Max Borg
Two years ago, international audiences got to enjoy Jacques Rivette’s L’Amour fou (1969) in its newly restored version as the inaugural screening of the Cannes Film Festival’s Classics program. Now, courtesy of the Criterion Channel’s new collection devoted to the director, American cinephiles can enjoy that piece of work as part of a series of eleven essential titles by one of the key names in European filmmaking.
In fact, Rivette was technically the first of the so-called Young Turks – the group of Cahiers du Cinéma critics that included François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard – to make a feature-length film; what eventually became Paris Belongs to Us (1961) languished in post-production for a few years until the success of his contemporaries, specifically Truffaut’s The 400 Blows and Claude Chabrol’s Le Beau Serge, gave the group the necessary clout to secure funds to complete the project.
That first film, whose lack of commercial success caused Rivette to stay at the Cahiers for most of the 1960s like his friend Eric Rohmer, was still somewhat rooted in cinematic conventions, as was the director’s sophomore effort The Nun (1966). Then, inspired by the political unrest of May 1968 and frustrated by the mainstream scene of the time, the erstwhile magazine editor found his groove with his third film, the aforementioned L’Amour fou.
Like his buddy Rohmer, Rivette sought to make films rooted in reality. But while Rohmer took that to mean adhering to certain principles (he generally avoided using non-diegetic music) and made works that were tightly, meticulously constructed, Rivette went in the opposite direction: L’Amour fou, where the story of a theater company rehearsing a play intersects with that of the stage director’s deteriorating relationship with his wife and lead actress, was filmed without a script or a shot list, relying on the actors – all chosen because of their affiliation with a playwright who favored improvisation – to take the premise wherever it needed to go.
The improvisational style, lauded by Rivette as the ideal form of collaboration because it forces the director to really listen to what the actors are saying, resulted in only the loosest of narratives (perhaps the most extreme application of the New Wave philosophy that strove for narrative simplicity) and a hefty running time, clocking in at just a few minutes above four hours.
This became a hallmark of the director’s filmography, reaching its apex a mere two years later in the shape of Out 1, which is not included in the Criterion Channel series but can be found with relative ease on disc. Another story of what happens backstage while a play is about to be staged, it is conventionally split in eight chunks of about 90-100 minutes each, for a total of almost 13 hours, a technical challenge when the film is screened theatrically in English-speaking markets (as the subtitles are not burned onto the print, but projected separately from a computer).
Despite such unconventional filming methods, Rivette faced more difficulties when he briefly shifted to a more fantasy-adjacent output in the 1970s, ultimately leading to a nervous breakdown that caused him to pull the plug on Marie et Julien, a project he eventually revived in 2003. In fact, his fortunes improved when, having established a partnership with producer Martine Marignac that lasted for the remainder of his lifetime, he returned to his usual explorations of the border between reality and fiction in the world of artistic creation.
Notably, despite the commercial stigma associated with very long films, Rivette never really struggled to attract high-profile names for his projects: Out 1 starred Truffaut’s frequent collaborator Jean-Pierre Léaud and Michael Lonsdale; 1991’s La Belle Noiseuse, a four-hour depiction of the relationship between a painter, his former model and the new one, featured Philippe Noiret, Jane Birkin and Emmanuelle Béart as the three leads; and Joan the Maiden, a two-part epic about Joan of Arc with a total runtime of 336 minutes, starred Sandrine Bonnaire.
This went on almost to the very end of his career: the Criterion Channel lineup concludes with 2001’s Va savoir, a romantic farce set, once again, in the world of stage productions, this time of a text by Italian Nobel Prize winner Luigi Pirandello. Starring Jeanne Balibar and Italian actor Sergio Castellitto, it originally came in at 220 minutes, but was shortened to 154 for its wide theatrical release, a rare example of the distributor actually taking the commercial aspect into account (the main omission was scenes pertaining to the play, which were then restored in 2002 with the premiere of the uncut version). His next two films, while far more manageable in terms of duration than his reputation would suggest, still ranged from 130 to 150 minutes.
Then, in 2009, Around a Small Mountain premiered in competition at the Venice Film Festival. Reteaming with Birkin and Castellitto, Rivette had applied his usual loose style to the microcosm of a traveling circus, but this time the looseness was far less daunting: at 84 minutes, it was his only feature film without a three-digit duration, perhaps a sign that he had mellowed with age. This turned out to be the case, but with a sadder connotation: retiring from filmmaking after that final endeavor, the director spent the last years of his life dealing with Alzheimer’s disease, early signs of which had impacted the filming process, causing Rivette to lose track of what had been shot.
And that is why this new Criterion Channel batch is so noteworthy, showing the transition from a more conventional narrative approach to the freewheeling style that came to define Rivette’s career: even when he had no script, he always knew where he wanted to go, and trusted his actors to get him there. Once he lost the ability to let them guide him through their improvisations, a different kind of looseness set in—one that diminished the art, rather than enhancing it.
The “Directed by Jacques Rivette” collection is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel.
