University of Cape Town – FAM4004S

Martin Botha

8 October 2017

‘The Beguiling Ordeal’:

Stages of Performance in Four Films by Jacques Rivette

“[W]ith Rivette, we are concerned primarily neither with product nor theory, but with the concrete practice of filmmaking. It is this that fascinates Rivette above all else, and whatever theories he has developed about the art seem to have been worked out experientially. He is not so interested in the film that eventually results from those labors, he explains, as with the process of work through which he and his coworkers pass.”

– James Monaco in the chapter ‘Rivette: The Process of Narrative’ in his movement-history The New Wave (1976: 306)

“Scripts even in the hands of unpractised players can come to life because life itself is a dramatically enacted thing. All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.”

– Erving Goffman in his study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1971: 78)

“You get stuck inside of what you’re searching for.”

– The painter Frenhofer in La Belle Noiseuse (1991)

The work of Jacques Rivette, far more than that of any of his Nouvelle Vague contemporaries, constitutes a Cinema of the Impossible. I mean this in nearly every sense. His films attempt to depict the genesis and material reality of fantasy; how the ‘something’ of art comes out of the ‘nothing’ of the creative void. They seem to want to negate themselves as auteurist works of directed imagination, replacing film narrative with the lived-in processes of literature, theatre, painting, magic and improvised community. And they sincerely try to become impossible to watch or screen in any ordinary cinema. They all take forever to be over with. You have to undertake to learn a new philosophy of aesthetic experience in order to keep caring after the second hour. But if you do, then you can get it. You lose yourself in each film’s generous unreeling of its own creation.

What makes Rivette’s particular conception of Slow Cinema unique is that it founds its rhythm on the life of communal performances. Whereas Tarkovsky synchronizes his films to the spiritualized detailing of nature, Ozu to the sighs and silences of domestic and seasonal habit, Antonioni to the long dark day of the soul, Angelopoulos to the survival of individuals in the face of modern myth, Bela Tarr to the starkly surreal decay of quotidian life, and Lav Diaz to the political heritage of the Philippines, Rivette confines his space and time to the demarcated zone of an event of Play. Each film takes as long as it requires to expend its own vitality. And this is discovered through the organic emergence of its final form within the creative process that simultaneously serves as its central subject. In the four films I plan on explicating in this essay – La Religeuse (1966), L’Amour Fou (1969), Celine et Julie Vont en Bateau (1974) and La Belle Noiseuse (1991) – the situations are, respectively, a young woman’s imprisonment in the routines of an 18^th-century convent, a couple’s entropy during the rehearsals of a Racine play, the adventures of two madcap friends who discover and gatecrash a literal ‘house of fiction’, and the production of the titular nude painting meant to become its aging artist’s masterpiece.[1]

Through the course of each story, we as the audience are interpellated into collaborating with the protagonists in their spiralling immersion into ‘the work’ at hand.[2]And this just implicitly serves as a means of inspiring in us a parallel empathy for Rivette and his crew in their own ever-present endeavour to capture its realization. As such, much of Rivette’s oeuvre suffers from an especially dispiriting practical irony. His films nigh-on require the cinema-going experience to have their rightful effect, but so few ordinary cinemas have ever had the boldness or nonchalance to show any of his three-hour-plus films in their full, uncensored versions. Nonetheless, to appreciate them the viewer needs to leave behind domestic comfort and familiarity to enter into the self-conscious indeterminacy of the movie theatre, wherein the overwhelming blankness of the screen and the mysterious company of their fellow audience-members can double for the emptiness of the stage and the unknowability of creative collaborators.[3]The physical zone of the cinema itself must come to reflect the inherent claustrophobia of Rivette’s multiple sites of love and creation: the artist’s studio, the couple’s apartment, the house of the repeated fiction. And the film can give away no clues at all as to its potential duration, so as to recreate the felt endlessness and unaccountable demands of the committed development of Art, from first inklings to eventual presentation.

All of this is done of course to accomplish the Nouvelle Vague’s founding dream of the creation of a self-conscious Cinema. I imagine that of all the young cineastes who mythically began their careers under the daily tutelage of Henri Langlois’s screening schedule at the Cinematheque Francaise in the early 50’s before joining the by-line of Cahiers du Cinema, Rivette was the one most overawed by the simple stoic joy of staying through three or more movies in sequence.[4]Since the New Wave directors were the first group of filmmakers to create works in open dialogue with cinema history and with each other, it’s seemingly no surprise that the movement’s energy would eventually settle, in Rivette’s work, on an avant-garde evocation of the phenomenology of cinematic duration (or ‘duree’, as the French would have it) itself. All their careers were foremost born out of an unadulterated love for the continuousness of movie-going, and so this unending aspect ultimately serves as their underlying subject. But the other big names, befitting their lengthy stints as critics, pursued their adoring inquiries primarily through internal play and critique. Godard tore apart the technical and narratological conventions of the Hollywood studio system seemingly one genre at a time until the jazzy, self-reflexive gangsterism of A Bout de Souffle (1960) became the self-hating, anarchistic mania of Weekend (1967). His experiments, like his Cahiers essays, were meant to provide formal conclusions, from which a newly personal and politicized cinema could then be speculated. Truffaut, for his part, bypassed theory entirely and broke the classical forms so as to produce uncontained expressions of youth, vigour and candour, writing his own troubles and affections into The 400 Blows (1959) and Jules and Jim (1962) before mellowing into the medium-idolatry of Day for Night (1973). Chabrol and Rohmer together took the path of harder directorial craftsmanship by focusing their careers on the revitalization of particular traditional genres: the Hitchcockian psychological thriller and the ‘moral tale’ of the tribulations of bourgeois conscience, respectively. They repeated and refined their takes on each for decades until their later works – La Ceremonie (1995) and A Summer’s Tale (1996), for example – accomplished a kind of self-contented mastery.[5]But these four (even Godard before 1968) were only avant-garde in so far as they were revisionist. They depended on the medium’s history to create the space for their developments. They wanted to make Hollywood films in their own way, but they still wanted to make Hollywood films.

Not so with Jacques Rivette. The self-consciousness his films evince is entirely original. Instead of making knowing takes on previous stories, he recreates and redoubles the distance between the conventional sincerity of a classical work and the open-ended ambiguity of the viewer’s and creator’s ordinary reality within the diegesis of his own films.[6]  In other words, the originals are not ‘reworked’ but enframed. The irony of the production lies in its form, not its content. We don’t have to suspend our disbelief in watching his films because we are not watching a ‘finished’ illusion of reality. We are watching the real construction of an illusion that can never be definitively finished. The space we enter and the characters we meet no longer belong either to life or art but to the liminal space of creation in which such categories are synthesized and transcended. To use Gilles Deleuze’s terms, Rivette constantly seeks to produce a time-image which depicts his characters withstanding the aesthetic reification of their own fantasies. And the experience of watching this occur becomes for us the closest Cinema can come to being a direct accompaniment to the open-endedness of reality itself. The variations he spins out of this conceit, which I will describe from here on out, constitute a career-long process of creative experimentation to match those at the center of each of his films.  

La Religeuse (1966) – The Convenience of Traps

We have to begin with the exception that proves the rule. La Religeuse (The Nun) is Rivette’s only traditional film, his only film less than 130 minutes long, and not coincidentally his only commercial success of any sort. It appears to play its story straight, as a faithful adaptation of the Enlightenment philosophe Denis Diderot’s canonical novel. It stars Godard’s great muse Anna Karina as Suzanne Simonin, a teenage girl abandoned by her noble family to languish her life away in a miserable convent for lack of funds or care to pay for her dowry. She resists and bewails her fate until she is transferred to a superficially happier nunnery. But her beauty attracts the toxic infatuation of the Mother Superior and she eventually escapes on the run. Having no experience outside the protection of an institution, she ends up destitute and prostituted and finally uses her last remaining freedom to throw herself out of a window at a client’s dinner party. So you can also say for once that the film has a distinct sense of closure.

But it is more of a piece with Rivette’s other films than it’s given credit for, and it provides a base from which to grasp the extenuations of his work’s subsequent self-reflexive twists. Even if there is no ‘meta’-story, the film is still enframed as a work of adaptation. The credits are preluded by a disclaimer about its fictitiousness as well as a three-minute mini-documentary (narrated by Rivette himself) on the context of the novel’s creation, from Diderot’s writing habit to the sociological functions of convents at the time (‘Paris, 1760’). Then the film’s full title is given as ‘Suzanne Simonin: La Religieuse de Denis Diderot’, making it the most definite of articles. Of course, these measures were partly just the means of finally getting past the censorship board’s stringency against anti-religious content, but they function too as explanations for the mise-en-scene’s prominent artifice. The film began in 1963, so to speak, as Rivette’s own successful stage production, and rarely has a movie-screen felt more like the border of a proscenium arch. The cinematography is rigorously timed to react to the stage-tested movements of the actors in every scene.[7]And the edit is full of quick cut-ins and blank black seams between scenes, emphasizing the formality and scriptedness of convent life itself and the non-continuity of the space’s overwhelming boredom. Suzanne and her audience are doubly imprisoned by its drab walls and the unruffled professionalism of the drama’s enactment. She is even explicitly ‘staged’ in her helplessness by two prominent screens within the mise-en-scene: the barred gate separating her from the audience that witnesses her refuse her vows and the iron grid that serves as the border between the uniformed performance of the nunnery and the wandering concern of any passing visitors.[8]Often she falls to the ground in prostrate frustration, seemingly knowing no other escape tactic but the expression of full submission. Karina explodes with patently real despair, further breaking the illusion of the institution’s godly routine, but when she escapes, and when she kills herself, she is quiet and surprisingly inconspicuous, her beauty flattened by the world’s indifference.

These inversions of the tropes of Rivette’s later work serve as a kind of test-case for expressing his philosophy of human sociality. Every institution is a form of collective (aesthetic) production, he implies, and there is no life beyond at least a minimal collectivity. But an institution beholden to rules it has merely inherited and doesn’t understand is no place for the individual either. Suzanne has no collaborators and no project beyond her own freedom and thus she is doomed, simply for trying to be her own person as a woman in the ‘Paris, 1760’ of the final title-card. But without any opportunity for play the film is burdened by the drear and isolating boredom it seeks to depict, and the story ultimately comes to seem like a cipher for Rivette’s own confinement within the demands and conventions of mainstream cinema. Thankfully, its profits would afford him the unalloyed freedom to subsequently pursue his own vision.

L’Amour Fou (1969) – The Erosion of Passion

It’s difficult to believe L’Amour Fou (Mad Love) was then Rivette’s follow-up. It is as free-form and unforced a film as La Religeuse is angular and tortured. Its only plotted conceit is that it begins with its ending, as the lovers Claire and Sebastien are first seen apart, her in a train compartment, him in their broken apartment listening to her voice-recordings. The rest of the film is structured by the entwining of three self-sufficient strands of slow-burn narrative: their life together in and out of the apartment, the endless rehearsals of his production of Racine’s Andromache, and a tv documentary crew’s grainy 16mm footage of the cast’s process and interviews. This takes four hours and twelve minutes or so. He cheats on her. She spies on him. She cheats on him. The production experiments with harnessing Racine’s Alexandrine verses to a drumming or clapping rhythm. We see fragments of the development of genuine dramaturgical insights in Sebastien’s verite confessions. Claire threatens to run away and/or kill herself multiple times. They make love in tears in the middle of the night. We watch table-read after table-read after table-read. There are ellipses in the middle of scenes that ensure we feel the ache of time passing. There are no mini-arcs to any of these sequences. We’re merely stationed with the characters for the time being. Finally the lovers confine themselves to their bedroom and begin to perform a kind of hour-long home theatre, in which they draw on and tear at the wallpaper, rock in each other’s laps, dress up as American explorers and eventually break through the door with an axe. The play comes together, impressively, but the couple drifts apart until they’re out of reach again. We see the first audience fulling up the theatre, but the camera drops down and loses itself in the white expanse of the stage floor.

It seems almost as if the play within the film is a kind of parasitic mise-en-abyme sucking in all the energy for clear-headed form and focus from the lives of its creators.[9]Just as the documentary crew lingers over the faces of the rehearsals, Rivette’s camera, in a sharper 35mm black-and-white, stays behind the behind-the-scenes, remaining entirely unconfrontational, until it catches the agonies of its distracted subjects. Again, this technique was conditioned by the parallel existence of a ‘real’ production: Jean-Pierre Kalfon, the actor playing Sebastien, was simultaneously directing Andromache for the Parisian stage and, what’s more, had fallen in requited love with Bulle Ogier, the actress playing Claire. So the special intimacy of the film almost inevitably stems from the context of its being a documentary production two or three times over.[10]Because we are already given the impression of there being two separate stable centres of direction and refinement within the story – the ruthlessly strict classicism of the play and the obsessive observation of the documentary crew – the rest of the film appears entirely real, unaffected and buoyed by its baggy length into being true. Rivette manages his characters’ actions as incidents for his hand-held shots to spontaneously react to. His frames are predominantly composed either as theatrical low-angle full-body long shots or great extreme close-ups of the couple’s most mellifluous expressions. In both, his camera is self-evidently searching for a kind of potential energy in every level of performance. Otherwise the editing is minimal and almost no non-diegetic sound is allowed for the film’s entire span. Absolutely everything in the film’s style is engineered to bolster the cunning illusion of pure presence. It is, as such, a Heideggerian cinema, an attempted evocation of our shared being-there with Claire and Sebastien.

The entropy of a failing relationship is just the steady draining of any vestige of mutual care, and so it can not be depicted, Rivette’s method implies, via traditional ‘scenes’. L’Amour Fou’s characters, like the stars of Andy Warhol’s movies, do not enter spaces together to pursue their desires. They are, instead, already pre-found features of the spaces they are forced to inhabit with each other, and so their decaying relations appear as the strict inversion of creativity as such. But this residual collectivity – the theatrical condition of the world itself, one could say – can only emerge for its own sake as a contrast to the voluntary and endless playfulness of the simultaneous production and documentary.[11]Otherwise, the mere depiction of ordinary company would indeed appear unredeemingly dull. Such a complementary process further reveals Rivette’s philosophy of artifice: the unscriptedness of life requires the presence or promise of a determined form of play to even be depicted, let alone lived.

 Celine et Julie Vont en Bateau (1974) – The Triumph of Silliness

Celine et Julie, on the other hand, is all play, and miraculously so. Created quickly as a cheap improvisatory cool-down from the dramaturgical maximalism of Out 1 (1971), it replaces the latent dread underlying all of Rivette’s preceding films with a sun-streaked sense of utter mischief and pleasure. It tells of the eponymous pair of friends – a magician and a librarian – meeting in a park, twice, identically, at the beginning and the end of the film, but swapping roles and costumes in the meantime. They follow and flirt with each other across Paris before Celine seeks refuge at Julie’s door. They spin fantasies together instead of talking. Eventually they discover somehow a shut-up mansion in which the melodrama of the mysterious murder of a little heiress is being played out daily by her father and two melancholy women. Both Celine and Julie enter the house separately only to forget the story as soon as they exit. But bright candies left in their mouths after each foray allow them to relive their shared role as the family nurse whilst sucking away the sweetness. Then they go in together and review the day afterwards together, facing the audience to watch and critique as their visions reappear before them. Eventually they concoct a potion to help them take control of the story, rescuing Madlyn, the little girl, just in time as the fiction collapses around them, with darkness encroaching and the other characters’ faces growing pale. Flushed by their success, they take her boating on the Seine and see the father and women pass by in the distance, their white faces frozen and immaculate.

But to describe the film in plodding terms is to belie its electricity. It is really a three-hour session in a cinematic playground.[12]Whereas in L’Amour Fou, Rivette’s observational eye is anchored to an uncreating chaos, here it struggles to keep up with the affections and affectations it seeks to appreciate. The enterprising joy of the central pair’s growing friendship is equally the blooming on-set rapport of the actresses Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier, who were also equal script collaborators with Rivette and his other co-writers. The fragmented melodrama they stumble across is a composite of two Henry James stories which, if cut back together, could probably stand by itself as a sincere short film adaptation. But its high literary seriousness is revealed in its absurdity by being cross-cut with the duo’s simultaneously enraptured and critical commentary. And the eventual success of their search-and-rescue intervention into the story signals the decisive triumph of the creative aspect of readership. The film’s fun comes from its exact reversal of L’Amour Fou’s presiding passive entropy: our surrogates are not the work’s beleaguered creators but its adoringly transgressive audience. Celine and Julie are already imitating our later conversations about the film within the film itself.[13]And their refusal to see its narrative as sacrosanct reflects our feelings of personal attachment to the outcomes of our own favourite texts. As a whole too, the film showcases an uncanny awareness of its own attractions. Here, the camera lingers not on intimations of turmoil but on every manifestation of pleasure available: Julie’s beaming face as she gets in the taxi after her first venture into the house, Celine’s slickly spontaneous stage-show as ‘the Mandrakore’, the succulent colours of the ‘fictional’ women’s flowers and dresses, the sound of the wind in the trees in the park at both meetings… And this time the circular narrative indicated by this last synchronicity is meant, as in Finnegans Wake per se, to emphasize the tale’s (and the central couple’s) throwaway self-sufficiency and to oblige us to return to it as often as it returns to itself.[14]

It’s almost unbelievable that Celine et Julie’s optimism could erupt from the langorous heat-death of La Religeuse and L’Amour Fou. But its vision of paradisal playfulness follows on naturally from the precedings films’ conclusions. In both, the possibilities of collective play are ultimately confined to the perpetuation of classical performances: the unchanging routine of a convent, the inviolable metre of a Racine production. But here Celine and Julie cast themselves as literature’s liberators. They get to know the enframed story so well – even making diagrams of the house on Julie’s kitchen chalkboard – that they finally overwhelm it with feeling and spontaneous poetry.[15]The cherishable details of the world beyond the story seep into its plotted purpose until the spirit of youth – a doomed girl[16]– is finally freed from it, and no ‘play’ is left but to enjoy a quiet floating moment before beginning everything again. The frozen figures in the passing boat are then the dead materiality of our fictions finding us out in the real. They refuse to be confined.

La Belle Noiseuse (1991) – The Scars of Appearances

In some sense, La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Nuisance) suffers for its relative maturity. It doesn’t quite return Rivette to any classical sensibility, but it is long enough divorced by age from the New Wave’s moment for it to feel as much a final flowering as Celine et Julie is a youthful bloom. It concerns the creation of two masterpieces – the painting of the title, and the film itself for depicting that creation’s endlessly abrasive process. Frenhofer, the work’s greying artist, hasn’t sold a painting since 1974 (just as Rivette hadn’t made an acclaimed film since that year’s Celine et Julie) and lives in rustic semi-retirement with his small family in the very south of France. But the visit of a rival fanboy painter, Nicolas, and his sublime wife, Marianne, spurs him into resuming his final sally at immortality. Marianne hesitantly becomes his new muse and model, and for more than two hours we watch him sketch her, daub her form, twist her body, experiment with her image and finally apply paint to canvas. He nearly gives up but she won’t let him. Every relationship in the film strains under the work’s ambition. Emmanuelle Beart, as Marianne, stays nude longer than any actress in any single film in cinema history. When the work is finally finished, we don’t even get to see it. Frenhofer bricks it up at the back of his studio. But not before his wife, Liz, sneaks a look and sketches a small cross on its back. She was his previous model for his previous attempt and he drowns the old incomplete painting in blue to force out the new one. He quickly makes a faux-replacement to show his expectant gallerist and the film ends with a relief-fueled soiree. In voiceover Marianne reveals herself as the story’s bookending narrator.

So for once the experiment is an entirely direct tarrying with duration as such. Marianne’s narration starts the film in a speculative retrospect, but its vast centre – the drama of the painter’s process – is an aching, suspenseful present-tense. Each stage self-evidently takes as long as it would take to perform in life. Frenhofer’s and Marianne’s frustrations become ours at the yet-unrewarded labour of our immersed viewing.[17]Again, Rivette uses music minimally, but every diegetic sound in the studio is inflated to an unhealthy amplitude and pitch. The camera consistently favours the full-body framing pursued by the painting itself, but whereas in L’Amour Fou it captures spontaneity, here it seeks to show the slow changes of the characters’ essences like bottles of wine. The colours are humid, deep and comfortingly natural like classic Matisse or Bonnard, and just serve to complement the unquestioned realism of the film as a whole. The story is scripted, but the process is not and doesn’t feel like it could be. Again, the enframed work takes over the piece’s dynamism and the productive torture of the artist-muse relationship conflates with the implied pains of Rivette’s production process to make us irreparably aware of the physical reality of Art. Marianne’s manipulation can not have been faked, as Rivette had to replicate it through Emmanuelle Beart’s submission to the recreation of the scene. He instills her polyvalent image into our imaginations just as Frenhofer sketches and brushes it into his own. The draft and failed versions of the picture stack up on the studio walls like an internal archive or scene-selection menu within the film itself. Marianne emerges as an equal collaborator in the process because she has to, or else risk becoming a casualty of his submission to the exhaustive logic of masterpieces. Liz’s cross perhaps signifies the direct outcome of his success in this regard: a new knowledge of the nearness of his death. He hides the painting because he sees it as a ‘posthumous’ work and therefore not his to evaluate. This is left to Marianne, whose final narration establishes her control of the story.

For all its patent suffering then, the film is eventually about success as much as process. Liz says at one point that ‘La Belle Noiseuse’ also means, in Canadian French, a beautiful “going nuts”, an image of a continuing descent into madness. But no matter how close the painting’s creation threatens to take both artist and model into a similar acrimony, they are protected by the determination of their collaboration, and as such the film perhaps demonstrates the elementary example of Rivette’s vision of positive play. The root of any valuable sociality comes to be seen as the equal collaboration of partners on a greater project, be it love or art, and so the subject of the film Rivette must have imagined as his own potential masterpiece is inevitably the extent of the strain a ‘masterpiece project’ takes on its diametrically opposed creators as well as their other competing relationships. As long as Frenhofer and Marianne’s collective belief in the potential of their piece holds, they find they can depend on each other to spur them both into better, more playful variations around the same essential beauty. Only together can they know what they’re doing.   

Fortunately, La Belle Noiseuse, in my opinion, isn’t Rivette’s masterpiece; not because it isn’t potentially his best film, but because his entire cinematic thought, as I have presented it at least, seems to exclude the idea of a finished formula for his personal accomplishment. The particular ‘unfinishable’ qualities of each of his films only find their places in the greater open-endedness of the arc of his career. They are all instances in the endless outworking of a valuable gimmick – a private method of mise-en-abyme that allows his films to be about cinema itself without lapsing into a paralyzing postmodern solipsism.[18]Watching them is an access to a fresh cinematic method of acquiring knowledge: simply watching the work of collaborative rehearsal and performance until we now ‘know’ how a convent is run, a troupe prepares, a fantasy is disrupted and a painter makes a masterpiece. In such a filmic space, the individual character can only exist in parallel with the life of this developing understanding.[19]As such, this knowledge does not precede the creation of the film but is discovered by its creators in the process of its making, thus making their unfolding surprise ours too as we watch them. And this transforms it into a hypnotic experience, as the magic of creative production breaks out again in the moment of its reduction to practical work. Rivette’s films are inspired in their depiction of that which goes beyond mere inspiration in the collective production of art. His realism is a mimesis of the cinematic process itself. And in its playful accuracy, it promises to go on forever, just as we promise to carry on watching it. 

Word Count: 4850

References and Bibliography

Armes, Roy. 1970.  French Cinema Since 1946 (Volume Two: The Personal Style). London: A. Zwemmer Limited.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2005. Cinema 2: The Time-Image. London: Continuum Books

Goffman, Erving. 1975. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Hammondsworth: Penguin Books.

— 1971. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. London: Penguin Books.

Graham, P. & Vincendeau, G. (Eds.) 2009.The French New Wave: Critical Landmarks. London: BFI Palgrave Macmillan.

Monaco, James. 1976. The New Wave. New York: Oxfrord University Press.

Thomson, David. 2014. The New Biographical Dictionary of Film(6^thEdition). New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

— 2006. ‘Have You Seen…?’: A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. London: Allen Lane.

[1]I’ve only left out here his two other important films – Paris Nous Appartient(1961) and Out 1(1971) – because the former is an underformed, feet-finding first feature and the latter is more than 12 hours long (!) and so would require its own singular essay to match its singular experimentation.

[2]“There comes a point after a couple of hours of film time when we cease reacting to the logic of the film and begin to flow with it.” (Monaco, 1976: 311)

[3]“[Rivette’s] films reproduce life’s pressure to decide about people on the evidence available.” (Thomson, 2014: 886)

[4]According to Monaco at least, “[o]f all the members of the New Wave, he is still the greatest cinephile and the only one who can still regularly be found in attendance at Cinematheque screenings.” (1976: 305)

[5]Much the same can probably also be said for Jacques Demy’s musicals and Alain Resnais’ art-house features. Only Agnes Varda and Chris Marker stand out as the other itinerant avant-gardists to catch the first crest of the New Wave in the early 60’s but their works were often too personal and underdistributed for their names to be grouped with the Cahiers Five. I apologize for mostly continuing that elision here but it is generally more productive to contrast Rivette’s cinema with that of his former colleagues than with the styles of the latter two essayistic auteurs.

[6]“We are now no longer presented with a ‘fait (or fiction) accompli’, but with material which has been only slightly edited for our convenience and which we must work to interpret. Naturally, there will be false leads, dead spaces, and arhythmic developments. All the better. The intention is not to “offend the audience.” To borrow a phrase from Peter Handke, but to open up new areas in which the audience can exercise its intelligence.” (Monaco, 1976: 310)

[7]And the camera’s movements are so strictly static and balanced that it comes as a shock when Rivette finally uses a handheld shot more than an hour in to track Suzanne’s near-breakdown around the courtyard while she tries to convince her first mother superior of her wretched failure as a nun.

[8]Partly this appears to be an intelligent development of Anna Karina’s more renowned role as Nana in Vivre Sa Vie(1962), in which Godard, her husband at the time, cast her as a multiply-framed prostitute who gradually loses all her remaining freedoms until her meaningless death, despite her beauty and her protestations of joyful agency.

[9]This function of multiple framing is seemingly jokingly referred to within the film too, in a scene in which Claire dismantles a gigantic Russian nesting-doll on her bed until she’s left with a final woman the size of a pin.

[10]Deleuze’s detailing of these life-art paradoxes deserves to be quoted in full: “The characters are rehearsing a play; but the rehearsal precisely implies that they have not yet achieved the theatrical attitudes which correspond to the roles and to the plot of the play which goes beyond them; on the contrary, they resort to para-theatrical attitudes which they assume in relation to the play, in relation to their role, and each in relation to the others, and these second attitudes are all the purer and more independent for being free from all pre-existing plot, which exists only in the play. These attitudes will thus secrete a gest which is neither real nor imaginary, neither everyday nor ceremonial, but on the boundary between the two, and which will point from this position to the functioning of a truly visionary or hallucinatory sense … It is as if the characters spring to life again on the walls of the theatre, and discover pure attitudes as independent of the theatrical role as they are of a real action, although echoing both of them.” (1986:187)

[11]“The fusion of latencies in the words ‘rehearsal’ and ‘performance’ had never been so complete or so deranging.” (Thomson, 2006: 33)

[12]An impression supported not just by its pervasive feeling of childish liberty, but also by the constant presence in the mise-en-scene of wigs, jack-in-the-boxes, colourful books, flowers, strange costumes, tarot cards and so on, all of them close at hand and often brought to bear.

[13]Julie even asks for a smoke-break halfway through one remembrance session.

[14]I haven’t even touched on its brilliance as an emporium of invoked film genres – from the early silent serials implied by the scene-titles (‘But, the next morning…’), to the Alice in Wonderlandhints of the beginning, to the Laurel-and-Hardy-like overtones of the titular comic pairing, and so on forever.

[15]And their many moments of ‘cross-dressing’ – Celine fooling Julie’s lover into leaving her, Julie taking over as the suited Mandrakore etc. – put the lie to any set dependence on scripted identity or appearance. They literally make themselves up as they go along.  

[16]Surely not coincidentally named after Proust’s Madeleine, whose form of ‘rescue’ is likewise a kind of resurrection of the possibilities of past joy. 

[17]As in La Religeuseagain, this premise follows on naturally from aspects of Godard’s Vivre Sa Vie, especially the famous scene of Karina’s Nana writing out the entirety of the letter offering herself to her potential madam. The experience is made to be unskippable.

[18]“Film for Rivette is less art form or entertainment than the unstable coinage of communication and experience.” (Thomson, 2014: 886)

[19]Goffman again, for a different context:“One is left, then, with the structural similarity between everyday life – neglecting for a moment the possibility that no satisfactory catalog might be possible of what to include therein – and the various “worlds” of make-believe but no way of knowing how this relationship should modify our view of everyday life.” (1975: 6)