isn’t simply a matter of tinkering, of something mechanical constructed from the outside, but rather—to refer back to what I was saying at the beginning—of something that has been “generated” that seems to entail biological factors. It isn’t a matter of making a film or a work that exhausts its coherence, that closes in on itself; it must continue to function, and to create new meanings, directions, and feelings. Here one comes back to the Barthes definition. I refer to Roland Barthes a good deal, because I find that he speaks more lucidly than anyone else at the present time about this kind of problem . . . and he says that there is a text from the moment one can say: things are circulating. To me it is evident that this potential in the cinema is allied to the semblance of monumentality we were just talking about. What I mean is that on the screen the film presents a certain number of events, objects, characters in quotes, which are closed in on themselves, turned inward, exactly as a statue can be, presenting themselves without immediately stating an identity, and which simultaneously establish comings-and-goings, echoes, among one another. NC: Is there a connection between these elements and the fact that these films lack a central character, a protagonist? Rivette: Yes, it is almost always groups that are involved, and this is a further link to the idea of ritual, of ceremony. If, at a pinch, there is 104

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an individual at the ceremony, it can only be the priest, someone who is never anything but the delegate, the representative of some community. But I don’t think this tendency in the cinema entirely obviates the possibility of a central protagonist. For example, I put Straub’s Othon in the same category (yet it’s a play that plays more than other Corneille dramas on the impossibility of saying who is “the” hero; there is no one interlocutor, one purveyor of truth in Othon, which isn’t Le Cid [1636, Pierre Corneille] or Polyeucte [1643, Corneille]— the role of hero circulates freely). Another example I include in the cinema of monumentality is Le moindre geste, by Deligny and Daniel. On screen there is a protagonist who is present for nine-tenths of the film, but this protagonist is someone with whom identification is strictly precluded, because he is by clinical definition a mental defective, and he is there on the screen purely as a physical presence, or on the soundtrack purely as an utterance detached from the physical presence—disconnected, first of all, because these are fragments of tapes recorded independently of the visuals (and therefore not synchronous), but also because this utterance is itself aberrant in the literal sense of the word. Another film I’d place in the same category, perhaps mistakenly, is Tati’s Traffic [Trafic, 1971]. Now there is a protagonist in Traffic, and it’s Hulot; but at the same time it’s quite obvious that the process which had already started in Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday [Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot, 1953] is accentuated here, whereby Hulot no longer runs the conveyor belt; instead, he is swept along by the fiction in almost precisely the same way as Fellini is swept along by Roma [1972]. You see Hulot wandering by from time to time in the background of his film, just as Fellini passes by suddenly, wandering around in his Roma (1972). Well, is one thing a consequence of the other? I have no idea. And one of the things I’m interested in now is to remake a film that has a strong, totally present central character— therefore one who is proposed as a vehicle, as operating the conveyor belt—and see what this contradiction would do to him. I think it might be a pity, within a cinema of “signification”—to employ this neologism—to abandon completely something that was so exciting in that traditional cinema: this play with the protagonist, the so-called central character, the Hitchcockian-Langian play on the phony central consciousness and all that this allows. But perhaps I am speaking here of incompatibilities: it remains to be seen. Another common factor in all these films—to my mind the only ones of any importance for several years—is the categorical refusal in practically all of them to use written dialogue. A refusal that doesn’t 105

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always happen in the same way, however, and doesn’t produce the same results. Broadly speaking, what I see in common is their refusal to write a text themselves that the actors will then interpret, the refusal to have the actors become interpreters of dialogue written beforehand, dialogue that one has either written oneself or at any rate is responsible for. As to how to proceed from here, there are different solutions. I won’t say that such films are all equivalent, as some are undoubtedly more powerful than others. These consist either of asking the actors to find their own words, or of giving the actors pre-existing texts for which one isn’t oneself responsible: the author of the text is antecedent, the author of the text is challenged in a sense, because either it’s Corneille (though as “matter”) in the case of Straub, or, in the technique that Godard has used more and more systematically, the author of the text is multiple, this being what has been called the technique of quotations. But these aren’t quotations, because the important point in the sequence of Jean-Luc’s films came when he began removing the quotation marks and the names of the authors, thus not wanting to be the author of his scripts and wanting these texts coming from all over the place to lose their authorship. This method has, I think, been taken up again in part by Jancsó, in so far as Jancsó uses songs a good deal—pre-existing material, of course—and I think that in the moments with dialogue, or so I felt while watching Red Psalm [Még kér a nép, 1972], he draws extensively and very systematically on real militant texts, historical or contemporary. And I believe that Gyula Hernádi’s writing job with Jancsó is increasingly becoming a matter of creating collages, on the same principle as Godard though perhaps not quite so extreme. Other solutions to this rejection of scripted dialogue: it can be Tati, unintelligible dialogue where all one hears is snatches of speech; it can be the Taviani Brothers [Paolo and Vittorio]; it can be Jean-Pierre Daniel, who takes previously recorded tapes, which, moreover, carry speech having no fixed reference in the fiction and which is completely erratic as speech. The only great exception I can see is Ingmar Bergman. All the same, I feel very inclined to put The Rite [Riten, 1969] with the cinema of monumentality and signification, and nothing could be more scripted than that. NC: Or even over-written, like Alain Resnais. Rivette: Resnais, actually, is someone who has always worked with written texts, very highly written even, but with the purpose of not writing them himself. For Resnais, as for Godard, there is purpose in 106

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using someone else’s text, a text of which he isn’t the author, the signatory. One could perhaps salvage Bergman simply as a sort of monster, a perfect schizo. Bergman is dual, like Jekyll/Hyde. There is a Bergman who writes a script, then a Bergman who films the script, and they aren’t the same. In The Rite, the words carried by the images are not filmed for their meaning but rather for their materiality, as events and not as meanings. The same is true of the “strong beat” moments in Marguerite Duras’s films. Yes, I think that’s the basis for everything: to treat the text as material that plays a role exactly similar to the other materials in the film—the actors’ faces, their gestures, the photographic texture. NC: But can the signified carried by this text-material be a matter of indifference? Rivette: I think one can say of the signified what we were saying earlier about narrative: it’s something that inevitably reappears anyway. Knowing it will reappear, one might as well try to have it circulate as much as possible, to use Barthes’s phrase. I think what all these filmmakers are trying to do is to have the signifieds that are present be caught up and carried in the general movement of the signifiers. This seems to me glaringly obvious in Jancsó’s films. I know too little about the Hungarian context of these films to be able to tell whether some things may not well have a more precise function there than here, with respect to the situation in Hungary. All the same, I think that Jancsó’s prime ambition is not to play catand-mouse with the State system as a whole: it seems to me a very partial view to see them as films playing on ambiguity, playing on the questioning of certain political values, inasmuch as he in fact spends his time playing on the rearrangement of labels. What struck me about both Sirocco [a.k.a. Winter Wind; 1969, Miklós Jancsó] and Technique and Rite, insofar as objectively they are perhaps the least “successful” though not the least fascinating of his recent films, is their element of juvenile play. These are ten-year-old children playing at spies or at war just like cops and robbers (or like Le petit soldat [The Little Soldier, 1963]: Godard again). In all these Jancsó films it is really recreation time: the children are in the playground during break between classes, dividing up into groups, forming into rings; it’s the political game to the letter: politics as a game, a game as politics, with the whole arsenal of revolutionary signifieds congealed, put back into circulation. And when I say juvenile, it isn’t meant pejoratively in any way; this may be a partial view of Jancsó’s films, but it’s more and 107

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more how I see them. Recreation time, but in the widest sense of the word; as Jean Cocteau said, “When a child leaves the classroom, we say it is for re-creation.” I think this is the value of Jancsó’s films: within a revolutionary state, he plays the role of re-creator. NC: Aren’t we coming back to the problem of pleasure in the cinema? Rivette: Yes, but pleasure has never been absent. NC: Hasn’t there been a tendency to minimize its importance on pseudo-scientific grounds? Now the idea that pleasure is an important factor is being rediscovered. Rivette: But this idea of a game, of pleasure, is also found in Renoir, it’s found in Rouch, it’s found in Godard. NC: Isn’t it to be found in Bertolt Brecht, too, but oriented towards the spectator? And during the period of the formation of the Berliner Ensemble, particularly. Rivette: Yes, the whole last part of Brecht’s Short Organum [1949] is concerned with this. Anyhow, pleasure is contrary to what I call journalistic films—in the derogatory sense of the term—whose only merit is to provide information that is already out of date, and very often they don’t even do that. One must be careful, though: the inflated notions about pleasure and entertainment over recent years have been very confused, because this can very quickly lead to the attitude that anything goes. All it takes is to smoke a little, acquire the right euphoric state, and one can get pleasure out of looking at or listening to absolutely anything. Some films seem to me to be made purely with a view to narcissistic pleasure, totally without productivity: if one doesn’t bring along one’s own euphoria, the films themselves produce nothing. So I am inclined to continue defending films that are themselves the producers of pleasure. Then again this pleasure or—why not?—this Barthean ecstasy of the spectator isn’t necessarily connected with euphoria; it can tend more in the direction of . . . let’s not say work—which is a large word that has been much abused (and one mustn’t confuse the work of the spectator or of the signifier with other forms of work)—but this pleasure in fact passes through certain stages, certain periods, which can equally well be attentiveness, perplexity, irritation, or even boredom. 108

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For me, the most powerful pleasure in cinema—and this is something that interests me more and more, and I don’t know if it can be related to this cinema of signification, of monumentality, that we were talking about—is connected with terror and anguish. For some years now I have been re-fascinated by horror films. And in Out 1 this was something I hadn’t planned at all at the outset. Initially we thought it was going to be very jolly, and we started out with the actors by criticizing L’Amour fou for its element of anguish, of psychodrama— psychosis, even—saying, well, it won’t be like that this time but just a jolly game with serial-type fiction; but very soon an element of anguish crept into the film (rather than the actual shooting). So even in a film where anguish hadn’t been planned, it reappeared, to such an extent that my editors said to me: “Now you should really make a horror film.” But perhaps they were hoping that might be fun to edit . . .

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Carlos Clarens & Edgardo Cozarinsky, “Jacques Rivette” From Sight & Sound, 43.4 [Autumn 1974]: 195–198.

Sight & Sound: With your three most recent films—L’Amour fou, Out 1, and Céline et Julie vont en bateau—one feels that you are becoming progressively more and more interested in the actors. Jacques Rivette: When I began making films my point of view was that of a cinephile, so my ideas about what I wanted to do were abstract. Then, after the experience of my first two films, I realized I had taken the wrong direction with regard to the methods of shooting. The cinema of mise-en-scène, where everything is carefully pre-planned and where you try to ensure that what is seen on the screen corresponds as closely as possible to your original plan, was not a method in which I felt at ease or worked well. What bothered me from the outset, after I had finally managed to finish Paris nous appartient with all its tribulations, was what the characters said, the words they used. I had written the dialogue beforehand with my co-writer Jean Gruault (though I was 90% responsible), and then it was reworked and pruned during shooting, as the film otherwise would have run four-and-a-half hours. The actors sometimes changed a word here and there, as always happens in films, but basically the dialogue was what I had written— and I found it a source of intense embarrassment. So much so that when I began work on La Religieuse, which was a project that took quite a while to get off the ground, I determined this time to use what was basically a pre-existing text. S & S: La Religieuse is your only film adapted from a literary source— and a classic into the bargain. Rivette: What attracted us to the Diderot novel [posthumously published, 1792] was that this text is highly wrought and very theatrical. Denis Diderot wrote it two years after his two major plays, Le Père de famille [The Father of the Family, 1758] and Le Fils Naturel [The Natural Son, 1757], and it’s completely bound up with those plays. In its sensibility, its use of language, it reveals the same theatrical perspective. In his letters, Diderot speaks of scenes, views, images in connection with La Religieuse, all of which encouraged us to make the 110

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film. In Diderot’s mind it was something very theatrical, very visual, and in effect it is composed of big scenes. We only added some five little scenes to serve as transitions; our main task was pruning, because if we had retained all the material in the novel, the film would have run five hours. Actually, our first adaptation of La Religieuse would have made a three-hour film. There were several successive stages. Jean Gruault had been an actor, though without any real vocation for it. He wanted to write plays, and during the editing of Paris nous appartient he brought me the first draft of a stage adaptation of La Religieuse. “La Religieuse is really a play,” he told me. And, “while I was writing the play, I was thinking it would be even better as a film.” We staged a production at the Studio des Champs-Élysées, with Anna Karina. It wasn’t so much a play as a sort of compromise, a bastard enterprise based on the script that the two of us had written in the meantime. S & S: In retrospect, La Religieuse looks like a transitional work. You are still using post-synchronization in it, for instance. Rivette: Direct sound was impossible for that film. I’m very fond of accents, but with Francisco Rabal you couldn’t understand a word. La ReIigieuse again dissatisfied me when I’d finished it. The project had been so long in preparation that even during shooting, when we finally got that far, I found myself irritated as well as disillusioned by the whole thing. The text had been so written and re-written and revised, and I knew it so thoroughly by heart, that I realized I was no longer really listening to the actors. Changing anything during shooting was out of the question: we had done all the condensing possible during the process of adaptation, and the text had become the Bible! And there were material problems, because this was a pseudo-expensive film, a pseudo-big production: once the actors and technicians had been taken care of, there wasn’t very much money left to make the picture. Since I found myself inattentive to the production and not listening to the actors, I realized this was not a method of filming that interested me. After La Religieuse, I made a program for the television series Cinéastes de Notre Temps. Jean Renoir, le patron was very simply shot, because at the time Renoir was already beginning to have difficulty in getting about. After two or three days of shooting, I realized that the best thing to do was to sit down facing him and ask questions, and then show films. So the filming was super-simple and the fifteenday schedule was one long conversation—not just the part we filmed, 111

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but our talks in between times during the days we spent in Provence, in the village where his father is buried, and in the place where he filmed La Règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game, 1939]. Afterwards came three months of editing with Jean Eustache, during which time we looked at all the material again and at quite a few films, trying to find an approach that would be—I’m not talking about results but the method—roughly speaking Renoir’s own or Jean Rouch’s. That was when I began to want to try the experiment of L’Amour fou. The film began as a sort of gamble by Georges de Beauregard. He needed to make films to keep his production company going, and one day he asked if I had anything in mind that wouldn’t cost too much. I suggested L’Amour fou, and there was no argument because it was something that could be shot in five weeks with a small cast and a minimum crew. Afterwards, he wasn’t too pleased to be presented with a film two or three times the length he wanted. So we didn’t do him much good, but I was delighted to have been able to make it. S & S: From L’Amour fou onwards, the script seems to be just a formality for you, something that can be shown to a producer or to the Centre du Cinéma. Rivette: Not only for me; a lot of directors are moving in the same direction. This has become more evident over the last ten years or so, because there are now cameras enabling you to do things that were possible in the silent days but were practically impossible, unless you had the energy of a Renoir, during the first thirty years of the sound film. There is a persistent idea of a cinema partitioned off in tiers: first you look for a subject, then you write as detailed a script as possible, on the basis of which you find someone to put up the money, for which purpose you pencil in the names of certain actors opposite fully defined characters. Once you have got all the elements together, often compromising some of your original ideas in the process, comes another stage: the actual shooting. You shoot little bits here and there, as meticulously as possible, and then you stick them together, and you’re pleased if you end up with something that corresponds to what was described more or less in your 200 typewritten pages. Personally, I find all this a dreadful bore. I don’t say that you can’t make great films like this: Alain Resnais does and he seems perfectly at ease within this formula. But the system stifles me; in my idea of cinema, all the stages should be totally interacting. I want to return, though with quite different methods, aims, and end-products, to the old Dziga Vertov idea: that the montage should 112

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be conceived with the project and not merely with the exposed film. This may sound like a conceit, but you could say that the script is written in the montage, and that the montage is established before shooting. I have been going in this direction for three films now, in L’Amour fou more than in Céline et Julie vont en bateau, and in Out 1 most of all. I hate to have the feeling, either during the shooting or the editing, that everything is fixed and nothing can be changed. I reject the word “script” entirely—at any rate in the usual sense. I prefer the old usage—usually scenario—which it had in the commedia dell’arte, meaning an outline or scheme: it implies a dynamism, a number of ideas and principles from which one can set out to find the best possible approach to the filming. I now prefer my shooting schedules to be as short as possible, and the editing to last as long as possible. S & S: How did you happen on a structure so rigorous and yet so free as that of Out 1? Rivette: Originally the idea was to do four parallel feuilleton stories, linked at the beginning of each episode by still shots connecting with the other episodes, rather like the old serials. We later abandoned this idea, but in the four-hour version we made use of black-and-white stills, either as a recall or an ellipse, a connection or a pause; in some cases the stills match with moments already seen, in others with scenes to come, occasionally with sequences that have been removed from this version entirely. In the thirteen-hour version, Jean-Pierre Léaud received his first message after four hours; in the four-hour version, he receives it after fifteen or twenty minutes. In the thirteen-hour version the plot got under way after four hours of documentary, both true and false, on the two theatrical groups: it was something of a documentary about the modern experimental theater, a little Peter Brookish or Living Theatre-like. And there were bits about Juliet Berto and JeanPierre Léaud, who were the characters outside all this; you saw him distributing his envelopes, and her doing her bit of hustling. Then came the idea of connecting the four parallel stories. It was at this point that Juliet and Jean-Pierre began to function as go-betweens for the audience, each in his own way, by trying to discover the significance of scenes or sequences of events that are as yet meaningless. S & S: The four-hour version is almost an abstract of the thirteen-hour one. There was, for instance, a second death—that of Juliet Berto. In the shorter version this is gone, allowing for the open but nonetheless 113

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disturbing ending, where one feels that Bulle Ogier is going towards her doom. Rivette: Out 1 really took shape only in the month before shooting began, although we had discussed it in rather a vague way for some months with the four actors (Michel Lonsdale, Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Michèle Moretti), and also rather more spasmodically with Léaud. We traced the path the film was to take a week before shooting began, because we needed some sort of outline to be able to plan the work and shoot the maximum footage in the minimum time. That was how we managed to shoot a thirteen-hour film in six weeks. Afterwards, for the first cut, we joined the material more or less as a first assembly; basically the thirteen hours comprise a montage, deliberate rather loose, largely retaining the improvisational aspect, sometimes even including hesitations and repetitions—a montage that hardly survives at all in the four-hour version. In the thirteen-hour version there were very long sequences of pure reportage about the two groups of actors, and also moments of “letting go,” particularly where the camera was concerned: ten-minute takes of the actors left entirely to themselves and cracking up rather spectacularly. It became something of a psychodrama. Of course the thirteen-hour version was edited to some extent, but always with the attempt to retain this “first assembly” feeling. The main impulse behind Out 1 was provided by a screening of the similar kind of montage Jean Rouch had made for his film Petit à Petit [Little by Little, 1970]. It ran for eight hours and was totally different from the four-hour version Rouch made, theoretically for television, and the ninety-minute version shown in cinemas. I was so impressed by the original that I refused to see the shorter versions. Out of that—with disastrous consequences, as you know—came the thirteen-hour version of Out 1. We still don’t know whether there will ever be enough money to make a print, although the negative must be in pretty good shape because it wasn’t tampered with too much. S & S: Why did you bring Balzac and Histoire des Treize [The Thirteen, 1833–39] into the film? Rivette: I hadn’t even read Histoire du Treize at the time, but I thought it was something everybody would know, or that people would at least get the reference. Actually there is nothing sinister about the conspiracy; it’s really more of a utopian plot, the key to which is revealed by only one or two people: by Lonsdale, in the long scene by 114

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the river with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and to a certain extent by Françoise Fabian and Jean Bouise in their very long scene. S & S: Léaud conjures these phantoms, rather as in Céline et Julie vont en bateau: through the incantation of letters, of words that he dissects, in analyzing the texts of the messages. Rivette: Léaud is an actor who goes all the way once you have suggested a direction to take. It was he who launched out down this track, somewhere between Honoré de Balzac and Lewis Carroll. Bulle Ogier was busy with another film and just turned up to shoot her scenes. Lonsdale, on the other hand, was in attendance throughout and was interested in what was happening to the other characters when his own wasn’t involved, so he had the key to the whole thing. But perhaps it was also because he is a director at heart, even though he hasn’t directed anything yet. S & S: The disparity between a rigorous overall structure and improvisation in detail, between documentary and vast conspiracy, rather suggests an unexpected reconciliation of Fritz Lang with Roberto Rossellini. Rivette: They are both filmmakers I admire. In point of fact I think that Phénix, the script I wrote with Eduardo de Gregorio after Out 1 and haven’t been able to film yet, is an attempt to do something halfway between F. W. Murnau and Renoir. Actually, Rossellini had a hand in the genesis of Paris nous appartient. Around 1955–56 he was in Paris and wanted to produce a series of films by young directors. He asked some of us from the Cahiers du Cinéma group to put up projects. I remember there was Jean-Luc Godard, who didn’t do anything at all; François Truffaut, who presented a rough draft of what was to become Les Quatre cents coups [The 400 Blows, 1959]; Claude Chabrol, who was already working on the script for Le Beau Serge [Handsome Serge, 1958], which he shot in 1957; and myself, with a theme somewhat derivative of The Blackboard Jungle [1955, Richard Brooks], about racism and students of various nationalities within the setting of the Cité Universitaire. It was an extremely phony script, because I projected a purely external view of the Cité, never having lived there myself, and also because I was rather under the influence of a particular area of American cinema, including directors like Richard Brooks. Rossellini tore it to pieces pitilessly but quite justifiably, and I set to work with Jean Gruault on another script that 115

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luckily wasn’t filmed, either, but out of which, more or less, came Paris nous appartient, which was also concerned with students and other outsiders. After that Rossellini left for India, and nothing came of these projects; but Paris nous appartient may be said to derive from the experience, if only as a reaction. S & S: In Out 1, as in Paris nous appartient, there is a suggestion of obsession about characters who are marginal to the action: Betty Schneider in Paris nous appartient, Léaud and Berto in Out 1. In both cases the setting is Paris, and both films end with an escape to nature, a nature by no means reassuring, with isolated house and water prominently featured—the Seine in Paris nous appartient, the sea in Out 1. Rivette: When we arrived at the house on the beach towards the end of shooting on Out 1, we had the feeling of stepping into a horror film complete with locked room, missing key, and all the rest. Suzanne Schiffman, Michel Lonsdale, and I arrived the evening before shooting was due to begin to consider the possibilities, and I found myself confronted with this house that was so much more interesting than I had expected. It was there, too, that we found the room with two mirrors opposite each other, which Bulle enters near the end. We used these mirrors in the first place because they were there; but also because by then we had realized the considerable role played by mirrors in the material we had shot. We hadn’t thought about this before starting: it was one of those things that happen as you go along. Actually, the element of obsession in Paris nous appartient only became apparent once the film had been edited. The ironic thing is that Out 1, which is about conspiracy and obsession, was shot in an atmosphere of complete relaxation, whereas Céline et Julie vont en bateau, a much sunnier and more amusing film, was beset by tensions and was very hard going—and not only because it was shot on a four-week schedule, with twenty working days. S & S: How did you envisage the montage of Out 1? Rivette: The first cut, resulting in the thirteen-hour version, was done with Nicole Lubtchansky. Afterwards I felt I was no longer seeing what I was watching on the editing table, and I called in Denise de Casabianca, who shut herself up alone for a fortnight with the thirteen hours to get to know them. After that I began work with her on shaping the shorter version, which actually runs four hours and twenty minutes. Of course we didn’t try to make a résumé of the thirteen 116

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hours, but to find material there for another film with its own rhythm and its own inner design. S & S: While watching Céline et Julie vont en bateau, we were also thinking of comédie policière and the work of the Argentinian theater group TSE. Rivette: Yes, of course. There was a first stage, mostly involving Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier—Eduardo de Gregorio too, but much less so—in which we tried to define the characters, then the whole beginning of the film, the way they meet each other. After that came a second stage in which we tried to find the shape the action would take. Quite early on I felt I wanted to have a film-within-the-film. It’s something I have often wanted to do, and I have one in Phénix, too. Even before I knew what the second film would be about, I planned to use Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier, so as to have a second couple not only acting this story but relating to the other pair. And there we got stuck for quite a time. At that point Eduardo began working more closely with us, innumerable ideas were thrown around, and gradually we narrowed it down to the Henry James novel The Other House [1896], which Eduardo knew and whose basic theme we used. I still haven’t read it; it hasn’t been translated into French. But we also borrowed from other James stories, in particular an early short story called “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” [1868]. Some lines in the film are lifted direct from this story, notably in Bulle Ogier’s speech about the trunk and the clothes kept stored in it during her first scene with Barbet Schroeder. Only four lines, but it amused Bulle and she wanted to say them. S & S: During the credits for the film, “Phantom Ladies over Paris” appears immediately after “Céline et Julie vont en bateau,” one in black on white, the other white on black, exactly like the names of the two “pairs” of actresses. Does this imply that “Phantom Ladies over Paris” is the negative of the “positive” main title, or is it simply the name of the film-within-the-film? Rivette: When we discussed how the second film should be integrated with the first, we considered various possibilities. At one stage the idea was to go much further in fragmenting the second film, particularly in dispersing the various elements, letting the montage range freely, thus permitting a variety of different meanings. At this point, naturally, we thought of comédie policière and about a writer who has been much 117

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in view since L’Année dernière à Marienbad [Last Year at Marienbad; 1961, Alain Resnais], and even before: Adolfo Bioy Casares and his novel The Invention of Morel [1940]. Of course we knew all this existed—Marienbad and the TSE and Morel—but we were trying to find a motif for ourselves that would be both similar to theirs and at the same time different; and we finally hit on the motif of the candy. After that everything progressed very rapidly. The candy-making— with due allowances—played the role taken by Histoire des treize in Out 1. We suddenly found the gimmick that enabled us to link all the elements—to provide on the one hand a mechanism for pulling the film together, and on the other something to hold the spectator’s attention throughout. For the beginning of the film, particularly everything to do with Montmartre in the first quarter of an hour, we had thought of presenting a sort of illusory Paris, something like the city you saw in American films of the fifties such as An American in Paris [1951, Vincente Minnelli]. But we would have needed more time—not more money, just time to look around while shooting—so it remained more an idea than an actuality in what we were able to shoot. We still had no final title. Someone said: “If it was an American film, it would have been called Phantom Ladies over Paris”; it became a sort of joke with us. But when the editing was finished, I wanted it to appear on the credits too. The way it is done makes the title look as though it were the title of the film-within-the-film. But if the film is shown in America, I’d like them to use the title Céline et Julie vont en bateau, although it’s difficult to translate literally. Céline and Julie Take a Trip suggests something to do with LSD. Take a Boat might be better, although this misses the significance in French of vont en bateau. Monter en bateau is to tell someone a rather involved story and have them believe you; aller en bateau is to be caught up in a story you’re being told—which is relevant because Céline and Julie tell each other stories and believe these stories. They embark on their own fiction: hence the shot of the boat at the end. S & S: How did you decide which actress should play which role? Rivette: We were a little undecided at first. We felt they could swap roles if they liked, but actually it was better that they should play the pairs they did. But that’s why I wanted to keep for the end the rather facile effect Hitchcock has used many times, notably in Strangers on a Train [1951, Alfred Hitchcock], which suggests they could have played the other two pairs. It’s a conventional effect to end what is 118

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after all a conventional film. Julie is a wholly sensible character. In fact the film is something that happens to Julie: she’s a character with her own inner psychology, possessing a past, a present, and even a future, as is suggested by implication in her meeting with Gilou, her girlhood fiancé; everything that happens to her is linked to her own imagination. Céline, on the other hand, is purely exterior, a behaviorist character, who is really seen from Julie’s point of view. We are with Julie, receiving flashes about Céline; there are some when Julie isn’t present, but they are all flashes of comedy, of exhibition—the scene with Gilou, the conversation with her friends from the theater. S & S: Where everything is fantasy with Céline, it is memory with Julie. For instance, the photograph of food in the trunk that heralds the appearance of the mysterious house. This was the failure of the 1961 film version of The Turn of the Screw [The Innocents; 1961, Jack Clayton], where Deborah Kerr was given a sort of escape-hatch or safety valve, in that it is after finding a photograph of Quint and Miss Jessel that she begins to “see” them. Rivette: All I remember about The Innocents is how silly I found it, psychologizing everything to death, turning the governess so blatantly into a neurotic. Of course you can read James that way, but who is to say that ghosts don’t exist? The Nightcomers [1971, Michael Winner], although extremely badly made, had a much more subtle theme. Nevertheless, I think that Henry James, like Bioy Casares, is unfilmable. They are authors who can be filmed figuratively or diagonally, taking up their themes, but never literally. A few days ago I saw the Italian adaptation of The Invention of Morel [L’invenzione di Morel; 1974, Emideo Greco], an unimaginably obvious, drearily literal illustration of the book. It’s incredible how anyone could make such a dull film out of that marvelous novel, where the things that work in the book as words on the page simply won’t transfer to the screen, even if, as the director claims, he tried to transpose from first-person narrative to third. It simply doesn’t work at all. The adaptation should have been much more ruthless, even a betrayal in the sense that Hitchcock betrayed Boileau-Narcejac [Pierre Boileau & Pierre Ayraud] for Vertigo [1958]—a film I thought about while watching The Invention of Morel, especially when the hero began to spy on his wife. Everything should have been reconstructed from there; above all, the mechanism shouldn’t have been revealed. S & S: Céline et Julie vont en bateau suggests another Bioy Casares 119

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fiction even more than The Invention of Morel: the novella El Perjurio de la Nieve [The Snow’s Perjury, 1944], in which the hero comes to an isolated house where the same actions and the same words are repeated day after day to arrest time, and it is his presence that breaks the spell. [El Perjurio de la Nieve was the basis for Leopoldo Torre Nilsson’s first feature: El Crimen de Oribe (The Crime of Oribe, 1950.)] Rivette: I haven’t read much of Bioy Casares. Contrary to what people think, I’m not particularly well read. But Eduardo knew that story and told me a bit about it while we were working. With this type of fiction—semi Anglo-Saxon, semi Argentinian—there are only two things you can do. You can borrow the mechanism to do something different, or you can take a kernel from the plot and start rebuilding from there, jettisoning the entire original mechanism. I was struck by this while watching that 1974 Italian film the other evening: the folly of trying to make a literal transposition of this sort of fiction. When Paris nous appartient came out, several people found comparisons with Jorge Luis Borges. Admittedly you see a book by Borges on the heroine’s table in the opening shot. But this was simply because Suzanne Schiffman, who was the assistant on the film, happened to be reading it. We needed a book on the table, we saw the title Enquêtes [Investigations; a.k.a. Otras Inquisiciones (Other Inquisitions), 1937–52], and thought it suited the film quite well, so on to the table it went. Anyway, two or three critics referred to Borges, no doubt because of that shot. So I then began to read Borges, and of course found him magnificent. For quite a while I wanted to do something with “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” [1944]—this was well before Bernardo Bertolucci’s Spider’s Stratagem [1970], at a time when I couldn’t get La Religieuse off the ground and was trying to set up something else—and for six months I struggled to construct a script from this story. I tried to fit all the levels of the Borges story into my adaptation, until I got lost in my own labyrinth and finally said, “It’s unfilmable.” Later I saw Bertolucci’s film, which I like very much, and as I see it he too abandoned any attempt to film Borges. The Spider’s Stratagem tells another story, in the middle of which is told the “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero.” What I wanted above all was to retain the last sentence, which—as always with Borges—hints at the possibility of quite a different story.

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Jonathan Rosenbaum, Lauren Sedofsky, & Gilbert Adair, “Phantom Interviewers over Rivette” From Film Comment, 10.5 [Sept.–Oct. 1974]: 18–24.

Jonathan Rosenbaum: How was Céline et Julie vont en bateau prepared? What was the initial motive? Jacques Rivette: Simply the desire to make a film. To get out of the dumps that we all felt we were in, make a film for as little money as possible, and, we hoped, amuse people. Because the adventure of Out 1 didn’t turn out very well, from the point of view of public reception—there was no reception. It was almost impossible to show the film. Meanwhile, there had been another project [Phénix] that we couldn’t do because it was too expensive, which Juliet Berto was also involved in. When we realized about a year ago that we couldn’t bring this project to fruition, I spoke to Juliet one evening and we decided to do something else. Something that, by contrast, would be very cheap, as easy to make as possible, and fun to do. The first idea was to bring together Juliet and Dominique Labourier, who were already friends: I’d often seen them together. Rosenbaum: There seems to be a Hollywood aspect to Céline et Julie vont en bateau that’s quite different from your earlier films. Rivette: Yes, but Hollywood twenty years ago, certainly not today. We thought of it in reference to certain things, such as everything concerning the house. Contrary to what some critics at Cannes thought, our ambitions weren’t along the lines of parody, but rather a pastiche of an old-fashioned sort of cinema. For instance, the use of wide angles and deep focus. I thought during the shooting that the film was a little bit like an RKO movie of the ’50s, but in color—those films that more or less successfully imitated William Wyler’s. There was a fad between 1945 and 1950 to use mise-en-scène in depth, particularly at RKO—the Gregg Toland influence. In the film’s details, we thought of several American movies. At the end, for example the idea was to have a slapstick finish. In fact we were thinking a bit of Howard Hawks, although we did it quite differently from the way Hawks would have. One of Hawks’s favorite remarks is that when he’s found a subject, he first of all tries to make 121

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a comedy out of it; then, if he doesn’t succeed, it’s a serious film. So I decided that the end that we would be completely open; it could be very dramatic or whatever we wanted. I wanted to have a slapstick finale because it seemed more amusing. There are several scenes in the film that I had to edit a lot because they played on looks and reactions—I had to do much more editing than in L’Amour fou or Out 1. And from the moment you start editing, you’re obliged to think about what Alfred Hitchcock would have done in similar circumstances. But it’s only in three or four sequences that we frankly attempted to follow the principles of Hitchcockian editing. For the first fifteen minutes, we wanted to have the imaginary Montmartre of a studio, like the Montmartre of An American in Paris [1951, Vincente Minnelli]—which is why we used the second title, Phantom Ladies over Paris, which is also the title of the interior film, if you like. Rosenbaum: Were cartoons an influence? Rivette: Oh, yes. Definitely. But cartoons were important as an idea only at the beginning. If we’d had more time and money, we would have pursued this idea more systematically. Although it might not have changed anything. And the actresses had this in mind all the time, especially Juliet. Everything she does is always very visual, physical. Her movements are very staccato—the way she walks, the way she eats the candy. Gilbert Adair: And Feuillade? Rivette: Not at all. I don’t find the film very Feuillade-like. The scene with the girls in black tights was just a gag, lasting only thirty seconds. Adair: But the whole idea of fantasy in the open air . . . Rivette: Yes, but that’s because we were broke. It wasn’t at all a theoretical position. When we were looking for the house, we wanted it to be very homey; in fact, it’s a completely normal house, but we filmed it in such a way that it seems a little unnatural. And we were lucky to find the cats there. We didn’t bring them. All the cats are in the film simply because they were there. Rosenbaum: When was script-writing introduced into the project?

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Rivette: There never really was a written script. What is a scenario, after all? Is it a project for a film, or, on the contrary, something written and then shot? I don’t do that any longer—not since L’Amour fou—and I have no desire to do it again. We began by elimination: we didn’t want to make a serious film; we didn’t want to make a film about the theater because we’d done that too often; we didn’t want to make a film about current events or politics. But we did have the desire from the very beginning to do something close to comedy, and even frankly commedia dell’arte. And the first thing we did after two hours of conversation was to look for the characters’ names. And we stopped there that evening. So finding the names Céline and Julie was our starting point. The first stage consisted of conversations with Juliet and Dominique, when quite quickly the two girls organized their own characters. Then came the idea of their meeting, how the two connected. But then there was a stage—after the first half-hour of the film as it now stands—where we didn’t have a clear idea, where there were all kinds of possibilities. We hesitated for about two weeks with Eduardo de Gregorio, who had joined us by that time. We already felt that a second story was necessary within the first, for which I wanted Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier, in order to have another feminine pair, both in opposition and in relation to the first. But we didn’t know at all, either, what the second story would be or the mechanism between the two—that’s what took the longest to organize. We did it by approximation, groping. It was Eduardo who suggested the Henry James novel [The Other House (1896)] that we started from, which he hadn’t read himself but had heard about. In fact, none of us has read it because we couldn’t find it. Eduardo read only the dramatization, which is apparently very boring; and I don’t read English well enough. We didn’t want this to be a realistic investigation—we sought a less realistic principle. We thought of lots of things, like Adolfo Bioy Casares: The Invention of Morel [1940]. The day when we were really happy, when I felt we’d found the trigger, was the day we had the idea of the candy. Because that was what permitted us to bring everything together. Rosenbaum: When did you shoot the scenes in the house? Rivette: In the middle of the shooting. At first we thought of doing it later, and then for all sorts of practical reasons—because both girls had to talk about the house in their scenes together—we had to shoot it earlier. On the whole, the shooting was in three parts: first we shot 123

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more or less everything corresponding to the first part of the film—all the exteriors (the chase, etc.) and the “annexes” (like the cabaret); then the scenes in the house; then everything taking place in Julie’s apartment. Rosenbaum: Why did you decide to use a scriptwriter and not depend completely on improvisation after the experience of Out 1? Rivette: Out 1 and Céline et Julie vont en bateau are related, but in the end quite different. In Out 1 there was a canvas, but inside the canvas was raw improvisation. But even in this case I wasn’t alone: I did it with a friend who was also my assistant director, Suzanne Schiffman. I like having someone by my side, anyway, as a kind of referee, not an arbitrator but someone who has other ideas. So Eduardo was there on Céline et Julie almost from the start. But I didn’t ask him to come as a scriptwriter. I asked him just to come and talk with us on the same level, and he was present during all the shooting. Adair: It wasn’t that you wanted someone to write the dialogue in the house? Rivette: Not really. Maybe a little. When you’re having discussions like that, it’s always useful to have several people to toss out ideas. Eduardo had already worked with Suzanne Schiffman on the Phénix project, and we were used to discussing things together very informally. It wasn’t at all work. In fact, during the shooting, Eduardo wrote two scenes in their entirety; everything else was done with us. The scenes in the house had to be written; those between the two girls were largely written by the actresses themselves. Their dialogue wasn’t definitive, but a sort of canvas on which we improvised afterward. After all, there were many precise things that had to be said; it couldn’t be totally improvised. And there was a whole system of repetition in the house, so that had to be completely written. Marie-France, Bulle, Eduardo, and I wrote out the principal scenes. But Bulle’s monologue when she’s bleeding and the scene just after, between Marie-France and Barbet Schroeder, were done only by Eduardo. Adair: In Out 1 there are explicit references to The Hunting of the Snark [1876], and the whole of Céline et Julie vont en bateau is saturated with the spirit of Lewis Carroll. What role did Alice in Wonderland [1865] play in the conception of the latter film?

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Rivette: We thought of it in the first scene. We wanted Juliet’s dash in front of Dominique on the park bench to remind one a bit of the White Rabbit. The idea was that Dominique would chase her and they would both fall, not into the rabbit hole, but into fiction. Rosenbaum: Why did you choose the title Out 1? Rivette: Because we didn’t succeed in finding a title. It’s without meaning. It’s only a label. Lauren Sedofsky: And Spectre? Rivette: I wanted the shorter version to have its own title. I seriously looked for one. There are so many readings possible that finally there’s none. Adair: How much was the spectator’s comfort a consideration in Out 1? Rivette: To begin with, we never really envisaged making a twelvehour film. We had the idea of dividing it into parts to be shown on television—which, I realize now, would have been a disaster. The ideal form of viewing the film would be for it to be distributed like a book or records; as, for example, with a fat novel of a thousand pages. Even if one’s a very rapid reader—which, as it happens, isn’t my case—one never reads the book in one sitting; one puts it down, stops for lunch, etc. The ideal thing was to see the film in two days, which allowed one to get into it enough to follow it, with the possibility of stopping four or five times. Adair: What were the reactions at Le Havre when it was shown that way? Rivette: Of course, length changes everything. And the reactions were more emphatic, subjective, and individual than for a film of normal length. Some people left before it was over, some arrived after the beginning; and among those who followed the film from beginning to end, there were some who wanted to see it as a test of endurance, others because they gradually got interested. But in any case, it was impossible to judge. After you’ve gotten over the hump of the first four hours, you mainly feel inclined to stay and see it through. But that’s a facile solution, because all of one’s criteria for what is good or bad 125

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disappear, and one is experiencing purely the duration. There are some sequences that I think are failures, but after a certain number of hours, the whole idea of success and failure ceases to have any significance. Some things that I couldn’t use in Spectre are all right in the longer version. The whole actor-spectator relationship is totally different in Out 1, because there the actors are much more actors than characters. There are many more scenes where the sense of improvisation is much stronger, even to the point of admitting lapses, hesitations, and repetitions. There are some of these in Spectre, but relatively few, because we treated it much more as a fiction about certain characters. In the longer version, the dramatic events are a lot more distant from each other, and between them are long undramatic stretches. Adair: For you, is the “ideal” spectator someone who sees the actors as actors, or someone who . . . Rivette: No, he’s someone who’s taken in. In any case, there’s no “ideal” spectator. Even when one sees a film a second time, one is always a different spectator. At least that’s what interests me when I see a film again. Spectre, in any case, needs more than one viewing. It’s too complex the first time; it has too much information. Céline et Julie vont en bateau, on the other hand, is a film one understands the first time. But to return to the question, the “ideal” viewer is one who agrees to enter the fiction: it’s the least that one can demand of a spectator. When I go to the cinema, I adore films that draw me into their fictions, although it doesn’t happen very often. But as Spectre progresses, this so-called “ideal” spectator should gradually begin to realize—during the last third or quarter—that the fiction is in fact a trap, that it’s full of cracks and completely artificial, in every sense of the word, and has only been a vehicle. Rosenbaum: To what extent is a viewing of Out 1 necessary to an appreciation of Spectre? Rivette: When we edited Spectre, we tried to make it as different from Out 1 as possible, working with the same material. We didn’t quite succeed since, contrary to what I thought, there were things that couldn’t be changed. The center of the four-hour film resembles that of the twelve-hour version quite a bit. On the other hand, the first and last hours are quite different. Not dramatically—we couldn’t alter the chronology of the sequences or it would have turned into something I didn’t want to do, something along the lines of Alain Robbe-Grillet. 126

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The feeling of time is quite different, of course, because in the long version almost nothing happens for the first three or four hours. It’s only documentary sequences of the two theater groups, Jean-Pierre Léaud’s distribution of envelopes on Champs-Élysées, or the various petty thefts committed by Juliet Berto. Also, Out 1 ends with very long sequences in which each of the actors more or less “goes to pieces” in front of the camera. It was impossible to keep extracts of this, since its interest was in the total duration of each scene. But contrary to what most people believe, one doesn’t learn any more in the long version than in the short one. I’d hoped to make not one but several films of normal length, one on each of the actors, but we discovered that it was necessary to relate them all the time. And when we started Céline et Julie vont en bateau, our intention was to make a film of normal length. We even had to swear to it in the contract. But we didn’t succeed. Perhaps next time we’ll manage to make a movie that’s an hour and a quarter! Sedofsky: What is the meaning of the opening title in Spectre, “Paris and its double”? [The action of Spectre is preceded by three introductory titles, which read as follows: “Hypothesis-location of the story/Paris and its double; the time: In April or May 1970/Meaning of the story.”] Rivette: I wanted the two titles to indicate that the film was shot in April and May 1970—that, for me, is the important thing, since there are many allusions in the dialogue to that period. It should be evident that the group of thirteen individuals had probably met and talked for some time until May 1968, when everything changed and they probably disbanded. Rosenbaum: In the final sequence of Paris nous appartient, set in the country, there’s a brief inserted shot of the Seine in Paris. Is the function of this shot at all related to that of the repeated shots of Place d’ltalie at the end of Out 1? Rivette: No. In Paris nous appartient it was a kind of psychological flashback, to remind one of an earlier scene on the Pont des Arts, while in Out 1 the shots of Place d’ltalie were inserted with no psychological implications, but frankly as empty spaces, as a kind of visual silence, like the silences in modern music. But it wouldn’t have been possible to have a blank screen for that length of time. I find blank screens very disturbing. 127

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Sedofsky: In both films, there is also a use of still shots. Rivette: There’s no relation. In Paris nous appartient, the scene we shot with the Finnish model is one that I didn’t like at all, and the stills were inserted only because the film that we shot was unusable. On the other hand, the stills in Spectre were the result of our naïve hope that our twelve-hour version would be shown on television as a serial—in eight episodes lasting an hour and a half each. So at the beginning of each episode we used about fifteen stills as a kind of visual summary of the preceding episode. They aren’t single frames, but simply production stills. When we tried a shorter version, our first montage ran five-anda-half hours. Then to make a commercially feasible length, we used the stills to tighten the editing, much the way that Jean-Luc uses titles more and more in his films, as in La Chinoise [1967, Jean-Luc Godard]. Every time there was an editing problem he had recourse to a title. But finally we spent more time on these photos than on anything else, because there were a priori so many possibilities. We wanted the relation between the film and the stills to be neither too close nor too distant, so it was very difficult to find just the right solution. Then we added the sound to the stills. They didn’t work without sound, because the silences interrupted either noises that were very loud or others that were just murmurs. Silence didn’t produce the effect we wanted. I wanted something purely artificial: what we have is just a meaningless frequency, as if produced by a machine, which interrupts the fiction—sometimes sending messages to it, sometimes in relation to what we’ve already seen or are going to see, and sometimes with no relation at all. Because there are stills from scenes, especially toward the end, which don’t appear in the body of the film and are frankly quite incomprehensible. Rosenbaum: Do you find that the “search for meaning” that creates a tension in Spectre and all your other films is resolved at all in Céline et Julie vont en bateau? Rivette: In comedy we pretend to resolve things. And in non-comedy one ends with a non-resolution. But it doesn’t seem at all evident to me that there’s a resolution at the end. After all, in the last scene the girls’ roles are reversed—but of course that’s just a pirouette. Sedofsky: Can we say, perhaps, that the theme of the search in your earlier films has become, in Céline et Julie, a formal problem?

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Rivette: It’s purely a question of film construction. Let me add that for me it’s the same in the other films. Because even in Paris nous appartient and Out 1 (L’Amour fou was an exception) we went through the same process: beginning with a certain number of characters, with certain relations between them, and then arriving at a stage in the preparation of the project where there was very little dramatic action. The characters have relations, they meet and so on, but they really belong to different worlds. And then there’s a stage—which was the same for Céline et Julie vont en bateau as for the others—which comes later, sometimes very late, that involves using a kind of fiction that I always see at first as a background and a mechanism, not the underlying motivation. Purely a narrative mechanism. It simply happened that when I wrote Paris nous appartient this mechanism became too important: this fiction of the Organization, which was really there only to connect all the elements, became more important than I had planned. In Out 1, I was already more careful, because the idea of the “thirteen” came rather late. For a long time we thought that the characters might never meet; perhaps there would be five or six completely different stories. We just didn’t know. Still, I had the idea that something should bring them together, and so it was Balzac’s Histoire des treize [1833–39]. But it was just a mechanism. In Paris nous appartient and, even more, in Out 1, I don’t take the whole idea of the search for meaning seriously. It was a convenience to bring about the meetings, but it didn’t work with either film, because they were taken to be films about a search. I tried and failed to make people understand, as the film progressed, that this search led to nothing: at the end of Paris nous appartient, we discover that the Organization doesn’t exist; and the more Out 1 progresses, the more evident it becomes that this new organization of the thirteen that appeared to have been formed never really existed. There had only been a few vague conversations between completely idealistic characters without any real social or political roots. In each case there was a first part where we assembled a story of a search, and a second part where little by little we wiped it out. For me, Céline et Julie vont en bateau is not very different, except insofar as the decision to make a comedy is more emphasized. To my mind, Out 1 is also a kind of comedy. It’s less obvious in Spectre, because the condensation dramatizes matters much more. And even the fact that we improvised led to an atmosphere of psychodrama, and was more likely to create a situation of aggression and violence. It’s very difficult to arrive at something more subtle. Because violence is 129

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the simplest way: this is what’s been happening in the theater for the past fifteen years. The easiest thing in the world is to roll on the ground. So in Céline et Julie we made a great effort to control the action, after the experience of Out 1, and remain as much as possible within a comic framework. Certain scenes between Dominique and Juliet became much more dramatic than we anticipated—which is just as well, because they were only moments. But there’s no more “truth” in this film than in the others. The only truth is that of the filmstock and the actors. Adair: But it is nevertheless remarkable that what you call only a mechanism in both Paris nous appartient and Out 1—the idea of a conspiracy—obviously permits a thematic reading. Rivette: I could have found another mechanism, I suppose. But in Out 1 I didn’t want to repeat Paris nous appartient, but to do a critique of it. When I decided to use Histoire des treize, it was as a critique of Paris, which tried to show more clearly the vanity of this kind of utopian group, hoping to dominate society. The group, or the idea of the group, begins by being fascinating and tempting, but in the course of the film it comes to be seen as futile. Rosenbaum: After your experience of directing La Religieuse on the stage, does improvisational theater hold any interest for you? [La Religieuse was presented at Studio des Champs-Élysées in 1963, two years before Rivette shot the film based on Diderot’s novel.] Rivette: No. La Religieuse was an opportunity that presented itself, and it wasn’t very successful. Luckily, there was Anna Karina, who wanted to play the main part. She gave an interest to the play, which was otherwise quite unsuccessful. In any event, it was a totally traditional theater piece. For me, the theater is much more a subject for films, as a metaphor of jeu and a meeting place for actors that allows for interaction. Adair: And the film, La Religieuse—what does that represent for you now? Rivette: I haven’t been back to see it for years. It’s far from a success. It was the film where I had the greatest means at my disposal, but still not enough, which is the worst situation—so it was the hardest to make. One can get by with very little money if one is making a contem130

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porary film, but insofar as this was a costume film, with a script, it was nothing but problems. During the shooting, we were completely submerged in problems of décor, costumes we didn’t have . . . we had to pretend, to create an illusion. It was a very difficult shoot and, moreover, I’d been turning it over in my mind for too long. Having said that, I should one day like to do a film of mise-en-scène in costume. La Religieuse may appear to be an uncharacteristic work, but it isn’t one for me. Rosenbaum: There seems to be a Bressonian side to the film. Rivette: Perhaps, but that wasn’t my idea at all. It was much more ambitious. All things considered, it was my idea to make a film in the spirit of Kenji Mizoguchi. But it’s not Mizoguchi. There was an attempt to make a film with extended takes or even one-shot sequences, with a flexible camera and rather stylized performances. So for me La Religieuse was a deliberately theatrical film. Because we didn’t have more time and a more homogeneous cast, however, the theatrical side was seen by everyone as a fault. Whereas it was in fact deliberate to have such a theatrical style of acting, with a very frontal mise-en-scène in relation to the camera. But this would have required more time for rehearsals, to harmonize actors from very different professional backgrounds. Rosenbaum: To turn to other directors’ films, how do you feel about the “American Underground”? Rivette: I would like to see a lot more; I’ve seen very few. I had certain reservations about this kind of cinema, which for me was associated with filmmakers whose work didn’t interest me at all, like Kenneth Anger or certain old films by Curtis Harrington. It’s only recently that I’ve come to see some completely different films: two by Michael Snow that excited me very much, Back and Forth [1969] and La Région Centrale [1971], although they bear no relation to the kind of cinema I do. I’ve also been very struck by the films of Ken Jacobs (e.g., Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son [1969]) and Peter Kubelka (e.g., Unsere Afrikareise [Our Trip to Africa, 1965]). Rosenbaum: And the French cinema now? Rivette: Now, I don’t know. I used to be very excited by Philippe Garrel, in 1968–69, when he made all his important films one after 131

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the other. And Jacques Tati is magnificent. If we’re going to talk about directors who are widely respected, there are many whom I greatly admire. It depends on the moment: six months ago I would have said Federico Fellini, but Amarcord [1973] was like a cold shower after the extraordinary Satyricon [1969] and Roma [1972]. Miklós Jancsó, in his last few films . . . Jean-Marie Straub. The latest Robert Bresson [Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake, 1974)] I find magnificent. And Werner Schroeter, whom I didn’t like at first, excites me more and more; above all, in The Death of Maria Malibran [1972] and Eika Katappa [1969]. And Carmelo Bene . . . Alain Resnais’s Stavisky [1974] is a beautifully filmed object, limited by a laborious script. Rosenbaum: What do you think of film criticism in France today? Rivette: There isn’t any. I was very excited by everything Cahiers du Cinéma had begun several years ago, but this was subsequently left hanging for the sake of something much less interesting and quite utopian. Sedofsky: Do you find any relationship between your cinematic research and the work of such writers as Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, and Roland Barthes? Rivette: I really don’t want to talk about it. (Laughter.) Sedofsky: But when you’ve described the mechanism of Spectre, here and elsewhere, you have used terms that make one think of semiological discourse. Rivette: Perhaps I’ve been influenced by my reading. But, of course, I haven’t done a serious reading of Derrida, Kristeva, or Philippe Sollers. The only one I’ve read completely and continue to read with pleasure is Barthes, perhaps because he is the most accessible. And he has certain things to say that do relate to cinema, more in my case to Spectre than to Céline et Julie vont en bateau. The few things that Barthes has written about the cinema I find accurate, because, like me, he’s more sensitive to the sort of things that escape an overly rigorous semiological approach. With any film, at the beginning there is a very theoretical, very abstract stage when one has ambitions that are at the same time very vast and very vague. Then, as soon as one begins to work on the practical side, one is faced with very concrete problems— relationships with those whom one is working with, especially the 132

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actors, followed by even more concrete problems in the shooting and editing. Sedofsky: But obviously the concrete problems don’t efface the clearly theoretical structure of your films, the “play of elements” that is a “production of significance.” Rivette: There are two principle ways of making a film. One can make it alone as an auteur, if you like; make a product, a fabrication that corresponds as much as possible to one’s reflective activity. There is a family of such directors: F. W. Murnau, Carl-Theodor Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, a certain part of Godard, Bresson, Straub, Josef von Sternberg, and in a certain way Schroeter. And then there is another way, which consists of making the film with others, meeting with certain other people. This “family” would be D. W. Griffith, Jean Renoir, and Roberto Rossellini. And as for myself, I have no desire to make a film of the first method. Even with La Religieuse, it wasn’t completely mise-en-scène. Even Paris nous appartient isn’t really in that vein, and certainly since L’Amour fou I’ve realized that working the first way, as metteur-en-scène, didn’t interest me, in fact bored me to tears. In any event, I don’t know how to do it. There are others who know how: I simply don’t. So I looked for another method to get a better result. And there was the coincidence, very strong for me, that just after La Religieuse and the whole business of the censorship, I had occasion to direct several television programs on Renoir. [Three programs titled Jean Renoir, le patron (The Boss) for the program Cinéastes de notre temps, in 1967.] They were deliberately made very simple, because what was interesting was to place the camera in front of Renoir and let him speak, and to show extracts from his films. First of all, we had fifteen days of shooting with Renoir in the country; we stayed with him, lunched with him, so had plenty of time to speak to him. Then came three months of editing with Jean Eustache, in which we had time to view sequences again and again, to choose the ones we wanted. To see films that I thought I knew very well, which a priori would hardly seem to assert themselves on the Moviola as much as films by Hitchcock or Eisenstein, for whom editing is much more important. But despite everything, the fact of seeing Renoir’s films on the Moviola made me see things differently—makes me see things differently.

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William Johnson, “Recent Rivette” From Film Quarterly, 28.2 [Winter 1974–75]: 32–39.

William Johnson: After Paris Belongs to Us, Mad Love, and the original, thirteen-hour Out 1, I expected any new film by Jacques Rivette to be slow and somber, reflecting gloom and taciturnity in its maker himself. But Céline and Julie Go Boating is an exhilarating film in which you turn out to be cheerful, animated, articulate. Jacques Rivette: I try to make the kind of films I enjoy as a spectator. When you’ve seen a lot of films, as you and I have, nine times out of ten you know what’s going to happen. I like films where you don’t know. . . . I like endless stories, along the lines of lines the Arabian Nights—or soap opera. Johnson: Although Céline and Julie Go Boating is your first film that goes in for sustained comedy, its parentage with your earlier work remains clear. The one film that stands apart is La Religieuse. Rivette: This was quite different. I didn’t write the script—it was an exercise in pure mise-en-scène. Johnson: Three recurring elements account for most of the family likeness in your films. One: the action revolves around some kind of theatrical enterprise—rehearsals of Shakespeare’s Pericles [1609] in Paris Belongs to Us, of Racine’s Andromaque [1667] in Mad Love, of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound [479–424 B.C.] and Seven Against Thebes [467 B.C.] in Out 1. In Céline and Julie Go Boating, the events inside the house take on this theatrical dimension. Rivette: At first we planned to present these events as a film-within-afilm, with Céline and Julie as editors doing their own montage of the different scenes. But a film-within-a-film had been done before, so we kept the basic idea but cut out all the specifics of film viewing and editing. Johnson: Instead, there are specifics of the theater—trois coups, applause, etc. In contrast with this stylized element, you make extensive use of improvisation: the second recurring element in your filmic oeuvre. 134

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Rivette: We had a two-page script of Céline and Julie Go Boating, but that was just something to show the producer. We started shooting only two months after I first discussed the idea of the film. Johnson: Several members of the cast share in the screenplay credits for Céline and Julie Go Boating; all of the cast do so for Out 1. Improvisation, for you, isn’t limited to the dialogue and action within each scene; it may determine the nature of the scene or change the course of the whole film. Rivette: Mad Love became longer and more “difficult,” more serious, as the filming went on. Out 1, on the other hand, seemed more serious in its early stages and gradually became more dreamlike. We started shooting it with no idea of the final shape of the film or even how the action would end. Johnson: An atmosphere of mystery and ambiguity pervades your films: the third recurring element in your oeuvre. This is true even of the apparently more straightforward Mad Love, since the viewer cannot say for certain how much of the two protagonists’ aberrant behavior is feigned rather than genuine. The atmosphere is dominant in your other films, reaching an extreme of complexity in Out 1. This is a pivotal work, combining the somber anxiety of Paris Belongs to Us (of which it could be considered an elaborate reworking) with the lighter approach of Céline and Julie Go Boating. It is also the film in which you have so far invested the most effort: after completing the thirteen-hour original, you returned to the editing table to produce a four-and-a-half-hour version. Rivette: The most difficult editing job I’ve ever done—under the title Out 1/Spectre. It is this “short” version that was shown at the New York Film Festival along with Céline and Julie Go Boating. Johnson: Faced with tangles of unexplained mysteries like Spectre and Céline and Julie Go Boating, the viewer may first try to puzzle out what’s really happening. This is a mistake. Your films contain two levels of mystery, one superficial and the other central, and anyone who becomes enmeshed in the first may never reach the second. The first level glitters with enticing clues and allusions. A scholarly critic could fill page after page analyzing all the references. Rivette: I like inserting traps for the critics. 135

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Johnson: Céline and Julie keep emerging from the house with a candy that enables them to see further visions. Later Madlyn offers them the same kind of candy. I wonder whether you picked the girl’s name because you were referring to another kind of confection that induced visions—the madeleine in Proust? Rivette (laughing): No, I didn’t think of it! But if that’s what you see, then it’s there for you—that’s your film. Johnson: Well, leaving Proust out of it, I still feel that the scenes inside the house represent the past. At the end, when Céline and Julie take part in those scenes, the faces of the other characters become livid and death-like—as if the past turns to ashes when the two women try to relive it. Rivette: We made the characters look that way partly because Céline and Julie, being in the action with them instead of looking at them from the outside, start to see them more critically. Also, the action now becomes like a theatrical performance, and the camera sees it as if from the wings, where the lighting looks harsh and the make-up unrealistic. Johnson: I see. (Pause.) Let’s move on. Obviously, anyone who tries to make sense of a Rivette film by collating all of the first-level details is asking for trouble. That way madness lies. A much safer response is to dismiss your films as elaborate games without any second level of meaning worth bothering about. Which leads to a fairly straightforward interpretation of Spectre: In real life we’re faced with phenomena that have much the same mystery and ambiguity as the first-level details of this film, of any Rivette film; it’s a mistake to try to look for a system that will account for everything. but it’s also a mistake to look for no structure at all. Rivette: I like my films to have at least two or three interpretations— not fixed, but shifting. (He spreads his fingers and moves his hands to and fro across each other.) Johnson: While watching Céline and Julie Go Boating I did not feel irritated by its first-level mysteries (as I did from time to time with Spectre); nor at the end did I feel any urgent need to work out an interpretation. Céline and Julie is a film that can satisfy before it makes sense. It can do this largely because you and your collaborators have steeped it in elements of immediate appeal. There’s comedy, broad 136

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humor, even slapstick. There’s suspense: the viewer wants to find out how the fragmentary scenes in the house will fit together and which of the characters will be killed—first-level mysteries that for once do not lead to frustration. There’s warmth and liveliness (as well as whimsy) in the relationship between and Céline and Julie. Visually, the film glows with summery colors. Rivette: As to influences on the film, I like to think of it as “Grandson of Hitchcock and Renoir.” Johnson: The sheer enjoyability of Céline and Julie Go Boating brings out a feature of your filmmaking that may escape notice in your earlier work. Rivette: I try to make my films in the most simple way possible. Johnson (raising his eyebrows): Simple? Rivette: Yes—within the given framework, of course. Johnson: In its formal development, Céline and Julie Go Boating is the most compelling of your films. After a relaxed start the action gradually accelerates, building up step by step to the hilarious climax before the brief and unexpectedly quiet ending. This formal shape is all the more remarkable because of the importance that you attach to improvisation. Rivette: I’m interested not just in telling a story but in seeing what happens during the filming—the atmospheric touches that arise. Some time ago I saw the first assemblage of Jean Rouch’s Petit à Petit [Little by Little, 1970] based on improvised scenes with Africans. It ran for nine hours; nothing happened; but it was fascinating. It lost a lot when Rouch cut it to ninety minutes or so. Johnson: Cinema is designed to capture the unexpected. Not surprisingly, your devotion to the unexpected makes your own films swell to unusual size. Rivette: I realize that some viewers object to the length of my films and find the temps morts painful. Johnson: While I’m not enthusiastic about the length of Mad Love or 137

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Spectre, even these do not give me the floundering sensation I get from most other directors who rely heavily on improvisation. Looking back at the two films, I become aware of the unobtrusive but acute control that must lie behind them—a control that can be deduced from some of the economical camera setups and, above all, from the editing. With Céline and Julie Go Boating, you take this control even further. Rivette: In editing Céline and Julie Go Boating I tried to cut to the bone. Johnson: Well, bone isn’t conspicuous. In any event, by giving Céline and Julie’s actions the trappings—or the control—of a stage performance, you introduce a parallel with your earlier films that also underlines an important difference. For the theatrical enterprises in Paris Belongs to Us, Mad Love, and Spectre go through interminable rehearsals but never reach a performance. Rivette: My protagonists are directors who don’t want to succeed. Johnson: But Céline and Julie do commit themselves. They act; they are successful. Or are they? Rivette: I can only film losers. It’s true, Céline and Julie are different. But you could say that, at the end, when they encounter the other boat, the sinister figures in it take them over. Johnson: In committing themselves to their system of belief, Céline and Julie obtain a specific success (they rescue Madlyn). At the same time they expose the general weakness of the system. which loses touch with life and turns rigid (the deathly tableau in the boat). So they try to embark on another adventure of discovery-cum-creation (the final scene in the park). This adventure begins in the same place and in the same way as the first—which suggests that the pattern may indeed have “taken them over” and they can only repeat it. But their roles are now reversed—which suggests that they may be able to vary the pattern and give it new vitality. The ending remains open. Rivette: If that’s what you see, that’s your film.

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1967: La Religieuse.

1982: Le Pont du Nord.

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1969: L’amour fou.

1974: Céline et Julie vont en bateau.

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1995: Haut bas fragile.

1976: Duelle.

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1983: Merry-Go-Round.

1984: L’amour par terre.

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1989: La Bande des quatre.

1998: Secret défense.

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1991: La belle noiseuse.

1994: Jeanne la pucelle: 1. Les batailles; 2. Les prisons.

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2001: Va savoir.

2003: Histoire de Marie et Julien.

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2007: Ne touchez pas la hache, a.k.a. La Duchesse de Langeais.

2009: 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup, a.k.a. Around a Small Mountain.

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John Hughes, “The Director as Psychoanalyst” From Rear Window, 1 [Spring 1975]: 3–10.

John Hughes: Out 1: Spectre is an exercise in the art of merging fantasy with (or perhaps of making it emerge from) what seems to me as “reality.” It’s hard to imagine what the original TV-oriented version of the thirteen hours would do to the mind. It’s a cinema with a magic that reminds me of both Jean-Luc Godard and D. W. Griffith, the surreal and the glowingly real. Jonathan Rosenbaum has, I think, revealed the central dialectic of Spectre: it’s Lang (Fate) versus Renoir (freedom). Jacques Rivette: Oh, you could point to a lot of other great directors. But the principle of the story of Spectre could have come from one of Fritz Lang’s early films. And one might also say that spirit of the actors is that of Jean Renoir. When we began to shoot Céline and Julie vont en bateau, we continually thought of Renoir and Alfred Hitchcock, but only in order to give the film a certain initial orientation. Because of the improvisational nature of Out 1 itself, we almost never thought of other directors. Hughes: But, in many ways, Spectre looks like a more controlled film than Céline and Julie vont en bateau. Rivette: Yes, of course. This is because the shorter version is a kind of montage of carefully chosen elements from the thirteen-hour totality of Out 1. Nevertheless, we shot Out 1 in a very adventurous way. We told the actors only the essential aspects of each sequence, and the rest was improvisation. In Céline and Julie vont en bateau there is almost no improvisation; the scenes were carefully constructed beforehand, and the racy, zigzag character of the film is completely premeditated. Hughes: You mentioned Hitchcock in reference to Céline and Julie vont en bateau, but weren’t other influences equally important? For example, in the meeting-in-the-park episode, the style reminded me of Nicholas Ray, while the content was pure Howard Hawks. Rivette: Yes, but I was wondering what Hawks film you had in mind?

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Hughes: Any of his reversal-of-sexual-roles comedies. Perhaps Bringing Up Baby [1938, Howard Hawks]. Rivette: No, I wasn’t conscious of that at all. The guiding principle of Céline and Julie vont en bateau is very conventional: it is the spirit of traditional comedy. The changing of roles and costumes, the discovery of the other within the self, etc., are aspects of classical comedy and especially of the commedia dell’arte which probably influenced Hawks as much in Bringing Up Baby as it did in me in Céline and Julie. The interplay of roles that takes place between the two girls is similar to the costume-changes of Columbine in the commedia dell’arte. Hughes: Would you agree with the Éric Rohmer character in Out 1, who seems to see the Balzacian conspiracy theme as a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin? Rivette: Oh, maybe, but it’s very hard for me to answer that! I don’t know! Anyway, before the shooting of Out 1, Balzac’s History of the Thirteen [1833–39] was a point of departure for both myself and the actors. But when the shooting had begun we found that the story had become reality in the individual characters and their interrelationships. Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark [1876] followed a similar parabola: it began as a kind of joke and was then taken apart and reassembled amidst the improvisatory momentum of the film. Hughes: But these elements are more than accidental, for they also relate quite clearly to your earlier films. You know, of course, of that old idea that chance equals necessity. Rivette: I don’t know if I agree with that as a generalization, but it is certainly applicable to cinema. Hughes: The notion of chance, of unpredictability, is present in the final, and perhaps the most important, image in Spectre: Jean-Pierre Léaud’s toying with the tiny Eiffel Tower reproduction. Each flick of his finger causes the toy to oscillate an indefinite number of times, but he refuses to count any higher than thirteen, which is the number of supposed “conspirators” whom Léaud is hunting. It also seems to represent Freud’s obsessive-compulsive syndrome, which is certainly related to Léaud’s (Colin’s) hysteria and paranoia.

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Rivette: This was an unimportant scene lost somewhere in the middle of the thirteen-hour version. When I began cutting up Out 1, I first decided what were to be the first and last shots of Out 1: Spectre. I knew right away that the scene with Léaud and the toy would have to be the end. The meaning that it has in Spectre, and to which you have alluded, is totally different from the impact of this scene in Out 1. Hughes: What happens to Colin in the longer version? Rivette: There is a sequence where we see Colin near madness, banging his head against the wall. [This sequence was subsequently deleted by Rivette from the complete version of Out 1 publicly presented in 1989.] Then he recovers mysteriously and visits his old friend, Warok (Jean Bouise). He says that he has understood and transcended the story of the thirteen, that it doesn’t bother him anymore. He says that he intends to lead a happy life in the future, but after he leaves Warok we see him dancing madly about in the streets with his harmonica. Then we see him begging, posing as a deaf mute as in the beginning of the film. Hughes: Is there any political significance to Colin’s paranoia? After all, Adolf Hitler was someone who was anxious to expose conspiracies. Rivette: And he wasn’t the only one! However, I wasn’t really thinking of Mr. Hitler. But you know there are a great many paranoiacs in Paris ... Hughes: Speaking of politics, I felt that Céline and Julie vont en bateau, on at least one level, marked an advance beyond Out 1 and your previous work. I was very impressed by the way in which Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, in the midst of the dream-sequences in the house, suddenly become aware of the confused network of class relations that exist there. They become servants. Rivette: Perhaps. I don’t know. The world “politics” is too wide an idea for me. But in some of the sequences in Out 1 we thought of certain political implications. The Berto character is politicized in the sense that she speaks differently, her language patterns differ from those of the other actors. She has a “popular,” although not necessarily proletarian, type of speech. She is a marginal kind of character 150

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who gets caught up in the center of events. But neither Spectre nor Céline and Julie vont en bateau presents political ideas in their traditional sense. The characters are totally fictional, but we did try to connect them a little with the contemporary realities of life in Paris. Hughes: But the ending of Céline and Julie is a revolution of sorts— although perhaps deriving out of the Groucho category of Marxism. At least your work is a healthy demystification of what I call “the school of the return of the repressed.” Rivette: You mean Freud’s notion of the return of the repressed instincts? What do you mean? Hughes: You know, Last Tango in Paris [1973, Bernardo Bertolucci], La Grande Bouffe [The Big Feast; 1973, Marco Ferreri], many contemporary films that show the bourgeoisie regressing to the hilt in excrement, food, and sex. Although I admire these films to a certain extent, it seems to me that you (and others, such as Luis Buñuel and Jean-Luc Godard) have gone on to a more analytical awareness of this tragicomic genre. Rivette: Yes, and do you know how the return of the repressed applies to Out 1? During the editing we had a lot of fun dealing with those characters, such as Pierre and Igor, who are spoken of in Spectre but who are never seen! Where Igor is spoken of in the film you quite literally have the repressed returning! Hughes: Yes, Igor is the “Other” in Jacques Lacan’s or R. D. Laing’s terminology. You know, the long scarf that he leaves behind, and the fact that Bulle Ogier fears that he may strangle her. Rivette: But that was all improvised! It was a nice day, the sun was perfect, and we shot about an hour’s worth of improvised dialogue between the two girls. I like this way of shooting because the unexpected can overwhelm your preconceptions. At a certain point, the actor, like the patient in psychoanalysis, falls into a kind of trance and says things—such as Bulle’s talk about the strangling—that suddenly become an integral part of the film. I then select such moments from the footage and add them to the final version. I think that the cinema, even at its most naturalistic, is always secretly involved in levels of dream and fantasy, and that we must see the so-called director as a 151

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kind of psychoanalyst. Like the psychoanalyst, the director does not talk, he listens—but this, of course, is just a metaphor. Hughes: The black-and-white photos of the actors that continually break into Spectre allow us to look at their fantasies in a different way. Are they a form of distanciation device? Rivette: Yes, they are very important—I spent most of the editing time of Spectre selecting them. They should be seen as a kind of machine, an electronic computer that interrupts the general dream of the characters in Spectre. Hughes: Did Jean-Pierre Oudart’s conception of “suture” influence your use of these photographs? Your awareness of the film as dreamfantasy and of the psychoanalytical aspects of point-of-view certainly is close to Oudart’s ideas. Rivette: I read Oudart’s “suture” articles after finishing the editing of Spectre. But for some time his ideas had been in the air within our little circle in Paris. So I suppose there is some kind of connection, but I couldn’t specify any direct influence. Roland Barthes’s S/Z [1970] was also in the air at the time, but I didn’t read it until much later. I have read a great deal of Lacan, but he’s very difficult. Hughes: Have you read Jacques Lacan’s “The Mirror Stage” [1949]? That shot of Bulle in front of the mirror near the end of Spectre reminded me of Lacan. Rivette: I have read this very dense essay, but it has nothing to do with that shot. The mirror was in the house where we were shooting, and I used it. Hughes: But the theme of mirror images is as important in your work as it is in the very Lacanesque films of Marguerite Duras. Rivette: I admire her work, and it might interest you to know that her next film [India Song, 1975] is being shot entirely through a mirror! By the way, did you notice the exercises of the acting troupe in Spectre? Hughes: Yes, where one actor mirrors the other’s gestures. As in that old Marx Brothers bit.

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Rivette: Precisely. It’s an exercise from Jerzy Grotowski or Peter Brook or the Living Theatre. We call it “The Mirror Exercise.” There’s a lot more of that in the thirteen-hour version. Hughes: The way that the stills both break into, yet maintain, the continuity of the takes in Spectre reminded me of Renoir’s experiments with multiple cameras in The Testament of Dr. Cordelier [1961] and Picnic on the Grass [1959]. Rivette: Yes, but of course there is a difference. I used only one camera. The idea of continuity is for me a problem concerning the duration of the take. I like to cut just before the emotional momentum of the shot is exhausted. Hughes: I’m very interested in the kind of color impressionism that I find in your new films. It reminds me of Duras and of Jean-Marie Straub’s Othon [1970], and I think this impressionism involves an openness to color and light that is original and astonishing. The play between blues and browns in Spectre runs the gamut from total accident to total control. Rivette: Both Spectre and Céline and Julie vont en bateau were shot in 16mm. We used the Éclair camera and a Nagra for the sound. At least part of the impressionism you see in Duras and Straub (who, by the way, was totally hypnotized by a screening of the thirteen-hour Out 1) comes from their low-budget techniques. I aim at something a little different in my recent films: you might almost say that I am trying to bring back the old MGM Technicolor! I even think that the colors of Out 1 would please a Natalie Kalmus [Hollywood color consultant, 1934–49]—although the print of Spectre at the festival was too dark, as it favored those blues and browns too much. I used the zoom in Céline and Julie only in order to move the camera closer for successive takes. As for lenses, the technicians on the set called me “Mr. TwentyFive” because I almost always use the twenty-five millimeter lens! Hughes: Cinema has, over the years, produced its share of “epics,” and yet we usually think of the medium as having a dramatic, as opposed to epic, orientation: Shakespeare as opposed to Homer. And yet your recent films are unabashedly epic in scale, although this is counter-balanced by a certain intimacy. Rivette: In all of my films I have been fascinated by the interaction 153

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among a great many characters. You might call this an epic approach in contrast to a restricted focus on only a few characters. I like the audience to be aware of a great many characters hanging about on the edges of the action. And yet I have been influenced by the theater a great deal, as you can see in my films. Before making Paris nous appartient, I read many plays by the Jacobean dramatists: John Ford, Cyril Tourneur, etc. The Revenger’s Tragedy [1606] was very important to me at that point. Do you know Raymond Queneau? Hughes: Zazie [1959], etc. Rivette: When you called my work epic a moment ago, you reminded me of Queneau’s theory that there are two categories of the novel: those that derive from the Iliad [8th century B.C., Homer] and those that descend from the Odyssey [8th century B.C., Homer]. The former have to do with battles and strife; the latter concern themselves with strange voyages, with discovery and return, and with the way in which these things are reported. My films are obviously epic in the Odyssean manner. Hughes: In other words, Roberto Rossellini instead of King Vidor and Cecil B. DeMille. Rivette: Or Fyodor Dostoyevsky as opposed to Honoré de Balzac. Hughes: Speaking of Rossellini, have you seen The Age of the Medici [3-part TV series, 1973]? Rivette: No, The Rise to Power of Louis XIV [1966] is the only one of the later films I have seen. But I would like to . . . Hughes: Rossellini’s films are of course all concerned with inward and outward voyages, and in The Age of the Medici he journeys into the metaphysical obscurities of Renaissance perspective. Is this not also present in the conclusion of Spectre, where Ogier’s multitudinous reflections throng the mirror, and then suddenly her shoulder cuts into the frame? Rivette: I don’t know. I’ll tell you after I see The Age of the Medici. By the way, our discussion of the epic and dramatic principles shortchanged the cinema. I, for one, have been very influenced by the theatricality of a director like George Cukor. 154

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Hughes: A Double Life [1947] is a strangely complex Cukor film that always makes me think of L’Amour fou. Rivette: I can hardly remember that one, but Sylvia Scarlett [1935] has always been important for me. Hughes: The acting style in your new films is certainly Cukoresque. Rivette: Yes, but I go a bit further in the direction of improvisation. After we had decided on the conception of a scene in Out 1, we would shoot immediately, without text or rehearsal. There was, however, usually a text and very often rehearsals for Céline and Julie vont en bateau. Hughes: You’ve seen a lot of Jean-Marie Straub’s work. Isn’t it strange that you and Straub begin with totally opposed ideas of the importance of the text, and yet you end up with . . . Rivette: The same thing! Of course, I admire Straub a great deal. Hughes: Despite (or perhaps because of) the paranoid character played by Léaud in Spectre, I was amazed at the control of this most brilliant of actors—his acting style is totally Brechtian. The very madness of the character he played enabled Léaud to shape an utterly lucid style, which at times resembled the techniques of Chinese theater. Rivette: All of the actors I work with are “physical.” They act more with their bodies than with their faces. I don’t like actors who are heavily into psychology. Hughes: Are you very much aware of Bertolt Brecht? Rivette: Of course, but the Chinese-theater effect comes (for me) as much from the Japanese cinema as it does from Brecht: Kenji Mizoguchi, Yasujiro Ozu, etc. I have also found that my best actors are like beautiful animals. I found that Juliet Berto is just like a cat. Jean-Pierre Léaud has the suppleness and grace of movement of some unknown, beautiful beast. Hughes: What inspired that very erotic shot of Berto with the two daggers? Were you thinking, perhaps, of Anna Karina and the scissors in Pierrot le fou (1965, Jean-Luc Godard)? 155

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Rivette: It’s possible. That shot probably derives from similar sequences that preceded it in Out 1. We got together to shoot a scene, and somebody came up with the two daggers, along with other props that we didn’t use. I asked Berto to play with the daggers in a way that would illuminate the character of Frédérique. Hughes: Michael Lonsdale, as one of theater directors in Out 1, says that Pierre would be able to play the part of Prometheus. Lonsdale is almost omniscient in relation to the other characters, is he not? Rivette: Lonsdale is very important; he is the fulcrum or axis by means of which I was able to play with the interrelationships of the characters. Lonsdale himself was very involved in the performances of the other actors, and after the filming of the exercise sequences he would often discuss the film in ways that reminded me of Renoir with his actors. Lonsdale is, in a sense, the central metteur-en-scène figure in Out 1, and he could certainly become a fine film director in his own right. He will always be a formidably intelligent and aware actor. Hughes: The surrealism that is latent in Spectre bursts forth in Céline and Julie vont en bateau, especially during the final “boating” scenes. Were you thinking of Buñuel? Rivette: No, not really. But now that you mention it, I was very moved by the interplay between dream and reality in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie [1972, Luis Buñuel]. You are probably right about that. This interplay provides, for me, a great deal of fun during the shooting. And shooting a film should always be a form of play, something that might be seen as a drug or as a game. Even during the “breakdown” scenes near the end of L’Amour fou, I was not being tragic as many people thought. I was joking, having fun, and so was Bulle Ogier. It’s just a movie, not some kind of cinéma-vérité! Hughes: Céline and Julie vont en bateau is certainly a fun movie. Rivette: Yes, but there is also a certain terror. Not in the tradition of Frankenstein films but more in the line of Jacques Tourneur. I Walked with a Zombie [1943], Cat People [1942], etc., are films that are intelligent and also stunningly crafted. Hughes: In both of your new films there is a use of the close-up that reminds me of something you once said about Nicholas Ray. 156

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Rivette: I don’t discuss my previous writings, and I disagree with or have forgotten most of them. I still admire Rossellini, Ray, Renoir, and Hitchcock, but I now have entirely different reasons for liking them. Hughes: The strange blend of Lang and Renoir (or Ray and Rossellini) in Spectre is nowhere more evident than in the conversation between Lonsdale and the others under that Langesque blue bridge (although it also resembles the bridge in Party Girl [1958, Nicholas Ray]), which appears near the end of the film. Rivette: It’s over the Seine at the point where you drive past the large building that contains the offices of the state-owned French television network. They are the ones who refused to show the original thirteen installments of Out 1. Hughes: There’s a smaller version of the Statue of Liberty near that building. Rivette: Yes, there’s a little Statue of Liberty at that very spot. Perhaps because there is very little liberty to be found in the French television offices.

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Serge Daney & Jean Narboni, “Interview with Jacques Rivette” From Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 323–324 [May–June 1981]: 42–49. Translated by Louisa Shea.

Jacques Rivette: There are very few directors in France who really control their production schedule; François Truffaut aside, there are really only Éric Rohmer and Claude Lelouch—those, that is, who created a studio that belongs to them in part or in full, and that allows them to work on short-, mid-, and long-term projects. I think that all other directors lose three quarters of their time between films, and that’s when one isn’t happy. The question of one’s production schedule is always a tricky one. Cahiers du Cinéma: And you think it’s time lost? Rivette: I’m not saying it’s necessarily lost time, but more often than not, it’s not the happiest of times. Half of the time is spent asking oneself, what project can I envision given the circumstances, the possibilities, the state of French cinema in general, and one’s own state in particular? And then, once one thinks one’s found a viable project, how will one pull it off? And will the project, when it finally becomes reality, lead to other things and how? It’s not always easy to live through, but, well, it’s the same for everyone. Cahiers: And you think it’s always been this way? Rivette: The feeling I have is that it’s become increasingly difficult in the past few years, and that it will become even more so because there are more and more directors, real and potential. In a certain sense that’s a good thing, and there’s no reason to establish a system of obstacles. But at the same time, I read this in Le Monde yesterday or today, there is sense of triumph, of euphoria in French cinema because last year there were 160 films and this year 180. But of these 180, how many will be seen outside Paris, be it only in France’s big cities? Cahiers: There are two films of yours, Noroît and Merry-Go-Round, that have still not been released.

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Rivette: They might very well have been released; but it so happened that Gaumont, in its capacity as distribution house, didn’t think they would bring in a large audience. Maybe they’re right, from their point of view. At the same time, they got caught up in the mess with Stéphane Tchalgadjieff and now they are stuck because of Stéphane’s insolvency. But these things happen to other films, too. This time, however, it happened to two films, one after the other, same story each time. But in a sense—and this is a very selfish point of view—I didn’t really do anything to ensure their release. Because the release, for instance, of Duelle, which was not an easy film to release, was done so clumsily that I would almost have preferred if the film had stayed in its cans. I was more handicapped, personally, even purely egoistically, by the failure of Duelle than I was by the non-release of Noroît and Merry-Go-Round. It gives one a stronger sense of rejection, of error of course, too. No, what’s really bothersome is that nearly all directors are at the mercy of such things. We were speaking earlier of Truffaut, Lelouch, or Rohmer; they had the wits to construct something—it wasn’t a gift bestowed upon them—a form, a micro-system that allows them to immediately overcome this type of misfortune, as in the case of La Chambre Verte [The Green Room, 1978] for Truffaut, or Perceval [1978] for Rohmer; as for Lelouch, there are many examples. But for me, and for almost everyone, it’s very difficult to carry on and begin again; and I consider myself privileged, insofar as I’ve been able remake several films that hadn’t been released, or had been but poorly so, and recently to remake another, thanks to the good will of the actors and the technicians, even though we had to film in very poor conditions. I remember a conversation I had with Serge Daney one evening when we’d met by chance, two years ago. You said something I found both fair and unfair. It was, I believe, about Claude Chabrol. You said that the director’s job was to film, so what you liked about Chabrol was that he was a director who filmed incessantly, like Raoul Walsh, or whoever it was. I know it’s true of directors like Lelouch, Truffaut, and Rohmer, who has barely stopped since the Contes moraux [Moral Tales, 1963–72]. But I think there are many directors who would say, “Most gladly! O.K., but how?” Cahiers: Then we have to come back to this idea of the micro-system. Were you conscious, at one time or another, that you were not creating your production micro-system and that you were proceeding a little haphazardly?

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Rivette: No, I was often tempted to create one. Not tempted strongly enough, no doubt, since I never succeeded, never saw the attempt through. I never felt that I had the will, or would take any pleasure in handling the financial mechanisms necessary to found a production house. It’s not even a question of means, it’s a question of affinity for such things. Let’s say that with someone like Tchalgadjieff, I thought for a number of years that I could have, like Chabrol with André Génovès, a relationship with someone who trusted me—rightly or wrongly—and who didn’t want to know what the next film would be but only: who would be in it, how much it would cost, if the project was feasible or not, and who would then try to get things rolling. Unfortunately, of that breed of producer, there are hardly any left; they’ve all gone down the drain. That’s been the Centre du Cinéma’s official policy in the past five years: to unseat them. It’s a systematic policy that coincided at its beginning with the departure of Chausserie Laprée; it’s not for nothing that the Centre was thanked . . . prematurely, alas. Cahiers: When one speaks to Truffaut of his job or career, the following is a word he accepts. How about you? Would you say, it’s my “passion”? Rivette: That’s a question I’ve always avoided. Cahiers: Because you see, what you call micro-systems, they make it so that a director can continue to work, to live his passion. Rivette: Certainly, and I am now punished for not having created one. At least relatively speaking, because, once again, I consider myself privileged compared to many. Cahiers: Your films, we’ve followed them from the beginning as so many experiments in how far one could go in this or that direction. Rivette: Not necessarily. In fact, it’s less true of my latest films, and maybe that’s what makes them less interesting. It’s possible. Cahiers: What strikes us about your films is that they represent an almost exhaustive spectrum of all possible scenarios. You began with a disaster of near apocalyptic dimension, a financial failure that was also a mythical film, Paris nous appartient.

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Rivette: Paris nous appartient, in the end, was a happy event. I never experienced it as a curse, because from the start, before it was even finished, thanks to François Truffaut and others, it gained a legendary aspect, so that was very good. Cahiers: Then came La Religieuse, which met with yet a different reception: here was a banned film, a scandal, etc. Rivette: It’s the contrary of Paris nous appartient, in a sense. Because, on one hand, it was a big commercial success—it’s even the only one of my films that met with real success; but it was one misunderstanding after another from beginning to end. Cahiers: Then, a moderate success, L’Amour fou. Rivette: L’Amour fou was, for the producers, I think, more or less a complete failure, in part because of their own clumsiness. For me, everything went very well, except that it wasn’t well distributed. But it was seen, after all. That’s all one asks for. Cahiers: Next, another mythical film, but one that was not seen, Out 1, then a film that rode the wave of the moment, feminist, leftist, etc., Céline et Julie vont en bateau; then another release that flopped, Duelle, followed by two more films that weren’t released, and now another. Rivette: What is it that strikes you in all this, the incoherence? Cahiers: No, the plasticity! Rivette: If you had accused me of incoherence, I could have accepted ... Cahiers: No, it’s rather that the films of Jacques Rivette are very different one from another, meet with different fortunes . . . Rivette: In the beginning, they tried to be. Now, I am more sensitive to their repetitive aspects. That said, it’s true that no two films were put together in the same way. Except for the little series with Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, Duelle, Noroît . . . and even then, we weren’t able to see the project through! Each of them represents a particular case, as Le Monde always puts it, from the film thrown together with little 161

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money from François, a little film stock from Chabrol, and a “let’s see what happens” attitude, to the very normal production of La Religieuse. The others are in-between, like L’Amour fou, a film that started out as a small, normal production and became a monster—by my own doing. And then there are others that benefited from particularly favorable conditions that couldn’t exist anymore today, like Out 1 or the series Duelle, Noroît. We obtained almost miraculous advances on projects of only three pages, thanks, I take it, to the previous film. Cahiers: You mean that today, it’s no longer possible to have the same experience in cinema as you had in the past? Rivette: It’s still possible, but no longer in the climate of tolerance and relative comfort of back when. In the past twenty years, there have been, roughly speaking, three periods. I’m not speaking about cinema as one discovered it in the ’50s and into which it was impossible for us to enter. There was the cinema of the early ’60s, a transitional cinema that gave us the first films of the so-called Nouvelle Vague, although the old system of distribution-production remained fairly strong. Even people like Georges de Beauregard established themselves by taking their place on the inside, alongside the old distributors of the ’50s who were still around. It’s at end of the ’60s that it all came crashing down. In the early ’70s, the Center’s policy of Advances was toppled. In 1967, L’Amour fou had been refused on the basis of a thirty-page script, even though it had a classical, well-developed storyline that allowed one to get a good sense, it seems to me, of what the film would be like. By contrast the project for Out 1, of only four pages, purely abstract, theoretical, was accepted in 1970, as was the four-film series I had proposed in 1975. Cahiers: So that’s the second period? Rivette: Yes. But at the same time, it created a bit of a scandal, the advance we’d received for the four films in ’75. You see, it was the end of an epoch. We’d received fifty million, that’s 200 million old francs. There had been advances of more than fifty, even 100 million, be it only for Bresson; but it was the fact that we got four at one go that caused the scandal. It cost us very dearly and we haven’t finished paying off our debt, Stéphane and I. In a certain sense, when we presented ourselves before the Commission on Advances, in early ’75, everyone knew that the Commission in question was coming to an end, 162

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and there were people who were sympathetic to us and who gave us, so to speak, a farewell gift. In retrospect, it was a very open period. In the years following 1968, for reasons of bad conscience, the cinema milieu in France and throughout the world tried to integrate into the system people who hadn’t previously been part of it, only to subsequently reject them. There was a period of five or six years during which one could do much; then everything was rebuilt. I think now that we were very clumsy because we didn’t know how to make the most of the situation. But could one have done more? Maybe it was all an illusion. Maybe Céline et Julie vont en bateau is the most one could do; but Out 1, the series of four films, no: one could embark on such a project but there were sanctions to be paid. I believe that what was being put into place, what is still being put in place now, is something completely different from the system of the early 1970s. Cahiers: Can one already describe what it will be? Rivette: I see it from the outside. Maybe there’s no precise project. There are things, it seems, that one no longer wants, but no one is quite ready to admit it. Cahiers: What disappeared in the early 1970s are producers, in the strong sense of the term. In your opinion, Tchalgadjieff, what type of producer is he? Did you have a real dialogue with him, or was he rather someone who trusted you and was happy to simply find and manage the finances? Rivette: I have never encountered the type of production work that directors would really need, that is to say, the American producer. This is something that’s completely lacking in France; or, if such producers exist, I’ve never met them. The feeling I have is that there are either people who want to intervene every step of the way, but then they can only flee from directors such as myself. (Or you have to be Luis Buñuel to work with them, with someone like Serge Silberman. Otherwise, it usually ends very badly, and there are many examples besides directorscreenwriter Liliane de Kermadec.) So there are producers who really intervene. And there’s the other type of producer, the kind I worked with. Very few of them, really: two films with Beauregard, four with Stéphane. Céline et Julie vont en bateau came together through a series of friendships, and was managed by Barbet Schroeder (if it weren’t for him, the film would never have been made), and for the last film, same idea. But these two films are exceptions. 163

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I only really know two producers who took on projects that had more or less clearly defined subjects. With Beauregard, things were all the more clearly defined because he suggested I do La Religieuse— I had come to him with a different project altogether. Then came the book, the adaptations, the classical project in short. L’Amour fou was just a phrase and became thirty pages. As for Stéphane, on all four projects, he simply trusted me. But both Beauregard and Stéphane took care of financing the project; after that they didn’t lose interest in what I was doing, but they had a false position with regards to the filming process, and in the end they didn’t intervene enough. Beauregard was prodigiously bored during the shoot. He would find the funds, watch the first rushes, and after that he simply wasn’t interested. Stéphane would have liked, I think, to follow the shoot but he was stuck in his office because of financial problems and also perhaps because of a certain reserve. But, you know, the producers have it wrong. If someone could be there all the time, alongside the assistant or the director of photography, someone who could provide another perspective and who could discuss things with us without being a watchdog, well then, why not? Maybe I wouldn’t put up with it, but I think it’s something that we—I say “we” because I think I’m not the only one—that we have lacked. Because even though we work with a team there are times on the shoot when one feels very much alone. Cahiers: A producer who doesn’t disengage from the project, yet doesn’t take on the role of despot, isn’t that a bit of a myth? Do you really believe it’s possible? Rivette: Maybe not. Maybe it’s a myth. As described, it’s a role that’s almost impossible to fill—it would require a saint. But in the last issue of Cahiers du Cinéma I read the interview with Irwin Winkler, where he speaks of his relationship with Martin Scorsese. He describes himself as someone who follows every step of the film, from the initial project to the end, including the actual filming. He isn’t absent, it seems, when important questions arise or when there are grave problems on the set. Cahiers: But isn’t it precisely to avoid this type of problem that certain directors created their own micro-systems, so that they knew they would always land on their feet again? Whereas you—I don’t know if you’ll recognize yourself in this romantic and extravagant image of yourself—you give the impression that you’re someone who says: if we don’t land on our feet again, well, too bad! 164

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Rivette: No. Absolutely not! No, no, I have always been convinced, before and after—not always after—that the films I was making were films that would find a large audience. When I was filming Noroît, I was persuaded that we were making a huge commercial success, that it was an adventure film that would have great appeal. When the film didn’t come out, when it was considered un-showable, I was surprised. I don’t consider myself . . . unfortunately, I’m not very lucid when it comes to the potential success of my projects, my films. That’s why it would be nice, even if it’s sometimes difficult, to be confronted by the producer. That’s no doubt why I like working with Suzanne Schiffman. Officially she’s first assistant, but unofficially at first, and then officially, she became co-screenwriter, and often, truth be told, co-director. Her role obviously isn’t that of producer, but she’s someone who, even as she participates in the project, can criticize it from the inside, in a constructive manner. Cahiers: Isn’t it true that the disappearance of the producer was accompanied by the inflation of the notion of the auteur? Rivette: The production machine, as if functions today, needs the figure of the auteur. The production machine creates them, doesn’t stop creating them, for better or for worse. It needs signatures, but you know that as well as I do. The number of such auteurs who have been created in the past ten years! We did it, too, thirty years ago, we created them, with people like Otto Preminger; although, in a sense, Preminger IS an auteur! Well, in any case, Moshé Mizrahi did create a good number and when I say Mizrahi, it’s a clear example! And of course Gaumont needs these auteurs created by Mizrahi, these perfect creations who have all the advantages of an auteur and none of the inconveniences. Cahiers: People like Luigi Comencini. Rivette: Comencini, yes, or what Joseph Losey became, etc. They are auteurs for promotional purposes. At the same time, this mix is amusing. I am not at all against mixing things, because I believe that cinema always has survived, and can only survive, on misunderstandings and chaos. Just as Jean Renoir made nearly three quarters of his greatest pre-war films with more or less shady producers. Now the profession has been frightfully cleaned up; irregularities have not become impossible, fortunately—they still exist—but they are harder and harder to get away with. There are other conditions that promise 165

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misunderstandings, and we must hope they will last. The fact that there are fake auteurs like Comencini, who are grouped together almost on the same level as Bergman, Fellini, or Bresson, might enable Bresson to make further films. So long live misunderstandings and long live chaos, because cinema lives only from them! It lives not only on bluff and imposture, but on misunderstanding, really! It started with The Birth of a Nation [1915, D. W. Griffith], maybe even before, and it hasn’t stopped since, in different forms according to the times, the periods, the circumstances. So I believe the only question that concerns all directors is this: given the circumstances, what misunderstanding can I turn to my profit? Cahiers: You told us earlier that you were annoyed by what Joseph L. Mankiewicz recently said about producers on television. Rivette: Yes, because Mankiewicz himself always holds to this kind of producer talk! I only saw part of the Jean Douchet broadcast, but that’s what struck me. It’s always the same talk, the same as Irving Thalberg: “What are these people who call themselves directors and who juggle lenses and camera movements?” It’s the discourse that Hollywood has always held vis-à-vis Orson Welles, for instance. I think that Mankiewicz ascribes to this discourse. It’s René Clair, Mankiewicz . . . René Clair, Mankiewicz, it’s all the same! They are fundamentally screenwriter-producers, and only secondarily directors. It’s normal that Mankiewicz should be against Thalberg, that is, against his boss and not against the producer, because he is the producer. Mankiewicz was a producer before the war and he has been the producer of most of his films. The conflict with Cleopatra [1963] is also a conflict with Darryl F. Zanuck, the big boss. I still think that All about Eve [1950, Joseph L. Mankiewicz] is a failed Broadway piece, and that it’s not for nothing that Mankiewicz left after the first scene of Cocteau’s Monstres sacrés (Sacred Monsters, 1940; not a good Cocteau play, by the way) because, as I see it, the first scene is so powerful that one cannot write the ending, or if one does, one is doomed to churn out a scenario à la Henri Bernstein. Either one drops the subject, or one ends up with something as bad as the third act of Monstres sacrés or the final scenes between George Sanders and Anne Baxter in Eve, of which I have a horrific memory. The truth is, I really liked Mankiewicz’s films from the 1950s, and when I saw some of them again, it was maybe in passionate circumstances. I know that was the case for Eve. I was working on a project with Jeanne Moreau and Juliet Berto where the first scene was that of 166

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Monstres sacrés, and when I saw Mankiewicz’s film again at that time at the Cinémathèque Française, I was deeply disconcerted because I was immersed in my project. So, of course, I reacted violently. Cahiers: When you see films, or see them again, you always react very passionately. I always have the feeling that you’re interested in all of cinema, not only the “great” films, auteur films. Rivette: It depends, as for all of us! There are periods when I’m more open than others. There is one thing that one never talks about, or rarely: the possibility of seeing a bad film, solely because one sees it in a particular state, on a particular day, at a particular time. One always speaks of films as if they were absolutes; yet we always see them in particular circumstances, be it only because of the different projection conditions of each theater. All of that matters enormously. So, it often happens that I see a film I know has objective value and yet sit through it absolutely bored, even though I know, at the moment I’m watching it, that I will find it remarkable if I watch it again in three months’ time; and vice versa. In other words, there is a pulp aspect to cinema, which shouldn’t be lost. I mean that in “pulp literature” one also, suddenly, comes across the série noire, Georges Simenon and others . . . there is always a moment where literature recognizes its own. And one of the strengths of cinema has been that great mix, and it’s thanks to this that Renoir could make films in the pre-war period, because they were presented as films by Julien Duvivier. To come back to your question, people who go to, say, one film every two weeks and tell themselves, “I will see the great films, but not the others, not the commercial movies,” I think those people have no chance of really seeing cinema. I think that cinema is only accessible to those who accept that they must consume the “mainstream.” On the other hand, the consumers of mainstream cinema who reject Marguerite Duras, Robert Bresson, Jean-Marie Straub, or Werner Schroeter are also people who refuse cinema. That said, it’s a question of lifestyle: there are those whose daily schedule includes two hours to watch a movie, others who prefer to read or listen to music. Cahiers: You are, as far as we know, one of the persons who watches the most films, who frequents the most obscure theaters. And television? Rivette: I have no relationship with television. It’s not a willed refusal. First, because I’m never at home; there, too, it’s a question of lifestyle. 167

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I have on occasion seen films on television at friends’ homes, and since I’m not used to it, I’ve always had the impression that I was not watching the film, that I was seeing something else, a reflection. It was not a real connection! I agree with what Jean Eustache says: television is great for a second viewing, but not for discovering a film. It’s a bit like seeing a film again on the editing table. And when I speak with people who’ve seen on television a film I saw earlier on the screen, I always have the impression that they haven’t seen quite the same film. But maybe that’s wrong . . . Cahiers: With tape recorders and cassettes, one can establish a new relationship to film. I imagine that someone could decide to watch again only one scene of a film he likes, for example the airplane scene in North by Northwest [1978]. That creates a new relationship to the film, a little crazy, a little suspect, rather anti-cultural. Rivette: It’s not at all anti-cultural. On the contrary, I think that’s what cinematic culture really is. Cahiers: Isn’t seeing too many films a little stultifying? Rivette: I don’t think so. Why? Cahiers: Because the weight of cinephilia seems to inhibit many young directors. Rivette: I think it’s inhibiting because they haven’t seen many films. The people who were the most influenced by Resnais, Godard, it’s because they discovered cinema with them, without seeing these two in the midst of all the American films that one imbibed earlier—that and the weight of the Cinémathèque Française. They were born to cinema with Alain Resnais and Jean-Luc Godard, in a sense. Of course that must be inhibiting! Cahiers: When you see a film, do you put yourself in the position of the director: “Let’s see, I would have done this like that”? Rivette: There’s no rule. One always does it a bit, especially with French films, because we are closer to them than to American movies, which always remain, even now, further removed, somewhat mythical.

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Cahiers: It seems to us that there are two poles in your cinema. One hyper-organized, codified, and the other more laissez-faire. Noroît would belong to the first and Merry-Go-Round to the latter. Rivette: Merry-Go-Round is the only time it really happened that way. For L’Amour fou and Out 1, we had a precise project. Not so for Merry-Go-Round. For L’Amour fou, which rapidly became a thirtypage narrative, all the details of the film were improvised as we went along, but the general line had been conceived from the beginning: we had talked about it at length with the actors, Bulle Ogier and JeanPierre Kalfon. It took root, it developed in all directions. Out 1 also had a very precise structure—the relations between the people, their work; only the ending was left blank, open, and we filmed it on the last days, based on the what had gone before. Merry-Go-Round, on the other hand, was, at the beginning, simply a matter of economic necessity, linked to the four-film series we’d proposed to the Centre at the beginning of 1975. It came just after Céline et Julie vont en bateau and the project was then simply called “Les filles de feu,” a label, no more. I overestimated my strength. More precisely, I continue to think that the project was attractive and feasible but I was not able to see it through, since the idea was to make four films with no direct relation to each other, except for certain actresses who would have evolved such that if one played the lead role in one film, she would play a minor role in another, and so forth. The relationship among the four films was very vague, the frame very hazy. There was a progression from one film to the next, of progressive complications, linked to the effect of the music on the action. Each film had a greater or lesser link to a particular genre: the first was a love story, the second draws on the fantasy genre, the third started out as a sort of western, an adventure film, and the fourth was to be a musical comedy. We began with number two: it was the screenplay that had taken shape the fastest, the actors were there, and I imperatively wanted to exploit the winter theme. That was Duelle. We continued with number three, after just one month’s pause, Noroît, the western-turned-adventure flick, and a month later, in August, we began filming the first of the four, the love story, and that’s when, quite simply, I broke down physically. As I said, I had overestimated my own strength. Cahiers: Why four films at the same time? Rivette: In the first place because (since the filmmaker does not enjoy 169

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the same status in relation to his characters as the Balzacian novelist does) it is the only way of being able to establish a specific “circulation” between these films, with certain characters and certain décors reappearing from one film to another under different lights, contradictory or complementary. But mainly to see “what happens” if four stories, whose respective genres would theoretically make them very different from each other, are filmed in one burst: how the interplay of reciprocal influences from the four productions would function, the interactions between the casts, their attitudes, their relationships—and what might be modified (accentuated, influenced, transformed) by this interplay. Of course, in making four films one after the other in a limited time, other methods would have to be envisioned, which should in their turn transform the very nature of these four films. First, starting from the basic principle of each of the fictions, the building of not so much a traditional scenario as a canvas: a construction, a framework of some fifteen block-sequences. Evolving parallel in time, the four stories are all divided into three main sections, three acts, corresponding to the three lunar phases (from new moon to full, return of the new moon, then finally full moon again—therefore with the same number of transitions from darkness to light) that circumscribe the forty days of Carnival. Then, during shooting, each “unit” (each block-sequence) will be subjected to a method designed to break down not only conventional dramatic techniques but also the more recent conventions of improvisation, with all the prolixities and clichés it entails (hesitations, provocations, etc.), and to establish an écriture, or form of writing, based on actions, movements, attitudes—the actor’s “gestural,” in other words. The ambition of these films is to discover a new approach to acting in the cinema, where speech, reduced to essential phrases, to precise formulas, would play a role of “poetic” punctuation. Not a return to the silent cinema, neither pantomime nor choreography: something else, where the movement of bodies, their counterpoint, their inscription within the screen space, would be the basis of the mise-en-scène. In order to enable us to make a definitive crossing of this frontier that separates traditional acting from the kind we are looking for, we required the constant presence during shooting of musicians (different instruments and styles of music according to each film) who would improvise during the filming of sequences, their improvisation dependent on the actors’ playing, the latter also being modified by the musicians’ own inventions (recorded in direct sound along with the dialogue and the “stage noises,” properly speaking). 170

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The interaction of our four films will thus be redoubled by the progressive accentuation, from one film to the next, of these principles of mise-en-scène: from the first film (Histoire de Marie and Julien), where they will function as an element of dislocation and strangeness within a dramatic construct that was still following the rules of romantic fiction—by way of the fantasy/horror film and the musical— to the fourth film (The Revenger), where the various aspects are to be driven to paroxysm (all the characters surrounding our three heroines are to be carried off by the dancers of Carolyn Carlson’s company). To create one’s own space through the movements of one’s body, to occupy and traverse the spaces imposed by the décors and the camera’s field, to move and act within (and in relation to) the simultaneous musical space: these are the three parameters on which our actors were going to attempt to base their work. Cahiers: With whom were you working? Rivette: With Eduardo de Gregorio, Marilù Parolini, and Bertrand van Effenterre. Eduardo was the most energetic interlocutor, but the others also played an important role. As for number four, the musical comedy I wanted to film with Anna Karina in the lead role, it remained rather vague; we had many ideas but we had started on a screenplay that wasn’t very good, a very bad starting point, and that’s why we pushed back the film till the following year. All the more so because with number one, we already knew we were no longer holding up. I really regret it, because I don’t know if the film would have been good, but I liked the subject and the two actors, too: Leslie Caron and Albert Finney. And so two years later (by which time the money for the two films had disappeared elsewhere, very precisely to Bresson), Stéphane Tchalgadjieff found himself in front of the Commission on Advances, to report on the contract we had signed for the four films, having to account for the two films that had not been made. He finally struck a deal whereby we had to make only one film instead of two. The Centre du Cinéma wanted either the first, aborted film, or the fourth of the group, “Filles du feu, scènes de la vie parallèle.” But as far as I was concerned, there was no way it would be either of these two projects, and so it became Merry-Go-Round, which was a different project altogether. It so happened that Stéphane had been in contact with Maria Schneider: he had proposed her another film that she turned downed, saying, however, that if Rivette wanted to make a film, she would accept. So we started with that idea, with Maria. I met her and asked 171

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her if there was an actor she would like to work with. She told me Joe Dallessandro. And so a month before we began filming—I didn’t know either actor—we started work with the two actors, and after eight days, things were going very badly. It was like a machine that, once set in motion, must continue running despite changing regimes, forced or arbitrary accelerations, until the energy is all burned up, exhausted. That’s not at all how we filmed L’Amour fou, even if there, too, the spectator feels he’s witnessing an encounter. I had seen both films by Marc’O, Les Bargasses [1965, Marc’O, a.k.a. Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin] first and then Les Idoles [1968]. Les Bargasses made such an impression on me that I asked Bulle Ogier to play a supporting role in La Religieuse, but she couldn’t because she was already working on Les Idoles. The project was in place, however, and very quickly took a shape that we never questioned. We filmed the scenes we had planned. It developed but it didn’t change. Cahiers: So Merry-Go-Round is unique? Rivette: With Merry-Go-Round everything changed. It’s an exaggeration to say that we placed Maria and Joe together in front of the camera and waited to see what would happen. We had a starting point, of course, and then we made up the beginning of a story, with a father who had disappeared, but all along we told ourselves that this is just a pretext for Maria and Joe to get to know each other. I like that idea: two people get together because a third, who has arranged to meet them, does not show up. They have no choice but to get to know each other. It’s a situation I imagined in the context of the Resistance. Thinking about it again later, I believe it was the subject of Robert Hossein’s Nuit des espions [Double Agents, 1959]. And since I didn’t feel like making a film about the Resistance or the terrorist underground, it became that more banal situation, two people convoked by a third who is only the sister of the one and the girlfriend of the other. But since the relationship between Maria and Joe rapidly became hostile, we were forced to develop the storyline; from a mere pretext it took on a disproportionate importance. Maybe that gives the film a certain vagabond charm, I don’t know, but it really is a film with a first half-hour that’s quite coherent, and then it searches for itself three times—three times searches for a way out . . .

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Jacques Rivette, “Press Conference at Cannes” From Cahiers du Cinéma, no. 445 [June 1991]: 34. Translated by David Phelps.

Question: In connection with La belle noiseuse, could you say something on the subject of the artist and the model? Jacques Rivette: When I was turning around this idea of making a film from Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” [1831], what made me think that it was possible was an interview with Isabella Rossellini— in the magazine Marie-Claire, I think—about the fact that she was both an actress in the movies and a model for Lancôme. She explained that, for her, the work of a model in front of a photographer was as important as that of an actress in front of a camera. She had a connection as strong with the photographer as with the director. This was the impetus for the story: a young woman who is forced to be a model and, at first, does it as a challenge, then is taken in by the performance. Question: What about the painter alone? Rivette: I saw, in the 1960s, a number of paintings by Bernard Dufour that really made an impression on me, mainly in the way in which the figure emerged on the canvas through, even in that era, non-figurative, gestural outlines of the body. So I thought of him very quickly. Since he didn’t have any exhibitions in the ’70s or ’80s, or I missed them, it was only then that I saw his more recent canvases, which were of the female body, fat decapitated nudes, missing the top and the bottom. It then became obvious that, if Bernard agreed, he would become the hand of Frenhofer. There’s a certain approach behind film projects that unfurl happily—which was the case with this one, in any case concerning the script and the shooting; after that we’ll see—and Bernard was immediately to be part of this project’s approach, which was also the opinion of the producer, Martine Marignac. And when I was a witness to the first meeting, in Paris, between Michel Piccoli and Bernard Dufour, face to face, it was clear that Frenhofer existed. I had already seen the setting of the Château d’Assas with its living room and salon—the two chimeras—and we told ourselves that Frenhofer 173

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would also be a chimera, with the body and the face of Michel and the hand of Bernard. Question: Is Balzac France’s Goethe? Rivette: I kept the reference to Balzac’s short story because I found that Frenhofer is a pretty name and that La belle noiseuse is a magical title that always made me dream. Even before I read “The Unknown Masterpiece”, someone had talked with me and I knew that there was a painting in it called La belle noiseuse. We didn’t call it The Unknown Masterpiece, since that tells a different story, which we couldn’t preserve from Balzac. Balzac is rigorously unadaptable to cinema, to television, or to whatever. In French literature, I think that Balzac is the greatest idea-bearer. He’s the equivalent of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for the Germans. He’s our Goethe. Question: Is drawing a kind of capturing? Rivette: In a sense. We never asked Bernard Dufour to restart a drawing, or to make any attempt beforehand. I’m repelled by preliminary sketches, unless they’re absolutely indispensable. First we filmed for fifteen days or so—which correspond to the first hour of the film, the prologue—so that, more or less, everyone could meet everyone else. Next, we entered into the workshop, where we filmed chronologically everything that happens there, to have this progression of drawings, of Frenhofer and Marianne’s relations, of the relations of Michel with Bernard as much as with Emmanuelle. Question: Is this another way of playing Cowboys and Indians? Rivette: It’s obvious that all the first poses of Emmanuelle have been determined by Bernard. It’s he who offered up the three lines spoken by Michel: “Right, arms hanging; look at me, but don’t stare.” Later, everything was completely collective. For me, the cinema is interesting when it’s given over to a number of people. This is one way of making films. I’m not saying it’s the only way, nor the best, but it’s the one I like, like a game, with partners, as when you play Cowboys and Indians. In the cinema, it’s another way of playing Cowboys and Indians. Question: Which artist exposes himself the most in the production process? 174

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Rivette: A director doesn’t put himself in danger as much as a painter in his relationship with his models, his actresses. A director is a hider. He is hidden behind the camera. And I—what’s more—I hide myself behind plenty of people, since it’s my screenwriting partners, Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, who have been equal parts of the adventure since the start and during the entire time of filming. Question: Is directing a matter of possession or invention? Rivette: There’s one sentence in the film—I don’t know if it’s from Christine or Pascal, it’s their collective style in this case and it doesn’t matter—that says, “Possession, possession . . . Possession is impossible.” Of course, a painter, a writer, a director fantasizes over this idea of possession, but knows quite well that it doesn’t exist. I’m possibly possessive with the actors, but it’s only to ask them for freedom, for invention. Question: Do you have a painterly approach to the cinema, or do you just approach painting from the point of view of a film director? Rivette: Of course, you can view my films as a metaphor for cinema itself, but I don’t realize it until after the fact. Here, it was in the editing that I reflected that my work was once again possibly connected to meta-cinema. After the fact, one could view my work as a metaphor for cinema. But it’s not obligatory. Many filmmakers wish to make films that try to talk about another art, painting. It turns out that two Frenchmen this year, with means that I suppose are different, have had this exact wish. It’s a coincidence, but I believe that this coincidence corresponds to something. Painting is one of the great temptations of cinema, and at the same time it’s not a temptation, since everyone knows quite well that cinema is the opposite of painting. It’s an impure art, complex, between the novel, theater, painting, music, dance, etc., and it’s normal that at this somewhat indeterminate place in the middle of the traditional arts, one wants to sometimes view cinema in a certain direction, or sometimes in another . . . I would love, for example, to make a film about dancing, but it would be very complicated. Once again, we’ve tried to make a film that doesn’t talk about painting, but borders on it, approaches it. So that it might make a stab down the path towards painting. When the painting is really about to start, my film withdraws with respect towards what’s going on in Frenhofer’s workshop; one passes to the other side of the table and no 175

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longer sees the work. At that moment, the film leans towards Liz, Julienne, towards all the other characters, or towards the relationship between Frenhofer and Liz. The film can no longer talk about painting, or, then again, it would need to be very, very long—the time it took Cézanne to make a picture.

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“THE CAPTIVE LOVER”

Frédéric Bonnaud, “The Captive Lover” From Les Inrockuptibles, March 25, 1998. Translated by Kent Jones.

Frédéric Bonnaud: Who are your favorite film directors? Jacques Rivette: I guess I like a lot of directors. Or at least I try to. I try to stay attentive to all the greats and also the less-than-greats. Which I do, more or less. I see a lot of movies, and I don’t stay away from anything. Jean-Luc Godard sees a lot too, but he doesn’t always stay till the end. For me, the film has to be incredibly bad to make me want to pack up and leave. And the fact that I see so many films really seems to amaze certain people. Many filmmakers pretend that they never see anything, which has always seemed odd to me. Everyone accepts the fact that novelists read novels, that painters go to exhibitions and inevitably draw on the work of the great artists who came before them, that musicians listen to old music in addition to new music . . . so why do people think it’s strange that filmmakers—or people who have the ambition to become filmmakers—should see movies? When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980. Their films would probably be better if they’d seen a few more films, which runs counter to this idiotic theory that you run the risk of being influenced if you see too much. Actually, it’s when you see too little that you run the risk of being influenced. If you see a lot, you can choose the films you want to be influenced by. Sometimes the choice isn’t conscious, but there are some things in life that are far more powerful than we are, and that affect us profoundly. If I’m influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, Roberto Rossellini, or Jean Renoir without realizing it, so much the better. If I do something sub-Hitchcock, I’m already very happy. Jean Cocteau used to say: “Imitate, and what is personal will eventually come despite yourself.” You can always try.

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Mary Wiles, “Jacques Rivette: Interview” From Mary M. Wiles, Jacques Rivette [Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2012], 139–149. Translated by Yolanda Broad & Mary Wiles; Paris, June 1999.

Mary Wiles: How did you come to make films? Jacques Rivette: It was Cocteau, he’s the guilty party. [Cocteau was responsible for the dialogue of Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Ladies of the Park; 1945, Robert Bresson), the film that Rivette saw on the day of his arrival in Paris in 1949.] It was while reading Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête [his journal written between 1945 and 1946 as he was filming La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast, 1946] that I got into cinema, wanted to do it, that I wanted to get together with people, not try to work by myself. Cocteau had the status of a well-known writer at that time, having had successes in the theater, having written books like Les Enfants terribles [1929]. But, even so, movies were something of ill repute at the time; film was regarded as an odd line of work. And now, well, now, it’s become a program, not just in universities, but even in lycées, and this is far worse. The films lycée students see, when they see La Règle du jeu [The Rules of the Game; 1939, Jean Renoir], they’re thinking, “Ooh, la, la, La Règle du jeu!” the way my generation thought, “Ooh, la, la, Bérénice!” [1670, Jean Racine] or “Ooh, la, la, Le Cid!” [1636, Pierre Corneille]. Wiles: Were there other points of reference for you from postwar Paris theater? Rivette: Yes, Peter Brook is, perhaps, the most obvious. In any case, in France, there aren’t many great playwrights. In the twentieth century, there are only two. Wiles: Who? Rivette: Paul Claudel and Jean Genet. And, in any case, Genet is very uneven. And Samuel Beckett isn’t French, you know, so you can’t say Beckett is a French author, even if he wrote certain plays directly in French. I think that he wrote En attendant Godot first in French [Waiting for Godot, 1948; first performed, 1953], and then he 178

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translated it later. He’s a very great author, but it’s hard to fit him into the history of French theater. He’s more Ireland; he’s an Irishman from Paris. I met him only once, by chance, in the ’70s. He was impressive, you know, his bearing: he was so handsome, so tall, so calm. Wiles: If you had to describe one of your films as autobiographical, which one would you choose? And why? All of them? Rivette: None of them. Yes, two of them have some autobiographical aspects. It’s obvious. The first one, Paris nous appartient, and then L’Amour fou, where everything is transposed. I do remember that one of the reasons that I used Jean-Pierre Kalfon in L’Amour fou was that he didn’t resemble me at all. Everything was different, but there were some moments of . . . solicitude; there are always the various feelings, the nuances that come into play, but all the rest is mine. Whenever there are contributions by the actors, by the co-scenarists, I’m delighted. The more that ideas get brought to me, the happier I am. I am not the least bit a “Monsieur, Je Regrette” [Mr. I Regret], but I’m not at all Monsieur Ingmar Bergman, either. I admire Bergman tremendously, but, well, someone who uses his life to write fabulous scenarios, and then film them just as fabulously, this Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde aspect, I don’t understand how it works. It’s another way of being. Wiles: You have mentioned Kenji Mizoguchi’s influence on your work, especially in La Religieuse. Were you also influenced by Japanese Noh theater? Rivette: I have seen Noh performances once or twice here in Paris but what you can see in France, or elsewhere . . . what is shown everywhere in the West . . . is extremely condensed, because if they showed a real Noh play, which actually doesn’t last all that long—but still, a Noh play does go on, so they condense it down to a half-hour, three-quarters of an hour, and the plays last much longer in Tokyo, you know, in real performances. Yes, I’ve seen some, but, in any case, Mizoguchi, he isn’t anything at all like Noh; he’s a lot closer to Kabuki. He did several films on Kabuki actors. [Rivette is referring here to Mizoguchi’s trilogy on the theater of the Meiji era, Zangiku Monogatari (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum, 1939), Naniwa Onna (The Women of Osaka, 1940), and Geido Ichidai Otoko (The Life of an Actor, 1941)]. There is the film where a couple attends a Noh performance—I believe that it’s Uwasa No Onna [The Woman 179

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of the Rumor, 1954]. All I know of Japanese consists of Mizoguchi’s film titles. Wiles: In your films, you often use long takes. Could you comment on this? Rivette: Ah, yes, continuous shots, because they’re more enjoyable to do, and the actors like them better. Almost all actors would much rather act, you know, without being interrupted. At the same time it means you can go faster. In France, we go faster because we’re poorer. There are people in America, like Cassavetes: he filmed things that way, sometimes. Wiles: Were you influenced by John Cassavetes? Rivette: Well, for my generation, Cassavetes is someone we admired a lot when we saw his films, but you can’t say we were influenced by him, because we were more or less the same generation; we were contemporaries, each on his own side of the Atlantic. By the time we saw his first real film, which was Faces [1968], the film that represents what will become his true cinema, we were already well on our way. In France, Cassavetes’s first big success was a film I like a lot, but it isn’t the film I like the best: it was Husbands [1970], which was his first big success in Paris with the general public. Faces was never released here in commercial theaters; we finally saw it at the Cinémathèque Française. The only other one that was commercially released here was Minnie and Moskowitz [1971]. I’m not exactly like Cassavetes, because he’s someone who films even faster than I do. Wiles: Could you comment on the relation between women and magic in Céline et Julie vont en bateau? Rivette: It was Juliet Berto who wanted to do that bit with the fake magician. I think that it’s an idea she came up with, like an enormous number of the film’s ideas. It was either Juliet, or it was Dominique Labourier who proposed them as we were talking, chatting, like this. It’s really hard to remember twenty-five years later who said this, who said that. There were so many conversations where we were just having a lot of fun. I never had as much fun. I don’t believe I ever laughed as much as during those sequences, during the few weeks when we were all talking with each other, when we tossed out a lot of ideas, ten times more ideas than there are in the film, loads of 180

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improbable ideas; we were saying whatever went through our heads, so the film is very “reasonable,” and funny. Ah, well, it was thanks to Juliet, so, I think it was she who wanted to do that bit, and later, it definitely influenced the film that I wanted to make. And then I came upon those books on the Carnival. I think that for me, it’s easier to believe that a woman could be a magician than a man. But it’s purely fictional, you know. It’s easier when it’s Juliet or Bulle Ogier or Geraldine Chaplin or . . . well, you see. They, yes, I can believe that they have magic powers. Wiles: Certainly. Rivette: Or waves, in any case. Geraldine, she’s someone who, the powers she has, it’s strange. It’s been my pleasure to work with gifted actresses, very intelligent, very different, like Bulle, like Juliet, you know, like Nathalie Richard, but I have truly never met anyone like Geraldine. She is someone who, at the very moment that you begin a sentence, replies, “Yes, I’ve got it,” and in fact, she does, she understands everything; she’s amazing. There’s no reason to tell her the scene because she’s already understood it. Her mind works at lightning speed. That’s how we did Noroît; the film was a disaster, but I have good memories of it because filming it was really crazy, in four weeks, at the ends of the earth in Brittany, you can just imagine . . . Wiles: How did you discover the play by Cyril Tourneur, The Revenger’s Tragedy [1606]? Rivette: I’m not the one who thought of it; it was Eduardo de Gregorio with whom I was working, with whom I had already worked on Céline et Julie vont en bateau and Duelle. He had seen—I don’t know whether in Rome or in another city—a staging of the play where gender roles were reversed, where the male roles were played by women and the female roles by men. The play wasn’t successful, and neither was the film, because people aren’t interested in seeing women as killers. Wiles: I think that was an excellent idea. Rivette: Ah, well, there’s one person who liked the film a lot, when it was shown in New York, and that was Susan Sontag. Wiles: Ah, yes? 181

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Rivette: Yes, yes. No, I was delighted—I mean, someone intelligent, thoughtful. Wiles: Yes, she is a highly respected American critic. Rivette: Well, I remember having attended a projection of Noroît in London; it was arduous. For the British, it was just not at all their thing, so . . . Plus the fact that the film opens with a title that reads, “A small island, off the coast of a larger one.” I had never given it any thought, but suddenly, I realize, I’m in London, and I say to myself, “Good lord! They’re thinking it’s Ireland!” Ah, yes, that was in ’76 or ’77. Oh, my, did they ever not like it! Tourneur isn’t Shakespeare, though. The former is hardly ever played. Wiles: In the United States, either. Even for Americans, the language is incomprehensible because it’s so archaic. Rivette: But this language is purposefully medieval, it’s fifteenthcentury English, essentially, and written at the very beginning of the seventeenth. We had two English-language actresses, Geraldine and Kika Markham, whom we’d met because she was in François Truffaut’s film Les deux anglaises et le continent [Two English Girls, 1971]. Kika was the one who helped Geraldine learn her lines. It’s the only time that Geraldine made mistakes, with the quotations from Tourneur. Even Geraldine had difficulty with Tourneur’s English, which, in all honesty, is extremely difficult because, again, it’s medieval English. Wiles: Do you believe that it mixes well with Celtic myth? Rivette: Ah, yes, yes. This is entirely from Jean Markale’s book (or books) I had read on Celtic myths. I remember the first projection of Duelle that we did in Cannes, not as part of the competition, but for the Cannes fortnight, and, generally, people hated it; and one of the rare people who spoke to me when leaving the film was Jean Rouch, who said to me, you know, this film consists entirely of myths that are also African myths. It all relates back to African myths, because that was his reasoning. He made that statement to me on the way out, so I told him, “No, I swiped it all from this book on Celtic myths,” and he said to me, “Well, what do you know. But I know all those stories; I know them from Africa.”

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Wiles: Does the music of the Cohen-Solal brothers (Robert and Jean) come from African music? Rivette: You’ll have to ask them that. No, I don’t think so, no. They’re still at it; they’ve always had a group. I don’t remember anymore who thought of them; maybe it was Bernadette Lafont who knew them, who’d met them at a performance. I hardly knew them at the time and got to know them while filming. They were terrific. There’s a lot in their music that’s related to Tourneur’s text. They try to produce music that’s very Celtic, using more or less Irish or Scottish components. Wiles: After watching Jean-Luc Godard’s Prénom: Carmen [1983], I noticed that the placement of the musicians resembles the way musicians intervene in Merry-Go-Round. Rivette: Yes, but Merry-Go-Round—this was filmed under very difficult circumstances. I was just recovering from more than a year of illness, and Maria Schneider was in failing health; that is, there were two people in poor health during filming, and also, there wasn’t any money at all, not at all. It was catastrophic. Sometimes it would be me, sometimes Maria, who would say, “We’re stopping, we’re stopping,” but, then, we’d keep on going anyhow; the crew would say, “No, no, we have to keep going,” and so, we kept on going. But at a certain moment we ended up with a montage, and I thought it would be good to have some musicians. This is the only time that I wanted music to come in afterwards to give the film a bit of energy. I already knew Barre Phillips, since Juliet Berto was making a film on which he did the music [Guns (1980, Robert Kramer)]. During the editing a year later, a year after filming, two films were made, essentially to get their sound into Merry-Go-Round and, obviously, to get their images on the image track. It wasn’t really much like the musicians in Duelle and Noroît, who were completely integrated into the filming, and you can see it. In Merry-Go-Round, it’s montage. JeanLuc Godard rehearsed the Beethoven quartet sequence, and he also filmed the quartet at the same time, as far as I know, even if they are completely independent from the rest of the film. Perhaps he shot them on the side, afterwards, but I wouldn’t know about that. You’d have to ask him. In Merry-Go-Round, music is an attempt to add a little tension to the film, which heads off in all directions, with some moments I like a lot. Wiles: Why did you feel the need to return to the theater after La Bande des quatre? 183

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Rivette: After La Bande des quatre, I was so pleased with the work we did with the actresses that I wanted to continue. And since they also wanted to do some theater, we got together a small group to work with each other on some classics; Pierre Corneille, Jean Racine, and Pierre de Marivaux are what we were working on. And then at the end of a few months, they wanted to do a real performance, and that’s when we dropped Marivaux, which was too hard. But we kept—and we should just have kept—Corneille. Because it was already too much, Corneille and Racine. It was just that we wanted to continue to work on those classics . . . on Corneille, which was the driving force. And besides, the work that I did with them and with the guys who had joined them was much more interesting to me—the play by Corneille, that is, Tite et Bérénice [1670]—than working on Racine’s plays, on Bajazet [1672] in particular. Bajazet is fabulous, I can’t speak ill of Racine, but you grasp it all in the very first reading. That’s it, we said, we understand it all, but then, afterwards, what were we going to do with it? Whereas Corneille is hard, even for the French, he’s hard. Wiles: You can imagine that for us Americans . . . Rivette: It’s like Latin for us. It isn’t French. All of those authors were fluent readers of Latin and Greek, but Corneille couldn’t read Greek, and that’s a big difference between him and others. Racine read Greek, and Corneille read Latin. And he read so much Latin that it’s almost Mallarmé, it’s so dense. Corneille’s Tite et Bérénice, it’s true that it’s a hard play, it’s overloaded, each verse says three things, and its characters are infinitely rich. Infinitely more things are happening between Titus and Bérénice, infinitely more things are happening in Corneille’s play, than in Racine’s, where nothing happens. Tite at Bérénice isn’t the Corneille play that I like the best ,though, even if it’s got fabulous language. It’s fabulous as a poem, but it’s like Shakespeare for you. As a matter of fact, I gather it’s hard to translate, just as Goethe is untranslatable, just as Pushkin is untranslatable, just as Dante is untranslatable—well, like all the major poets. I don’t know, but, in any case, Tite at Bérénice was difficult to stage. Wiles: I’ve read a few of Corneille’s plays but have never seen them performed on stage. Rivette: In France, and I’m not the only one, once you get hooked on Corneille, you’re lost. It’s very deep. He’s an author I find very dense, so full of history, of thought. He’s a very rich author. 184

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Wiles: You cite him in your film. Rivette: Yes, in fact, the theatrical passage I prefer in La Bande des quatre is the passage of Corneille; there’s just the one, it’s the little scene performed by Laurence Côte and Nathalie Richard, which is from the final play by Corneille; it’s one of his most beautiful ones, Suréna [1674], and it’s going to end badly, and they know it right from the start. [In the film, Act I from Suréna is staged, in which Suréna, a Parthian general, and Eurydice, daughter of the King of Armenia, declare their tragic love for each other, knowing that each has been promised to another.] They are magnificent, both of them, Nathalie and Laurence: Laurence plays the male role of Suréna, and Nathalie, Eurydice. (Pause.) What is the film, if I may ask you, that made you want to do your work on me? Wiles: Paris nous appartient. Rivette: Ah, yes. For me, this is a film with a rapport. Wiles: Yes . . . Rivette: Okay, it is very naïve. It is a terminally naïve film that made some forty years ago, and it’s the film of a sixteen-year-old child, but maybe its naïveté is where its strength lies. Wiles: And I love Haut bas fragile. Rivette: Ah, yes, well, me too. Well, that’s a more recent film. I really like it. It’s one of the ones I like a lot. It’s a film we did in a very short time, for purely practical reasons, so it wasn’t planned. It is based on the taxi-dance halls in New York from the 1920s. Wiles: This works so well. Rivette: It’s a film we did only because Jeanne la pucelle was such a wreck from the point of view of production costs. Even though we did it for very little money, it was a bit too much; and so my producer, Martine Marignac, with whom I’d worked ever since L’Amour par terre, felt the need for another film, and for it to be very inexpensive, so, I was asked to do it. I was told, “Well, Jacques, we’re going to shoot another film very fast and for very little money.” I didn’t have any ideas, so what I did was to phone Nathalie Richard and then 185

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I phoned Julienne Denicourt, both of whom had previously had secondary roles in my films—Nathalie, in La Bande des quatre; Marianne, in La belle noiseuse—and then Laurence Côte, who came later. Laurence wanted to tell this story, which was Laurence’s story, so we worked it in. Wiles: Was the film’s title and its relation to the three girls based on a notion of music, for instance, high, low, fragile, slow . . . Rivette: The title came later. Oh, people were opposed. They were very opposed to that title. I liked it a lot. Wiles: I still haven’t seen Secret défense because it hasn’t yet been released in the United States. Rivette: I’m sorry. And in Paris, it isn’t shown a lot. It’s really the story of Electra. Electra is the motor that drives the story, if I dare say so. And, in fact, I didn’t think of Sophocles, I thought of Jean Giraudoux, who wrote a version of Electra, rather different from the one by Sophocles, to the extent that Aegisthus plays a very important role in the play by Giraudoux. In Giraudoux’s play, Aegisthus defends himself by saying that he killed Agamemnon but that he had a good reason to do it! Oh, ha, ha! While in Aeschylus, he hardly appears at all, and in Sophocles, he has almost no lines, the poor guy. In Euripides, he never appears, and the few lines he has are those reported by a messenger. Giraudoux’s Electra [1937] is not very well known. The part was performed on the stage by Renée Devillers, a good actress whom we know from the film by Roger Leenhardt, Les dernières vacances [The Last Vacation, 1948], which was filmed in 1947. Ondine [1939, Giraudoux] itself is a good play because the subject is so strong. One can’t really put Giraudoux on the same plane as Claudel, though . . . or Genet. There’s Cocteau, too, who did loads of plays. There are two or three very fine ones, but the others, they are . . . worthless. But maybe these are written for the actors, because, let’s face it, they are going to ask for plays, so, O.K., he consents and writes them. There is a very fine one that is never staged, which Cocteau wrote for himself, Les chevaliers de la table ronde [The Knights of the Round Table, 1937]. The subject is intoxication. The entire court of King Arthur is intoxicated, and as a result Lancelot falls in love with Guinevere, and so forth. The play is pretty intense. It is entirely consumed with dependency and, for Cocteau, this meant opium. 186

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Wiles: Would you agree that the difference for the spectator between film and theater is the presence of the actor’s body? Rivette: But where does the actor’s body have more presence, in the theater or in cinema? Wiles: That’s the question. Rivette: It depends, it depends, but in the theater, what’s most important is the voice, because the voice is crucial, too. Wiles: I agree. Rivette: But I think an actor’s presence is crucial, as well. Why are there actors who have presence, and others who don’t? There are very fine actors, who act well, who are very intelligent . . . Wiles: Yes . . . Rivette: But finally, so what, who cares? Excuse me, who cares? They don’t exist because nobody’s there, in theater auditoriums, in movie theaters. And then there are others who aren’t very clever, who do whatever, and, zoom, there they are. Wiles: Some actors are charismatic . . . Rivette: If anything is important, it’s the voice. That’s why the idea of dubbing is so monstrous. And so is synchronization by actors. I think, in any case, that American films are so bad because almost all the actors are required to synchronize. Everything is re-done; the sound is re-done. You can see it, and you can hear it, too. Wiles: It’s interesting to me that in Paris nous appartient and Haut bas fragile, it’s music and the absent voice that compel the characters Gérard and Ida to continue searching forever. Rivette: Yes, for me, the voice is one of the two things that theater and cinema share and that give presence to the actor. And the other is the “look.” In cinema, it’s the look that is crucial; in the theater, however, it plays no part. The actor’s look is inconsequential in the theater. What is very important in the theater, though, and also in the cinema, but less so—and usually, it is the actor who decides—is timing. For 187

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me, this is the quality that gives the actor presence on stage; it’s a sense of timing. There’s no other way to say it. There’s no word in French for it. Tempo means something else. In the cinema, the metteur-enscène is supposed to be more or less responsible for this. But if I use sequence shots, it’s so that the actors can share in the control of the timing. So, timing, voice, and the look. In the era of silent film, it was the look that gave presence to the actor, along with the body and the way the actor moves it. All the major directors of silent films had an extraordinary sense of this; in silent films, the actors’ manner is extraordinary, they have such a bearing . . . they know. The greats have so much bearing. There aren’t any actors left nowadays who know how to address the audience in that way. They don’t know how to speak anymore. Ah, no, what has happened in the United States over the last twenty years is disastrous. Wiles: I agree. Rivette: Everything is done by management. Just look how many coproducers there are in the credits. Just look at how many co-producers an American film has. Generally, there are five or six co-producers and three or four scriptwriters, at least. What are all those producers in the credits for? They’re endless. You see five of them, six of them. There are co-producers and associate producers and line producers, who are there on the set, right? Whereas the others, they are in their offices in the process of calling Chicago, New York, etc. Wiles: Right. It’s more of a business than an art. Rivette: Yes, that’s right, but the cinema has always been a business; it used to be a business that was run by people who loved it, and in the theater, too. I think that this sort of thing has also happened on Broadway, for musicals aren’t what they once were. Wiles: When I saw Haut bas fragile, I thought of Vincente Minnelli’s The Band Wagon [1953]. Rivette: Yes, yes, but it’s been transposed. Wiles: Of course. Rivette: In any case, The Band Wagon onstage is a true musical comedy with Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele Astaire . . . right at the 188

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beginning of the thirties. I think that it’s the last musical comedy in which Fred Astaire performed on Broadway with his sister. [The Astaire team performed on Broadway in The Band Wagon in 1931.] Nothing of the story remains in the film, except that several songs come from the musical and other musical comedies by Arthur Schwartz, since he’s the composer. Ah, no, I’m not familiar with musical comedies, except from recordings. I collect all the recordings I can find of Broadway musicals. Wiles: Ah, yes? Rivette: I don’t know whether you go to see them. Do you live in New York? Wiles: No, I live in Florida. Rivette: In that case, you don’t get to see any more musicals than I do. Wiles: Is there any hope for American cinema? Rivette: There are directors like Robert Altman. I really like Altman even if his films are uneven, who seems to be the only one who has any rapport with the actors, who likes them, who shoots them, who does extended shots of them. This occasionally produces very long films and, even then, Geraldine Chaplin told me that she was among those who viewed the rough cut of Nashville [1975, Altman] and the rough cut of A Wedding [1978, Altman], and that there were extraordinary moments in both films that were lost in the editing. Wiles: What do you think of the French cinema now? Rivette: Ah, well, there’s some of everything. It has its strengths and its weaknesses, there are films that are worthless, but . . . there’s a vitality, a vitality, even if I don’t like everything. But, you know, it depends entirely on the gentlemen from Canal+ and on the advances from the Centre du Cinéma, but more on the gentlemen from Canal+ these days. Doing a film without Canal+ is very difficult as soon as it isn’t something that can be shot in five weeks in Paris, the way we filmed Haut bas fragile. Wiles: Yes. In any case, Haut bas fragile is a film that truly possesses a sense of timing; I found this to be so, when I saw it. 189

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Rivette: You can shoot hundreds of minutes per day using sequence shots with, let’s face it, terrific crews and terrific actors, and unless you can do that, as we did in Haut bas fragile, it doesn’t get done. . . . It just doesn’t get done.

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Hélène Frappat, “Secrets and Laws” From La Lettre du cinéma, no. 10 [1999]. Translated by Srikanth Srinivasan.

Hélène Frappat: One of the things that interest you, as Serge Daney once said, is to film work. Jacques Rivette: Yes, yes, well . . . I try to. The idea of work. Because I think it’s impossible to really film it. Frappat: You work towards filming this idea of work. Rivette: Yes, it leads to the idea that films are the story of films. You may say that this is tautological, but I think it isn’t just that . . . or rather, there is a truth in tautology. Forty-five years later, I want to go back to the lines at the beginning and the end of my old article on the genius of Howard Hawks [Cahiers du Cinéma, May 1953]: “That which is, is,” but the second “is,” if done right, doesn’t have the same meaning as the first! So the work of filming work isn’t purely tautological, and at the same time, I think we shouldn’t shun tautology. For example, one of the tautologies we must assert is that films are films. It means a lot of things—it means that a film should be a film, i.e., something that exists in space and time, on screen, before our eyes; but it’s also celluloid that is printed upon, sensitized by both optical and chemical processes that should be taken into account. Light isn’t something magical but is part of the work, and there are individuals whose profession it is to work with light. Frappat: In the idea of mise-en-scène, there is this evidence that you speak about in your article on Hawks. To get to this evidence, must one take quite a detour? Rivette: Yes, in cinema, you take a detour through this machine that is the camera. Even if it was initially a very simple machine—the admirable Lumière camera, which is a small wooden box you can hold in the palm of your hand—it was a machine all the same. Not to mention today’s cameras, which are much more sophisticated than those from thirty years ago, like today’s film rolls that are infinitely more complex than Auguste and Louis Lumière’s film roll. But with 191

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the Lumières’ celluloid, the photographic process intervenes between what the eyes see and what will be on screen: so there’s an activity here that you can’t deny by saying, “It’s magic.” And if I feel like repeating “a film is a film,” it’s also in relation to most critics who are, very often, concerned with a film’s story, possibly its characters, at times the actors, but that only rarely. Yet it seldom matters to them that it’s a film, i.e., something that should have the truth of film, in the sense that Paul Cézanne spoke of the truth of painting, a material truth, which should hold up on the screen just as a painting should hold up on the wall, on the canvas. I admit that it’s very hard to speak about this matter in words, since it’s something on the level of intuition. You get the feeling that it’s either there or not, and this feeling is quite arbitrary. It’s very hard to justify it, and you are tempted to say, “That’s how it is,” following the method of Mr. Alain [a.k.a. Émile-Auguste Chartier], for instance, who, in his writing on works he admired, refused arguments and discussions, preferred examples, and said: “Well, that’s how this one is, and that’s how that one is, and you either agree or you don’t.” The principle is that opinions, like works, should be stated as clearly as possible: take it or leave it. I still think that this is at the heart of Hawks’s aesthetic, as it is of John Ford’s or Cecil B. DeMille’s. Frappat: Do you feel that you’ve returned to Hawks with Secret Defense? Rivette: I hope I hadn’t completely lost sight of him in the meantime! Hawks was one of our rare references for Joan the Maiden: we’d quickly adopted the Western in general, i.e., Hawks and Ford, and of course Roberto Rossellini, as our model for the construction of episodes, the tone of the dialogue, and the relationships between characters. Those were our references. We’d also thought of Jean Renoir at the beginning, but I think he disappeared along the way: what remained were Hawks’s and Ford’s Westerns, and Rossellini. Frappat: At the beginning of The Battles, there is a tracking shot on Joan, who walks along a wall. Then the camera pans to reveal an opening in the wall. That’s from The Searchers [1956, John Ford]! Rivette: I agree, it’s a Western shot in any case; on top of that, she is looking westward at that moment. Now, how could one say that such a film exists and such a film doesn’t? I cited Alain/Chartier, but 192

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ultimately, my main reference (I’m speaking of writers I know well, whom I’ve often read; Éric Rohmer was the one who made me read Alain/Chartier) is Jean Paulhan, whom I read by myself, if I may say so, when I was a teenager in Rouen. There are whole books by Paulhan on this question; not on cinema, but it amounts to the same thing. A Short Preface to All Criticism [1951] is Paulhan’s fundamental book on the subject, except that he asks the question but doesn’t answer it: how is it that we speak of a particular work because we think it’s important, and how is it that we know that all the others, full of good things they may be, aren’t of any importance whatsoever? That’s the most important point; it’s what comes first. We can comment all we want after this, but why do we speak of this work and not that? Why is it that even those who find a work “terrible, monstrous” pick this one out for consideration, and not those around it? How is it that such-and-such a painting, book, music, or film exists, that it has an existence as a painting, as a novel, as a poem, as a symphony, as a film? That’s the fundamental question that everyone dodges. For Charles Baudelaire’s contemporaries, why was it soon evident that Baudelaire was someone to fight over, and that others weren’t? It is especially clear from the nineteenth century onwards, where the idea of conflict is more pronounced, but it was true even before: when we read, for example, Madame de Sévigné [Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné] on Jean Racine, we can see that there was a relentless discussion; with Pierre Corneille, it was the Quarrel of Le Cid [1636]. I’m not saying that the only criterion for a work’s “existence” is conflict, conflict at the moment of its reception, but it’s one of the criteria; admittedly, works that are embraced by everyone right away, in general, don’t interest anyone ten years later. At the same time, if you work towards provoking a conflict, you go wrong grossly. Baudelaire and Gustave Flaubert were incidentally the first ones to be sorry about what happened and thought, understandably, that the conflicts over their work were all a terrible misunderstanding. Frappat: But does cinema have the same status? One of the problems facing film critics is that they don’t really know what they are talking about. At times, they aren’t really writing on cinema: they might as well be writing on literature. Rivette: Ah yes, of course! That’s why I often feel like repeating: where is the film in what you’re writing?

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Frappat: Does cinema need different criteria of judgment from the ones traditionally used? Rivette: Yes, I think so. Frappat: That brings us back to the question of mise-en-scène. Rivette: But saying mise-en-scène is replacing one problem with another! That’s actually what we did at Cahiers du Cinéma, and I am one of those responsible for putting this term mise-en-scène on a pedestal. It allows us to pin a word on the mystery, but once we have said mise-en-scène, what do we mean by it? The problem is simply displaced, let’s say it is named, but it isn’t resolved. Sure, it does revolve around mise-en-scène, but what is mise-en-scène? A vast question! Frappat: It revolves around what you call “the idea.” Rivette: It revolves around the fact that mise-en-scène is a very precise activity, and even if everyone does it in his own way—which is different from the next person’s, thankfully, because it wouldn’t be interesting otherwise; everyone has his own technique—they all seem to talk about the same thing. That’s what surprised our first readers at Cahiers du Cinéma—there are probably other examples, but I’m speaking of what I know best, hence Cahiers in the 1950s. Here’s André Bazin, for example, who was both intrigued and, at times, taken aback by us, even if he loved us and even if we respected him deeply: “What makes it possible for you to defend Jean Renoir, Roberto Rossellini, and Alfred Hitchcock at the same time?” And the big question: “How can you reconcile Rossellini with Hitchcock?” It’s clear that, for Rossellini, Hitchcock was the devil himself. For his part, Hitchcock knew well that Rossellini existed (since he had “taken” Ingrid Bergman), but whether he saw even one film by Rossellini in his life, I don’t know, though it was perhaps the least of his worries. Well, yes, there was something that made it possible for us to admire Rossellini and Hitchcock at once and on the same level—not in the same way, but equally strongly. That’s what must be resolved. Frappat: We come back to what you once called the “politique des auteurs.” Rivette: Yes, but the politique des auteurs quickly became an evasion, 194

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because it meant saying: they are really very different, but they have the commonality of being “auteurs.” Sure, but then, everyone becomes an auteur after that! Now, it’s true for Rossellini and Hitchcock, it’s still true for Ford and Renoir, it’s true again for Hawks, it’s still true, naturally, for Ernst Lubitsch or Carl-Theodor Dreyer, but is it still true for Vincente Minnelli, or even for Richard Fleischer? And then you come to Positif, where they start talking about Sydney Pollack or I-don’t-know-who, or some random director, since when you talk about Pollack, you’re not far from some random director! So the politique des auteurs is a poor response, and, above all, it doesn’t explain why, in the work of “great” auteurs, as in the work of great novelists, great painters, and great musicians, everything is interesting, because their failures deserve more attention than a hack’s accomplishment: that’s indeed what the politique des auteurs originally wanted to say. Why is a commission executed by Abel Gance infinitely more interesting (for, if I recall correctly, it was for Gance’s film Tower of Lust [1955]—a purely made-to-order product that Gance spoke about with great modesty—that François Truffaut coined the expression politique des auteurs in a 1955 issue of Cahiers) than Jean Delannoy’s masterpiece? That’s the first question. That one is an open-and-shut case, but what was never resolved, and still remains unanswered, is the question of how one can admire on the same level—because of their consistency, because of their logic, let’s say, but that isn’t enough—filmmakers as different as (let’s retain the same names) Rossellini and Hitchcock. Frappat: “Consistency” is a partially satisfying answer, but it also goes round in circles. Rivette: Yes, because what do you say to justify it? You talk about scripts, you talk about themes and the recurrence of themes, and you’re trapped there. Sure, it does happen that there are favorite themes in the work of great filmmakers: it’s evident in Yasujiro Ozu, less so in Kenji Mizoguchi, but in the work of other filmmakers like Hawks, this requires a work of “clarification”; and it’s very fuzzy in Renoir: what’s common between La Chienne [1931] and Night at the Crossroads [1932]? There are seventeen years and many kilometers between them! Not to mention indisputable “auteurs” like René Clair or Joseph L. Mankiewicz, who aren’t, for all that, great filmmakers. These are real questions. There are others, too, which still remain unanswered; it’s as if people dodged them because it obliges them to ask what a film is. (I’m not going to answer that! Don’t count on me!) 195

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What do we expect from a film? Why do we sit in front of a white screen, the same way that we pick up a book and begin reading it with the intention of going all the way to page 363? What do we really expect at that moment? Frappat: That’s the question of criticism. Rivette: Yes, that’s just why I spoke of Paulhan’s book, A Short Preface to All Criticism, which is incidentally very disappointing at first reading: Paulhan is an essentially deceptive writer. That’s why one must read him over and over. Frappat: You are one of the filmmakers who ask this question. Rivette: There are at least two of us with Rohmer, three with Jean-Luc Godard; but Jean-Luc asks the question differently, in more or less in enigmatic formulations. Frappat: Even so, it’s up to the critic to ask the question, “What do I expect of a work.” It’s both a philosophical and a political question. Rivette: They are anyway the most important questions. There’s nothing more important than what we call metaphysics: writers like Baruch Spinoza, Immanuel Kant, and G.W.F. Hegel ask fundamental questions. I have a hard time reading them, but even if I don’t always manage to, I know that they are taking about the most important things. They have their own techniques to do this: to read Chinese writers, one must learn Chinese; to read the philosophers, one must learn philosophical language. Frappat: Friedrich Nietzsche had called Kant “the Chinaman of Königsberg”! Rivette: I’ve always been a bit scared of Kant. Frappat: Yet you quote a line by Charles Péguy in your “Letter on Rossellini” [Cahiers du Cinéma, April 1955]. Rivette: The line by Péguy that says Kant has no hands! Well, he says “Kantianism,” not “Kant,” which means his disciples, his epigones. Frappat: That’s kind of the question at the heart of Secret Defense: 196

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what can I expect? It’s a question of exigence, in a way, and if the film was received coolly, that is perhaps because it was faced with people who had no desire to ask such a question. Rivette: They were afraid of being bored, that’s all. Did they know what it was about? Maybe not, but it’s certain that they were afraid of being bored. Admittedly, when I think a film may be boring, I’m not too keen to go see it, either. It’s simply that the films I’m bored at aren’t the same. Frappat: We are left with this mystery, this tautology to which you referred: that “a film is a film.” Rivette: I’ve been thinking about it, and I have given myself, not answers, because I don’t think there can be definitive answers in this matter, but perhaps only elements of an answer. But what would you say to try to answer this question? Frappat: To pinpoint the mystery, and not to dispel it, I’d say that one mysterious thing is the relation between a very concrete activity and an idea: how does this concrete attention to details, to the relation between space and time, which is the work of mise-en-scène, relate to a more general idea, the idea of the film? Rivette: I agree that the answer necessarily revolves around a relationship. The question to be asked is: between what? I get the impression, by the way, that this notion corresponds to all forms of expression, not just cinema. It can well be the case with any artistic approach, and perhaps even with events of everyday life. Nothing ever exists alone, anyway; we exist only in relation to other people, and it’s precisely this dialogue, or this trialogue, or this quadrilogue, etc., that we constantly have in life. No one exists alone, and everything that concerns men and women always corresponds to a given relationship: there’s a relationship between A and B, or between A and B and C. Frappat: This relationship defines the dynamic: there’s never a force by itself. Rivette: Yes, this relationship goes backward at first glance. I don’t know if that’s what you mean: it goes both ways. Frappat: That’s why a relationship of force can be conscious. 197

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Rivette: Maybe not . . . why a relationship of force? It can be one of friendship! Frappat: I thought that forces work in pairs. Rivette: Yes, if one takes the word force positively, there are nice forces as well as negative forces. But what needs to be understood is precisely their relationship. I recall that I quoted the example of Jean Paulhan, who wrote a small book that can be read in less than an hour, A Short Preface to All Criticism, and in which he is astonished that no one to his knowledge has really, clearly, directly asked the question that nonetheless seems fundamental to him: why is it that critics, and not just critics but also amateurs interested in literature, choose to discuss, heap praise on, and severely criticize such-and-such a work, and pass over all others in silence? And Paulhan cites the example of books that, at their time, were badly received, but people agreed right away that they were exactly the books to be badmouthed: Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal [Flowers of Evil, 1857], for instance (one could also invoke Olympia [1938, Leni Riefenstahl] or The Rite of Spring [1913, Igor Stravinsky]), whereas no one disputed the merit of many other works. On the contrary, everyone agreed that they were beautifully written, wholly pleasant to read, and then completely forgotten six months later. Frappat: There are some others that seem to demand nothing of their public. Rivette: Right. So how is it that, when critics said Baudelaire was an impostor, they went precisely after Baudelaire and not such-and-such a writer whose name nobody knows now. That was Paulhan’s real question: how is it that there’s a kind of consensus that was produced very quickly, at times immediately. (It was the case with Comte de Lautréamont [Isidore Lucien Ducasse], but for purely material reasons, because Les Chants de Maldoror [The Songs of Maldoror, 1868] was published almost secretly; it wasn’t until some years later that Remy de Gourmont or Léon Bloy began thinking, “That’s one bizarre writer there,” and the controversy kicked off.) This is the question Paulhan asks, but doesn’t answer categorically. A Short Preface to All Criticism sketches a first draft of the solution, which opens up to other questions. Frappat: In what sense, according to Paulhan, is an answer possible? 198

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Rivette: It’s exactly on this notion of a precise and fundamental relationship: simply put, given that the subject is literature, it’s the relationship between words and thought. If I have to summarize the matter very crudely, what Paulhan tries to suggest, to indicate, to make his reader discover, is this: the authors we want to talk about and discuss are precisely those who have written with a clear awareness of the problem posed by the relationship between words and what we call ideas, thoughts, feelings, emotions—the two faces of language. He gives counter-examples. He presents three extracts from authors of the time, completely forgotten today, three extracts from novels of the ’50s. He says, broadly: “Here are three texts written in French, there are no mistakes, but they don’t work, either! Why so? Because there’s something missing, unless there’s something too much, but what?” Frappat: One could call it the relationship between grammar and idea. Rivette: There’s another book by Paulhan, Key to Poetry [1945], where he looks for the key that will allow us to say, not that this poem is great or that one is terrible—it’s less ambitious, but at the same time, it has a different kind of ambition—but that this theory about poetry is likely to be correct, and that other theory isn’t very pertinent. He ends up with an algebraic formula that, very broadly, says that a correct theory must be reversible. In other words, a theory of poetry that speaks of words should be the same when speaking of ideas. Frappat: Reversible between thought and language? Rivette: Right. This is the same as saying that the writing of a real writer, be it a poet, playwright, or a novelist, must reach a stage where the words cannot be moved, modified, replaced, or swapped: that’s what differentiates perfect verse from journalistic prose. You can’t change or add one word to Racine’s “la fille de Minos et de Pasiphaé.” It so happens that this is a perfect alexandrine to boot, one that says very important and profound things about the character of Phèdre [Phaedra, 1677], since it isn’t all that easy being the daughter of Minos and Pasiphaé, what with the law on one side and the animal or animality on the other. Frappat: I feel that . . . Rivette: . . . it’s more complex in cinema?

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Frappat: Exactly. I’ve not read Paulhan’s text, but you could say . . . Rivette: I only take it as my starting point because, again, it would be wrong to try to do a literal transcription. I’ve tried at times, by reading Paulhan, since I’m not a writer and I try to be a filmmaker, to see what happens if we attempt to transpose his work. At one point, I thought that since cinema is ultimately both space and time, one could perhaps say the following (not in order to know if a film is a film in the true sense of the word, or only a strip of film projected on a screen, but rather as a key to theories about cinema): theories of cinema that speak of time are correct if we can apply them, as they are, to space. Frappat: A reversible relationship between space and time? Rivette: Yes, but I know that it’s ultimately very theoretical, even if cinema is indeed an art of space and time, of space in time, or time in space . . . Frappat: of space–time . . . Rivette: of space–time. Frappat: Isn’t it extremely abstract to separate space from time? Rivette: It’s impossible, actually. But, admittedly, all existing theories of cinema, like many old theories, privilege space, i.e., its plastic qualities. This resulted in an overvaluation of films that were simply a collection of pretty images, and people couldn’t tell Ford from Emilio Fernández (quite an era). And there were others who wanted to privilege time, when editing was thought of in the most mechanical way, so Vsevolod Pudovkin became an equal of Sergei Eisenstein’s. And now, since Roger Leenhardt and Bazin, when time-value justifiably enjoys enormous popularity on enlarged and less cursory foundations, the risk is no longer to see cinema as anything more than a pure and simple narrative medium—that is, under the categories of story and fiction—but forgetting that it still concerns projected images, photographic images reproducing places, bodies, and gestures, and that cinema is not the realm of “word-based narratives.” This, I think, is the current tendency among both newspaper critics and Gilles Deleuze, who clearly privileges what he calls time-image. Frappat: He privileges time-image over movement-image. (Pause.) 200

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I think that the real question, which is essential to aesthetics, is the question of the judgment of artworks: what constitutes judgment, one that makes an artwork an artwork? Rivette: Ah no, the question isn’t “what constitutes judgment?” but, on the contrary, “What makes a work deserve to be considered?” Judgment comes later; it certifies, often despite itself, and, once again, one of the greatest proofs of this is the aggressiveness towards a work during its reception. This was evident in the case of The Rules of the Game [1939, Jean Renoir], it was evident with Robert Bresson, and it was evident with Godard, to cite only three great names. The proof is in the hostility: people sense all of a sudden that there’s something that disturbs them. But they often get it wrong as to what disturbs them: there are things that are disturbing because they herald a new truth, and others that are disturbing solely because they want to stir the pot! So this can’t be the criterion, either: we wouldn’t get too far if we were to say that all works that get bad reviews are great. Frappat: Cinema isn’t at the root of the question. This aesthetic problem emerged . . . Rivette: It’s not an aesthetic problem, it’s an existential problem! Frappat: Yes, inasmuch as the two are inseparable. It seems to me that this problem emerged historically at the end of the eighteenth century. Rivette: No, it was always there; one just has to read the Quarrel of Le Cid. Frappat: But there was a moment where the question, as far as painting is concerned, for example, seems more complicated than when it concerns literature, or poetry—we could place painting and poetry on the same level. I’m thinking of a certain number of aesthetic debates at the end of the eighteenth century, around what is called the sublime, a subject that constitutes the source of our aesthetic modernity. Rivette: Yes . . . Frappat: The question arises with certain images, not so much with literature as with certain paintings (English philosophers mostly talk about painting), or even certain poetic texts: they all constitute such deviations from what may be expected of an image that we are forced 201

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to wonder if we are still in front of artworks. Cinema prolongs this problem, possibly in a more complex way than literature, if we stick to Paulhan’s definition at least. And I’m thinking of a second problem: can we isolate aesthetic debates? If we consider, for example, the source of cinema’s modernity, without necessarily harking back to its proper historical origins, but to a time period following the Second World War. Rivette: Yes and no, since the source of modernity may be said to be The Rules of the Game and Citizen Kane [1941, Orson Welles], which date back to 1939 and 1940. Frappat: I’m thinking again of debates you took part in, and which probe into the relationship between aesthetics and morality, broadly speaking: can we separate the two? Is the question “what makes an artwork an artwork” a purely aesthetic one? Rivette: No, once again, I think it isn’t a purely aesthetic question, and it isn’t a purely moral question, either: it’s an existential question— I hold on to this word—and so there are both ethical and aesthetic dimensions to it. This always brings us back to the famous line about tracking shots as being a question of morality, which remains true; it was always true and there’s no reason for it to stop being true. But once again, this offers a general framework for the question, but it doesn’t define the terms of the relationship we’re looking for. I’ve asked myself this question; I wanted to know what exactly were the terms of the relationship that makes a cinematographic work deserve to be called a film, since that’s what we try to talk about. I think that this relationship actually occurs between two poles, but that’s where it becomes hard. I’m tempted to use a word that’s very hard to handle, but I’m going to use it nonetheless because I’m taking cover behind great writers whom I don’t know well, but fine: it’s the word “law.” I knew that we were going to see each other to discuss our question, and I was thinking about it, and there was this word “law” floating around in my head, which I didn’t know how to handle. And then, in the new issue of Télérama, I came across a long interview with Pierre Legendre that I found totally fascinating and insightful. He’s a writer that Serge Daney admired a lot, but I’ve always been scared to read him. And so Legendre, as those who’ve been reading him for longer know better, starts from the idea, from the term “law,” i.e., something that is built by reason to give man the means to establish, prolong, and 202

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sustain his humanity. In other words—and I’m still paraphrasing Legendre—something that will allow him to give life to a (human) subject as much as to fiction, two terms he places on the same level. And then there is the word. The word, evidently, is the fundamental element of humanity, as it’s through the word that man uses his reason to establish himself as a subject and as fiction. Man needs the word and the law to establish himself, to survive from one generation to the next, to not be entirely at the mercy of death, to perpetuate himself against the backdrop of death; to be sure, every human existence unfolds against the backdrop of death, but this is a transmission that has been accomplished, since the beginning, through great fictions, and here Legendre employs the words mise-en-scène and montage. That’s what struck me, as I thought it was too good a confluence! If I understood correctly, Legendre uses the word montage in exactly the same sense as Claude Lévi-Strauss uses the word bricolage, i.e., the act of assembling pre-existent elements into a new object, a new fiction with its own logic and its own necessity. Frappat: There’s a heterogeneity of elements. Rivette: There’s a heterogeneity of elements, there’s even a gratuitousness of elements, but this human activity, accomplished through the word and where man makes use of his reason, produces a new fictional framework that isn’t eternal: every civilization constructs such fiction at some point in time that will necessarily progress, since it’s taken up by the succession of things. So with this word “law” on one side, I believe that all films worthy of the name have a more or less close relation to a form of law. I think that this relationship of the film to law can have at least two faces: the first, and the most obvious, is from the side of what we can call the subject (or the theme, the story, the “content,” to take a term from old debates). It is, for example, one of the most obvious reasons for the greatness of classical American cinema, where the relationship of the individual to the law is the primordial motif—and not just in Westerns or gangster films (which have no other “subject”), but also in comedies: you just have to see what radically separates “Americans” (Frank Capra, Hawks, Leo McCarey) from “Europeans” (Lubitsch or Billy Wilder). Let’s try to summarize: in one form or another, there exists an external force one is forced to confront, resist, try and overcome; or even a rigid and constraining framework that is perceived by the “hero,” rightly or otherwise, as existing independent of his will, and at times even his knowledge. 203

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The second face is from the side of what is generally called miseen-scène (the “form” of old masters): this is, quite visibly, a system clearly determined and shaped by all formal parameters: writing, framing, editing, sound design, “choreography” of actors and the camera, etc. From the first shot, there is, on the screen, the implementation of “rules of the game” that are both stated and respected—where every departure, deviation, or inflection acquires power and meaning. And of course, great films are those that know how to impose a strong dialectic between these two relationships to law: Fritz Lang by definition, but also, given all the imaginable variants of this dialectic (whose history may just be the true history of cinema), Ford and Mizoguchi, Dreyer and Renoir, F. W. Murnau and Rossellini—let’s say every great filmmaker. The term I want to use for the other pole—the one on the opposite side—is “secret,” because I think there is, at the center of every work worthy of the name—and this doesn’t contradict the idea of law, by the way—a secret, one that isn’t an enigma of narration and that doesn’t have to do with simple bricolage. (Those would be fictional mysteries of a given scenario: it’s not for nothing that so many filmmakers and novelists, including Honoré de Balzac and Henry James no less, have played with stories that gamble on mysteries and secrets, where it’s the suspense that gives meaning to the fiction, as Pierre Corneille himself would have said.) I mean a secret in the most fundamental sense. I continue quoting Paulhan, who says that it’s the feature of mysteries to be mysterious. The secret here is the individual’s secret. It’s a secret that the filmmaker doesn’t know, that he conveys without knowing it. It’s the secret of very personal, very existential, very suggestive things that the film finds itself conveying: beyond what the filmmaker consciously intended, he says things about himself and, through himself, about humanity, things that he had no intention of saying. Frappat: You’ve come exactly to the definition Kant gave of genius! Rivette: Is it? I’ve never read Kant, but it’s obvious that the writers we’ve been quoting have read him well, Alain/Chartier as much as Legendre; because the history of law descends straight from Mr. Immanuel. Frappat: He says that the genius carries a mystery within, a secret, which he’d be totally incapable of explaining himself, but which can 204

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be found in his work, and which his successors can perhaps explain and pass on. Rivette: Yes! But again, it wouldn’t work if it were just that. He must know that he carries a mystery within, a secret, and that he tries to bring it out, to get rid of it, to expel it, as Jean Cocteau said. But he doesn’t know how, so he does it through fictions and by referring to laws—certain laws that concern him personally, but also that tower above him and impose themselves on him like an external necessity, like fate. Frappat: That’s why this secret can be passed on: because there is the law. Rivette: As a provisional hypothesis and a starting point for the discussion, let’s submit that what makes a film a film is that there is both a secret and a submission to law, to a law that isn’t necessarily the same for all films, even though I suppose that, deep down, these different laws converge. This will bring us back to the question we asked earlier: how is it possible to admire both Hitchcock and Rossellini? Frappat: They all speak of the same thing. Rivette: Yes, but at first, they don’t seem to be obeying the same laws. It’s even obvious: the clearest, the most visible laws aren’t the same. But, on the other hand, what is of the same order is perhaps . . . All this is hypothesis, of course. Let’s see later if it interests others; either they will take it up or not. This isn’t intended to be a theory. In fact, it cannot possibly be a theory; it wouldn’t work if it were. It can only be a series of practices. Frappat: This relationship between the secret and the law is wonderful: the secret as something existential, and the law as something more universal. Rivette: Yes, you could say that the secret is individual, the law is society . . . Frappat: Community . . . Rivette: Yes, a community of individuals who have managed to form a society, through word, through reason, through ceremonies, through 205

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fictions; for ceremonies are part of fictions: they are one stage, one form of the general fiction. Frappat: Certain films address the secret of their viewers and others don’t address it at all. Rivette: Yes, but on the other hand, it doesn’t mean that filmmakers must make autobiographies! That was the big discussion I had with Jean Eustache during the three months we spent together editing the TV series on Renoir: we discussed this topic constantly while watching our material over and over, and watching Renoir’s films again (we saw most of his films from the ’30s on the editing table). Jean used to say, “Cinema should be personal, you must talk about yourself,” and I’d say, “No, you shouldn’t talk about yourself; you should construct fictions, try to invent stories.” Frappat: What James calls the power of the indirect. Rivette: Yes! I think we were both right, as it always happens in such cases, since finally, Jean made his autobiographical films that, despite himself, became fictions, and I tried to make fictions, but it so happened that twice or thrice that, despite myself, I introduced things that I myself had experienced. I was aware of it in L’Amour fou, of course, but in the other films, I only realized much later that I’d talked about certain things that were a secret, to me most of all. Enough about me. I think this is a general law. For instance, if we take The Rules of the Game and Citizen Kane, we know now that, in these two films, Renoir and Welles “said” things about themselves that they had no intention of saying, and that they seemed to have realized this later. That’s why Welles never stopped putting on false faces after this; he must’ve felt fully naked when he saw Kane! And Renoir never acted anymore. Again, this secret isn’t necessarily autobiographical, it’s bodily and spontaneous: the real biography of a film auteur, or a novelist for that matter, is often of no interest. The biography of James is that of a writer of novels. Ditto for Flaubert, but that doesn’t prevent the biographical dimension from coming out very strongly in his work, and even more so in James. Frappat: I’d even say that it’s not autobiographical, in the sense that it’s in the realm of fiction. Rivette: Yes! 206

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Frappat: It’s as though there was such an opacity, in James’ work for instance, about himself that he was just investigating himself without knowing it. Rivette: Yes, without wanting to. Like how Flaubert, in his letters to his friends, keeps repeating: “I’m totally impersonal, I wasn’t speaking about myself there.” Frappat: Along similar lines, it could be said that, conversely, in a film like The Mother and the Whore [1973, Jean Eustache], there is a bit of opacity at the end . . . Rivette: Yes! Frappat: . . . which causes the autobiography . . . Rivette: . . . to turn into fiction! Yes, I found that striking. I knew Jean quite well, and I knew the two young women a little—the outline of their relationship and certain incidents. And when I saw the film, everything had magnificently turned into fiction. Frappat: To come back to the word “law,” it’s both a precise and an extremely vast term, which also has a moral connotation. Rivette: No! Well, I don’t like the word “moral”: ethical, yes, why not, why not have Mr. Spinoza with us! Along with Mr. Kant, since Kant had read Spinoza, after all—at least as far as I know! I’ve never read Kant, but I’ve read Spinoza . . . Fine, let’s be serious and try to go ahead. The richer the relation between the poles of law and secret, the more intense a film will be. And the result is a third word I want to advance to talk about films really worthy of the label. That word is “danger”: they are all films that confront a danger; they are difficult films to make, films that are perilous to everyone—not just to the director, but to everyone involved, especially the actors. These are films where a real risk is run—at times consciously, at times unconsciously—by those that have undertaken it, those that have completed it: these are films where, consciously or otherwise, more or less voluntarily, some basic element of the film (narration, actors, camera, what you will), which only wanted to take it easy, is jeopardized. All of this applies not only to a solitary filmmaker like Bresson or Josef von Sternberg or Eisenstein, but, again, to all those who are caught up in the adventure. It’s a series of dangers that have been 207

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overcome. There can perhaps be no great film without the feeling that it could have been a disaster, that it should have been, without some sort of miracle that has saved everything by dint of hard work, calculation, and determination. But putting it in these words is probably a modern approach that takes us away from the great classicism of the pioneers: the peril for them was that they were forced to invent everything. Frappat: We could say that, today, it’s a loss of control compared to classical control. Rivette: Yes, it’s obvious in the case of a filmmaker like Max Ophüls. He throws himself in the line of fire perpetually, leaping into the unknown but always landing on his feet with utmost feline grace. But the danger can also simply be the risk of coming across as ridiculous. Bresson, for instance, is just on the edge; Jean-Marie Straub, too. This is actually the risk—that of tipping over—that modern filmmakers run. You’re just a hair’s breadth from pastiche or parody. Marguerite Duras is a typical example. She’s at the extreme edge of parody, but her work stays there. I’m thinking of her greatest films, but, ultimately, I think hers are all great films, even if there are some that move me more than others. Still, I think she is a great filmmaker. It’s the same with Godard; a particular film may be more accomplished, more convincing, even more moving than the others. That doesn’t matter; what counts is the trajectory and general progression. Frappat: What might he be risking? Rivette: Jean-Luc? Oh, he risks everything at once! He’s run every risk possible, at times even unconscious ones. Now maybe we can look for films that haven’t surmounted perils, that haven’t been narrowly won ordeals. But ultimately, it’s there in classical works, too, but as a theme, as a starting point; the narrowly won ordeal is Pierre de Marivaux’s subject, and that of most tragedies too: the narrowly lost ordeal. Frappat: A trial. Rivette: Yes, except that, in classical works, the trial is more a question of subject matter, the story or the characters, whereas modern artists have subjected their very means to a trial. Édouard Manet, for instance, in the history of painting. Manet or Paul Cézanne: this is the 208

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point where everything turns around. That’s the difference between Diego Velázquez and Manet, or even between Velázquez and Francisco Goya. Goya is the moment where everything tips over, poof! Frappat: That’s what I was saying a while ago: there’s a moment when the crisis becomes visible and explicit, and so, for the viewer, it becomes part of what he’s looking at. Rivette: So let’s retain that provisionally, and with the hope that others may possibly want to continue our dialogue. Well, these are not exactly discoveries: law, secret, and danger, if we want to summarize the two poles in three words. Danger is perhaps a kind of a product of their relationship, unless we say that danger is simply the name of the relationship between law and secret. There are plenty of examples in the history of modern cinema. Frappat: I’m thinking of Fritz Lang. Rivette: Yes, or Nicholas Ray, for instance. Frappat: Danger is also something existential, like the secret. Rivette: Yes. In a way, our attempt at defining them hasn’t gotten us far, and we could have stated all this differently. Critics will continue to grapple with the matter, which is all the better. The point is to separate the impostors from those rare ones who try to see a bit more clearly. Not the sincere ones, because pure and simple sincerity is of no interest. Sincerity is not a value. Frappat: Now that we’re coining categories—secret, danger, law— there’s one I find important, and that’s the category of innocence. Rivette: Yes! But innocence is a term . . . anyway, go ahead! Frappat: I was thinking that cinema is perhaps one of the arts where there’s a crucial relationship between the innocence of what is filmed, the recording of what is present, the ontological aspect, on one hand, and a kind of total absence of innocence on the part of the artist, on the other hand. Cinema is one of the arts most capable of staging this tension between the innocence of invention and fiction, and the absence of innocence in the artistic means. It may be one of the criteria 209

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for discrimination: there are films that pretend this question doesn’t exist. Could we then link the question of law to that of innocence? Rivette: What amuses me in what you say is that it reminds me of the very first article that I wrote and published, in the early ’50s when I had in Paris only for a few months. It was in a small bulletin of a few pages called The Latin Quarter Film Club Bulletin, run by Rohmer, who was called Maurice Schérer at the time. It’s what inspired him, a few months later, to set up Gazette du cinéma, which ran for five issues and where François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and I had our first lessons, so to speak. And so, this very first text of mine was titled “We Are Not Innocent Anymore” [Bulletin intérieur du Ciné-club du Quartier Latin, January 1950]. Frappat: I’ve read it. Rivette: Ah, have you? I’d come to Paris a few months earlier, from Rouen, a town where there were only three or four theaters remaining in 1945, because of the war and the bombing. So there were relatively few films to see: except for new French films and major American pictures, dubbed in French of course, there was just one film club that had a monthly screening, where I’d seen older films like The Rules of the Game, Citizen Kane, and Shadow of a Doubt [1943, Alfred Hitchcock], but no silent film. I’d known silent cinema only through the films of Chaplin and Laurel and Hardy, which I’d seen as a kid on a Pathé Baby 9.5mm film projector at my grandfather’s home on Thursday afternoons. I arrived in Paris, and after a month or two, I dared to go to the Avenue de Messine, to the Cinémathèque Française. I started to go there as often as I could. There, I came across films by D. W. Griffith, Mauritz Stiller, and Douglas Fairbanks, all this cinema from the 1920s and the 1930s. I had this strong feeling that there was, in these great films by Griffith, Stiller, and Erich von Stroheim, or the first films by Dreyer and Murnau, an innocence of cinema that had been irrevocably lost. It was obvious to me at the beginning of 1950, a period that, in hindsight, can seem still extremely classical. What was there in 1950? Answer: Renoir, Welles, and Bresson, for they had all started a revolution. (And Rossellini had started his, but it wasn’t apparent until months later.) I think now that innocence goes back much further. It is perhaps to be found only in the work of Louis Lumière, who didn’t want to be an “artist,” just a photographer of movement. Even Griffith’s 210

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Intolerance [1916] can’t be said to be an innocent film: it’s the subject of the film, after all, to tackle different stages of civilization and knowledge, and all that this implies about crimes, destruction, and barbarism. Frappat: Intolerance tackles the total absence of innocence in history. Rivette: Yes! It’s already the case with The Birth of a Nation [1915], which tackles the Civil War on one hand and racism on the other. Both unconsciously and in fake good conscience, racism is at the center of the film. So I think we’ll have to quote Heinrich von Kleist’s famous line once again: innocence is always lost. The only thing to do is to take a gigantic detour to try and see if there isn’t a small door at the back that will allow us to return to the original paradise. I’m referring to Kleist’s magnificent text “On the Marionette Theater” (1801), which everyone knows and which we can read five hundred times without being bored. Frappat: Could we establish a link between this loss of innocence and a relationship to law? Rivette: No, because law exists to the extent that innocence is always already lost; whatever the milieu a man is born in, he is born in a civilization, with all that comes with it: a culture that will be imposed on him, the milieux he will grow up in, learning to worship the Christian God or whomever. It’s up to him to manage after that, but what is sure is that he isn’t, has never been, innocent. In any case, even Lumière’s innocence is perhaps fictitious, as was the case with painters who thought long that there is something innocent in Giotto di Bondone, for instance, and later said, “No, it’s not Giotto, it’s Giovanni Cimabue.” Similarly, in music history, the Romantic nineteenth century lived with the idea that music was invented by Italians in the sixteenth century. There’s a poem by Victor Hugo about it [“Les rayons et les ombres” (“Beams and Shadows,” 1840)], on music that harks back to Palestrina. Or Alfred de Musset’s verses: “Harmony, harmony, which comes to us from Italy and which came to it from the heavens” [“Lucie,” 1835]. We know now that the history of Western music is more complicated than that, that the genealogy goes further back. Now they say, “It’s Pérotin, who himself draws on what is called the Notre-Dame school!” Innocence is always a fiction.

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Frappat: On one hand, there’s this secret that the artist is unaware of ... Rivette: It isn’t that he is unaware of it. I think he is half-aware of it, and that he refuses to see what’s happening. He refuses in order to be able to work; if he were so aware of it, he wouldn’t be able to do anything. He wouldn’t be able to write a word, put the brush on the canvas, or compose one note of music! He has the need to be halfaware, like children who close their eyes with the hands but spread out their fingers a little. There’s a childish aspect to the artist’s attitude, in any case. Whether it’s a writer, a painter, or a filmmaker, there’s always a return to childhood, but a childhood that has nothing innocent about it: this child is in fact a small man who knows a lot of things but doesn’t want to know them, who knows more than he believes or wants to. Frappat: He isn’t completely aware of the secret, but he is aware of this loss of innocence. Rivette: Yes, and he knows that he is lugging around something very heavy, which gets in his way. He doesn’t exactly know what it is, he wants to know, but doesn’t want to know too much, either. Anyway, Mr. Sigmund Freud has shared some words with us on this question, and also Mr. Jacques Lacan, who has opportunely underlined two or three points that we often prefer to pass over in silence. Frappat: Your definition of cinema—the relationship between secret and law— could be applied to psychoanalysis. Rivette: Yes, of course! The psychoanalysts talk about the same thing. The strength of analysis lies in the fact that it speaks to every man about fundamental things. Its other strength, I think, is that it always remains incomplete. Everything is incomplete, of course; if it weren’t, history would stop and then . . . the end of the world! We’re lucky that we’re dealing with the incomplete, that all fiction, no matter how finished it is, even the finest novel in the world, calls to mind other novels, and that’s what makes for any work’s power. Don Quixote [1605/1615] gave rise to sequels and imitations, then it gave birth to many more novels. And it’s tempting to see Citizen Kane and The Rules of the Game trying to give birth to their own children! People produce different things, of course, but never what they want to. I believe that no one has ever made exactly what he wanted 212

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to, and luckily so. And then, too, you get more or less used to what was made, despite yourself. I myself don’t ponder too much over what I think about my films. In fact, I don’t see them after their release, and if I see them a long time later, I’m rather surprised that they are quite different from the idea I had of them. Finally, I think you tend to like works that don’t at all resemble what you had originally intended to do! They are more surprising, even if they contain mistakes. Frappat: You said that, with certain films, there is the impression that they all talk about the same thing, even if they are very different. Is this some kind of common law? Or might we say that we’re dealing with similar relationships to law? We spoke earlier of Hitchcock and Rossellini; we could also speak of Fritz Lang. Rivette: No, Hitchcock and Rossellini are quite different. It’s evident that they don’t have the same relationship to law, in any case not to the same laws. But at the same time, they both know that there are laws to be taken into consideration, and they both carry around their secrets. It’s obvious with Hitchcock: even at the time when he made Vertigo [1958] or Marnie [1964], it was clear that he was bringing into play elements that he had only postulated in his more anecdotal films. It’s François Truffaut who told me how Hitchcock showed him the work print of Marnie: François saw the film alone in a studio screening room, and, at the end, Hitchcock came there to receive him. What struck François was that he was all red (even though it wasn’t yet the time for whisky), as if he had the feeling of being completely naked with this film (that’s the impression François had, in any event): he knew that he had just shown a totally indecent film. Frappat: A feeling of shame. Rivette: Yes, he was red with shame. At least, that’s how François saw it and described it to me. At other times, Hitchcock could boast like a teenager: there’s his famous line about Vertigo, where he says that the heroine has stripped but won’t take her knickers off! And when you see Vertigo again, it’s just that. But at the same time, it’s more than that; there’s something else that goes beyond erotic anecdote in every possible direction. Frappat: For a certain number of films—Hitchcock’s, Lang’s, I’m thinking of The Nun too, and one could say this about all your films— 213

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this tension between secret and law (even if it’s a product of hindsight and not intended to be so) is the very subject in a profound way, the basic thing at stake. Rivette: Yes, but one could say that, in the work of Lang or Kenji Mizoguchi, the law is shown in its negative aspect, in its mulish, almost foolish aspect, as something that constrains the individual. This is a real aspect of what human law is, but it isn’t the “real” law. Frappat: I was rather thinking about The Nun: about this tragic tension between the law and the secret, where this girl, who is originally shrouded in secrecy since she doesn’t even have a name, demands a trial. Rivette: That is the power of Denis Diderot’s story, which was strongly inspired by real events. Suzanne Simonin’s irresolvable dramatic situation is that she is condemned by the very thing she believes in the most, by her faith; so there’s no way out. Frappat: And no trial. Rivette: Yes. She wants to keep her faith and get her freedom, but she’s told, “That’s impossible, one doesn’t go without the other,” or rather that faith implies the absence of freedom. Frappat: In that sense, freedom is completely on the side of the law. Rivette: Of real law, yes, of course. When Lacan or Legendre uses the word “law,” it’s in the sense in which law is positive, and freedom can only exist within a framework, a civilization where law is established by reason, and therefore allows individual freedom. Legendre talks about the moment—and this ties in to what you said about Diderot, since the story of The Nun is Diderot’s; I simply retranscribed it—where the representatives of law become criminal, where they say, “Kill!” and not “Be free!”; be it Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, they all said, “One must kill.” Frappat: So what characterizes “great works” is the tense relationship between an absolute freedom, which is that of invention—even if this freedom is later illuminated or obscured by its relationship to the secret—and a strict relationship to the law.

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Rivette: Yes, that’s what allows us not to think the moon is made of green cheese, as per the old saying, to try to tell the impostors from . . . Frappat: Hunt down the impostors! Rivette: Yes, hunt down the imposters! What allows us to say, for example, that Lars von Trier, as he seems to me, is an imposter. I think I understand well how this boy works: he knew very early on, after his first film, which was brilliant, and he struggled with this, that he was not Dreyer and that he would never be Dreyer, since his big problem seems to be his relationship to Dreyer. So he had to move on from there, and it’s increasingly evident, especially after the failure of Europa [1991], which is probably the most annoying film in the history of cinema! Certainly not the worst, but the most annoying! Following the failure of Europa, von Trier thinks he’s obliged now to have a gag, a gimmick in each of his films: for Breaking the Waves [1996], it was the zigzagging camera; for The Idiots [1998], it was Dogma; and we know that the next one has Björk in a musical [Dancer in the Dark, 2000]. A different gimmick each time, for it can’t work in two successive films. And he is very talented, he has great skill. There are high points in Breaking the Waves and The Idiots. The last sequence of The Idiots is beautiful, but what doesn’t work, as in all his films, is the film itself: there is no film, only bits and pieces. For me, he’s the typical example of the filmmaker who is talented, intelligent, and clever, but by too much. A little like Roman Polanski, except that he’s even more twisted. Frappat: That’s the difference between Lars von Trier and Dreyer on the question of miracles. Rivette: There’s the fact that Dreyer “believes in God.” I put that in quotes because I don’t care whether he personally believed or not, but his films believe for him; while Lars von Trier may be a good Catholic, a believer who will go straight to paradise—I wish him that—but his films don’t believe for one second. Frappat: There’s something too conscious in what he does. Rivette: Not just that! He knows everything right away: there’s no secret, he has no secret, the poor guy! Everything is in the instruction manual. That’s why his films work so well with viewers and critics: 215

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everything is in the manual, there’s nothing new, it’s the old law of nineteenth-century academic theater. Frappat: We could say what a character from Gang of Four says about Constance (Bulle Ogier): “You either have a sense of mystery or you don’t.” She has a sense of mystery, without trying to be mysterious; there’s something almost ontological about it. Rivette: Yes, it’s a fact that can be observed, a state of grace in a way, to speak in theological and Jansenist terms. And you can only reply like Joan of Arc to that, there’s no other way! “If I am not in Grace, may God place me in it; and if I am in it, may God keep me in it.” Frappat: That brings us back to the almost mystical aspect of law. Rivette: Mystical in the sense that mysticism is also existential: mysticism is something very bodily, something incarnated. It doesn’t reside in pure ideas. On the contrary, it’s associated with the body. The great mystics are great materialists; they carry out a very precise activity on their bodies, and even a very coded one when it comes to some of them. Speaking about Ignatius of Loyola and Roland Barthes, I recently came across a line (by Barthes, not Loyola) that amused me, where he says that he is incapable of reading a text if it’s badly written! The text must first be well-written for it to be legible. Frappat: To come back to the reception of works of art, those who recognize the greatness of a work understand that it’s addressed to them and that, with respect to the work, they belong to this community, as Legendre said, that defines humanity. But let’s try to narrow that down a bit. From the point of view of greatness and reception, what is most specific or endemic about a film work? Rivette: What’s specific about it is the invention of Mr. Lumière. Frappat: It’s the manner in which the work of mise-en-scène juxtaposes (or not) secret and law. Have you found yourself engaged in this line of thought in your work? Rivette: I don’t think so. I get the feeling that, when you work, you ask yourself a lot of anecdotal questions—fortunately! You sense at the beginning that there are possibilities of resonance from a given starting point, one like Balzac’s “The Unknown Masterpiece” [1831], 216

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for example, or the story of Joan of Arc. This has to do with a realm of preoccupations, echoes, and suggestions, one that is more or less rich and that you want to explore, or make “resonate” in your own way and by your means. It harks back to the famous, now-somewhatoutmoded spat on the topic of small versus big subjects. There’s an article that Claude Chabrol wrote along these lines in Cahiers du Cinéma in the ’50s, a time when big subjects meant the films of Stanley Kramer or André Cayatte. Frappat: Social subjects. Rivette: Right. Luckily for cinema, television has taken over a large part of these debates, and it’s television that is now in charge of dealing with big subjects: society, good and evil, racism, and so on. That doesn’t mean films shouldn’t be interested in good and evil, racism, and the like. What Chabrol basically said was that one must take small subjects that look like nothing and make great films out of them, rather than taking big subjects and making small films of them! But to come back to the question you asked me: before starting a film, you have the feeling that . . . Let’s take a concrete example: I hesitated for two or three years before beginning on the story of La belle noiseuse, because I know that a film on the idea of a masterpiece— what comprises genius in painting, all these questions that are present in Balzac’s text, even if we told a wholly different filmic story while retaining just the characters and the painting—the idea that Balzac embodied, couldn’t be told anymore. At least, I was incapable of telling it. But I wanted to tell another story based on it, one that is about the relationship between the director and the model, in the Bressonian sense of actor. Even so, very early on, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, and I decided that we weren’t going to cheat on the question, that we were going to—frankly, frontally, deliberately, and even caricaturally—take it as our material, that the conversations would revolve around truth in painting, about what a painting is, and all such questions that have been there since the time of Cézanne, and even before Cézanne, since these issues are already implied in Balzac. All these were important questions that we didn’t want to dodge, treat recklessly, or cheat on, even if they aren’t the subject of the film. It was this two-level game that was, in a way, amusing and tempting. We didn’t want to cheat on the subject, even if there was another subject at work at the same time. In a way, La belle noiseuse concerns the relationship between the real subject and the fake subject.

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Frappat: I’d say another thing about the specificity of cinema: in the finest films, there’s always a relationship between something totally and absolutely childish, which is sometimes on the level of a fable—it’s the Famous Five [1942–62, Enid Blyton] quality of your films—. . . Rivette: Gang of Four, where there are effectively five women! Frappat: . . . and something totally thought over, reflexive and philosophical, which is everything you just mentioned: the relation among secret, law etc. Rivette: But those are things you don’t think about, things that I talk about today more or less awkwardly, and with the help of Mr. Legendre, Mr. Lacan, Mr. Spinoza, and many others whom I’ve read more or less well and whom I repeat more or less naïvely. But if, by chance, I try to make another film, I hope I won’t think of this moment one bit! That’s one good thing about cinema: while you’re making films, there are so many things, questions, little problems to solve during what is strictly called shooting, where something essential happens nonetheless, where everything comes into play. If the film is badly shot, no matter what you do, it can never be well edited. That may be the great advantage of filmmakers with respect to painters or writers, who remain all alone before their canvas or sheet of paper, but not before their untalkative screen: fortunately, in cinema, at the most decisive moment, you don’t have much time to think about big questions or big problems; there are so many concrete issues to solve all the time. It took me three films to understand this: what’s good about shooting is that it poses only practical problems; aesthetic problems arise earlier or later, not during shooting. I’m going to quote Paulhan once again here, a text titled Tomorrow’s Poetry [1947]: writing poems is about following, subjecting yourself to certain rules; it’s a thankless work “until tomorrow, for poetry”! And sometimes that’s how some very fine poems are created, at the end of the day, because the poet has done his work, almost purely mechanically but clearly with knowledge, with ten years of trial and error behind him. And one day, it all works, and poetry is suddenly there! Why? How? It’s a miracle that happens by dint of work. Frappat: And by dint of what could also be called a method.

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Rivette: Of course, of critical work. Criticism comes earlier or later, not during the work; once again, it’s one of the advantages of film direction: when you’re at it, you don’t really have the time to think about it; perhaps at bedtime, but then you’re worn out, and you fall asleep. Frappat: But at the same time, during the shoot, there’s constant invention at work. Rivette: But it’s the others who invent, if everything goes well. It’s the actors who are suddenly full of bright ideas, the cameraman who says, “Look, if we put the camera there instead of here.” You go, “Of course, that’s indeed where the camera should go, that’s much better.” In the best moments, which are the only ones that count, you just need to choose, to sort things: “Look, Sandrine has an idea, and Jerzy has another [Sandrine Bonnaire and Jerzy Radziwilowicz, the lead actors of Secret Defense], but if we approach it this way, it will all fall into place because, deep down, they are in agreement.” Frappat: I’m talking of method in the sense that Hawks talks about his shoots, for example. Rivette: I’m personally wary of anecdotes by American filmmakers, nine-tenths of whom are great liars. Hitchcock didn’t lie to François because he knew he was in front of a filmmaker and he was careful, but most of the time, these directors spout nonsense! But sorry, what was the story with Hawks? Frappat: He inserted the shoot into the story itself: on the set of Only Angels Have Wings [1939, Howard Hawks], when Rita Hayworth was having trouble delivering her lines, the point of the scene became that she couldn’t do it. Rivette: That’s quite possible. Everyone does those things; Renoir’s done it, and so have all directors who know that actors aren’t machines, and that you must take them as they are, because it’s today that the scene must be shot, not tomorrow. I think what sets a real director apart from a fake one, at such moments, is this feeling about whether what the actor does is right or not (as in music; you can be mistaken), and what the director does about it; the real director notices that one hits the right note and the other is a bit off. At this moment, does he try to ensure that the other actor also finds the right note, or 219

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by contrast, is he going to play off this mismatch? Sometimes the answer is yes, sometimes no; it depends on the scene, on the rapport between the actors. The real director knows what to do, not the fake one. At times, it’s more interesting to change the line, sometimes to retain it as it is, even if it sounds a bit bizarre. Frappat: Depending on the meaning it takes with respect to the general idea of what is right and what is not. Rivette: With respect to everything else, with respect to the context that’s only vaguely there in your head. You don’t have it laid out as a grid that you can refer to: ah yes, shot 477B! I’ve never had a shot 477B! You have it in your body, because you have a different body for each film, and that’s what you discover on the first day of every shoot. It was clear on the first day of the shoot of Secret Defense that Sandrine was a different person now: we spoke about the character of Sylvie knowing very well that it wasn’t the same character as Joan the Maiden. This was actually the starting point of the project. Even she had been thinking about it for weeks and months, so it’s another Sandrine. I’m necessarily a different Rivette now from the one who, on the first day of the shoot of Joan, asked Sandrine to come galloping towards the camera. That’s not what answers the question about whether the film is really a film or not! Frappat: I think that this question of a different body you talk about has to do with . . . Rivette: Yes, with decision-making. Perhaps, if you have something in you that (and it’s part of a director’s unconscious work on himself), during the six, eight, or ten weeks of shoot, spontaneously makes you go “yes, no, no, yes,” as François depicted so well in Day for Night [1973], in the scene where the director mechanically answers those who mob him when he comes to the shooting spot: “This one, yes, red,” and to another man, “No, not so bulky.” If you have to think every time, you’ll never get it done, you’ll never be able to say “Lights!” I don’t say it though, I prefer that the first assistant say it. I only ask the actors to go ahead, in one way or another. I call them by their first name most of the time; but I do say “Cut!”—or rather I don’t, I let the camera roll on . . .

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“JACQUES RIVETTE: VA SAVOIR”

Liza Béar, “Jacques Rivette: Va savoir” From Liza Béar, Beyond the Frame: Dialogues with World Filmmakers [Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2008], 221–224. New York, September 2001.

Not wishing to talk in the dark, smoke-filled bar of Jacques Rivette’s hotel and denied access by authority to the totally empty dining room, we settle for a small window table in the lobby overlooking Central Park. “It could have happened in any country,” says Rivette as I apologize for this inhospitable predicament. At seventy-three a frail, delicate man, he rewraps his red plaid scarf carefully around his neck as protection from the draught. Having first come to New York with the wistful Céline and Julie Go Boating, Rivette is making his first visit in twenty years—to a very new New York. The occasion is the opening of his latest film, Va savoir, a virtuoso romantic comedy about a French actress who returns to Paris to perform an Italian play. The story combines astute character study with some fancy plot flourishes—even on second viewing, an unexpectedly delightful film for these not so delightful times. “The starting point for the story was Jean Renoir’s The Golden Coach [1952], which I absolutely did not intend to remake,” said Rivette. “It’s about a troupe of actors from one country who go to perform in another country. What I took from it was the idea of an actress and her relationship with three very different men.” The three men are an impetuous Italian man of the theater (Sergio Castellitto), a stiff intellectual pedant (Jacques Bonaffe), and a suave con man (Bruno Todeschini). Why three? Because, Rivette explains with an anecdote, as Renoir told Truffaut in a very long interview for Cahiers du Cinéma (which Rivette at one point edited), “three is the magic number in the theater.” With this rather vague idea in mind, Rivette first sought out the Rome-based Castellitto after seeing him act in several films, then the cinematographer who had previously worked with the popular Italian actor-director. It was Castellitto who suggested Come Tu Mi Voi [As You Desire Me, 1930], the Pirandello play that the actors in Va savoir perform. He went on to play Ugo, not only an actor and director but also the husband of lead actress Camille (Jeanne Balibar) in the film. 221

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Actors and the theater have been a recurring theme in Rivette’s films, from his earliest Paris Belongs to Us, in which actors rehearse Shakespeare’s Pericles [1609], juxtaposing the mystery of the creative process against the physical realities of artistic survival. “It’s significant,” says Rivette, “that Camille’s character in the Pirandello play is known in Italian as l’ignota—the unknown.” With a so-so box office and Paris audiences for Pirandello fluctuating, Ugo applies himself by searching for an unpublished Goldoni manuscript, Il Destino di Venezia [The Destiny of Venice], which may be in a private library in Paris. A typographical error in the title complicates the search and also provides the perfect set-up for the film’s festive ending. With a strong Italian anchor for the scenario, other Italian plot links followed. “From the moment the Italian troupe acting Pirandello was in the story,” Rivette explains, “I wanted Ugo, this Italian director in Paris, to have his own thing going. She [Camille] comes to Paris terrified about seeing her former lover, a philosophy professor, from whom she’d fled because she felt trapped by him. To offset her anxiety, I wanted to give Ugo hope—the hope of finding this unpublished Goldoni manuscript that he’d read about in a biography.” While Rivette and his co-screenwriters invented the details, he said that Ugo’s trajectory in the film was inspired by historical fact: Goldoni’s financial struggles for much of the last thirty years of his life, spent in Paris. “He barely survived,” said Rivette. An earlier film of Rivette’s, La Bande des quatre, addresses another kind of survival, the artistic kind among young actresses. “The two films, La Bande des quatre and Va savoir, are polar opposites,” Rivette said. “In La Bande des quatre, they’re learning the process. Three-quarters of them will never make it to the stage. In Va savoir, it’s the exact opposite. They’re all experienced actors with a play they’ve already performed in Italy. In La Bande des quatre, I tried to show how the demands of their work affect these young actresses’ private lives, what they must sacrifice in order to succeed. They got a severe ethics lesson as well as acting training.” The light, playful tone of his latest film allows Rivette to make fun of an abstruse philosophical text like the one by the German Heidegger, whose writings inspired Jean-Paul Sartre’s much better known Being and Nothingness [1943], at least in France. As the epitome of academic frivolity, a supporting character in the film, Do (Hélène de Fougerolles), is writing her own thesis on the history of the brooch through the ages. Rivette credits the idea to a co-scenarist who once worked in the costume department. 222

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Born in Rouen, Rivette said that his parents did not approve of his cinematic ambitions. His father owned a pharmacy on one of the main squares in the city, and the family lived above it. In 1940, he recalls, when the Germans arrived in town, the whole neighborhood was burned down. “My father had already been called up by the army. My mother, sister, and I were part of the exodus to the countryside and we found ourselves in a part of France called La Vendée, with my grandparents. However, during the bombing of 1942–44, up to the Liberation, we were in Rouen again, and we spent a lot of time in caves waiting for sirens. Once we were in a makeshift shelter and a bomb dropped fifteen meters from our house, which was blown to bits. During the raids as many as several hundred people might be killed in one night.” Speaking of his own start in the cinema, Rivette said that “the desire to make films grew bit by bit, but someone who had an enormous influence on me unknowingly was Jean Cocteau. I was studying French literature and classics at Rouen University but not doing very well in Latin and Greek. So I started going to the cinema. Rouen had been ravaged by the war so there were only two or three theaters left in 1944–45. Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast [1946] was playing at one of them. But what especially impressed me were the diaries Cocteau kept during the making of the film, from the very first day of shooting, which were published when the film came out. It’s one of the most beautiful books about cinema ever written. This was an extremely difficult shoot, remember, because at the end of the war France was still very impoverished.” At twenty-one, Rivette headed for Paris and within two years started to work at Cahiers du Cinéma along with François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Éric Rohmer, and Jean-Luc Godard. “We were writing while we waited,” Rivette said. “We had absolutely no desire to be critics for the rest of our lives. We only wanted to make films. At the same it was interesting to discuss what we admired or disliked about the French cinema of that period.” As for Rivette’s views on the current state of French cinema, he says it has certainly become easier to make films in France that it was twenty years ago. “I’ve had the luck not only to work with the same producer, Martine Marignac, for the past twenty years,” said Rivette, “but I also like to work with the same key crew people, who know my ways of working. That really helps a lot. You really don’t want to start from scratch with each crew. Forty years ago I didn’t mind, but now I don’t want to do that anymore. Actors, now, that’s another matter.” 223

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“What has changed over the years,” he added, “is that I’ve become more and more interested in the actors themselves and the production stage of the film, the actual time on the set, which I used to dread. I’ve come to value this more and more because that’s the time when you are really working with actors. That’s what counts, the actual moment when you are shooting.”

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Valérie Hazette, “Hurlevent: Rivette’s Adaptation of Wuthering Heights” From Senses of Cinema, no. 29 [December 2003].

Valérie Hazette: The main topic I would like to explore with you concerns the episodes of the novel of Wuthering Heights [1847] that are difficult to translate into images, and their oneiric equivalents in the first, middle, and last scenes of Hurlevent. According to what Pascal Bonitzer said in a filmed interview [see the Rivette DVD collector pack released by ARTE in the Autumn 2002], the first scene was inspired by Georges Bataille. While leafing through the critical publications for Emily Brontë’s novel, he came across a book by Bataille, The Tears of Eros [1961]. Jacques Rivette: Well, it is not a book but an article, a very long article, which he collected later in a book called—I think—Literature and Evil (La Littérature et le Mal [1957]). Pascal knows Bataille far better than I do, since he was the subject of Pascal’s Ph.D. thesis. As for me, a long time ago, I merely skimmed through this article by Bataille. The truth is that I am not very familiar with it. Hazette: So there was this article, but also an illustration, apparently a reproduction of a painting by Nicolas Poussin. Rivette: No, it was not exactly an illustration. It all started—and it has been stated in a number of interviews, so you must have heard about it—it all started when I had no plans to shoot an adaptation of Wuthering Heights, or anything else for that matter. It was after . . . Hazette: . . . the Balthus exhibition? Rivette: It was after Love on the Ground. I had just finished the editing—it was probably at the end of 1983 or the start of 1984. I believe it was at the start of 1984 that the Balthus exhibition took place in Beaubourg. So I went to this exhibition. Seeing as he’s a bit of an eccentric and all that, I am very fond of Balthus [Balthasar Klossowski de Rola]. So I went to the exhibition, which was actually superb. I already knew the drawings produced by Balthus for the book that Gallimard 225

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editions had intended to publish at the beginning of the 1930s— around 1932 or 1933, I think. These drawings, by the way, were more or less contemporary with Luis Buñuel’s first desire to film the novel of Wuthering Heights. I believe he had already written the screenplay. Hazette: Which he only shot twenty years later. Rivette: Yes, but still, his screenplay was written at the time in question. So it was in the air for this little group, and Buñuel, Balthus, etc. knew each other. They used to gravitate around the surrealists, while otherwise retaining their independence. And then, although I had already seen some reproductions of the drawings, the Balthus exhibition of Beaubourg featured a small, separate room—a kind of tablier, as one says in old French—where they actually displayed all the Balthus originals: the ink as well as the pencil ones, the final drawings as well as the sketches. And I was struck by the fact that Balthus enormously simplified the costumes and stripped away the imagery trappings that are so much foregrounded in the William Wyler movie of Wuthering Heights [1939]. I also wondered why nobody had ever made a movie in which Catherine and Heathcliff were the age they actually are in the novel. Because in the Wyler movie they are thirty and in the Buñuel movie [Abismos de passion, 1954] thirty or forty. Therefore they are adults, and it does not mean anything. Well, it does mean something, but something completely different. So I felt like making a movie with some very young actors. I started with this idea in mind and made the first adaptation—well, maybe not the first one because there are adaptations that I have never seen—in which they are their age. It was a novel that I had read, like everyone else, when I was eighteen or nineteen in its classic French translation, the famous translation called Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent [1925], by Frédéric Delebecque—which is quite a good translation. It is a free translation, a kind of adaptation for the French language, which, as far as I know, is pretty faithful. The only criticism that I might make, very quickly, on the translation of Monsieur Delebecque is that everybody uses the “vous” form while, theoretically, between Catherine and Heathcliff ... Hazette: Maybe because there is never any “thou” in the novel. Rivette: Of course. Still, I don’t know which one Emily Brontë would 226

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have chosen. Because, on the one hand, when she writes the novel in 1840 or so, the “you” is very strong above all, maybe in a Protestant environment. On the other hand, I really find that the “tu” form comes more naturally. In English, I am not sure. The important thing is that it was quite a good translation. In fact, I had gone through it and tried to establish a few comparisons with the English text. And, of course, when we prepared the movie, I bought the English text and compared. But then, I deliberately decided not to re-read it. So I started with this idea in mind, and talked first to my producer, Martine Marignac, with whom I had already made North Bridge and Love on the Ground, and then to Pascal and Suzanne Schiffman, with whom I had worked on Love on the Ground, too. (Love on the Ground was the first movie I had made with Pascal; Suzanne, I had known for years and years.) But I had decided not to re-read the novel: I asked Pascal to summarize it for me. I wanted only to have the outline of the story and of the characters, that’s all. And from the start, I told him: “Only the first part,” because I knew about the second part. I had a very strong memory of the Wyler movie—because I hate it—and of the Buñuel movie because, as you know, I find it very beautiful. The characters are forty, but still, the movie remains very, very powerful. Hazette: After Love on the Ground, which was shot in the suburbs of Paris, did you feel like heading southwards for Hurlevent? Rivette: Indeed, I was tempted to make a film with a very stormy atmosphere, with the idea of “wilderness,” which had been completely absent from all I had done before. Hazette: Did you know this impressive stone building, this farm or mas, prior to the shooting? Rivette: No, not at all. In fact, Suzanne and I spent a long time looking for it. In the end, we eventually found this place. It was mainly the farm that mattered: the farm—as you probably know—is in Ardèche whereas the mansion, which should be nearby, is actually located 100 kilometers below, between Nîmes and Montpellier, near Sommières. However, it became obvious at an early stage that we would not find the mansion in Ardèche, or the setting for the farm near Sommières. I personally like the farm a lot. The mansion was trickier. It was a very, very tough shoot; it was a terrible shoot. 227

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Hazette: That is why I was unwilling to bring up the subject—I wonder if the novel can cast a bad spell. Why were there so many difficulties? You said that between the actors and the technicians . . . Rivette: We experienced difficulties at every level. The first difficulty regarded the financing of the movie. We had been denied the avance sur recettes (“advance on takings,” from a grant given by the Centre National de la Cinématographie)—which rarely happens—and that was it. The movie eventually got financed thanks to the intervention of Jack Lang [then Secretary of Culture], who organized a donation directly from the Ministry, and also thanks to Claude Berri, who entered into co-production. The latter told Martine, “Well, since you have trouble finding the money, don’t worry, I’ll co-produce the movie with you,” and he brought along the distributor, which was crucial. So that was the first difficulty. The second difficulty was quite typical; it consisted of finding the young actors. In this respect, I was happy, for it went well. The only problem was that, in the end, there were, as you know, these two actresses whom I hesitated between for Catherine’s part. There were Fabienne Babe, whom I finally chose—and Emmanuelle Béart. It is unlike me but, for that movie, I did quite a few video tests with a lot of young actresses and young actors. Funnily enough, the only one that we did not see at the time was Juliette Binoche, and who knows, if we had met her . . . She played in Rendez-vous [1986, André Téchiné] almost immediately after our shoot ended. It had the same director of photography. It was pretty clear to me that our Heathcliff would be Lucas Belvaux, because he had this sort of “peasant” demeanor when he walked, when he talked, in fact, in his whole being. To me, he was a kind of emblematic Heathcliff, even if he did not possess at all the dark romanticism of Emily Brontë’s Heathcliff. And if I eventually chose Fabienne rather than Emmanuelle—they were both smashing during the tests—it is only because I found that there were more affinities between the two. Hazette: Between Lucas and Fabienne? Rivette: Between Lucas and Fabienne, rather than between Lucas and Emmanuelle. First and foremost, the fact that Emmanuelle was a brunette, whereas Lucas and Fabienne were both fair. That, I believe, tilted the balance in favor of Fabienne. However, the shoot was very tough. Since the financing of the 228

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movie had taken so long, the crew was everything but homogeneous. The project did not start rolling till very late and the director of photography I wanted was not available. So, at that stage, we hired the people who happened to be free. And it did not go well with Renato Berta: he is a very good director of photography but failed to breathe team spirit into the crew. And the young actors felt traumatized because they could sense that something was not working, that it was a shoot ridden with unnecessary crises. On top of that, the thing that, of course, weighed considerably on the shoot, was that Suzanne—me too, but even more so Suzanne, since she was closer to him—knew that François Truffaut was dying. And he died a few days after the shoot ended. So, for the whole length of the shoot, every single day, we were expecting to receive the phone call that would tell us “François has died.” It was a truly harrowing situation. Therefore, everything conspired to make Hurlevent a difficult shoot. And there were scenes that were not shot because Monsieur Berta, who, again, is a great director of photography, also needs loads of time. So we either simplified or deleted. In my opinion, some important scenes are missing towards the end, in particular when it comes to Catherine’s long illness, which is really too elliptical—and it is so powerful in the novel. That is why I believe we did a better job of the scenes that were shot on the farm than of those that were shot in the mansion, where things went even worse with Monsieur Berta and the heat of the spotlights. I was personally exhausted and, towards the end, as if it were not enough, a cold epidemic broke out, which means that we were all halfsick. Fabienne was very sick, so sick that it could well have helped her to play the dying Catherine. Hazette: But how long did the shoot take? How much time did you have? Rivette: I forget. It was probably no more than a six-to-seven-week shoot. We had so little money, so little! Hazette: And who was your distributor? Rivette: It was the distributor who, at the time, depended on Claude Berri, that is to say the AMLF [Agence Méditerranéenne de Location de Films]. So the distribution came with Claude Berri. But the film was not a success and, after the editing—it was painstakingly edited—we 229

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also faced serious difficulties with the sound mixing. The sound mixing was a nightmare; the sound after mixing was pretty bad—it was already only average upon shooting. Well, it did not compare with what I usually got from the other sound engineers. But the worst came on mixing: we mixed in a bad auditorium, and what we heard did not synchronize at all with what we had on the film. We then had to digitalize and reinforce the direct sound. Well, for me, it’s too late now to give it another try! I’d better get on with it . . . Therefore, Hurlevent was really a problematic movie. Actually, I don’t know what to think of it. I haven’t seen it since and would be very much afraid of seeing it now. I believe there are things that I truly like and others that are definitely not so good. But then I hope that we did capture the force of the subject and of the novel, since we remained faithful to it and also since the actors were good. I really like the actor [Olivier Cruveiller] who plays the older brother and with whom, incidentally, I worked again in Jeanne la pucelle. Hazette: How did you choose Olivier and Isabelle, since there is an opposition between the fair hair of the Séveniers (Catherine, Heathcliff) and the dark hair of the Lindons (Olivier, Isabelle)? Rivette: I must confess I did not pay attention to that. Hazette: Those actors are also very, very young: Olivier Cruveiller and Alice de Poncheville. Rivette: Yes, indeed, since we had met Olivier by chance, during a casting for Heathcliff. But I told him from the start that he must play the elder brother. Hazette: Hindley. Rivette: Well, yes, but he had to be given a French name. I called him “Guillaume,” if I remember correctly. He is an actor whom I like a lot and chose again for Jeanne la pucelle. Also, the actress who played the maid-servant [Sandra Montaigu] had a small role in Love on the Ground. And I really like the actress who played Isabelle, too: she was only fifteen when we made the movie. She had never done anything. And I think she had the potential, but it just did not happen. Later on, she made one or two movies in which she was good as well, but she did not persevere. She lacked the vocation. It was fun for her but she lacked the vocation. 230

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Hazette: And the costumes were quite remarkable, weren’t they? Rivette: Yes, I agree. But this had a lot to do with Lydie Mahias, our script-girl, who, in actual fact, did far more than one job. I had decided pretty soon that the film would take place in the 1930s—maybe because of Balthus. And then, from her family house, she dug out lots of original women’s clothes from the 1930s, and she put them to good use. Hazette: In particular, the shoes. All along, there is a contrast between white and black shoes. Rivette: It is possible, but on this topic you know better than me. Hazette: So the scenes you are unhappy with are mostly in the part that takes place in the mansion. Rivette: Yes, because then Monsieur Berta took even longer than we had reckoned for the lighting of each scene. So we were under tremendous pressure, especially on the last days when it became essential to shoot all that we could. But again, I haven’t seen the movie since. And if I saw it now, I really don’t know what I would think of it. Hazette: This movie is extremely powerful. It is shorter than your other movies, and also has a lot of “punch.” Rivette: Since it was necessary to condense quite a lot, by force of circumstance, I believe that it is indeed the most elliptical of all my movies. Otherwise I might have made a three- or three-and-a-half hour movie, as I usually do. But there, we were obliged to simplify, to keep to the essentials. In the end, it might have given a more vigorous and energetic feel to the film. Hazette: Regarding the end, it looks as if all the adaptations of Wuthering Heights have suffered from great production constraints: Wyler wished the ending had not been imposed on him; the screenwriter Patrick Tilley [from Robert Fuest’s 1970 adaptation of Wuthering Heights] was thoroughly disgusted by the way the final editing was done. Rivette: In contrast, Buñuel’s ending is superb.

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Hazette: In the tomb. Rivette: Completely invented. It is extraordinary. It is beautiful, but different, since the two main actors are definitely forty. Besides, among all the versions I know, Buñuel’s is the “shortest”: he uses the most compressed timeline. Not only does he stick to the first part, but he also starts when the adult Heathcliff comes back, and he finishes with Catherine’s death, which represents a quarter of the novel. Hazette: After all, Brontë’s novel had to be divided into two parts, two volumes, to be saleable. Rivette: The second part of the novel is equally beautiful, superb. Hazette: Truffaut kept the same actor, Jean-Pierre Léaud, in The 400 Blows [1959] and Love on the Run [1979], the last movie of the Antoine Doinel cycle, with an interval of twenty years between the two films. If you had had the same opportunity with Lucas and Fabienne, would you have been tempted to make the second part of Hurlevent, a generation later? Rivette: Not with Fabienne, since Catherine is dead. So another actress would be needed. But with Lucas, it could have been interesting. But I won’t do it. Anyway, now, it is too . . . well, no, it has been eighteen years since 1984. Hazette: And when was the movie released in the theaters? Rivette: If I remember correctly, it was released in the autumn of 1985, in September or October. So, at the time, I thought to myself that it was a strange idea to choose to release it in September, when there were already loads of other movies being released concurrently. Hazette: Who decides the release date? Rivette: Not me, the distributor does. Besides, the distributor was linked to Berri, so they decided . . . But it is not their fault if the movie was a flop. This movie belongs to a category of movies that people like or do not like. There are movies that, more or less, appeal to many people for many different reasons, like Va savoir. On the contrary, there are movies that some people like a lot while, to others, they mean absolutely nothing. For example, Up, Down, Fragile belongs to this 232

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category. It is a movie that people either like a lot, or, they cannot even conceive why we thought of making it in the first place. And it is going to be the same story with The Story of Marie and Julien. This I know in advance—whether it is good or not, some people will love it and others will hate it. Hazette: Do you think that this has to with their “reading,” or interpretation, of the movie? Rivette: It has to do with this topic, though I could not say exactly why. That’s the way it is: there are some movies that really divide people. Those who are interested are even more interested; however, those who are not interested cannot even start to imagine what triggered the idea. It was fairly noticeable with Up, Down, Fragile and, as noted, will certainly be with The Story of Marie and Julien. Hurlevent worked much the same way but, on top of that, people have pre-conceived ideas about Wuthering Heights, which has merged in their minds with the Wyler movie. But, for me, Wyler’s movie is vaguely faithful to the novel, in the letter, but makes no sense whatsoever with all those ball scenes sprinkled everywhere. In fact, they transformed the novel into an “Emily Brontë and Jane Austen” production. Actually, Wuthering Heights is Wyler’s movie, after a novel by Jane Austen! Hazette: But do you really think that the Wyler movie is being so vividly remembered by today’s true cinephiles? Rivette: No, but the only interesting thing is that Gregg Toland did the photography. Therefore, thanks to him, there were moments that were visually powerful. Laurence Olivier, of course, is a fabulous actor: had he done it ten years earlier, he would have been fantastic. Hazette: Adapting Emily Brontë’s novel is not a walk in the park and, nowadays, in 2000, there are more adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels than of Wuthering Heights. So why this desire to make a film based on Brontë’s novel, since most of these ventures fail in one way or another—commercially, mainly? During the shoot, there is always something that does not happen or does not happen according to plan. Or else, it is very difficult to find the right actors. Rivette: There have been some successful film adaptations of Jane Austen’s novels, though? 233

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Hazette: Yes, Jane Austen, but . . . Rivette: I don’t know her novels so well but there is this adaptation with Emma Thompson in it . . . Hazette: Sense and Sensibility [1995, Ang Lee]. Rivette: It wasn’t too bad, was it? It is not a great movie because it is treated in a very impersonal manner. Hazette: With Jane Austen, it seems to be easier. Rivette: Well, yes, because first of all, the dialogue is already completely written: it just needs shooting. Jane Austen was a true genius when it came to writing dialogue. Hazette: Whenever a good version of Wuthering Heights emerges, the filmmaker takes a particular stance, emphasizes a certain angle, a personal vision—especially for the character of Nelly, the servant. Therefore, the fact that you did not re-read the novel makes sense to me. Rivette: I don’t know. I felt it was necessary not to re-read it straightaway. I re-read it later on, though. In fact, I started to re-read bit by bit, when we had decided on everything, when we already had our scenario. Then, I re-read it completely. And afterwards, I was able to say: “What about using the sentence she uttered at that moment—or this sentence, or that one.” Besides, on re-reading it, I could not help thinking that it was a superb piece, the work of a genius. Hazette: And did you try to re-read it in English too? Rivette: No, I did not. I was just curious to see how it was translated. I cannot read well enough in English. I can read newspaper articles in English, but cannot read English fluently—in particular, when it is a text as well-written as Emily Brontë’s. I did try with another AngloSaxon author—not an English one—who is very badly translated into French, Henry James. It is indeed very difficult to translate him. Half to three-quarters of the translations of James are awful in French. It so happens that I have compared the translation and James’s original text a couple of times. In the French translation of The Wings of the Dove [1902], there are some passages that do not mean 234

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anything. In following the English text, I realized that the translator had translated word for word because this person did not fully understand. Therefore it was a translation that did not mean anything in French. Conversely, there were things that the translator had oversimplified, like the first sentence: “She waited, Kate Croy,” which is so beautiful but ended up being completely flattened out. The translator simply wrote : “Kate Croy attendait son père.” In short, all the syntactic effect had thereby been totally destroyed. Hazette: All the visual quality of the interpolated clause. Rivette: Yes, the particular syntax and, also, the polysemy. Hazette: Similarly, in your movie, one thing can have several meanings, and this leaves a lot of room for interpretation. But who got the idea of the central scene—the oneiric scene? Rivette: I cannot remember . . . It was meant to represent a division. It felt obvious, necessary for this oneiric scene to be in the middle and materialize the passage of the three years during which Heathcliff is absent. I simply felt like having this scene, which, indeed, is a creative add-on. Hazette: And what about the powerful idea of the blood that appears progressively, like some stigmata. Rivette: I forget what we did. I just know that we came up with the oneiric idea in an attempt to represent the passage between the two parts, since the first and second parts are about the same length. We knew we needed a visual equivalent, so we felt we could have an oneiric scene—like we had at the beginning and . . . Hazette: At the end . . . Rivette: This is a principle that I have applied again to The Story of Marie and Julien. In fact, I realize now that Marie and Julien has been very much influenced by our adaptation of Wuthering Heights, since the project was born two years later. Hazette: Do you wish to talk about The Story of Marie and Julien? Rivette: No, not particularly. I only wanted to mention that it had been 235

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structured around dreams, like our adaptation of Wuthering Heights. There is a dream at the beginning, one in the middle, and one at the end. It does not end with the dream, even though the audience will no longer know when they are seeing a dream and when they are seeing reality. Hazette: In Hurlevent, I didn’t realize that the first scene was a dream. To me, the time just seemed to be suspended. It is thanks to Pascal’s interview, which is present on the DVD collector pack released by ARTE, that I learned about it. However, it is the dream scene located in the middle of the movie that makes everybody want to see the film. Rivette: As far as I can remember, I was quite happy about it. Hazette: How did you come up with the creative idea? Did it simply occur to you? Rivette: Well, I don’t know. I think that we talked about it (the three of us: Pascal, Suzanne, and I), that we sat down and had a discussion. Personally, I like working that way: I write very little. It is Pascal who writes, afterwards. But apart from that, when we see each other, we talk, we talk, we talk, and then, sometimes, the good ideas come. Suddenly, you say something that triggers a reply. And that’s why I quite like working in a trio. Because when three people have a discussion, they hand over the baton frequently, whereas two people often go round and round with their opposite views. In a trio, the third person takes sides for one or the other. Additionally, clearer arguments have to be given. That’s how you move forward. It has worked the same way for The Story of Marie and Julien with Pascal and Christine Laurent. We also had loads of problems—for instance, finding the end, which did not exist in the text I had dug out—and tackled them by discussion. Hazette: Regarding the release of Hurlevent, there were apparently a couple of hitches. I have the feeling that its screen life was cut short in the theaters. Rivette: No, it could not be different because the audience was not there. So, when there are only a few spectators, the movies cannot be shown in empty theaters for long. That’s why I am happy about the DVD. Now, there are a lot of people who will see it who were not even aware that the film existed. They may well buy the DVD for La belle 236

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noiseuse or Gang of Four, which are more popular. But, then, maybe they will feel like watching the other movies—including Hurlevent.

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Jacques Rivette, “On Don’t Touch the Axe” From a press conference at the 2007 Berlin International Film Festival.

Question: In a way, this film is the end of a cycle because first we had Out 1 sort of as an inspiration from History of the Thirteen [1833– 39], by Honoré de Balzac. Now he’s here again, this time with a story out of the three-novel cycle that, in its adaptation, is very close to the original. Mr. Rivette, could you tell us a little about your passion for Balzac and maybe also about Balzac himself—what sort of an impact Balzac has had on your career? Jacques Rivette: Well, that’s not one question, it’s at least three or four. I’ll try not to answer them all at once but perhaps one after the other. In the case of this film, Ne touchez pas la hache, I hadn’t prepared at all to adapt Balzac’s novella as close as I had done in other cases, but be it Out 1 or La belle noiseuse, Balzac has always been very important for me. He was a little bit of a pretext for this film but here it’s a different story because I did not start with the idea of having a new adaptation of Balzac—sorry that this answer is getting quite long but it’s a bit difficult to do it otherwise. After The Story of Marie and Julien I felt like doing a film that would have a contemporary narrative. We had Next Year in Paris, and, in the proposed film, I wanted to have Guillaume Depardieu as an acting partner to Jeanne Balibar. This was a contemporary film, rather close to Out 1, and so I started with the producer Martine Marignac and we’re wondering how to shoot this film, and I thought that this project—I realized nobody was interested in the project. No French or foreign television channels: nobody, absolutely nobody was interested in financing the film, and I thought, “O.K., if nobody wants to do this story, I’ll do something else.” But there was one thing that I was very interested in and that was having this film for Jeanne and Guillaume, and I really regretted the fact that I couldn’t see them acting together in a rather dramatic story. So with the screenwriters Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent I tried to find a different scenario where we could have these two actors interacting and working together, and we spent two weeks reading universal literature to find a good project for Jeanne and Guillaume. We had Henry James for a long time but he absolutely refused to take 238

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part in our project, so in the end it was Balzac. And within three nights we wrote a new story, or rather he wrote the story, “La Duchesse de Langeais” [1834], and we used it; it wasn’t really our original plan but that’s just what happened. So we have this Balzac cycle because that’s simply the way it worked out . . . pieces coming to us. Maybe I haven’t expressed myself clearly. When I was preparing a different film, Jeanne la pucelle, I was persuaded, I was convinced, that the woman playing Jeanne needed an actor acting with her who was as strong and imaginative as herself, and therefore I needed to have Jeanne and Guillaume together in my new film—that’s what I felt like doing. When we talked about Next Year in Paris, which was my other project, then again I can only say that it was Balzac that manifested himself to us instead. I thought I should keep to his text because I think it’s an excellent piece of art. I’ve forgotten the beginning of my answer. In any event, Balzac arrived in this project rather late—at a very late stage because I had already decided I wanted a film with Jeanne and Guillaume and then only afterwards, of course, did I work on Balzac’s text with Pascal and Christine. When writing the screenplay we thought, “What should we keep in, what should we have outside, what titles would we have in between?” And so on—and there you are. We just tried to stay as close as possible to Balzac’s story, and to his way of telling the story. I needn’t explain how different it is to write or to shoot a film, that’s clear. But what I did try to do with Pascal and Christine, and also with Jeanne and Guillaume, was to try and find the elements that give Balzac’s writing such strength. Sometimes he has very long and complex phrases, but they are full of ideas, and we wanted to keep this supple way of writing, also this continuous way of writing that sometimes, naturally, is additionally very violent because sometimes there’s no other way of expressing oneself. So we tried to keep to Balzac as best we could by our own means. Question: You talk about keeping close to Balzac’s text. Now why did you choose the title? Was that because of this worrying aspect of love? Rivette: No, no, that was to keep close to Balzac, because when he wrote this story, which he published first in a magazine and then in a volume, that was the original title. So I reused the original title. It was “Ne touchez pas la hache.” Balzac decided on a different title only much, much later in his career when he started republishing the contents of what became La Comédie humaine [1829–48], where he links one story or novel with another; and of course we weren’t doing La Comédie humaine, as we didn’t have the time. We had just this one 239

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part, a very precise part, which is a story in itself, and Balzac gave it the title “Ne touchez pas la hache” when it was on its own. So that’s what we decided to use, the original title: Don’t Touch the Axe.

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Jean-Marc Lalanne & Jean-Baptiste Morain, “The Secret Art” From Les Inrockuptibles, March 30, 2007. Translated by Craig Keller & Joseph Coppola.

Jean-Marc Lalanne & Jean-Baptiste Morain: Is the reception that your films receive something that still burns you up? Were you hurt by the bad reception for Histoire de Marie et Julien? Jacques Rivette: You always wish there were more of a response. But often it comes five, ten years down the road. As it turns out, for Histoire de Marie et Julien, I’m starting to get a sense these days of some change of heart. But films today have a completely different life with DVD, which I think is the greatest. First of all, because that’s practically the only way I watch films anymore. Lalanne & Morain: Which films have you seen recently on DVD? Rivette: I’ve been really disappointed by the new films I’ve seen. I’m pretty appalled by the current American cinema, after having thought so highly of it. Martin Scorsese has disappointed me a lot. I think that Francis Ford Coppola is a much more interesting filmmaker. When you see One from the Heart [1982] again, you’re really struck by a very strong desire for cinema. I’m often struck today by the way in which some filmmakers build this image of what their cinema is, and then are no longer willing to let go of it. Even filmmakers that I’ve liked a lot, like Clint Eastwood, have disappointed me. I couldn’t bring myself to go see his two latest films [Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima, both from 2006]. Lalanne & Morain: Were the cells of cinephiles in the 1950s, and notably that of Cahiers du Cinéma, similar to secret societies? Rivette: The secret society, that’s always the other people. It wasn’t an accident if there were conflicts with other groups, other magazines, such as Positif. But yes, of course . . . Lalanne & Morain: The story of the cinephilia of the ’50s, a nearly mythological phenomenon seen from today, has something of the 241

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novelistic about it, almost as if it comes out of Balzac. Did you live this, at that time? Rivette: We were all very surprised by what took place, by what they called the New Wave. No one from among us, whether it was François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, or Éric Rohmer, anticipated that it would take that dimension. Above all, this verified, after the fact, the appropriateness of what we all thought and what François wrote in his famous article “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema” [1954], which nevertheless was an absolute rupture. Cahiers du Cinéma was thus paid attention by the institutions of criticism and film. Lalanne & Morain: Can you tell us about your encounter with the Cahiers group? Rivette: The great difference with the Positif critics, for example, was that we all wanted to make films. When I met François, Jean-Luc and the others on my arrival in Paris from Rouen, we would meet each other at the Cinémathèque Française on the Avenue Messine, where we went just about every night. Already, what differentiated us from other cinephiles, even if we were all snot-nosed kids (I was twenty-one and François seventeen), was, again, that we wanted to make films. We had no idea at all how; I, for one, knew absolutely no one. François had just been released from military prison thanks to André Bazin, and we fell in together right off because we wanted to become filmmakers. I was enrolled in the College of Arts but I did not have the least intention of pursuing these studies: it was just to be able to benefit from the advantages of student-status. Lalanne & Morain: Does the desire to make films date from your adolescence in Rouen? Rivette: I retell this often. (Laughs.) The guilty party is Jean Cocteau. The determining factor was the release of La Belle et la Bête [Beauty and the Beast, 1946] and, most of all, the publication of his diary of the shoot. I had read a lot of Cocteau, whom I liked a lot. At that time, I didn’t much know what I wanted to do later on, and when I read this diary—when he recounted the work with the crew, all the problems that he encountered, his skin disease, Jean Marais’s injury, and so on— I immediately knew that this was what I wanted to do. I told myself that cinema was a place where things happened, where one debated 242

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with people, where one invented and tried things whether they worked or not. Lalanne & Morain: You brought to Cahiers du Cinéma the relish for interviews and the idea of going over to the film set. Rivette: That was most of all an excuse to see what happened on a film set. I went over to the one for Max Ophüls’s The Earrings of Madame de . . . [1953] and stayed there two or three days in a corner; I watched Ophüls work, Danielle Darrieux, but in the end I did not write anything. When it comes to the interviews, that came from the great vogue, at that time, of very long radio interviews with writers: André Gide, Paul Léataud, and others. And there was Paul Claudel, who edited the text of these interviews for Gallimard, and who, in principle, corrected nothing. I was leafing through this book when it had just come out, and François and I said to each other, “This is what we should be doing!” And that is why we went with our tape recorder to see Jacques Becker. Lalanne & Morain: L’Amour fou, for its part, is a rather overwhelming film about the complexity, the instability of a couple’s connections. But that question disappeared in your cinema up until the two most recent films, Histoire de Marie et Julien and Ne touchez pas la hache, where it becomes totally central again. Again we find the same, very naked pain, tied to love. Rivette: (A long silence.) Yes. (Laughs.) But no, I’ll respond. I shot L’Amour fou by telling Georges de Beauregard, the producer, that I was going to make a film about jealousy, which wasn’t entirely true. We shot it in five weeks, under very tight conditions. The film was marked by what I was discovering at the time in the theater, namely through the productions of Marc’O and his actors. Jean Eustache was doing the editing on Les Idoles [1968, Marc’O, a.k.a. Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin] but also for the documentary Jean Renoir, le patron, which I made in 1967 for the Cinéastes de notre temps series. I remember long discussions that we had on the question of true and false. It followed that the basic principle of the cinema should be reality, and what’s more, truth. What I was opposed to was the idea that there was no truth other than fiction. In a certain way, L’Amour fou is a fiction-film relative to the idea that, indirectly, it proposed the truth-film: La Maman et la putain [The Mother and the Whore; 1973, Jean Eustache]. That film is direct autobiography; all the characters 243

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on screen were literally people I knew from the period. Jean was writing with the will to be utterly faithful to the biographical material, to find the most exact equivalence to it. In Une sale histoire [A Dirty Story; 1977, Jean Eustache], this very volition becomes the film’s subject. Lalanne & Morain: In Out 1, that twelve-hour-long cult film, you added to Marc’O’s troupe two slightly younger individuals, two of your associates in the New Wave: Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto. It’s really a great film about the ’68 youth culture without ever coming right out and saying so. Rivette: Yes, I shot two years after ’68 and, without ever making reference to the events, the characters never stop referring to what happened two years prior. As for Jean-Pierre’s and Juliet’s characters, they absolutely do not comprehend the world in which they’re evolving. But around them, the secret society of the Thirteen (Michel Lonsdale, Bulle Ogier, Bernadette Lafont, etc.) never stops commenting upon what’s happened. For me, it’s clear, the film speaks of ’68, or rather the immediate post-’68 years. Lalanne & Morain: You were the only filmmaker of the New Wave to establish a bridge with the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, Andy Warhol in particular. Rivette: In the ’60s, I kept going to the Cinémathèque Française. Which François, for example, no longer did. It’s there that I discovered the New York avant-garde films. I remember discovering Chelsea Girls [1966, Andy Warhol], which impressed me a great deal. Lalanne & Morain: Did you meet Warhol? Rivette: Once, at La Coupole, early in the 1970s. I was meeting up with Bulle and we were in the same group of people. But he was very hemmed-in; spoke little; looked like a sphinx. Lalanne & Morain: You shot Dallessandro, thinking of Warhol?

Merry-Go-Round

with

Joe

Rivette: I found him magnificent in Paul Morrissey’s trilogy: Flesh [1968], Trash [1970], and Heat [1972]. But the idea was Maria Schneider’s, who really wanted him to be her partner, because she had 244

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met him in Rome, I think. The shoot was very difficult. Maria wasn’t doing very well, was in a physical state that didn’t make work very easy; she was sleeping all the time or not at all. Without going overboard, I felt like Billy Wilder waiting for Marilyn Monroe to get ready without ever being certain that she’d actually show up. Very quickly, Joe understood that he’d get nothing out of this film. Relationships on the set were very tense, precisely because we had a lot of illness crop up at the onset of the shoot. But Joe had a kindness to him, and an impeccable seriousness. Total respect for Joe Dallessandro. Lalanne & Morain: After that film, you went on to Le Pont du Nord, which takes a hard look at the end of the ’70s and the squashing of the utopias of ’68. Rivette: We shot that film in November of 1980. At the time, we thought that Valéry Giscard d’Estaing had every chance to win a second term. You don’t remember the end of the Giscard years with any certainty, but it really wasn’t anything to pin a medal on. Ministers were committing suicide, were getting killed leaving their homes, all followed by a series of scandals: there was the affaire des diamants, of “sniffer planes” for locating oil deposits. Giscard’s last year in power was delirious, almost demented. Le Pont du Nord is a slightly polemical film about this deep malaise, this asphyxiated feeling that belonged to the France of the late ’70s. But the film was released a few months after François Mitterand’s victory. It was therefore already out-of-date, historically. Lalanne & Morain: The passing of the baton between an individual contemporary to ’68, such as Bulle Ogier, and a succeeding generation that has no memory of the events, embodied by her daughter Pascale Ogier and the latter’s punk petit soldat silhouette, is tremendous. Rivette: The idea was to refer to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza— passing from the Parisian quartiers outward to the peripheral areas, those zones that are slightly uncertain, but without ever leaving Paris. We also wanted to show everything that was in the process of being transformed, under construction. Lalanne & Morain: Does the current presidential race interest you? Rivette: It’s amusing. If you can’t laugh at it, then what will you ever laugh at? No, frankly, I don’t have any big thing to say about it. 245

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Lalanne & Morain: At what point your films took account of the political mutations inside France has already been discussed somewhat. What do you think of the films that were speaking more directly about politics, the utopias of collective cinema around the time of ’68, JeanLuc Godard’s Dziga-Vertov group? Rivette: The films that you’re speaking of were collective in the same way that the regime in Beijing was a democracy! Lalanne & Morain: In your connection with improvisation, you’ve always put into place a collective practice, whereby the actor takes part in the directing. Rivette: In certain films, that’s true. None of my films were built according to the same rules of the game, even if I’d resorted several times to a large degree of improvisation, where the actors in part had to invent what they were doing, what they were saying, and sometimes contributed all the way up to the story of the movie. Sometimes this got very risky, but each time in a different way. I’ve often taken the risk of keeping my mouth shut about my films, but I will say this: never the same way twice. But in any case, I think that cinema is always collective, even in the work of Robert Bresson. Lalanne & Morain: That’s not what Anne Wiazemsky wrote about Bresson in her recent novel. Rivette: I’ve read that, too, and I really liked it. Still, we see that the shoot was somewhat collective. Sometimes, the donkey just would not respect what it was that Bresson wanted. (Laughs.) Lalanne & Morain: Why do the credits of your films always indicate: “direction: Jacques Rivette” rather than “a film by Jacques Rivette”? Rivette: I detest the formulation “a film by.” A film is always by at least fifteen people. I don’t like “réalisation” very much, either, which seems to me very pretentious, maybe because its root is “reality.” Mise-en-scène means a rapport with the actors, and the communal work is set with the first shot. What’s important for me in a film is that it be alive, that it be imbued with presence, which is basically the same thing; and that this presence, inscribed within the film, possess a form of magic. There’s something profoundly mysterious in all of this. It’s an alchemy that one procures—or does not procure. Early in 246

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the shoot, anything’s still possible, but once you’ve taken two or three steps, already you have to follow the course that the film has taken. Yet that’s what’s interesting. Filmmaking is a collective work, but one wherein there’s a secret, too. For that matter, the actor has his secrets as well—of which the director is the spectator. Lalanne & Morain: Then is the cinema, for you, a collective work between people who have secrets? Rivette: Yes. It’s a little closer to that. And I think that the story of a film always ends when you talk about it.

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Bibliography (English Language)

On Jacques Rivette Almén, Byron, & James Butler. “Mad Sound and the Crystal-Image: The Soundtrack of Rivette’s L’Amour fou.” In Greene, Liz, & Danijela Kulezic-Wilson, eds. The Palgrave Handbook of Sound Design and Music in Screen Media : Integrated Soundtracks. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 197–212. Armes, Roy. “Jacques Rivette.” In French Cinema since 1946. Vol. 2: The Personal Style. 1966. London: A. Zwemmer, 1970. Burt, Richard. “Jacques Rivette and Film Adaptation as ‘Dérive-ation’: Pericles in Paris Belongs to Us and The Revenger’s Tragedy in Noiroit.” In Semenza, Greg Colón, ed. The English Renaissance in Popular Culture : An Age for All Time. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 167–186. Calbi, Maurizio. “Exilic/Idyllic Shakespeare: Reiterating Pericles in Jacques Rivette’s Paris nous appartient.” Sederi, 25 (2015): 11–30. Chauderlot, Fabienne-Sophie. “‘Becoming Image’: Deleuzian Echoes in Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse.” Eighteenth-Century Life, 25.1 (Winter 2001): 88–100. Deleuze, Gilles. “Rivette’s Three Circles” (1989). In Deleuze’s Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews, 1975–1995. Trans. Ames Hodges & Mike Taormina. 2001. Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2007. 355–358. Di Iorio, Sam. “Three Tracking Shots: Jacques Rivette Towards a Masterless Cinema.” Contemporary French Civilization, 32.2 (2008): 85–112. Dowd, Garin. “Paris and Its Doubles: Deleuze/Rivette.” Deleuze Studies, 3.2 (2009): 185–206. Elsaesser, Thomas. “Around Painting and the ‘End of Cinema’: A Propos Jacques Rivette’s La belle noiseuse” (1992). In Elsaesser’s European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005. 165–177. Fairfax, Daniel. “Questions of Montage and Filmic Space in L’Amour fou and Out 1, by Jacques Rivette.” Studies in French Cinema, 17.2 (2017): 182–197. Fieschi, Jean-André. “Jacques Rivette.” In Cinema, A Critical Dictionary: The Major Filmmakers. Vol. 2. Ed. Richard Roud. New York: Viking Press, 1980. 871–878.

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Harcourt, Peter. “On Jacques Rivette (the Early Films).” Ciné-Tracts, 1.3 (Fall/Winter 1977–78): 4l-52. Jackson, Kevin. “Carnal to the Point of Scandal: On the Affair of La Religieuse.” In Mayor, Robert, ed. Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 139–156. Kite, B. “Jacques Rivette and the Other Place, Track One.” Cinema Scope, 30 (Spring 2007): 12–21; & Cinema Scope, 32 (Fall 2007): 43–53. Lesage, Julia. “Céline and Julie Go Boating: Subversive Fantasy.” Jump Cut, 24–25 (Mar. 1981): 36–43. Levinson, Julie. “Céline and Julie Go Story Telling.” French Review, 65.2 (Dec. 1991): 236–246. Lloyd, Peter. “Jacques Rivette and L’Amour fou.” Monogram, 2 (Summer 1971): 10–15. Marie, Michel. The French New Wave: An Artistic School. Trans. Richard Neupert. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell, 2003. Martin, Adrian. “The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette’s Phantoms.” In Perkins, Claire, & Constantine Verevis, eds. Film Trilogies: New Critical Approaches. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 111–126. Martin, Adrian. “Jacques Rivette: The Great Manipulator.” Cineaste, 41.4 (2016): 4–10. Monaco, James. The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette. 1976. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Morrey, Douglas, ed. “Jacques Rivette.” Special issue of Australian Journal of French Studies, 47.2 (May–Aug. 2010): 121–221. Morrey, Douglas. “To Describe a Labyrinth: Dialectics in Jacques Rivette’s Film Theory and Film Practice.” Film-Philosophy, 16.1 (2012): 30–51. Morrey, Douglas, & Alison Smith. Jacques Rivette. 2009. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2019. Neupert, Richard. A History of the French New Wave Cinema. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press., 2007. Raghavendra, M. K. “World and Text: Interpreting Jacques Rivette.” In Raghavendra’s Locating World Cinema: Interpretations of Film as Culture. New Delhi: Bloomsbury, 2020. 65–92. Rohdie, Sam. “Jacques Rivette.” In Rohdie’s Montage. 2006. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2019. 105–108. Romney, Jonathan. “How Jacques Rivette Made Filmmaking Fascinating.” Modern Painters, April 2006: 36–39. Rosenbaum, Jonathan, ed. Rivette: Texts and Interviews: London: British Film Institute, 1977. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Work and Play in the House of Fiction: On Jacques Rivette” (1974). In Rosenbaum’s Placing Movies: The Practice of Film Criticism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. 142–52. Rosenbaum, Jonathan. “Jacques Rivette.” Artforum International, 54.9 (2016): 89–98. Shachar, Hilar. “Moving Backward, Looking Forward : Jacques Rivette’s 249

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Hurlevent.” In Shachar’s Cultural Afterlives and Screen Adaptations of Classic Literature: Wuthering Heights and Company. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 61–84 Singerman, Alan J. “Desperately Seeking Suzanne: The Semiotics of the Soundtrack in Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse.” Diderot Studies, 28 (2000): 141–160. Suchenski, Richard I. “‘We Are No Longer Innocent’: The Long-Form Aesthetic of Jacques Rivette.” In Suchenski’s Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film. Corby, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 2016. 93–142. Tavassoli-Zea, Zahra. “Rivettean Cinema as the Acquisition of Hidden Knowledge.” In Tavassoli-Zea’s Balzac Reframed: The Classical and Modern Faces of Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan. 125–164. Vanderschelden, Isabelle. “Jacques Rivette.” French Studies, 65.4 (2011): 552–553. Watts, Andrew. “Adapting Balzac in Jacques Rivette’s Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe): Violence and the Post-Heritage Aesthetic.” In Cooke, Paul, ed. Screening European Heritage: Creating and Consuming History on Film. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. 145– 162. Watts, Philip. “Jacques Rivette’s Classical Illusion.” Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 9.3 (Sept. 2005): 291–299. Wiles, Mary. Jacques Rivette. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Wood, Robin. “Narrative Pleasure: Two Films by Jacques Rivette” (1981). In Wood’s Sexual Politics and Narrative Cinema. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. 285–300. By Jacques Rivette (on Howard Hawks, 1953) In Joseph McBride’s Focus on Howard Hawks (Prentice-Hall, 1972), 70–77. Also in Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 126–131. (on The Lusty Men, 1953) In Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 104–106. (on Cinemascope, 1954) In Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; NeoRealism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 275–279. (on Angel Face, 1954) In Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; NeoRealism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 132–135. (interview with Jean Renoir, 1954) In Sight and Sound, July-Sept. 1954, 12– 17. (on Roberto Rossellini, 1955) In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Rivette: Texts and 250

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Interviews (BFI, 1977), 54–64. Also in Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 192–204. (on recent American cinema, 1955) In Jim Hiller’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 94–97. (interview with Howard Hawks, 1956) In Andrew Sarris’s Interviews with Film Directors (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 228–240. (on Beyond A Reasonable Doubt, 1957) In Jonathan Rosenbaum’s Rivette: Texts and Interviews (BFI, 1977), 65–68. Also in Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 140–144. (on Kenji Mizoguchi, 1958) In Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 264–265. (interview with Roberto Rossellini, 1959) In Jim Hillier’s Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s; Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave (Harvard University Press, 1985), 212–217. (on Testament of Orpheus, 1960) In René Gilson’s Jean Cocteau (Crown, 1969), 164–165. (interview with Alain Resnais & Alain Robbe-Grillet, 1961) In Andrew Sarris’s Interviews with Film Directors (Bobbs-Merrill, 1967), 434–452. (reviews of Renoir’s The Woman on the Beach, French Cancan, Little Red Riding Hood, The Tournament, Tosca, & The River, 1957) In André Bazin’s Jean Renoir (Simon & Schuster, 1973), 223–224, 260, 272–274, 282–284. (“We Are Not Innocent Anymore,” 1950) In Emiliano Battista’s Reisestipendiumsvideo (Travel Stipend Video; Peter Müller, 2011). (“Death Taken Seriously,” 1960) In René Gilson’s Jean Cocteau (Crown, 1969), 164–165.

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Aux quatre coins (On Four Corners; 1948) Principal Actors: Two women and two men, including Francis Bouchet. Black and white, 16 mm Silent 20 minutes Le quadrille (The Quadrille; 1950) Producer: Jean-Luc Godard Principal Actors: Liliane Litvin, Anne-Marie Cazalis, Jean-Luc Godard. Black and white, 16 mm Silent 40 minutes Le divertissement (The Entertainment; 1952) Principal Actors: Olga Waren, Sacha Briquet, Alain MacMoy. Black and white, 16 mm Silent 40 minutes Le Coup du berger (A Fool’s Mate; 1956) Production Companies: Claude Chabrol (AJYM), Les Films de la Pléiade (Pierre Braunberger) Director: Jacques Rivette Assistant: Jean-Marie Straub Screenplay: Rivette, Charles Bitsch, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, adapted from “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat,” a 1959 short story by Roald Dahl. Cinematography: Charles Bitsch Editing: Denise de Casabianca Principal Actors: Virginie Vitry (Claire), Étienne Loinod (pseudonym of Jacques Doniol-Valcroze—Jean, the husband), Jean-Claude Brialy (Claude, the lover), Anne Doat (Solange, the sister), Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Claude Chabrol, Robert Lachenay. (the guests). Black and white, 35 mm 28 minutes

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Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us; 1958–60) Production Companies: François Truffaut (Les Films du Carrosse), Claude Chabrol (AJYM) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Jean Gruault Cinematography: Charles Bitsch Sound: Christian Hackspill Editing: Denise de Casabianca Music: Philippe Arthuys Principal Actors: Betty Schneider (Anne Goupil), Giani Esposito (Gérard Lenz), Françoise Prévost (Terry Yordan), Daniel Croheim (Philip Kauffman), François Maistre (Pierre), Jean-Claude Brialy (Jean-Marc), Jean-Marie Robain (Dr de Georges), Laura Mauri (his pupil), Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Demy, Jacques Rivette. Release: December 13, 1961 Black and white, 35 mm 140 minutes A young woman meets a group of friends with counter-cultural leanings and gets involved in their production of Shakespeare’s Pericles (1609). At the same time, a mysterious figure approaches her with news of a conspiracy. Much of the film alternates between the young woman’s rehearsing for the play and investigating the conspiracy as she wanders through a maze-like Paris. Suzanne Simonin, la religieuse de Denis Diderot (The Nun; 1965–66) Production Company: Georges de Beauregard (Rome-Paris Films) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Jean Gruault, adapted from La Religieuse (The Nun, 1796), by Denis Diderot. Cinematography: Alain Levent Sound: Guy Villette Editing: Denise de Casabianca Music: Jean-Claude Eloy Principal Actors: Anna Karina (Suzanne Simonin), Micheline Presle (Madame de Moni), Francine Bergé (soeur sainte Christine), Liselotte Pulver (Madame de Chelles), Francisco Rabal (Dom Morel), Christiane Lénier (Madame Simonin), Charles Millot (Monsieur Simonin). Release: July 26, 1967 Color, 35 mm 135 minutes The Nun adapts Diderot’s La Religieuse (1796), which is a caustic indictment of the Catholic Church and its practice of forcing young women into convents. Rivette’s rendition is lurid and intense and leans toward a feminist angle. L’Amour fou (Mad Love; 1967–68) Production Company: Georges de Beauregard (Sogexportfilm), Cocinor253

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Marceau Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Marilù Parolini Cinematography: Alain Levent (35 mm), Étienne Becker (16 mm) Sound: Bernard Aubouy (35 mm), Jean-Claude Laureux (16 mm) Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Jean-Claude Eloy Script Supervisor: Lydie Mahias Principal Actors: Bulle Ogier (Claire), Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Sébastien/ Pyrrhus), Josée Destoop (Marta/Hermione), Michèle Moretti (Michèle). Release: January 15, 1969 Black and white, 35 mm 250 minutes In January 1969, a shorter version of approximately two hours was simultaneously released at the request of Cocinor-Marceau. Jacques Rivette disowned this version immediately following its release, and thus, this film is no longer in legal circulation. The first part of the film focuses closely on rehearsals for Racine’s Andromaque (1667). The principal actress drops out of her boyfriend’s production. He replaces her with another actress, and a good deal of the movie deals with her ensuing psychological disintegration. Out 1: Noli me tangere (Out 1: Touch Me Not; 1970) Production Company: Sunchild Productions (Stéphane Tchalgadjieff) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman, inspired by The Thirteen (1899), by Honoré de Balzac. Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn Sound: René-Jean Bouyer Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Script Supervisor: Lydie Mahias Principal Actors: Bulle Ogier (Pauline-Émilie), Juliet Berto (Frédérique), Michael Lonsdale (Thomas), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Colin), Bernadette Lafont (Sarah), Françoise Fabian (Lucie), Hermine Karagheuz (Marie), Michèle Moretti (Lili), Jean Bouise (Warok), Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (Étienne), Pierre Baillot (Quentin), Éric Rohmer (the Balzac scholar), Alain Libolt (Renaud), Marcel Bozonnet (Nicolas/Arsenal/Papa/Théo), Christiane Corthay (Rose), Sylvain Corthay (Achille), Michel Delahaye (an ethnologist), Jean-François Stévenin (Marlon), Michel Berto (Honeymoon), Edwine Moatti (Béatrice). First Public Projection: Le Havre, Maison de la Culture, September 9–10, 1971 Color, 16 mm 760 minutes (12 hrs. 40 min.); restored version 750 minutes (12 hrs. 30 min.) Out 1: Spectre (Out 1: Spectre; 1971), alternate version, released March 254

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1974; 260 minutes There are two rival play groups preparing Aeschylus productions. One group is led by a male director and is preparing Prometheus Bound (479–424 B.C.), while the other is led by a female director and is preparing Seven Against Thebes (467 B.C.). The film spends a great deal of time showing us the two groups as they conduct improvisational exercises and workshop their productions. Rivette focuses closely on how each group approaches the problem of staging a play with very little action. The Prometheus group is broadly Dionysian in approach, while the Seven Against Thebes group is broadly Apollonian. Meanwhile, we are introduced to two street hustlers. A young man obnoxiously plays the harmonica while pretending to be mute and aggressively panhandling. A young woman picks men up in bars and absconds with their wallets. Gradually, both of them are drawn into a conspiracy involving a mysterious figure named Pierre and a secret society known as The Thirteen. An additional key player is the owner of a hippie bookstore where young people gather. The stories of the two street hustlers, the bookstore owner, and the two theatrical groups eventually begin to intersect. Céline et Julie vont en bateau—Phantom Ladies over Paris (Céline and Julie Go Boating—Phantom Ladies over Paris; 1973–74) Production Companies: Les Films du Losange et Renn Productions (Claude Berri), with six co-producers: Action Films, Les Films Christian Fechner, Les Films 7, Saga, Simar Production, Vincent Malle productions Executive Producer: Barbet Schroeder Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, MarieFrance Pisier, Eduardo de Gregorio The story of the film-within-the-film was inspired by The Other House (1896) and “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (1868), by Henry James. Cinematography: Jacques Renard Sound: Paul Lainé Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Principal Actors: Juliet Berto (Céline), Dominique Labourier (Julie), Bulle Ogier (Camille), Marie-France Pisier (Sophie), Barbet Schroeder (Olivier), Nathalie Asnar (Madlyn), Marie-Thérèse Saussure (Poupie), Philippe Clévenot (Grégoire). Release: September 20, 1974 Color, 16 mm/35 mm 185 minutes Librarian Julie is reading a book about magic in the park when stage magician Céline whirls past like the White Rabbit and drops her scarf. Julie follows her and hijinks ensue. The two women become fast friends and their identities begin to blend as they play at swapping lives. Eventually they start repeatedly visiting an old mansion where a Henry James story is playing on a loop—and 255

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where things get heavier. Duelle (Scènes de la vie parallèle: 2. Une quarantaine; 1975–76) Duel, released as Twilight (Scenes From a Parallel Life: 2. The Forty: 1975– 1976) Production Company: Sunchild Productions (Stéphane Tchalgadjieff) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Marilù Parolini Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Pierre Gamet Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Jean Wiener (direct improvised sound) Principal Actors: Juliet Berto (Leni), Bulle Ogier (Viva), Jean Babilée (Pierrot), Hermine Karagheuz (Lucie), Nicole Garcia (Jeanne/Elsa), Claire Nadeau (Sylvia Stern). Release: September 15, 1976 Color, 35 mm 120 minutes Duelle was meant to be part of a tetralogy called Scènes de la vie parallèle (Scenes from a Parallel Life). It was to consist of four genre films connected through a female-centric, cosmic mythology: a noir, an adventure, a musical, and a supernatural romance. Duelle is the noir, Noroît is the adventure. In Duelle the audience is thrown into the middle of a complex situation in a disorienting manner and left to piece together what’s going on. Two powerful women are engaged in some sort of mysterious conflict and each enlists other young women in her service. There’s also a secret society involved, called The Salamanders. Noroît (Scènes de la vie parallèle: 3. Une vengeance; 1975–76) Northwest Wind (Scenes from a Parallel Life: 3. A Vengeance: 1975–1976) Production Company: Sunchild Productions (Stéphane Tchalgadjieff) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Marilù Parolini, adapted from The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), by Cyril Tourneur. Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Pierre Gamet Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Robert and Jean Cohen-Solal, Daniel Ponsard (recorded direct sound) Principal Actors: Geraldine Chaplin (Morag), Bernadette Lafont (Giulia), Kika Markham (Erika), Humbert Balsan (Jacob), Larrio Ekson (Ludovico), Anne-Marie Reynaud (Arno), Babette Lamy (Régina), Danièle Rosencranz (Celia), Élisabeth Medveczky (Élisa). Release: 1976 Color, 35 mm 130 minutes 256

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Noroît is a nearly all-female pirate revenge story, with a modernist score and elaborate dance-like choreography that occasionally lapses into actual dance. Merry-Go-Round (Merry-Go-Round; 1977–78) Production Company: Sunchild Productions (Stéphane Tchalgadjieff) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman, Eduardo de Gregorio Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Pierre Gamet, Bernard Chaumeil Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Barre Phillips, John Surman Principal Actors: Maria Schneider (Léo), Joe Dallessandro (Ben), Danièle Gégauff (Élisabeth), Françoise Prévost (Renée Novick), Maurice Garrel (Julius Danvers), Sylvie Meyer (Shirley), Michel Berto (Jérôme). Release: April 6, 1983 Color, 35 mm 155 minutes A male and a female are summoned to a hotel in Paris by the female’s sister, who then is nowhere to be found. They follow a series of clues through a series of country estates. It’s a 157-minute mystery-wrapped-in-further-enigma sort of thing with multiplying plot twists and double-crosses that gradually pull the narrative into a deep abyss. Le Pont du Nord (North Bridge; 1980–81) Executive Producer: Martine Marignac Associate Producer: Barbet Schroeder (Les Films du Losange/Margaret Menegoz) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Bulle Ogier, Pascale Ogier, Suzanne Schiffman Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Georges Prat Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Astor Piazzzolla Principal Actors: Bulle Ogier (Marie Lafée), Pascale Ogier (Baptiste), Pierre Clémenti (Julien), Jean-François Stévenin (Max). Release: March 24, 1982 Color, 16 mm/35 mm 127 minutes Le Pont du Nord is meticulously organized around its board-game concept, but from scene to scene the film is extremely loose and improvisational. Marie has recently been released from prison and is averse to setting foot indoors. (The entire film takes place outside, save one scene.) She meets Baptiste, a tough young street dweller, and the two of them get embroiled in an impenetrable conspiracy that revolves around a map that overlays Paris with a game board, complete with obstacles and hazards. 257

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L’Amour par terre (Love on the Ground; 1983) Production Company: Martine Marignac (La Cécilia, in association with the Ministry of Culture) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Marilù Parolini, Suzanne Schiffman Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Pierre Gamet, Bernard Chaumeil Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Principal Actors: Geraldine Chaplin (Charlotte), Jane Birkin (Emily), André Dussollier (Paul), Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Clément Roquemaure), Facundo Bo (Silvano), Laszlo Szabo (Virgil), Isabelle Linnartz (Béatrice), Sandra Montaigu (Éléonore). Release: October 17, 1984 Color, 35 mm 170 minutes 120 minutes, short version edited by J. Rivette and N. Lubtchansky A pair of actresses is invited to star in a play being written by a famous playwright; the work will be staged in his own mansion. There’s a magician living on the premises, a Dr. Mabuse figure who uses his powers to manipulate others. The play is about a past love triangle in which the magician and playwright had been rivals. The magician uses his powers to seduce the two actresses, who begin having visions. Past, present, and play all start to intermingle. Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights; 1984–85) Production Companies: Martine Marignac (La Cécilia with Renn Productions) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Suzanne Schiffman, adapted from part one of Wuthering Heights (1847), by Emily Brontë. Cinematography: Renato Berta Sound: Alix Comte Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Pilentze Pee, Trati Na Angelika, Polegnala e Pshenitza, “Le mystère des voix bulgares” Principal Actors: Fabienne Babe (Catherine), Lucas Belvaux (Roch), Olivier Cruveiller (Guillaume), Olivier Torres (Olivier), Alice de Poncheville (Isabelle), Sandra Montaigu (Hélène), Philippe Morier-Genoud (Joseph), Marie Jaoul (Madame Lindon), Louis de Menthon (Monsieur Lindon). Release: October 9, 1985 Color, 35 mm 130 minutes Wuthering Heights (1847) is transposed to the 1930s. Rivette shifts the action to the Cévennes, an area historically associated with a stern rural Protestantism and characterized by a wild, sun-drenched landscape where 258

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isolated farms can be several miles apart. In this version, the racial element is removed; Heathcliff is a blonde with fairer skin than Edgar. The film ends halfway through the novel and does not continue the story into the second generation. This Wuthering Heights is particularly dark, focusing intensely on Heathcliff’s cruelty and Catherine’s psychological dissolution. La Bande des quatre (Gang of Four; 1988) Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent Cinematography: Caroline Champetier Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Editing: Catherine Quesemand Principal Actors: Bulle Ogier (Constance Dumas), Benoît Régent (Thomas), Laurence Côte (Claude), Fejria Deliba (Anna), Bernadette Giraud (Joyce), Ines d’Almeida [Ines de Medeiros] (Lucia), Nathalie Richard (Cécile). Release: February 8, 1989 Color, 35 mm 160 minutes Gang of Four follows a group of women enrolled in an acting school run by an imperious woman. A male character (another Dr. Mabuse figure) introduces himself, with different fake identities, to several of the women and tries to seduce or otherwise manipulate them in order to gain access to the old house in which they live together. For the rehearsal scenes, the play is Pierre Marivaux’s La double inconstance (Double Inconstancy, 1723). Because this is an all-female acting school, the male roles are played by women. La belle noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker; 1990–91) Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, loosely adapted from the novella “Le chef d’oeuvre inconnu” (“The Unknown Masterpiece” [1831]), by Honoré de Balzac. Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Igor Stravinsky Principal Actors: Michel Piccoli (Frenhofer), Jane Birkin (Liz), Emmanuelle Béart (Marianne), Marianne Denicourt (Julienne), David Bursztein (Nicolas), Gilles Arbona (Porbus) and the hand of the painter Bernard Dufour. Prize: Grand Prix du Festival de Cannes, 1991 Release: September 4, 1991 Color, 35 mm 240 minutes 259

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La belle noiseuse: Divertimento (1991), alternate version; 120 minutes La belle noiseuse is ultimately more about the model than it is about the painter. The setup is that an art dealer invites a young painter and his girlfriend to the villa of a master painter who hasn’t finished anything in a decade. The painter harbors the ambition to create one last masterpiece: a painting of a famous courtesan with the title “La Belle Noiseuse.” His wife was originally to model for the painting but they had abandoned the project years earlier. The art dealer’s scheme is that he expects the painter will be so inspired by the beauty of the model’s character that he will finally paint “La Belle Noiseuse.” This is indeed how the action plays out, but Rivette is more interested in interrogating the relationship between painter and model than he is in celebrating the genius of the painter. For the first half of the film, the painter is in control. He twists and bends the model’s body, treating her as raw material. The second half of the film sees her assert her own creative agency and reimagines the relationship between painter and model (or director and actress) as one of collaboration. The film also focuses on the strain that creative work puts on relationships, along lines similar to those found in L’Amour fou. Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Maiden; 1992–94) 1. Les Batailles (The Battles) 2. Les Prisons (The Prisons) Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Guillaume Dufay/Jordi Savall Principal Actors: Paris 1455: Tatiana Moukhine (Isabelle Romée). Vaucouleurs: Sandrine Bonnaire (Jeanne), Baptiste Roussillon (Baudricourt), Olivier Cruveiller (Jean de Metz), Jean-Luc Petit (Henri Le Royer), Bernadette Giraud (Catherine Le Royer), Jean-Claude Jay (Jacques Alain), Jacques Rivette (the priest). Chinon: André Marcon (Charles, the dauphin of France), Marcel Bozonnet (Regnault of Chartres), Jean-Louis Richard (La Trémoille). Poitiers: Bernard Sobel (Pierre de Versailles), Wilfred Benaïche (Mathieu Mesnage), Jean-Pierre Becker (Jean d’Aulon). Orléans: Bruno Wolkowitch (Gilles de Laval), Lydie Marsan (Hermine), Pierre Baillot (Jacques Boucher), Vincent Solignac (Pierre d’Arc, the brother of Jeanne), Mathias Jung (Jean Pasquerel). The Environs of Paris: Florence Darel (Jeanne d’Orléans), Germain Rousseau (the confessor of the Dauphin), François Chattot (Arthur de Richemont), Emmanuel de Chauvigny (Gros-Garrau), Didier Agostini (Montmorency), Nathalie Richard (Catherine de la Rochelle). Beaurevoir: Philippe Morier- Genoud (Philippe le Bon), Yann Collette (Jean de Luxembourg), MoniqueMélinand (Jeanne de Luxembourg), Édith Scob (Jeanne de Béthune), Hélène de Fougerolles (Jeanne de Bar). Rouen: Alain 260

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Ollivier (Pierre Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais), Michel Berto (Guillaume Erard), Jean-Claude Frissung (Nicolas Loiseleur), Frédéric Witta (Jean Massieu). Release: February 9, 1994 Color, 35 mm Les Batailles (The Battles): 160 minutes; Les Prisons (The Prisons): 175 minutes Joan the Maiden is divided into two halves, The Battles and The Prisons, each nearly three hours long. Both subtitles are figurative: the first half (Battles) focuses on Joan’s battle to be believed and to be given command of an army, while the second half (Prisons) focuses on the metaphorical prison in which she found herself after the king decided to suspend military action against the English without having driven them from France. The film spends only 45 minutes on the trial and execution. Rivette’s primary interest is the question of how this girl, living in an utterly sexist society, managed to gain command of a military force, inspire widespread allegiance, and achieve victory against overwhelming odds. Haut bas fragile (Up, Down, Fragile; 1994–95) Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Nathalie Richard, Marianne Denicourt, Laurence Côte, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent Cinematography: Christophe Pollock Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Principal Actors: Nathalie Richard (Ninon), Marianne Denicourt (Louise), Laurence Côte (Ida), André Marcon (Roland), Bruno Todeschini (Lucien), Anna Karina (Sarah), Wilfred Benaïche (Alfredo), Stéphanie Schwartzbrod (Lise), Laslo Szabo (the voice of the father), Jacques Rivette (Monsieur Paul), Enzo Enzo. Release: April 12, 1995 Color, 35 mm 170 minutes Three women in Paris—one just emerged from a coma, one fleeing a life of crime, and one searching for her biological parents—intersect through interactions with a shadowy figure named Roland. Une aventure de Ninon (Lumière et compagnie) (Ninon’s Adventure: Lumiere & Company, 1995) Director: Jacques Rivette Principal Actor: Nathalie Richard. Release: December 28, 1995 Black and white, 35 mm 52 seconds 261

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To celebrate the centenary of Auguste and Louis Lumière’s first film program in 1895, forty directors from all over the world were asked to make a film with the restored hand-cranked camera. Each director, including Rivette, filmed a single sequence lasting fifty-two seconds, with no synch sound or artificial lighting. Secret défense (Secret Defense, a.k.a. Top Secret; 1997) Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Emmanuelle Cuau Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Éric Vaucher Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Principal Actors: Sandrine Bonnaire (Sylvie), Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Walser), Grégoire Colin (Paul), Laure Marsac (Véronique/Ludivine), Françoise Fabian (Geneviève), Hermine Karagheuz (the nurse), Bernadette Giraud (Marthe). Release: March 18, 1998 Color, 35 mm 170 minutes A female scientist investigates a dark family secret. Rivette spends a large chunk of the film’s running time observing the scientist in minute detail as she travels to a railway station, takes an intensely suspenseful train ride, and then makes her way to a villa where we expect bad things to happen. Va savoir (Who Knows?; 2000–01) Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions) Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Principal Actors: Jeanne Balibar (Camille), Sergio Castellitto (Ugo), Jacques Bonnaffé (Pierre), Marianne Basler (Sonia), Hélène de Fougerolles (Do), Bruno Todeschini (Arthur), Catherine Rouvel (Madame Desprez). Release: October 10, 2001 Color, 35 mm 150 minutes Va savoir+, original version, released April 24, 2002; 220 minutes Va savoir is about a traveling Italian theater troupe performing a Pirandello play in Paris. The star and director are a married couple. While in Paris they get embroiled in a trio of interlocking love triangles that mirror the play they are performing. Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Story of Marie and Julien; 2002–03) Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions), 262

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Cinemaundici, Arte France Cinéma, VM Productions Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Principal Actors: Emmanuelle Béart (Marie), Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Julien), Anne Brochet (Madame X), Bettina Kee (Adrienne), Olivier Cruveiller (editor), Mathias Jung (porter), Nicole Garcia (Delphine, the friend). Release: November 12, 2003 Color, 35 mm 151 minutes Marie and Julien was originally going to be the love-story entry in the Scenes from a Parallel Life tetralogy from the 1970s. Filming on Marie et Julien (Scènes de la vie parallèle: 1), starring Leslie Caron and Albert Finney, began in August 1975 but was interrupted on the third day. The final execution over twenty-five years later is quite different from Duelle and Noroît. It’s less formally experimental and there is no musical performance in the film. Julien is a clock-repairman who lives in an old house full of clocks. There are clocks everywhere, often piled on top of other clocks. We learn that he is blackmailing Madame X, a businesswoman who deals in fake antique silks. He dreams of a stranger named Marie and then meets her on the street. She moves in shortly thereafter. Things are not as they seem, and there may be some strange connection between Marie and Madame X. Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe, a.k.a. The Duchess of Langeais; 2006) Production Company: Martine Marignac and Maurice Tinchant (Pierre Grise Productions), Cinemaundici, Arte France Cinéma Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, adapted from “La Duchesse de Langeais” (1834), by Honoré de Balzac. Cinematography: William Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Pierre Allio Principal Actors: Jeanne Balibar (Antoinette de Langeais), Guillaume Depardieu (Armand de Montriveau), Anne Cantineau (Clara de Sérizy), Marc Barbé (Marquis de Ronquerolles), Thomas Durand (De Marsay), Nicolas Bouchaud (De Trailles), Mathias Jung (Julien), Julie Judd (Lisette), Victoria Zinny (Mother Superior), Remo Girone (Father Confessor), Bulle Ogier (Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry), Michel Piccoli (Vidame de Pamiers), Paul Chevillard (Duc de Navarreins), Barbet Schroeder (Duc de Grandlieu). Release: March 28, 2007 Color, 35 mm 263

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137 minutes Adapted from Balzac, this is the story of a young Napoleonic war hero who becomes obsessed with a married woman, with tragic results. 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (Around a Small Mountain; 2008) Production Company: Martine Marignac and Maurice Tinchant (Pierre Grise Productions), Cinemaundici, France 2 Cinéma, Rai Cinéma, Alien Produzioni Director: Jacques Rivette Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Shirel Amitay, Sergio Castellitto Cinematography: Irina Lubtchansky, William Lubtchansky Sound: Olivier Schwob Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Music: Pierre Allio Principal Actors: Jane Birkin (Kate), Sergio Castellitto (Vittorio), André Marcon (Alexandre), Jacques Bonnaffé (Marlo), Julie-Marie Parmentier (Clémence), Hélène de Vallombreuse (Margot), Tintin Orsoni (Wilfrid), Vimala Pons (Barbara), Mickaël Gaspar (Tom). Release: September 9, 2009 Color, 35 mm 84 minutes An Italian businessman/thinly-veiled Rivette stand-in becomes fascinated by a circus performer and sojourns as a circus groupie, which ultimately catalyzes a personal catharsis for the circus performer.

Theater La Religieuse, by Denis Diderot (The Nun, 1796) Director: Jacques Rivette Adaptation: Jean Gruault Run: From February 6 to March 5, 1963. Studio des Champs-Elysées, Paris. Bajazet (1672), by Jean Racine, and Tite et Bérénice (1670), by Pierre Corneille Production: TGP, Le Château de Carte, Capella Films Director: Jacques Rivette Lights: Caroline Champetier Art Direction: Manu de Chauvigny Run: From April 18 to May 20, 1989 Théâtre Gérard-Philipe (TGP), Saint-Denis (Seine Saint-Denis)

Television Jean Renoir, le patron (Jean Renoir: The Boss; 1967, 95 minutes) Three-part television documentary

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About Jacques Rivette: Le veilleur (Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman; 1990, 124 minutes) Two-part television documentary about Rivette, directed by Claire Denis.

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Index

Abismos de passion, 226 À bout de souffle (Breathless), 37 About Something Else (O necem jinem), 77, 79 Academicism, 15, 19–20 Acting, 16–17, 27, 34, 42, 60, 68, 131, 155, 170, 187–188, 222, 224, 239 Adair, Gilbert, 121–133 Adenauer, Konrad, 77 Aeschylus, 3, 99, 134, 255 The Age of the Medici, 154 Agnosticism, 31 Alain (Émile-Auguste Chartier), 192–193, 204 Alice in Wonderland, 124 All about Eve, 166 Althusser, Louis, 87 Altman, Robert, 189 Amarcord, 132 American film, 2, 14–15, 17–18, 20, 33, 74, 78, 115, 121, 189, 203, 219, 241 An American in Paris, 118, 122 American Underground, 131 Amiard, Andrée, viii AMLF (Agence Méditerranéenne de Location de Films), 229 L’Amour fou (Mad Love), ix, 2, 4–5, 38–42, 53, 61–62, 67–68, 72, 75, 95, 98, 100, 109–110, 112–113, 122–123, 129, 133–135, 137–138, 141, 155–156, 161–162, 164, 169, 172, 179, 206, 243, 253–254 L’Amour par terre (Love on the Ground), ix, 2, 7, 143, 185, 225, 227, 230, 258 Andromache, 3–4, 39–43, 45, 49, 56, 64, 73, 75, 134, 254 Anger, Kenneth, 131 266

L’Année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad), 118 Antigone, 23, 56 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 16, 19 Apollonianism, 255 Aquinas, St. Thomas, 31 Arabian Nights, 134 Arrow Films, 5 Assayas, Olivier, 11 Astaire, Adele, 188–189 Astaire, Fred, 188–189 Astruc, Alexandre, 16, 34 As You Desire Me, 9 Aumont, Jacques, 38 Aurenche, Jean, 17, 60 Austen, Jane, 233–234 Autant-Lara, Claude, 19, 33 Auteurism, 14–21, 67, 69–70, 133, 165–167, 194–195, 206 Aux quatre coins (On Four Corners), viii, 1, 252 Avant-gardism, 23, 244 Une aventure de Ninon: Lumière et compagnie (Ninon’s Adventure: Lumiere & Company), ix, 261–262 Ayraud, Pierre, 119 Babe, Fabienne, 228–229, 232 Back and Forth, 131 Bajazet, ix, 184, 264 Balibar, Jeanne, 9, 221, 238–239 Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski de Rola), 225–226, 231 Balzac, Honoré de, 3, 5, 9, 98–99, 115, 129, 149, 154, 169, 173–174, 204, 216–217, 238–240, 242, 264 La Bande des quatre (Gang of Four), ix, 2, 7, 11, 144, 183–186, 216, 218, 222, 237, 259 The Band Wagon, 188–189

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INDEX Baratier, Jacques, 24 Les Bargasses, 38, 40, 172 Barka, Ben, 81 Barthes, Roland, 3, 30, 45, 56, 103–104, 107–108, 132, 152, 216 Bartók, Béla, 60 Bastide, François-Régis, 28 Bataille, Georges, 225 Les Batailles (The Battles): see Jeanne la pucelle Baudelaire, Charles, 193, 198 Baxter, Anne, 166 Bazin, André, 1, 14–21, 34, 84–85, 194, 200, 242 Béar, Liza, vii, 221 Béart, Emmanuelle, 7, 9, 174, 228 Beauregard, Georges de, 38, 48, 64, 112, 162–164, 243 Le Beau Serge (Handsome Serge), 22–23, 115 Beauvoir, Simone de, 27 Bechdel, Alison, 11 Becker, Étienne, 45 Becker, Jacques, viii, 2, 15–16, 18, 243 Beckett, Samuel, 178–179 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 183 Being and Nothingness, 222 La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast), 24, 178, 223, 242 La belle noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker), ix, 7–9, 11, 145, 173–176, 186, 217, 236–238, 259–260 La belle noiseuse: Divertimento, 8, 259 Belvaux, Lucas, 228, 232 Bene, Carmelo, 132 Beneyton, Yves, 55–56 Bérénice, viii, 178 Bergman, Ingmar, 28, 61, 69–70, 73, 106–107, 166, 179 Bergman, Ingrid, 26 Berliner Ensemble (Brecht), 108 Berlin Film Festival, vii, ix, 5, 238 Bernanos, Georges, 20–21 Bernstein, Henri, 166 Berri, Claude, 228–229, 232 Berry, Dennis, 56 Berta, Renato, 229, 231 Berto, Juliet, 5, 95, 99, 113–114, 116–117, 121–123, 125, 127,

130, 150, 155–156, 166, 180–181, 183, 244 Bertolucci, Bernardo, 120, 151 Beyond the Frame, 221 Billiards at Half-Past Nine, 89 Binoche, Juliette, 228 Birkin, Jane, 7, 10 The Birth of a Nation, 82, 166, 211 Bitsch, Charles, 23 Björk (Guðmundsdóttir), 215 The Blackboard Jungle, 115 Bloy, Léon, 198 Blyton, Enid, 218 Boileau, Pierre, 119 Böll, Heinrich, 89 Bonaffe, Jacques, 221 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 264 Bondone, Giotto, 211 Bonitzer, Pascal, 175, 217, 225, 227, 236, 238–239 Bonnaire, Sandrine, 8, 219–220 Bonnaud, Frédéric, 177 Borges, Jorge Luis, 2, 32, 120 Bost, Pierre, 60 Boston Globe, vii Boudu sauvé des eaux (Boudu Saved from Drowning), 72 Bouise, Jean, 115, 150 Boulez, Pierre, 59, 65 Boulle, Pierre, 19 Bradbury, Ray, 31 Braques, Georges, 29 Brault, Michel, 77 Breaking the Waves, 215 Brecht, Bertolt, 87, 108, 155 Bresson, Robert, 8, 16, 18, 21, 31, 67, 91, 131–133, 162, 166–167, 171, 178, 201, 207, 210, 217, 246 Breton, André, 75 Brialy, Jean-Claude, 23 Bringing Up Baby, 149 British film, 14–15 British Film Institute (BFI), vii–viii Broad, Yolanda, vii, 178 Broadway (New York), 166, 188–189 Brontë, Emily, 7, 225–226, 228, 232–234 Brook, Peter, 113, 153, 178 Brooklyn Academy of Music (New York), 5 Brooks, Richard, 115 267

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INDEX Buñuel, Luis, 151, 156, 226–227, 231–232 Butor, Michel, 28 The Cabinet of Caligari, 35 Cahiers du Cinéma, vii–viii, 1–3, 10, 14, 18, 22, 24–25, 29, 31, 34, 36, 38, 76, 115, 132, 158, 164, 173, 191, 194–196, 217, 221, 223, 242–243 Camerini, Mario, 16 Canal+ (Paris), 189 Cannes Film Festival, ix, 121, 173, 182 Canticum Sacrum, 62 Capitalism, 6 Capra, Frank, 203 Captain Grant’s Children, 99 Cardo, Francis, 20 Carlotta Films, 5 Carlson, Carolyn, 171 Caron, Leslie, 171, 275 Carroll, Lewis, 3, 99, 115, 124, 149 Casabianca, Denise de, 65, 101, 116 Casares, Adolfo Bioy, 118–120, 123 Casque d’or (Golden Helmet), 18 Cassavetes, John, 77, 80, 89, 180 Castellitto, Sergio, 9–10, 221 Catholicism, 4, 215, 253 Cat People, 156 Cayatte, André, 21, 93, 217 Céline et Julie vont en bateau— Phantom Ladies over Paris (Céline and Julie Go Boating), ix, 2, 4–7, 10–11, 110, 115–119, 113, 121–124, 126–130, 132, 134–138, 141, 148–151, 153, 155–156, 161, 163, 169, 180–181, 221, 255–256 Celticism, 182–183 Centre National de la Cinématographie (Paris), 228 “A Certain Tendency of French Cinema” (Truffaut), 242 Cézanne, Paul, 35, 176, 192, 208, 217 Chabrol, Claude, viii, 1–2, 22, 24, 30, 115, 159–160, 162, 217, 223, 242 La Chambre Verte (The Green Room), 159 Le Chanois, Jean-Paul, 15, 21 268

Les Chants de Maldoror (The Songs of Maldoror), 198 Chaplin, Charles, 74, 210 Chaplin, Geraldine, 181–182, 189 Chardonne, Jacques, 21 La Chasse au lion à l’arc (Hunting the Lion with Bow and Arrow), 89, 97 Chausserie-Laprée, Jacques, 160 Chelsea Girls, 80, 244 Les chevaliers de la table ronde (The Knights of the Round Table), 186 La Chienne, 195 Chinese theater, 155 La Chinoise, 128 Christianity, 31, 211 The Chronicle of Anna Magdalena Bach, 92 Chukhrai, Grigory, 85 Chytilova, Vera, 55, 77–80, 93 Le Cid, 105, 178, 193, 201 Cimabue, Giovanni, 211 Cinéastes de notre temps, ix, 40, 44, 111, 133, 243 Cinecittà Studios (Rome), 81 Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin, viii, 1 Cinémathèque Française, viii, 1, 34–35, 102, 167–168, 180, 210, 242, 244 Cinéma-vérité, 53, 96, 156 Cinerama, 22 Cinq cents millions de la Bégum (The Begum’s Fortune), 31 Citizen Kane, 6, 202, 206, 210, 212 Civil War (U.S.), 102, 211 Clair, René, 166, 195 Clarens, Carlos, 110 Classicism, 6, 26, 31, 35, 39, 77, 96, 101, 110, 149, 162, 164, 184, 203, 208, 210, 223, 226 Claudel, Paul, 178, 186, 243 Clayton, Jack, 119 Clément, René, 15–16, 19, 85 Cleopatra, 166 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 15–16, 19 Cocteau, Jean, 9, 24, 30, 61, 67, 108, 166, 177–178, 186, 205, 223, 242 Cohen-Solal, Jean, 183 Cohen-Solal, Robert, 183 Comédie Française (Paris), 74 La Comédie humaine, 239

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INDEX Comédie policière, 117 Comedy, 7–8, 18, 119, 122–123, 128–130, 134, 136, 149, 169, 171, 188–189, 221 Comencini, Luigi, 165–166 Come Tu Mi Voi (As You Desire Me), 221 Commedia dell’arte, 113, 123, 149 Commission du Centre national du Cinéma (Paris), 99, 112, 160, 162, 169, 171, 189 Communism, 19, 71, 82 Comolli, Jean-Louis, 38 Conrad, Joseph, 20 Contes moraux (Moral Tales), 159 Cooper, Gary, 17 Coppola, Francis Ford, 241 Coppola, Joseph, vii, 241 Corneille, Pierre, ix, 105–106, 178, 184–185, 193, 204, 264 Côte, Laurence, 185–186 Le Coup du berger (A Fool’s Mate), viii, 22, 60, 66, 252 Les Cousins, 30 Cozinsky, Edgardo, 110 El Crimen de Oribe (The Crime of Oribe), 120 Criticism (film), viii, 1–2, 22–23, 33–37, 46, 84, 120–121, 131–132, 192–193, 196, 198, 200, 209, 215, 219, 223, 226, 242 Cruveiller, Olivier, 230 Cukor, George, 61, 154–155 Cunningham, Merce, 79 Dabit, Eugène, 17 Daisies, 55 Dallessandro, Joe, 7, 171–172, 244–245 Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne (Ladies of the Park), 31, 67, 178 Dancer in the Dark, 215 Daney, Serge, 158–159, 191, 202 Daniel, Jean-Pierre, 103, 105–106 Dante (Alighieri), 184 Darrieux, Danielle, 243 Day for Night, 220 The Death of Maria Malibran, 132 Delahaye, Michel, 39, 63 Delannoy, Jean, 15, 33, 195 De Laurentiis, Dino, 15

Delebecque, Frédéric, 226 Deleuze, Gilles, 200 Deligny, Fernand, 103, 105 DeLillo, Don, 7 DeMille, Cecil B., 154, 192 Demons, 31 Denicourt, Marianne, 186 Denis, Claire, ix, 11 Depardieu, Guillaume, 9, 238–239 Les dernières vacances (The Last Vacation), 18, 186 Derrida, Jacques, 132 De Sica, Vittorio, 16, 33 Il Destino di Venezia (The Destiny of Venice), 222 Destoop, Josée, 39 Les deux anglaises et le continent (Two English Girls), 182 Devillers, Renée, 186 Les Diaboliques (The Devils), 19 Dickens, Charles, 83 Diderot, Denis, viii, 3, 67, 110–111, 130, 214, 253, 264 Dionysianism, 255 Direct cinema, 5, 77, 96–97 The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, 156 Le divertissement (The Entertainment), viii, 1, 252 Documentary, 5, 43–44, 52–53, 98, 127 Dogma 95 (Denmark), 215 Domarchi, Jean, 26 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 1, 115 Don Quixote, 212, 245 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 31, 154 La double inconstance (Double Inconstancy), 259 A Double Life, 155 Douchet, Jean, 166 Dovzhenko, Alexander, 78, 83 Dreyer, Carl-Theodor, 8, 77, 83, 90, 133, 195, 204, 210, 215 “La Duchesse de Langeais” (Balzac), 239 Duelle (Duel), ix, 7, 142, 159, 161–162, 169, 181, 183, 256 Dufour, Bernard, 173–174 Duras, Marguerite, 28, 107, 152–153, 167, 208 Duvivier, Julien, 17, 167

269

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INDEX The Earrings of Madame de . . . , 243 Eastmancolor, 68 Eastwood, Clint, 241 L’Écran Français, 34 Édouard et Caroline, 18 Effenterre, Bertrand von, 171 8½, 61 Eika Katappa, 132 Eisenschitz, Bernard, 93 Eisenstein, Sergei, 25–26, 30, 76–78, 80, 82–83, 85–86, 88, 133, 200, 207 Electra, 186 Elena et les hommes (Elena and Her Men), 16, 25–26 Éloy, Jean-Claude, 59, 65–66 En attendant Godot (Waiting for Godot), 178 Les Enfants terribles, 178 Enlightenment, 3 Enquêtes (Investigations; a.k.a. Otras Inquisiciones [Other Inquisitions]), 120 Esposito, Gianni, 22–23 Et Dieu . . . créa la femme (And God Created Woman), 16 Euripides, 186 Europa, 215 European Diary, 79 Eustache, Jean, 53, 112, 133, 168, 206–207, 243–244 Existentialism, 17, 27, 201–202, 204–205, 209, 216 Expressionism, 80, 85 Fabian, Françoise, 115 Faces, 180 Fairbanks, Douglas, 210 The Famous Five, 218 Les Fanatiques (A Bomb for a Dictator), 23 Faulkner, William, 20, 25, 29 Fellini, Federico, 17, 19, 61, 103, 132, 166 Feminism, 11, 161, 253 Fernández, Emilio, 200 Ferreri, Marco, 151 Feuillade, Louis, 99, 102, 122 Fieschi, Jean-André, 93 “Les filles de feu”: see Scènes de la vie parallèle Le Fils Naturel (The Natural Son), 110 270

Film Comment, vii, 121 Film noir, 15, 17, 256 Film Quarterly, vii, 22, 134 Finney, Albert, 171, 275 Flags of Our Fathers, 241 Flaubert, Gustave, 193, 206 Fleischer, Richard, 195 Fleming, Victor, 102 Flesh, 244 Les Fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), 198 The Flood, 62 Ford, John (drama), 154 Ford, John (film), 2, 77, 87, 192, 195, 200, 204 Fougerolles, Hélène de, 222 Françoise ou La vie conjugale, 93–94 Frappat, Hélène, 191–220 French Cancan, 23 French film, 1, 10–11, 14–22, 24, 36, 67, 70–71, 131, 158, 168, 189, 210, 223, 242 Freud, Sigmund, 149, 151, 212 Fuest, Robert, 231 Gabin, Jean, 17 Gallimard Editions, vii, 225, 243 Gance, Abel, 24, 195 Gangster films, 22, 203 Garrel, Philippe, 53, 61, 67, 73, 131 Gateff, Amy, vii, 38 Gaullism, 4 Gaumont Film Company, 159, 165 Gazette du Cinéma, viii, 1, 210 Geido Ichidai Otoko (The Life of an Actor), 179 The General Line (a.k.a. The Old and the New), 77, 87–88 Genet, Jean, 178, 186 Génovès, André, 160 Gertrud, 77–78, 90–91 Gide, André, 243 Giraudoux, Jean, 186 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry, 245 Godard, Jean-Luc, viii, 1–2, 4, 25–34, 36–37, 53, 61, 67, 70–71, 73, 77–78, 80–81, 83, 96, 106–108, 115, 128, 133, 148, 151, 155, 168, 177, 183, 196, 201, 208, 210, 223, 242, 246 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 99, 174, 184

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INDEX The Golden Coach, 221 Goldoni, Carlo, 222 Gone with the Wind, 102 Gorin, Jean-Pierre, 4 Gorky, Maxim, 87 Gourmont, Remy de, 198 Goya, Francisco, 209 La Grande Bouffe (The Big Feast), 151 Grant, Cary, 17 The Grapes of Wrath, 87 Greco, Emideo, 119 Gregorio, Eduardo de, 93, 115, 117, 120, 123–124, 171, 181 Grémillon, Jean, 17 Griffith, D. W., 35, 77, 82–83, 86, 133, 148, 166, 210 Grotowski, Jerzy, 153 Gruault, Jean, 23, 110, 115 Guns, 183 The Happening, 55 Hardy, Oliver, 54, 210 Harrington, Curtis, 131 Harvard University Press, vii Haut bas fragile (Up, Down, Fragile), ix, 8–9, 185, 187–190, 232–233, 261 Les Hauts de Hurle-Vent, 226 Hawks, Howard, 2, 33–34, 54, 121, 148–149, 191–192, 195, 203, 219 Hayworth, Rita, 219 Hazette, Valérie, vii, 225–237 Heat, 244 Hegel, G.W.F., 26, 83, 196 Heidegger, Martin, 222 Heinrich, André, 30 Hemingway, Ernest, 20 Hernádi, Gyula, 106 Heron, Liz, vii, 14, 25 Herostratus, 55 Hiroshima, mon amour (Hiroshima, My Love), 24–32 Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Story of Marie and Julien), x, 9, 11, 146, 171, 233, 235–236, 238, 241, 243, 262–263 Histoire des Treize (The Thirteen, a.k.a. History of the Thirteen), 98, 114, 118, 129–130, 149, 238 Hitchcock, Alfred, 9, 18, 33–34, 37, 41, 53, 56, 74, 86, 103, 105,

118–119, 122, 133, 137, 148–149, 157, 177, 194–195, 205, 210, 213, 219 Hitler, Adolf, 150, 214 Hollywood, 2, 33, 85–86, 121, 153, 166 Homer, 81, 153–154 Hossein, Robert, 172 Hughes, John, vii, 148–157 Hugo, Victor, 99, 211 Huillet, Danièle, 77 The Hunting of the Snark, 99, 124, 149 Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights), ix, 7, 139, 225–237, 258–259 Husbands, 180 Huston, John, 20 The Idiots, 215 Les Idoles, 40, 68, 172, 243 Ignatius of Loyola, 216 The Iliad, 154 Impressionism, 153 India, 25 India Song, 152 The Innocents, 119 Les Inrockuptibles, vii, 177, 241 Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC; French Institute of Cinema, Paris), viii, 71 Intolerance, 77, 83, 211 The Invention of Morel, 118, 120, 123 L’invenzione di Morel, 119 Italian film, 15–16, 19–20 I Walked with a Zombie, 156 Jacobs, Ken, 131 Jacques Rivette: Le veilleur (The Night Watchman), ix, 265 Jaguar, 89 James, Henry, 117, 119, 123, 204, 206–207, 234, 238, 255 Jancsó, Miklós, 103, 106–108, 132 Jansenism, 216 Japanese film, 155 Jarmusch, Jim, 11 Jean-Marc ou La vie conjugale, 93 Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Maiden), ix, 8, 11, 145, 185, 192, 220, 230, 239, 260–261 271

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INDEX Jean Renoir, le patron (The Boss), ix, 111, 133, 243, 264 Jeux interdits (Forbidden Games), 18 Joan of Arc, 216–217 Joffé, Alex, 23 Johnson, William, 134–138 Jones, Kent, vii, 177 Journal d’un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest), 18 Kabuki theater (Japan), 179 Kafka, Franz, 2 Kalfon, Jean-Pierre, 38–45, 47–49, 51, 54–59, 62–63, 68, 70, 73, 95, 169, 179 Kalmus, Natalie, 153 Kant, Immanuel, 196, 204, 207 Karina, Anna, 3, 66–67, 111, 130, 155, 171 Karmitz, Marin, 55 Keller, Craig, vii, 241 Kermadec, Liliane de, 163 Kerr, Deborah, 119 Key to Poetry, 199 Kleist, Heinrich von, 211 Klossowski, Pierre, 28 Kramer, Robert, 183 Kramer, Stanley, 217 Kristeva, Julia, 132 Kubelka, Peter, 131 Kuleshov, Lev, 86 Labarthe, André, 40, 42, 44–45, 51–52 Lacan, Jacques, 151, 212, 214, 218 Labourier, Dominique, 5, 117, 121, 123, 125, 130, 150, 180 Lafont, Bernadette, 183, 244 Laing, R. D., 151 Lalanne, Jean-Marc, 241–247 Lancelot du Lac (Lancelot of the Lake), 132 Lang, Fritz, 2, 30, 81, 105, 115, 148, 157, 204, 209, 213–214 Lang, Jack, 228 Langlois, Henri, viii, 102 Last Tango in Paris, 151 Latin Quarter Film Club Bulletin (Bulletin intérieur du Ciné-club du Quartier Latin), 210 Laurel, Stan, 54, 210 272

Laurent, Christine, 175, 217, 236, 238–239 Lautréamont, Comte de (Isidore Lucien Ducasse), 198 Leacock, Richard, 83 Léataud, Paul, 243 Léaud, Jean-Pierre, 5, 94–95, 99, 113–114, 116, 127, 149, 155, 232, 244 Leaves from Satan’s Book, 83 Lee, Ang, 234 Leenhardt, Roger, 17–18, 34, 186, 200 Leftism, 20, 161 Legendre, Pierre, 202–204, 214, 216, 218 Lelouch, Claude, 158–159 Lenin, Vladimir, 214 Léon, Didier, 39 “Letter on Rossellini” (Rivette), 196 Letters from Iwo Jima, 241 La Lettre du cinéma, vii, 191 Levent, Alain, 51 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 203 Levy, Don, 55 Lewis, Jerry, 1 Liberation: see “Second World War” Lilith, 58 Literature and Evil (La Littérature et le Mal), 225 Living Theatre (New York), 56, 113, 153 Lizzani, Carlo, 19 Locarno International Film Festival, ix Lola Montès, 16, 67 Lonsdale, Michel, 94, 96, 98, 100– 102, 114–116, 156, 244 Loren, Sophia, 70 Losey, Joseph, 165 Lovecraft, H. P., 31 Love on the Run, 232 Lubitsch, Ernst, 74, 195, 203 Lubtchansky, Nicole, 95, 116 “Lucie” (Musset), 211 Lumière, Auguste, ix–x, 97, 191–192, 216, 262 Lumière, Louis, ix–x, 97, 191–192, 210, 216, 262 Lycée Pierre-Corneille (Rouen), viii Lynch, David, 11 Machorka-Muff, 77, 91–92 Madame Bovary, 72

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INDEX Made in USA, 77, 80 The Magnificent Ambersons, 85 Mahias, Lydie, 231 Maistre, François, 23 Mallarmé, Stéphane, 184 Malle, Louis, 24 Malraux, André, 20–21 Manet, Édouard, 29, 208–209 Mankiewicz, Joseph L., 33, 166–167, 195 Mann, Anthony, 17–18 Manniez, Véronique, x Mao, Zedong, 214 Marais, Jean, 242 Marc’O (Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin), 38–40, 68, 95, 172, 243–244 Marcorelles, Louis, 22, 33–37, 53 Marie-Claire, 173 Marignac, Martine, 173, 185, 223, 227–228, 238 Marivaux, Pierre, 184, 208, 259 Markale, Jean, 182 Marker, Chris, 30 Markham, Kika, 182 Marnie, 41–42, 57, 213 La Marseillaise, 72 Marx, Groucho, 151 Marx, Karl, 82–83 Marx Brothers, 152 Marxism, 3, 82–83, 87–88, 151 Master of the House, 90 Mastroianni, Marcello, 61 Matisse, Henri, 29 Les Mauvaises Rencontres (Bad Liaisons), 16 McCarey, Leo, 203 McCarthyism, 22 Mead, Taylor, 79 Méditerranée, 77, 81–82, 93 Meiji era (Japan), 179 Méliès, Georges, 97 Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor), 30 Le Mépris (Contempt), 81 Merry-Go-Round, ix, 7, 143, 158– 159, 169, 171–172, 183, 244, 257 Metropolis, 31 MGM (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), 153 Milne, Tom, vii, 76, 93 Minnelli, Vincente, 118, 122, 188, 195

Minnie and Moskowitz, 180 “The Mirror Stage” (Lacan), 152 Les Misérables, 99 Mitterand, François, 245 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 35, 61, 77, 86, 131, 155, 179–180, 195, 204, 214 Mizrahi, Moshé, 165 Modernism, 2, 26, 257 Le moindre geste (The Slightest Gesture), 103, 105 Moi un Noir (I, a Black), 89 Le Monde, 158, 161 Monkey Business, 54 Mon Oncle (My Uncle), 23 Monroe, Marilyn, 245 Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday (Les vacances de Monsieur Hulot), 105 Monsieur Verdoux, 74 Monstres sacrés (Sacred Monsters), 166–167 Montaigu, Sandra, 230 Morain, Jean-Baptiste, 241–247 Moravia, Alberto, 81 Moreau, Jeanne, 166 Moretti, Michèle, 40, 44, 56, 63, 100, 114 Morrissey, Paul, 244 Mother, 87 The Mother and the Law, 83 The Mother and the Whore (La Maman et la putain), 207, 243 Moukhine, Tatiana, 23 Muriel, 35 Murnau, F. W., 35, 115, 133, 204, 210 Musicals, 188–189 Musset, Alfred de, 211 Le Mystère de l’Atelier 15 (The Mystery of Workshop 15), 30 Les Mystères de Paris, 99 Naniwa Onna (The Women of Osaka), 179 Narboni, Jean, 38, 76–92, 158 Nashville, 189 Naturalism, 80, 151 Neorealism (Italian), 15, 21 Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe, a.k.a. The Duchess of Langeais), x, 9–10, 147, 238–240, 243, 264 273

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INDEX New Wave (French Nouvelle Vague), 1, 3, 5, 7, 10–11, 16, 36, 162, 242, 244 New York Film Festival, 135 Next Year in Paris, 238–239 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 196 Night at the Crossroads, 195 The Nightcomers, 119 Nilsson, Leopoldo Torre, 120 Noh theater (Japan), 179 Noroît (Northwest Wind), ix, 7, 158–159, 161–162, 165, 169, 181–183, 256–257 North by Northwest, 168 Notes of a Film Director, 82 Not Reconciled, 77, 89, 92 La Nouvelle Critique, vii, 93 Nuit des espions (Double Agents), 172 October (Ten Days That Shook the World), 30 The Odyssey, 81, 154 Ogier, Bulle, 7, 38, 41, 43, 48, 52, 54, 57, 68, 70, 98, 100, 114–117, 123–124, 151–152, 154, 169, 172, 181, 216, 244–245 Ogier, Pascale, 245 Olivier, Laurence, 233 Olympia, 198 Ondine, 186 One from the Heart, 241 Only Angels Have Wings, 219 “On the Marionette Theater” (Kleist), 211 Ophuls, Max, 16, 67, 208, 243 Ordet (The Word), 90 Orlan, Mac (Pierre Dumarchey), 20 Orphée (Orpheus), 9 The Other House, 117, 123 Othon, 103, 105, 153 Oudart, Jean-Pierre, 152 Out 1: Noli me tangere (Touch Me Not), ix, 2, 4–5, 7, 11, 93, 98, 101–102, 104, 109–110, 113–114, 116, 118, 121–122, 124–127, 129–130, 134–135, 148–151, 155–157, 161–163, 169, 238, 244, 254–255 Ozu, Yasujiro, 155, 195 Pabst, G. W., 35, 85 Paramount Pictures, 15 274

Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us), viii, 1–2, 4–5, 7, 10, 22–24, 39, 60, 62, 65–66, 96, 98, 110–111, 115–116, 120, 127–130, 133–135, 138, 154, 160–161, 179, 185, 187, 222, 253 Parolini, Marilù, viii, 41, 48, 171 Party Girl, 157 La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (The Passion of Joan of Arc), 90 Pathé Film, 210 Paulhan, Jean, 193, 196, 198–200, 202, 204, 218 Péguy, Charles, 22, 196 Perceval, 159 Le Père de famille (The Father of the Family), 110 Pericles, 2–3, 22, 134, 222, 253 El Perjurio de la Nieve (The Snow’s Perjury), 120 Pérotin, Latin Perotinus, 211 Perrault, Pierre, 77–78, 83, 88–89, 97 Persona, 61–62, 70 Petit à Petit (Little by Little), 114, 137 Le petit soldat (The Little Soldier), 107 Phaedra, 199 Phelps, David, vii, 173 Phénix, 115, 117, 121, 124 Phillips, Barre, 183 Picasso, Pablo, 29–30 Piccoli, Michel, 7, 173–174 Picnic on the Grass, 153 Pierre, Sylvie, 38 Pierrot le fou, 155 Pirandello, Luigi, 2, 9, 57–58, 221–222, 262 Pisier, Marie-France, 117, 123–124 Playtime, 69 Poe, Edgar Allan, 3, 99 La Pointe Courte, 30 Polanski, Roman, 215 Pollack, Sydney, 195 Pollet, Jean-Daniel, 77, 80–82, 93 Polyeucte, 105 Poncheville, Alice de, 230 Le Pont du Nord (North Bridge), ix, 7, 11, 140, 227, 245, 257 Populism, 17 Positif, 195, 242 Pour la suite du monde (For Those Who Will Follow), 77, 88, 97

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INDEX Poussin, Nicolas, 225 Preminger, Otto, 8, 34, 85, 165 Prénom: Carmen (First Name: Carmen), 183 Prévert, Jacques, 17 Princess Yang Kwei-Fei, 77 Les Prisons (The Prisons): see Jeanne la pucelle Prometheus Bound, 3, 99, 134, 255 Propaganda, 82, 86 Protestantism, 227, 258 Proust, Marcel, 136 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 84–87, 200 Pushkin, Alexander, 184 Pynchon, Thomas, 7 Le quadrille (The Quadrille), viii, 1, 252 Une quarantaine (The Forty): see Duelle Les Quatre cent coups (The 400 Blows), 24, 115, 232 Queneau, Raymond, 154 Rabal, Francisco, 66, 111 Racine, Jean, ix, 3, 39–40, 45, 50, 55–56, 74, 134, 184, 193, 199, 254, 264 Radiguet, Raymond, 30 Radziwiłowicz, Jerzy, 9, 219 Ray, Nicholas, 2, 148, 156–157, 209 “Les rayons et les ombres” (“Beams and Shadows,” Hugo), 211 Realism, 2, 4, 10–11, 58, 80, 123 Rear Window, 148 Redding, Otis, 59 Red Psalm (Még kér a nép), 106 La Région Centrale, 131 La Règle du jeu (The Rules of the Game), 112, 178, 201–202, 206, 210, 212 Le Règne du jour (The Times That Are), 89, 97 La Religieuse (The Nun), viii–ix, 3–5, 11, 39–40, 64–67, 93, 96, 110–111, 120, 130–131, 133– 134, 140, 161–162, 164, 172, 179, 213–214, 253, 264 Rendez-vous, 228 Renoir, Jean, viii–ix, 2, 16, 23–25, 40–41, 53, 58, 61, 70–72, 77–78, 85–86, 108, 112, 115, 133, 137,

148, 153, 157, 165, 167, 177–178, 195, 201, 204, 206, 210, 219, 221 Resistance (French), 172 Resnais, Alain, 24–32, 35–37, 83, 106, 112, 118, 132, 168 The Revenger, 171 The Revenger’s Tragedy, 7, 154, 181 Ricardou, Jean, 104 Richard, Claude-Eric, 39 Richard, Nathalie, 181, 185–186 Riefenstahl, Leni, 198 The Rise to Power of Louis XIV, 154 The Rite (Riten), 106–107 The Rite of Spring, 29, 198 Riva, Emmanuelle, 27–28, 31 Rivette, André, viii RKO Pictures, 121 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 28, 79, 101, 126 Rocha, Glauber, 69 Rohmer, Éric (Maurice Schérer), viii, 1–2, 149, 158–159, 193, 196, 210, 223, 242 Roma, 105, 132 “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes” (James), 117 Romanticism, 60, 164, 228 Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 121–133, 148 Rosi, Francesco, 85 Rossellini, Isabella, 173 Rossellini, Roberto, 16, 19, 23, 25–27, 31, 60, 70, 77, 85–86, 115–116, 133, 154, 157, 177, 192, 194–195, 204–205, 210, 213 Rossen, Robert, 58 Rotterdam Film Festival, 5 Rouch, Jean, 61, 70–71, 77–78, 83, 88–89, 96–97, 108, 112, 114, 137, 182 Rouen University (France), 223 Une sale histoire (A Dirty Story), 244 Salome, 103 Sanders, George, 166 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 20, 222 Satyricon, 132 Scènes de la vie parallèle (Scenes From a Parallel Life), 171, 256 Schiffman, Suzanne, 94–95, 98, 116, 120, 124, 165, 227, 236 Schneider, Betty, 22–23, 116 275

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INDEX Schneider, Maria, 7, 171–172, 183, 244–245 Schroeder, Barbet, 117, 124, 163 Schroeter, Werner, 103, 132–133, 167 Schwartz, Arthur, 189 Science fiction, 30–31 Scorsese, Martin, 164, 241 The Searchers, 192 Second World War, 202, 223 Secret défense (Secret Defense, a.k.a. Top Secret), x, 2, 9, 144, 186, 192, 196, 219–220, 262 Sedofsky, Lauren, 121–133 Sennett, Mack, 55 Sense and Sensibility, 234 Senses of Cinema, 225 Senso, 16 Sept jours ailleurs (Seven Days Somewhere Else), 55 Série noire, 81, 167 Seven Against Thebes, 3, 99, 134, 255 Sévigné, Madame de (Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné), 193 Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 60 Shadow of a Doubt, 210 Shadows, 77 Shakespeare, William, 2–3, 22, 134, 153, 182, 184, 222, 253 Shea, Louisa, vii She Wanted to Find Herself, 57 Short Organum, 108 A Short Preface to All Criticism, 193, 196, 198 Sight and Sound, vii, 33, 110 Silberman, Serge, 163 Silverstein, Elliott, 55 Simenon, Georges, 167 Sirocco (a.k.a. Winter Wind), 107 Snow, Michael, 131 Sollers, Philippe, 132 Sontag, Susan, 181 Sophocles, 23, 186 “Sound and Image” (Soviet manifesto), 83 Spectre, ix, 4–5, 125–129, 132, 135–136, 138, 148–157, 254–255 The Spider’s Stratagem, 120 Spinoza, Baruch, 196, 207, 218 Srinivasan, Srikanth, vii, 191 276

Stalin, Joseph, 214 Les Statues meurent aussi (Statues Also Die), 30 Stavisky, 132 Sternberg, Josef von, 133, 207 Stewart, James, 17 Stiller, Mauritz, 210 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 60, 91 Strangers on a Train, 118 Straub, Jean-Marie, 65, 74, 77, 89–92, 103, 105, 132–133, 153, 155, 167, 208 Stravinsky, Igor, 25, 29, 60, 62, 198 Stroheim, Erich von, 35, 83, 210 Stromboli, 27 Studio des Champs-Élysées (Paris), 39, 111, 130 Sue, Eugène, 99 Suréna, 185 Surrealism, 17, 148, 156, 226 Sutherland Trophy (BFI), viii–ix Suzanne Simonin, la religieuse de Denis Diderot (The Nun): see La Religieuse Sylvia Scarlett, 155 S/Z, 152 Tashlin, Frank, 1 Tati, Jacques, 23, 69, 103, 105, 132 Taviani, Paolo, 106 Taviani, Vittorio, 106 Tchalgadjieff, Stéphane, 159–164, 171 The Tears of Eros, 225 Téchiné, André, 228 Technicolor, 68, 153 Technique and Rite (La tecnica e il rito), 103, 107 Telemusik, 60 Télérama, 202 Terra em transe (Entranced Earth), 69 Le Testament du Docteur Cordelier (The Doctor’s Horrible Experiment), 25, 72, 153 Thalberg, Irving, 166 Théâtre du Châtelet (Paris), 23 “Theme of the Traitor and the Hero” (Borges), 120 Thompson, Emma, 234 Tilley, Patrick, 231 Tite et Bérénice, ix, 184, 264 Todeschini, Bruno, 221 Toland, Gregg, 121, 233

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INDEX Tomorrow’s Poetry, 218 Tom, Tom, the Piper’s Son, 131 Toni, 72 Torquato Tasso, 99 Tourneur, Cyril, 7, 154, 181, 183 Tourneur, Jacques, 156, 182 Tout va bien (All’s Well), 4 Toute la mémoire du monde (All the Memory in the World), 25–26 Tower of Lust, 195 Traffic (Trafic), 105 Tragedy, 5, 7, 23, 67, 156, 185, 208, 214, 264 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (Around a Small Mountain), x, 1, 9–10, 147, 264 Trier, Lars von, 215 Truffaut, François, viii, 1–2, 22, 24, 33–34, 36, 46, 67, 115, 158–161, 182, 210, 213, 219–221, 223, 229, 232, 242–244 TSE Theater (Argentina), 117–118 The Turn of the Screw, 119 Twilight: see Duelle Ullmann, Liv, 70 Ulysses, 16 University of Illinois Press, vii, 178 “The Unknown Masterpiece” (Balzac), 173–174, 216 Unsere Afrikareise (Our Trip to Africa), 131 Uwasa No Onna (The Woman of the Rumor), 179–180 Vadim, Roger, 16 Vampyr, 90 Vancouver International Film Festival, 5 Van Vogt, A. E., 31 Varda, Agnès, 24, 30 Va savoir (Who Knows?), x, 2, 4, 9, 146, 221–224, 232, 262 Va Savoir+, 9, 262 Velazquez, Diego, 30, 209

Une vengeance (A Vengeance): see Noroît Verne, Jules, 31, 99 Vertigo, 9, 119, 213 Vertov, Dziga, 78, 83, 112, 246 Les Veuves de quinze ans (The FifteenYear-Old Widows), 71 Vidor, King, 15, 83, 154 La vie conjugale (Anatomy of a Marriage), 93–94 Vigo, Jean, 24 Visconti, Luchino, 16 Une Visite, viii La Vocation suspendue (The Suspended Vocation), 28 Les voitures d’eau (The River Schooners), 97 Walsh, Raoul, 159 War and Peace, 15 Warhol, Andy, 80, 244 Webern, Anton, 91 A Wedding, 189 Welles, Orson, 6, 24, 29, 85–86, 166, 202, 206, 210 Westerns, 14, 192, 203 Wiazemsky, Anne, 246 Wiene, Robert, 35 Wilder, Billy, 203, 245 Wild Strawberries, 28 Wiles, Mary, 178–190 The Wings of the Dove, 234 Winkler, Irwin, 164 Winner, Michael, 119 Wuthering Heights (Brontë), 7, 225–237, 258–259 Wyler, William, 18, 85, 121, 226–227, 233 Zangiku Monogatari (The Story of the Last Chrysanthemum), 179 Zanuck, Darryl F., 166 Zavattini, Cesare, 16 Zen Buddhism, 59–60 Zinnemann, Fred, 18

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