Jacques Rivette

C O N T E M P O R A R Y
F I L M
D I R E C T O R S
Jacques Rivette
Mary M. Wiles
Jacques Rivette
Wiles_Rivette text.indd 1
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Contemporary Film Directors

Edited by James Naremore
The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

well-written introductions to directors from around the
world and from every level of the film industry. Its chief
aims are to broaden our awareness of important artists,
to give serious critical attention to their work, and to illustrate the variety and vitality of contemporary cinema.
Contributors to the series include an array of internationally
respected critics and academics. Each volume contains
an incisive critical commentary, an informative interview
with the director, and a detailed filmography.
A list of books in the series appears

at the end of this book.
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Jacques Rivette
Mary M. Wiles
Universit y
of
Illin o i s
Pr e s s
U r ba n a ,
C h icago,
a nd
S pr ing fiel d
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In memory of my father,
Charles Preston Wiles
Frontispiece: Jacques Rivette

Photographer Moune Jamet. Courtesy
of Collection Cinmathque Franaise.
2012 by Mary M. Wiles
All rights reserved
Manufactured in the United States of America
1 2 3 4 5 c p 5 4 3 2 1
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wiles, Mary M.
Jacques Rivette / Mary M. Wiles.
p. cm. (Contemporary film directors)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Includes filmography.
ISBN 978-0-252-07834-7
1. Rivette, Jacques, 1928 Criticism and interpretation.
I. Title.
PN1998.3.R584W55 2012
791.4302'33092dc23 2011026050
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Contents
Preface and Acknowledgments | ix
moving backstage:
the films of jacques rivette | 1
The Apprentice Years: Aux quatre coins, Le quadrille,

Le divertissement, and Le coup du berger 1
From Shakespeare to Sartre: Paris nous appartient 8
From the Literary Text to the Tableau: La religieuse,

Hurlevent, La belle noiseuse, and
La belle noiseuse: Divertimento 22
A Revolution in Realism, Reflexivity, and

Oneiric Reverie: Jean Renoir le patron, Lamour fou,
Out 1: Noli me tangere, and Out 1: Spectre 41
Sounding Out the Operatic: Les filles du feu

(Duelle and Norot), Merry-Go-Round,
and Le Pont du Nord 61
Reenvisioning Genres: Haut bas fragile,

Jeanne la pucelle, Secret dfense, and Va savoir 77
An Occult Theatricality: Cline et Julie vont en bateau

Phantom Ladies Over Paris, Lamour par terre,
La bande des quatre, Histoire de Marie et Julien 98
Returning, Departing: Ne touchez pas la hache

and 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup 127
an interview with jacques rivette | 139
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Filmography | 151
Bibliography | 163
Index | 171
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Preface and Acknowledgments
Cinema spent its earlier years distinguishing itself from theater: Jacques
Rivettes cinema paradoxically achieves renewal precisely through reference to different forms of theatricality. Academic discussions in the past
have consistently situated Rivette on the periphery of the French New
Wave movement, as his films have been perceived to be at variance with
those of his contemporaries. Film critics have measured his work solely
against the zeitgeist of the New Wave, which vaunted spontaneity and
freedom from theatrical convention. More recently, studies published
in France and Britain, most notably Hlne Frappats seminal work,
Jacques Rivette, secret compris (Jacques Rivette, Secrets Understood/
Included; 2001) and Douglas Morrey and Alison Smiths excellent monograph, Jacques Rivette (2009), have argued for Rivettes centrality, both
as a leading figure of the postwar French avant-garde and as a filmmaker
whose work anticipated the postmodernist concern with process, participation, and the performative. In the discussion that follows, I move
backstage to observe Rivettes cinema more closely from the perspective of the theater; each section focuses on a different dimension of
theatricality in his films.
The following commentary provides a loosely chronological overview
of Rivettes films from the New Wave to the present day. In the first
section, I examine the evolution of Rivettes early career and his work
on short films that already reflect his interest in the connection between
theater and cinema. I then move on to analyses of Rivettes feature films.
In the second section, I show how Rivettes first feature film, a classic of
the New Wave, draws on existentialist theater to address questions of
personal culpability and conspiracy. The third section traces the evolution of the tableau as a dimension of theatricality in film adaptations. In
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the fourth section, I look at how Rivette engages with realism, reflexivity,
and European experimental theater in his films from the 1960s and early
1970s. In the fifth section, I show how direct sound and music construct
a theatrical dimension in films from the mid-1970s and early 1980s. The
sixth section looks at how varied modes of theatricality contribute to
the reinvention of film genres, from the 1990s to the commencement
of the new millennium. In the seventh section, I trace the evolution of
an occult theatricality across three decades. The final section examines
Rivettes return to the tableau in his most recent Balzac adaptation, and
also his subsequent departure for the theatrical arena of the circus.
In this project that has concentrated on those feature films that foreground theatricality, I have also attempted to show how Rivettes enduring
interest in the relation between cinema and theater continues to evolve
over the years, expanding to encompass the relation between cinema and
various arts, particularly painting, literature, music, and dance. Painting
that forms the subject matter of La belle noiseuse (1991), an adaptation
of Honor de Balzacs nineteenth-century novella, is thus approached as
an additional pictorial dimension of the theatricality that defines Rivettes
earlier adaptation of Denis Diderots La religieuse. Rivettes work with
film adaptation has continued to provide him with the means to explore
the relation between literary, pictorial, and theatrical representations.
Music that becomes part of the operatic conception of Scnes de la vie
parallle (Scenes from a Parallel Life; 1976) possesses a special significance in nearly all of Rivettes films. A musical score provides a source
of inspiration for the director and his theater production in Paris nous
appartient (Paris Belongs to Us; 1961); again, the compositional practices
of Pierre Boulez provide a source of inspiration for the serial form of Out
1: Noli me tangere (Out 1: Touch Me Not; 1970). Yet the regenerative
role of music is, perhaps, most evident in Haut bas fragile (Up Down
Fragile; 1995) where a missing melody motivates a young womans search
backstage, where she is finally able to retrieve her sense of selfhood.
While the following book is organized according to varied dimensions
of theatricality in Rivettes work, I have attempted to demonstrate that
each film has distinctive themes that ally it with others, while highlighting those inaugural moments that anticipate issues addressed in later
films. The themes of conspiracy and investigation that are developed
in Rivettes first feature film will be revisited and reworked in film after
x
| Preface and Acknowledgments
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film throughout his career; the commitment to feminism already in

evidence in his second feature film, Suzanne Simonin, la religieuse de
Denis Diderot (The Nun; 19651966; released 1967), which focuses
on the freedom of a woman to choose her own destiny, has remained a
constant in his films. The examination of the male-female couple in the
radically experimental Lamour fou (Mad Love; 1969) continues to be
explored from within disparate generic and stylistic contexts over the
years, perhaps most evocatively in the recent releases Ne touchez pas
la hache (Dont Touch the Axe; 2007), which explores themes of erotic
desire and possession, and 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (Around a Small
Mountain; 2009), which chronicles the journey of its heroine, Kate (Jane
Birkin), who becomes involved with an Italian traveler while on summer
tour with her familys circus troupe.
Rivette is known internationally as a director who presents unusual,
persuasive portraits of female friendship and engages with the possibility
of desire between women. I look at the powerful, subversive roles that
Rivettes female heroines play in films interconnected not only through
their relationship to film genres but also through other diverse associations, such as the relation between women and the occult, the resonance
of the female voice on stage and off, the representation of the female
body in dance and performance, and the depiction of friendship between women. Upon close analysis of these films, it becomes evident
that Rivettes authorial signature is not merely discernible in the way
in which theatricality inflects his films, but also in the manner in which
womens lives are portrayed.
The majority of the films that I discuss are currently available either
on DVD or video. Earlier films released in the late 1960s and 1970s, the
four-hour versions of Lamour fou and Out 1: Spectre (1974), have never
been commercially available on film or video; the thirteen-hour Out 1:
Noli me tangere was never released theatrically. These three films are
rarely screened outside the European film festival circuit and are only
available at select film archives in Europe and North America, yet they
form the core of Rivettes work with theatricality, temporal duration and
reflexive textuality, and so I felt that it was imperative to include them
in this discussion. Subtitled versions in English of Duelle (Duel; 1976),
Merry-Go-Round (19771978; released 1983), and Le Pont du Nord
(1982) remain commercially unavailable and, although these films repre Preface and Acknowledgments
xi
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sent an important part of Rivettes work, I have kept discussion of them

to a minimum. I should add that I have chosen to include an extensive
analysis of Norot (Northwest Wind; 1976) (even though no subtitled
version in English is available) not only because it is the sole film in the
oeuvre that announces itself as an adaptation of a play, but also because it
bears traces of an operatic theatricality. I have had the opportunity to see
all of Rivettes films, with the exception of the three silent 16 mm shorts,
Aux quatre coins (On Four Corners; 1949), Le quadrille (1950), and Le
divertissement (1952); for an illustrated, in-depth discussion of these
films, I highly recommend Frappats illustrated biography of Rivettes
early life and film career in Jacques Rivette, secret compris. Owing to
spatial constraints, I have given more attention to some feature films
than to others and radically limited discussion of certain films, including
Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights; 1985) and Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the
Maid; 1994), in particular, that bear a less obvious relation to theater. I
am hopeful that this introductory study of Rivettes career will prompt
further study of films that I have not treated in detail in this volume.
All translations from the French are my own, unless otherwise noted,
and with the exception of the interview with Rivette published in this
volume, which Dr. Yolanda Broad and I translated together. The titles of
Rivettes films are given in both the original French and in their English
translations on initial citations, and subsequent references are made with
the French-language title. The release date of each film is the date cited
in the text unless otherwise noted; the dates of the actual film shoot are
included in the filmography. Note that in the filmography, I use the
term mise-en-scne, rather than the term direction, out of respect
for Rivettes own nomenclature that reflects his deeply held conviction
that film is a collective, rather than a solitary, endeavor.
| | |
This book has greatly benefited from the contributions of a variety of

key individuals. My discussions with Maureen Turim, who directed
my doctoral dissertation on Rivette, provide the impetus behind this
volume. My former colleagues Nora Alter and Robert Ray helped establish the correspondence between James Naremore, the series editor,
and myself. I would like to express my gratitude to Jim for this exciting
series that places independent filmmakers like Rivette on center stage,
xii
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and also for inviting me to play a part in it. Additionally, special thanks
go to Joan Catapano, editor in chief, for her patience, encouragement,
and support and also assistant editor Daniel Nasset, who joined the
editorial team late in the process. I am especially grateful to Jonathan
Rosenbaum for his excellent feedback; his expertise on Rivette and
detailed observations were invaluable. Additionally, I am indebted to
the expertise of Dr. Yolanda Broad for her assistance with the translation
of the interview with Rivette that is published in this volume. I owe
a special debt to Vronique Manniez, who facilitated the subsequent
interview with Rivette in December 2009; her knowledge, willingness
to help, and words of encouragement sustained me throughout the
final stages of this project. I thank the following friends and colleagues
for their counsel, support, and encouragement: Nora Alter, Matthew
Ayton, Martyn Back, Robin Bond, Mike Budd, Margaret Burrell, Rolando Caputo, Jennifer Clark, La Colin, Patrick Evans, Walt Evans,
Peter Falkenberg, Eric Freedman, Christophe Gallier, Bruce Harding,
Susan Hayward, Susan Hegeman, Douglas Horrell, Katherine Jensen,
Jeongwon Joe, Daniel King, Michel Marie, Martine Marignac, Sharon
Mazer, Douglas Morrey, Scott Nygren, Phil Powrie, Robert Ray, Susan
Reilly, milie Sitzia, Rose Theresa, Jim Tully, and Alan Wright.
I am grateful to the Cinema Studies program and the College of
Arts at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand,
for research support. I would also like to thank David Schwartz of the
American Museum of the Moving Image, Lise Zipci and milie Lacourt
of Films du Losange, and Pierre Grise Productions. I am also grateful
to the staff members at the British Film Institute and the Iconothque
at the Bibliothque du Film in Paris for their help and assistance in
acquiring images.
My interview with Jacques Rivette took place in Paris in June 1999.
I was struck by his brisk, determined gait as he entered the caf at Place
de la Bastille (which for the French is always associated with the storm
of revolution) and also by the unkempt shock of gray, curly hair that at
once evoked photographic portraits of Jean Cocteau. Rivettes genuine
goodwill, self-deprecating sense of humor, and patience with my French
put me at ease very quickly. Just as one would anticipate, Rivette remains
a candid and thoughtful critic, whose love for the cinema is always in
evidence. My commentary on Rivettes work is drawn from published
Preface and Acknowledgments
xiii
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sources, especially from interviews; I have not sought confirmation from

Rivette for any interpretation or statement made in this volume. In sum,
Rivette recalls this line from Cocteaus poem, Lone, which is recited
by the dancer Pierrot in Duelle: I only see the underside of the fabric
I am weaving.
| | |
Earlier versions of the material on Haut bas fragile appeared as Restaging the Feminine in Jacques Rivettes Haut bas fragile in Studies in
French Cinema 1.2 (2001): 98107, ed. Susan Hayward and Phil Powrie;
and earlier versions of the material on Norot appeared as Sounding
Out the Operatic in Jacques Rivettes Norot in Between Opera and
Cinema, ed. Rose Theresa and Jeongwon Joe, in Critical and Cultural
Musicology, ser. ed. Martha Feldman (New York: Garland/Routledge
Press, 2002), 199222; and different versions of the material on Out
1: Noli me tangere appeared in In Permanent Revolution: Jacques
Rivettes Out 1: Noli me tangere in the Australian Journal of French
Studies 47.2 (2010): 14659, ed. Douglas Morrey and Brian Nelson.
xiv
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Jacques Rivette
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Moving Backstage
The Films of Jacques Rivette
The Apprentice Years: Aux quatre coins, Le quadrille,

Le divertissement, and Le coup du berger
In the spring of 1957, Jacques Rivette had just completed his first short
35 mm film, Le coup du berger (A Fools Mate; 1956), and was in the
planning stages of his first feature, Paris nous appartient, while continuing to write incisive critical pieces for the Paris film journal Cahiers du
cinma. Not yet thirty years old, Rivette was already a veteran film critic
and an aspiring director who had worked as an apprentice on the set
of Jacques Beckers Ali-Baba et les quarante voleurs (Ali-Baba and the
Forty Thieves; 1954) and Jean Renoirs French Cancan (1955). Rivette
was born on March 1, 1928, and raised in the Norman city of Rouen in a
family where everyone is a pharmacist (qtd. in Rosenbaum, Texts 91).
He commenced an undergraduate humanities degree in Rouen, but his
scholastic work was placed on indefinite hold when he discovered Jean
Cocteaus diary of the filming of La belle et la bte (Beauty and the Beast;
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1946), a fortuitous event that he later affirmed marked the beginning of

his vocation as a filmmaker. Rivette knew that to realize his ambition,
he must move to Paris. In 1949, he packed a copy of his first 16 mm
short film, Aux quatre coins (On Four Corners; 1949), and left his native town determined to pursue a filmmaking career. The afternoon that
Rivette arrived in Paris, he made his first contact, the young actor Jean
Gruault, who was at the time managing a bookshop not far from Place
St. Sulpice. Gruault invited Rivette to a screening that same evening of
Robert Bressons Les dames du Bois de Boulogne (Ladies of the Park;
1945), which was being introduced by a film critic, Maurice Schrer,
who would later adopt the pseudonym ric Rohmer. In the months
that followed, Rivette frequented the Cinmathque on Avenue de Messine and the Latin Quarter cin-club, where he became acquainted with
Gruaults circle of friends, which included Suzanne Schiffman, Franois
Truffaut, and Jean-Luc Godard.
Gruault ultimately became Rivettes scriptwriter on Paris nous appartient, the film that Truffaut alludes to in his semiautobiographical Les
quatre cent coups (The Four Hundred Blows; 1959), which in May 1959
premiered at the Cannes Film Festival. Truffaut won the Best Director
Award that year, a distinction that has led critics to identify this work
as the inception of a nouvelle vague (new wave). Yet the French press
earlier enthusiastic description of such films as Claude Chabrols Le
beau Serge (Bitter Reunion; 19571958, released 1959) and Les cousins
(The Cousins; 1959) as a nouvelle vague testified to what certain film
historians like Alan Williams describe as the growing national interest in youth culture, which was expressed in the media throughout the
1950s (329). The metaphor of a new wave was appropriated by those
eager to identify the inaugural films made by the ex-Cahiers critics as
a youth culture phenomenon. Indeed, the directors were soon dubbed
and became known internationally as the young Turks.
Rivette recalls that in the early 1950s they met every day at Cahiers
and collaborated on each others 16 mm productions. In 1950, Godard
produced and acted in Rivettes second short 16 mm film, Le quadrille,
which was subsequently projected at successive screenings at the Latin
Quarter cin-club. In the summer of 1952, Rivette filmed Le divertissement, another 16 mm production, which its cameraman Charles Bitsch
described as a Rohmeresque Marivaudage between young men and
2
Jacques Rivette
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women, foreshadowing scenes in more recent films such as La bande

des quatre (qtd. in Frappat, Secret 98). Around this time, Rivette was
also acquiring valuable experience by assisting as a cameraman on Truffauts Une visite (A Visit; 1954) and Rohmers Brnice (1954). By 1956,
Chabrol had formed his own production company, AJYM Films, and in
alliance with producer Pierre Braunberger, he produced the companys
first film, Le coup du berger, directed by his friend Rivette. Film scholar
Michel Marie affirms that this 35 mm film was the first professional
production accomplished by the New Wave, as the previous shorts
directed by Rivette, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Godard had been shot in
16 mm, a format that was considered non-professional (59).
Rivette filmed Le coup du berger in Chabrols smoke-filled apartment, where Godard, Truffaut, Robert Lachenay (Truffauts childhood
friend), Jean-Claude Brialy (in the role of the lover), and Jacques DoniolValcroze (in the role of husband) gathered to discuss each shot setup.
Rivette retained Bitsch as a cameraman and was assisted on the set by
Jean-Marie Straub, who later became a key figure in the evolution of
the New German Cinema. The film was completely post-synchonized,
as was Paris nous appartient, because, as Marie points out, in the 1950s,
direct sound still posed cumbersome and difficult conditions for recording dialogue (to say nothing of the need for more retakes), all of which
ran counter to the needs set by the small budgets of the New Wave
(95). Le coup du berger owes its title to a chess move that Rivette had
heard about. Its story is centered on a young woman (Virginie Vitry)
who attempts to deceive her husband about the origins of a mink coat
that her lover has given her as a present. She does not foresee, however, the secret alliance that has formed between her husband and her
own sister (Anne Doat). While aspects of the films story about lovers
schemes predict Rivettes future work, as Hlne Frappat points out,
the film lacks the mediation of theatrical mise-en-scne that lends his
later films their contemplative reflexivity (Secret 99).
The theatrical dimension that sets Rivettes work apart from others
in the New Wave film movement surfaces in his first feature-length film,
Paris nous appartient. The films release in 1961 provoked Le Monde
critic Yvonne Baby to query, Why have you situated Paris nous appartient in the milieu of the theater? to which Rivette responds, Maybe it
is because of my affection for Jean Renoirs Le carrosse dor (The Golden

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Coach; 1952), but I like films that use theater as their dcor and I would
like, sooner or later, to make a film about actors (14). The notion of theatricality as a dramatic performance is crucial to understanding Rivettes
work, especially the most obviously staged textsthe plays within the
films. The majority of films within Rivettes oeuvre make direct references
to a play or plays: Paris nous appartient refers to Shakespeares Pericles
and The Tempest; the revolutionary Lamour fou stages Jean Racines
Andromaque; the legendary experimental work Out 1: Noli me tangere
cites Aeschyluss Prometheus Bound and Seven Against Thebes; Cline
et Julie vont en bateau (Celine and Julie Go Boating; 1974) is based, in
part, on the dramatization of Henry Jamess novella, The Other House;
the third part of a four-part film series Les filles du feu (Girls of Fire)
or Scnes de la vie parallle, Norot announces itself as an adaptation of
Cyril Tourneurs The Revengers Tragedy; Lamour par terre (Love on
the Ground; 1984) is centered on dramaturge Clment Roquemaures
mysterious play; La bande des quatre (Gang of Four; 1989) is set in a
theater school; Va savoir (Who Knows?; 2001) incorporates the miseen-scne of Luigi Pirandellos Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me).
Although Suzanne Simonin, la religieuse de Denis Diderot, an adaptation
of Denis Diderots eighteenth-century novel, bears no apparent relation
to theater, Rivette constructed the film from a theater performance at
Studio des Champs Elyses, which he directed. The recent Haut bas
fragile relies on the theatrical performance style associated with early
cinema and the taxi-dance halls of the 1920s and 1930s.
Predictably, the formal innovations Rivette experimented with in
his early work were generally dismissed by Anglophone film historians
and critics as contrived and artificialin a word, as theatrical. In his
assessment of Paris nous appartient, James Monaco in The New Wave
dismisses the film for its forced, theatrical tone: Paris nous appartient seemed to be exactly the kind of film one would expect a critic to
make, full of what seemed like forced, false intellectual mystery: thin,
monotonous, and lacking resonance (308). Film historian Roy Armes
upholds Monacos appraisal in his assertion, The tone never varies, the
dialogue is flat and the photography, although competent, is never striking. The films major defect is its failure to create any sort of dramatic
tension (182). The perception of the film common among these New
Wave historians seemed to perpetuate the idea that the films affected
4
Jacques Rivette
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theatrical tone was the source of its commercial failure. The terms of
their critique invoke the tenets of Truffauts landmark article for Cahiers entitled, A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema, in which
he formulated the zeitgeist of the New Wave by opposing it to theatrical Tradition of Quality productions of the 1950s. Truffaut denounced
the dialogue of such films, which was derived from literary classics and
adapted by scriptwriters Jean Aurenche and Pierre Bost to complement
the metteur en scnes use of scholarly framing, complicated lightingeffects, polished photography that inevitably resulted in an artificial
studio style (230). The New Wave aesthetic was critically formulated in
opposition to the Tradition of Quality cinema, its filmmakers applauded
for their ability to wipe the slate clean of the artificially staged look
that threatened to compromise films status as an autonomous art.
This discussion of Rivette envisions an alternative to the type of film
criticism that locates the theatricality of his films as their determining
flaw. Such a casual dismissal of the director reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of his acute awareness of the diverse notions of theatricality that inform his work. Indeed, Rivettes penetrating critical pieces
composed for Cahiers du cinma that reflect his understanding of the
profound interrelation between the arts are as internationally recognized
as his films. Rivette owes his critical acuity, in part, to the mentorship
of film theorist Andr Bazin, whose formulation of an ontology of cinema broke new theoretical ground, providing justification for a cinema
based on the principles of realism. Bazins theory of cinematic realism
preoccupied the postwar intellectual and artistic community, yet it was
the debate concerning the interrelation between theater and cinema
that most deeply concerned Rivette. In his seminal essay from 1951,
Theater and Cinema, Bazin responded to those French critics who had
been using the notion of the irreplaceable presence of the actor to
construct an unbridgeable aesthetic moat between theater and cinema
(96). Bazin challenges such commonplaces of theatrical criticism to
introduce a strangely paradoxical notion of presence, which he argues
in cinema is both delayed and deferred: It is false to say that the screen
is incapable of putting us in the presence of the actor. It does so in
the same way as a mirrorone must agree that the mirror relays the
presence of the person reflected in itbut it is a mirror with a delayed
reflection, the tin foil of which retains the image (97). Bazin shrewdly

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transfers the problem of the actors presence from the ontological to the
psychological level, thus dismissing the notion of the actors presence as
an issue that definitively sets theater apart from cinema.
He proceeds to locate cinematic specificity in decor, attributing its
unicity to a founding lack, for one could say that in the best films something is missing. It is as if a certain inevitable lowering of the voltage,
some mysterious aesthetic short circuit, deprived us in the cinema of a
certain tension which is a definite part of theater (98). Yet this lack to
which Bazin refers does not refer simply to the cinemas formal properties
but to the perceived historical, literary, and cultural lack, the inferiority
complex that cinema bears beneath the weight of its ancestor, the theater.
Bazin points to metteurs en scne like magician Georges Mlis, who at
the beginning of the twentieth century used the old art of theater in the
new cinema, with the actors facing the public (78). Such examples permit
Bazin to conclude that primitive cinema served as both an extension and
a refinement of the theater. This observation serves as the theoretical
impetus for his formulation of cinematic specificitythe independent
stance of the cinema as a mature art form (87). By focusing on cinemas
inferiority complex with respect to the theater, Bazin is able to liberate
cinema from theater, locating its specificity within a dramaturgy of nature where the actor is no longer required. Bazin thus reclaims a realist
cinema from its association with the theatrical tableau by aligning it with
the quotidian and the authentic. Theatricality, by comparison, is shown to
be a closed and conventional space, a locus dramaticus where theatrical
ritual is cut off from the real world, a stage where the plasticity of the
body is perceived as central to the scene. Bazins realist stance led him
to advocate filmed theater, championing those theatrical adaptations in
which the artificiality of the original locus dramaticus was respected,
and thus recorded simply, rather than transformed through formative
cinematic trickery.
Bazins theoretical speculations on the relation between the theater
and the cinema remain extremely pertinent to our discussion that focuses
primarily on theatricality in Rivettes films. The theatricality that remains
the hallmark of Rivettes oeuvre can be viewed, in some sense, as an
implicit response to Bazin. Bazin prioritized the place of realist cinema
by insisting on the integrity of stage space and decor within theatrical
Jacques Rivette
12/7/11 2:16 PM
adaptations. Rivette returns to the theatrical tableau to rediscover a true

realism. Rivette affirms:
All films are about the theatre, there is no other subject. Thats choosing
the easy way, of course, but I am more and more convinced that one
must do the easy things and leave the difficult things to pedants. If you
take a subject, which deals with the theatre to any extent at all, youre
dealing with the truth of the cinema: youre carried along. It isnt by
chance that so many of the films we love are first of all about that subject, and you realise afterwards that all the othersBergman, Renoir,
the good Cukors, Garrel, Rouch, Cocteau, Godard, Mizoguchiare
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 as the subject.
Taking it as the subject of a film is being frank, so it must be done. (qtd.
in Aumont et al. 2627)
Rivette does not seek to theatricalize cinema, transforming it into a lesser

descendent of theater; rather, as film theorist Jacques Aumont affirms,
he permits cinema to follow its dramatic inclination, while paradoxically
placing this on display (Patron 234). Rivette uses theater to assist him
in achieving what he believes to be cinemas true vocationto encounter
the real. For Rivette, the theater is not cinemas enemy but its ally in a
more difficult mission, which, in Aumonts terms, is to achieveagainst
the facility of the cinematic machinea true realism (Patron 236).
Rivettes form of reflexivity must be distinguished, however, from the
materialist cinema promoted primarily by British Marxist critics during
the 1960s and 1970s. Marxist critics at the British journal Screen applauded films that foregrounded their own rhetorical codes designed to
reproduce the real, specifically through the preferred Brechtian strategy
of emphasizing the means of representation at the expense of mimesis.
In contradistinction to the reflexivity of materialist cinema, Rivettes
films participate in the wider political, artistic, and social trends of postwar France with its renewed interest in such categories as aesthetics,
subjectivity, and experience as a response to the postwar crisis in the
realm of representation. The arrival of television in the 1950s, which was
accompanied by the inundation of high capitalist Hollywood spectacle,
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precipitated the contemporary crisis in representation that film theorist

Youssef Ishaghpour associates with the world-historical decline of the
aura (61).1 The theatrical tendency characteristic of cinematographic
modernity emerged in response to this banalizing trend, which entailed an accelerated loss of meaning and reduction of image information
to the ephemeral (Debord 38). The theatrical tendency of Rivettes cinema protested the reintegration of art into the mundane world of utilitarian consumerism by promising a restoration of aura through recourse
to secularized ritual. The theatricality of Rivettes cinema challenges
the cultural dominant through a return to ritual and myth. A focus on
theatrical ritual and its potential for cinema thus unites our discussion
of Rivettes work, while ensuring specific points of reference for each
section in which a film or group of films is examined.
From Shakespeare to Sartre:
Paris nous appartient
Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us; 1961), a founding masterpiece of the New Wave, is about a university student, Anne Goupil
(Betty Schneider), and a struggling Paris theater director, Grard Lenz
(Giani Esposito), who are rehearsing Shakespeares play, Pericles, Prince
of Tyre. Their questionable commitment to the production and to each
other leads them into a sinister maze of madness, duplicity, and death
from which there is finally no escape. Lines from Shakespeares Pericles,
a drama derived from a classical Greek tale of murderous intrigue, high
seas piracy, and an imperiled kingdom, repeatedly resonate from within
their locus dramaticus, seeming to echo the modern-day machinations
of an international cold war conspiracy that has taken hold of the entire
city and its denizens. In its concurrent staging of classical and cold war
conspiracy scenarios, the film draws an implicit parallel between antiquity and the contemporary world, between theater and cinema, between
the dramaturge and the film director, and in this way re-presents the
quotidian world of postwar Paris with the force of ancient ritual.
As Paris nous appartient begins, we watch from the window of a train
as it moves through the bleak suburbs south of Paris to approach the Gare
dAusterlitz. The scene positions the spectator to identify with the point
of view of a tourist arriving from beyond the borders of the city, a refugee
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seeking the city as a safe haven, or a Parisian native returning home. The
point of view remains unsourced; thus, the film opens with an enigma.
Rivette reflects in 1959: To the extent that there is mystery at the heart
of the cinema (as there is mystery at the center of everything, in general,
and of all the arts, in particular), ... I believe that the mystery at the
heart of cinema is, to use the expression of Andr Bazin, ontological: in
the cinema, there is a process through which one can apprehend reality
that, on the one hand, will only be able to apprehend appearances, but
that, on the other hand, through appearances, can also apprehend an
interiority (qtd. in Collet, Le cinma 5758). The mystery at the heart
of Rivettes cinema becomes a quality of the world itself when we attribute
to him Bazins conception of an ontological realism, which was based on
the existentialist ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre (Andrew 1056). For existentialists such as Sartre, Emmanuel Mounier, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
reality perpetually unfolds: the mind participates in its experience. Thus,
mystery is the quintessential attribute of the real and a value attained
when consciousness sensitively confronts the world (Andrew 106).
An intricate plot follows the films enigmatic opening. Having recently arrived in Paris from the provinces, Anne is seated before the
open window of her flat in midsummer trying to focus on Shakespeares
The Tempest when she overhears the sound of a woman crying. A distraught Spanish woman in the neighboring flat forewarns Anne of a
conspiracy that has already resulted in the death of a close friend Juan
and several others. Later at a caf, Anne meets her half-brother Pierre
(Franois Maistre), to whom she discloses this strange incident. That
evening, Anne accompanies Pierre to a soire where the mysterious
circumstances surrounding the death of Juan, a Spanish musician, are
again the subject of speculation. Some guests debate whether Juans
stabbing was the result of murder or suicide. While milling about, Anne
encounters the distracted theater director Grard Lenz, a drunken,
loud-mouthed journalist Philip Kauffman (Daniel Croheim), who is in
flight from the McCarthy trials, and his friend, the svelte Terry Yordan
(Franoise Prvost), Juans old flame.
Juans death has not only deeply affected those in his immediate
circle but has potentially gutted Grards production of Pericles. An
audiotape of original guitar music that Juan had recorded with Terry
was to have offset the poorly funded production, and the vexed direc
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tor bemoans the fact that it has gone missing. He runs into Anne again
when she arrives on his set one afternoon, accompanied by her friend
Jean-Marc (Jean-Claude Brialy), an actor in the play. Grard asks Anne if
she would read for the role of Marina, the imperiled princess in Pericles.
She agrees, and later decides to help Grard by tracking down the missing audiotape. Anne discovers from a conversation with Juans former
mistress Aniouta Barsky that it might be in the possession of a financier
Dr. de Georges. She follows up on this lead, and on others, but does
not succeed in locating the tape until much later, when she overhears
it unexpectedly at Terrys flat. Meanwhile, Grard has enlisted the support of De Georges and a new producer, Raoul Boileau, enabling the
troupe to recommence rehearsals in the well-established Thtre Sarah
Bernhardt. Grard admits to Anne that he has been forced to make
concessions and has had to cut her from the production.
To distract her from her woes, Pierre invites Anne to a private screening of Fritz Langs German expressionist classic, Metropolis (1927). This
grandiose, modernist allegory, which reflexively mirrors the story of
Paris nous appartient, envisions the city of the future as a New Tower
of Babel imperiled by a conspiracy that threatens to unleash the dark,
explosive forces contained within the regulated systems of modern technology (Gunning 5556). As the parable of Babel sequence unfolds
before us, the film strip breaks, causing a loud eruption during the silent
projection that calls attention to the cinematic apparatus as a machine
as potentially volatile as the city of Metropolis itself. Annes evening
is definitively ruined when Philip phones to inform her that Grard is
dead, apparently having committed suicide. After a distressing visit to
Grards flat, Anne calls a taxi, planning to meet Terry and Pierre, and
others, at a remote country estate. Once there, Anne unexpectedly has
a hallucinatory vision of Terry shooting Pierre, who falls onto a snowy
embankment. Shortly thereafter, Terry arrives at the house alone without Pierre and subsequently confesses to the accusatory Anne that he
is dead. Terry refuses to accept responsibility, however, explaining that
Pierres demise was actually Annes own fault because she had wanted
the sublime. Philip and Terry drive away to an unknown destination,
and an actor from Pericles confides to Anne that he intends to continue
with the production. The film closes as Anne watches geese disperse
over a still lake.
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Throughout the film, Rivettes camera embraces the incertitude of

seemingly random passageways, the unexplained occurrence, and the
unanswerable query. The camera takes a circuitous path to introduce the
films main character, Anne, as it cranes across rooftops into the window
of her room, where she is reciting Ariels song from The Tempest. Our
entry into the room, like Ariels, is motivated by sound, and thus we are
situated as eavesdroppers. Post-synchronized sound permits Rivette
throughout the film to focus on the interplay between sound and image. In the opening scenes, dialogue lines reverberate as though from
within an echo chamber in which words migrate and change meaning.
In response to Pierres query in the caf scene, Annes exasperated exclamation of I cant bear it anymore echoes the Spaniards response to
Annes inquiry in the previous scene. Annes repetition of the Spanish
womans line and the posture she assumes, I no longer have the courage, point to the identification of the women with each other. Moreover,
the meaning of the phrase becomes reflexive within the context of the
caf conversation, not only as an indication of Annes inability to repeat
her theatrical script but as a self-conscious pointing to the character
Annes repetition of the scripted line of another character. Pierre takes
up Annes role of eavesdropper, asking her what her Spanish neighbor
had said, to which Anne paradoxically replies, Nothing I can repeat.
Reasserting her identification with the Spaniard, Anne adds, It didnt
make any sense. I think shes crazy, like me. The caf scene closes with
a final repetition and literary citation. As they leave the caf, Pierres
partner Ida remarks, Lets not waste time, which becomes a line Anne
repeats and rephrases as a Proustian reference, And lost time, one
never retrieves it.
While Anne is positioned by the film as an eavesdropping witness, an
outsider who will persistently seek to pin down the meaning behind the
mystery, she is simultaneously situated as a participant, an insider whose
discourse repeats, without her knowledge or control, partial phrases
that the Spaniard reveals. The psychoanalytic implications of this aural
repetition are elaborated with reference to Sigmund Freuds analysis
of a case of female paranoia (1915) in which a woman embracing her
male lover is frightened by a click or knock.2 Believing herself to have
been photographed in a compromised situation, she reproduces, without
understanding, the memory of the primal scene. The uncanniness of this

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situation derives not only from the hallucinated repetition of an unconscious memory in the womans present sexual life, but in the splitting of
her identification as a witness and a participant across the two scenes
insofar as the paranoia of being observed originated in the unconscious
memory of observation. While the character Anne points to her own
paranoiac disposition, I think shes crazy like me, the uncanniness of
the situation is set in place by a structure of repetition not recuperable
as an aspect of character psychology. The effect of an echo chamber
produced by the reflexivity of the films dialogue and by literary citations
places the spectator simultaneously in the position of a participant who
identifies with character psychology and a witness forced to reflect on
the character as a fictional construct within a dramatic situation.
This ceremonial participation that the film demands resembles a Sartrean dramatic rite. In The Author, the Play, and the Audience, Sartre
observes in 1959, I want the audience to see our century from outside,
as something alien, as a witness. And at the same time to participate in
it, since it is in fact making this century. There is one feature peculiar
to our age: the fact that we know we shall be judged (76). Rivette reinvents Sartrean theatricality in Paris nous appartient, specifically through
the notion of situation. Sartre borrowed the concept of situation
from Charles Dullin, whose theater school Latelier shaped an entire
generation of artists, including such luminaries as Jean-Louis Barrault,
Antonin Artaud, Jean Vilar, and Jean Marais (Bradby 5). Drawing on
the strategies of situationist theater that Sartre proposed as a safeguard
against realistic, psychological theater, Rivette positions the spectator
as a witness who encounters a dramatic situation and as a participant
engaged in it.
A crane shot captures Anne once again; this time poised by the window of a painters atelier. Like Anne, we again participate as eavesdroppers on a scene in which we are made privy to the mysterious circumstances surrounding Juans death. His portrait, which has already been
sold and which we never see, is replaced by the painters blank canvas,
which serves as the structuring absence of the scene. The phantom quality of Juan would seem to point toward what historian Louis Stein in
Beyond Death and Exile has termed the shadow war, the specter of
the Spanish Civil War that appeared sporadically up until the point of
Francisco Francos death (223). Much of this clandestine struggle left no
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documentation, according to Stein, because most of the records of the

guerrilla fighters, as well as those of local and regional committees, were
seized by the authorities and impounded or destroyed (223). Invaluable
documents were irretrievably lost. The painters blank canvas serves as
the center of gravity of the scene and the film itself, pointing not only to
the absence of the character Juan but also to the absence of an accurate
historical portrait of the period he represents.
Juans story is based on myth, the figure of the republican guerrilla
cloaked in an aura of mystery. The frustrated painter whose task has
been to penetrate surface appearances in order to portray his models
essence gesticulates angrily Fictions! Mysteries! in response to Jos,
the Spanish guitarist who questions the truth of Juans identity. The
guitarist plays a melancholic refrain, a hollow echo of Juans original
composition that one guest (Claude Chabrol) dubs the Music of the
Apocalypse. The guitarist calls attention to his own imitative refrain
unapologetically with the remark Its all thats left. Minna compares
Juan to Spanish dramaturge Garca Lorca, whose verses such as Cancion
del jinete (Song of the Horseman) drew inspiration from the lyricism of
popular Andalusian songs. Others suggest that Juan, like Lorca, might
have faced a fascist firing squad had he lived. A disillusioned Romanian
seated inconspicuously to the side (Rivette in an exceptional cameo
role), despairs of the others cavalier response to the crushed revolution, alluding to the Hungarian Revolution of 1956. In this scene, Juan
becomes a nostalgic reference standing for the portrait of the political
artist tragically doomed by a situation of crisis. Stein attempts to account
for the mythic force that the figure of the Spanish republican generated
within the minds of the masses: Were they the Don Quixotes of the
twentieth century, immersed in a fantastic dream and wearing tattered
rags for armor? Were they simply zealots and revolutionaries who didnt
know when to acknowledge defeat? Or were they heroes, anonymous
idealists whose exploits, told and retold in the villages, would keep hope
alive? (228). While the absence of Juans portrait implicitly poses questions destined to remain unanswered, his possible suicide presents the
disturbing image of a final retreat into despair.
The mythic force of the republican warrior, Juan, evokes that of
the Sartrean existentialist hero, who is tied to a situation of crisis that
requires sacrifice. In his own plays, Sartre favored extreme initial situ
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ations, often opening them with crisis. Sartres Les mains sales (Dirty
Hands; 1948), which questions the nature of collaboration and personal
culpability, is a work that informs Paris nous appartient; the drama, like
the film, opens with the characters speculations surrounding a political murder and closes with the suicide of its existentialist hero Hugo.
Sartres later drama Les squestrs dAltona (The Condemned of Altona; 1960) examines the connections between modern history, capitalist
expansionism, and violence through its depiction of the sequestration
and suicide of a Nazi torturer named Frantz and his collaborationist
bourgeois father. Here, the Sartrean hero within the situation of crisis
bears obvious resemblance to the myth of the Spanish revolutionary,
who takes whatever risks are deemed necessary at whatever the cost and
accepts responsibility for his actions. The portrait of the existentialist
hero intersects with that of the republican warrior, for both are viewed
on the sociohistorical landscape as solitary figures forced by a crisis to
choose and accept the risks involved.
The absent portrait of the exiled Juan provides space for the elaboration of a new mythopoesis from the perspective of postwar Paris, for
the Spanish guerrillas unrealized dream of liberation stands in a parallel
relation to that of the French Left. The wartime heroics of the maquis
and those Leftists in the Resistance were commemorated by General
Charles de Gaulle, and then forgotten. Like the Spanish maquisards,
those members of the French Left who fought in the Resistance were
forced to live as though in exile within a nation whose destiny they
had shed blood to protect but were ultimately powerless to control. It
was, perhaps, the intact myth of the indomitable Spanish warrior that
inspired the French Left to rise up in May 68 in an attempt to reclaim
their country from the tyranny of global capitalism. The resonance of
Spanish myth is evident several years later in Alain Resnaiss La guerre
est finie (The War Is Over; 1966), which concerns three days in the life
of an aging revolutionary, Diego (Yves Montand), who thirty years after
the Spanish Civil War is still working for the overthrow of the Franco
regime. Diego visits Paris, where his political strategies and commitment
to the struggles of the past are challenged by a band of student terrorists.
Unlike Resnaiss young terrorists, the guests at the soire are eavesdroppers, witnesses to an abject, mysterious scene that will have traumatic resonance. The serious tone of the company at the soire is re14
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flected in the reasons they cite for his death: the nihilism of Spanish
exiles who had given up the struggle, the stagnant Paris climate, the
secretive machinations of the elusive femme fatale Terry, who embodies
the seductive allure of Western capitalism. Juans death echoes Lorcas,
which in turn echoes that of Vladimir Mayakovskythe celebrated poet
of the Bolshevik Revolution. Like the spectator, the guests eavesdrop to
pin down details; yet they are simultaneously situated as participants and
collaborators in the mysterious circumstances surrounding Juans death
and implicate each other by turn. The guilty paranoia of the guests augments the uncanny effect already formally present in the films opening
scenes. On the surface, the films title, Paris Belongs to Us, implies
plenitude and possession, while providing an ironic evocation of the
sense of loss and exile central to the atelier scene and the film. Rivettes
title offers a shifting historical referentat once retaking Paris from the
collaborationist Vichy government, but more directly, Francoist Spain
to which the films opening epigram borrowed from Catholic playwright
Charles Pguy, Paris belongs to no one, provides a measured response.
Indeed, the films obsessive focus on the mythic figure of the republican
warrior might be read as the expression of a national trauma: the guilt
and shame that is experienced after the fact for the collaborationist role
that France played under Marchal Ptain and then continued to play in
the fascist consolidation of power in Spain after World War II. It could
also be that the films commemorative allusion to the Spanish Civil War,
appearing not long after Frances defeat in Indochina and at the height
of the Algerian conflict, is reinvented in and for the historical moment,
displacing the contemporaneous crises to an elsewhere (Higgins 108).
Indeed, the artists inability to represent the crisis in communication
and the cascade of whispered innuendos at the soire could testify to
the intense censorship that the Algerian conflict provoked and that was
in full force at the time the film was made.
The story that follows the resonant atelier scene focuses on Grard
and his recruitment of Anne for Pericles. It draws on the subcultural,
communal student ethos of the Thtre National Populaire. During the
1950s, the T.N.P. functioned as a young theater devoted to a new generation of workers and students (Serrire 182). Under the directorate
of Jean Vilar, its repertoire reflected the tradition of the Elizabethans
and the ancient Greeks, for whom theater represented an open forum

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for the public debate of civic concerns (Bradby 93). The films focus
on Shakespeare and the powerful appeal of the Bard to both Grards
troupe and the student Anne clearly reflect the spirit of the T.N.P.
cultivated by Vilar; yet it simultaneously predicts the end of this era.
The film shows that, by the end of the decade, young people were either discarding the postwar dream of a popular theater to secure more
lucrative positions in new media technologies or were, like Grard,
being co-opted by capitalist speculators.
The staging of Shakespeare in the film provided Rivette with the opportunity to explore the interrelationship between theater and cinema.
In a 1996 interview with Aliette Armel, Rivette describes Shakespeare
as a myth, which he envisioned as a continent that we know to be
gigantic, extraordinary, but that remains Terra incognita (64). Rivette
places stress on theatrical space, which, he explains, is for him, the
primary scene, the unconscious of the cinema (qtd. in Armel 62). The
scene in which Anne rehearses the role of Marina from Pericles playfully
cultivates the interchange between theater and cinema. Annes role of
Marina, the abandoned waif who becomes the unwitting object of a
murderous conspiracy, rhymes with her cinematic script in Rivettes
production. This duplication of theatrical and cinematic scripting is
paralleled by the scenes formal elements. As Anne repeats her lines,
Is this wind westerly that blows, a prop man stands at her side with
a blowing fan that is used to simulate a sea breeze. The fan would be
used to create the effect of realism at the cinema, but in this scene,
its ungainly appearance on the stage foregrounds theatrical artifice.
This scene holds up theatrical and cinematic conventions to the light,
permitting the spectator to reflect on profilmic representation as an
artificial construct.
After the rehearsal, Terry pulls up to the theater in a flashy convertible coupe to pick up Grard, leaving Anne behind in the street with
Philip. Suddenly, a shot of another car rapidly approaching, followed by
the sounds of screeching brakes and a woman screaming, explodes into
the quiet, contemplative space of the city square. The cut transports
us, in effect, from a leisurely Paris afternoon to an expressionistic Los
Angeles night, a moment that pays homage to the celebrated opening
sequence of Robert Aldrichs film noir, Kiss Me Deadly (1955). In it,
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Figure 1. Annes audition

in Paris nous appartient.
private eye Mike Hammers (Ralph Meeker) expensive sports car that
closely resembles the one Terry drives is run off the road, and his crazed
female passenger is inexplicably tortured and killed. Hammers maniacal
search, which anticipates Annes subsequent trajectory, through a shadowy maze of anonymous streets, stairwells, and apartments for the great
whatsit that he presumes to be the source of a conspiracy ultimately
uncovers an atomic bomb. Aldrichs closed in world in decay, which
Rivette refers to in his 1955 essay, Notes on a Revolution, is reflected
in the universe of Paris nous appartient, which similarly offers an account of moral suffocation, whose only way out must be some fabulous
destruction (qtd. in Hillier 96). Shell-shocked after the so-called auto
accident, Philip rushes off with Anne through the bright neon streets,
having witnessed the suspected murder of another anonymous victim
run down in the street. Anne listens attentively to Philips paranoid rants
about an international conspiracy and his prophesies of the director
Grards demise.
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The cold war conspiracy that Philip describes to Anne draws on

the explosive energy of Kiss Me Deadly, yet the obsession with crime,
criminals, and criminal conspiracies began in the early 1840s when a
collective paranoia captivated Parisians of all classes (Burton 51). Publications such as the Gazette des tribunaux and Les mystres de Paris
amplified the terror, until Parisians readily subscribed to the notion that
the city had succumbed to a menacing criminal conspiracy aimed not
just at its inhabitants but also at the very structure of society (Burton 51).
Encrypted forms of communication and a private language characterized
this dangerous underworld, a composite of criminal and working classes.
Paris nous appartient inverts this urban myth, transforming an insidious
proletariat underclass into an invasive cosmic force governed by the
panoptic eye of Protean rulers, whose perspective hovers over the city.
Wandering through the bustling Paris shopping district, the paranoiac
Philip is situated as an eyewitness to a conspiracy that is unfolding everywhere around him. Rushing from the crowd past department store
windows, Philip remarks to Anne, The real masters are hidden and
govern in secret. They have no names, a comment inflected with the
certainty of being controlled by social, political, and economic forces
that are no longer visible or identifiable. Conspiracy here may serve as
an oblique reference to the postwar networking of American, British,
and French nation-states, whose concerted effort to counter international communism by admitting Francoist Spain into the United Nations
necessitated their accidental abandonment of the revolutionary cause
of Spanish republicans.
Rivette challenges the meaning of mystery in Paris nous appartient, for in his film mystery becomes associated not simply with a
conspiracy plot but with the city itself, which is transformed into that
sphinx called Paris that Alfred Delvau describes in Les dessous de
Paris (1862) (9). As Philip discovers a dark walkway, he confides to
Anne: The world is not as it seems. What seems true is only an appearance. I seem to speak in riddles, but some things can be told only
in riddles. Like the mid-nineteenth-century flneur who stands apart
as a privileged witness, Philip becomes a chronicler and philosopher
of the city, who claims to decipher its hieroglyphic and arcane signs,
commenting, What Im saying, some have guessed. But I KNOW it
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(Benjamin, Paris 37). Yet as his observations reenact the rapture of

the flneur, a chorus of womens voices filters into his conversation with
Anne, recirculating Ariel and the sea-nymphs song from The Tempest.
At this moment, Philip is recast within Annes theatrical script from
the films opening scene. The unmotivated intervention of this song,
which remains illegible and indecipherable to Philip, places him as
an unwitting participant in, rather than an informed witness to, the
mysteries that the sphinxlike city holds.
Flnerie finds its historical echo in Philips autoscopic nightmare
of self-replication, his production and reproduction of a series of selfportraits that adorn his hotel wall. Anne discovers him incapacitated on
the floor of his hotel room, unable finally to decipher the signs of the city
before him. Haunted by memories of the Paris boulevards, he remains
destined to perpetually clone images of himself. Like the nineteenthcentury criminal, Philip sees himself as a cloak without a body, a Proteus
whose lack of self-individuation leads him to obsessively identify with
the imagined being of others: I cling to people I meet, you or anyone.
I look at them. They exist (Balzac qtd. in Burton 52). Like the canny
criminal Jacques Collin of Honor de Balzacs Splendeurs et misres des
courtesans (18381847), Philip remains an invisible witness to those he
observes, possessing omniscient powers of observation over hotel inhabitants that serve as a microcosm of the city. He instructs Anne to Look
at people who pass. They live in the real world, while consecutive images of hotel occupants illustrate his activity of observing and recording:
Finnish, 18 years old. Ambition, happiness. Works as a model, hopes
for better. Philips protean capability will paradoxically deprive him of
the possibility of entering into relationships with these other selves and
will instead condemn him to the solitude of self-replication. The hotel
inhabitants he observes are themselves simultaneously engaged in an
identical process of self-dilation. When Anne later enters the Finnish
models room, extreme close-ups of the portfolio photographs lining
her wall offer a dizzying spectacle of self-replication, her identity transformed into dilated images of body parts. The proteanization of Paris
life is produced and reproduced ad infinitum in Paris nous appartient,
where the principle of character identity collapses into an endless echo
of the criminal self.
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In his capacity to project himself into his characters and in his desire
to move from the analysis of particulars to a synthetic knowledge of the
whole, the dramaturge Grard participates in the same epistemological
universe as the protean criminal. On the Pont des Arts overlooking the
Ile de la Cit, a district historically associated with the criminal underclass, Grard displays to Anne his knowledge of the synthetic structure
of Pericles, explaining to her, its made up of rags and pastiches, but it
hangs together on another plane, from a global point of view. As the two
stroll across the bridge, Grard offers her a part in his play, recalling an
earlier scene in which Philip, crossing the identical bridge, urges Anne
to play the part of criminal investigator in the conspiracy that threatens
Grard. The film scripts the spectator in the same manner that Anne is
cast in Grard and Philips scenario, seducing us into a brotherhood
of participatory identification with a family of the damned that creates
the conspiratorial web of the film itself. Louis Moreau-Christophe in
Le monde des coquins (1863) writes of the nature of the criminal conspiracy in Paris nous appartient: Still today, in France, an association of
rogues forms a kind of brotherhood, a guild, a family pactthe family
of the damnedwhose members are united through unbreakable ties
of criminal solidarity (qtd. in Burton 53). The close conformance of the
films organization to the underlying structure of the conspiracy myth
that preoccupied the mid-nineteenth-century French imagination seems
overdetermined. Its reinscription in Paris nous appartient must be read
as an echo of the moral panic and national trauma that had resurfaced
once again in Paris like a postwar aftershock. It can simultaneously be
understood as symptomatic of the identity crisis at the heart of French
film as an art and a technology.
Jacques Attali, like Claude Lvi-Strauss, argues that music and
musicians themselves provide a substitute for myth in contemporary
culture. Attali affirms that music enables us to envision a new world,
which will supersede the everyday and establish a new order; it is the
herald of the future (11). For this reason musicians, Attali argues,
are dangerous, disturbing and subversive, and consequently, their
history is irrevocably tied to that of repression and surveillance (11).
The ambiguous role of the musician is analogous to that of the film
director, as both are playing a double game. Both musician and director
serve in the duplicitous role of reproducer and prophet (Attali 12).
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Playing his part in the Parisian underworld of criminals and outcasts,

the exiled musician Juan, like the director Rivette, is a participant in a
society that he cast in a political light (Jean-Luc Godard surfaces in a
cameo appearance as Juans cohort to serve as a fence or middleman in this network of criminal contacts). Yet, the musician, like the
director, is simultaneously destined to serve as historian and reflect
through aesthetic ritual the deeper values of society. The myth of music
and musician paradoxically provides the impetus to the films narrative
economy, which is propelled by the paranoiac activity of eavesdropping
and surveillance. The paranoia, panic, and identity crisis central to the
film predict the accelerated shift into late capitalism, which is reflected
in the consolidation of American, British, and French nation-states
and the consequent abandonment of the Spanish republican cause.
The censorship put into place by the surveillance apparatus of the late
capitalist state, in which multinational corporations and the media
play a collaborative role, is forecast by the economist De Georges,
who brands Juans music as rubbish, pure filth and the musician as
a walking anachronism. Juans music is replaced by the high-tech
simulated sound effects of waves and seagulls that are imposed on the
director by the capitalist entrepreneurship of Boileau, who ultimately
oversees and polices the production. Yet the plaintive melody at the
heart of the heroines quest is not irretrievably lost, for Anne is at last
privy to the mysterious music when Terry unexpectedly produces the
original tape and plays it, its quiet sonority imparting a melancholic,
pensive dimension to Annes discovery.
The conspiracy plot of Paris nous appartient that centers on the
retrieval of taped music dramatizes the listening in on, transmitting,
and recording at the heart of the modern cinema and, in this manner,
discloses the surveillance potential of the apparatus. Paris nous appartient exposes the Protean potential of the cinematic apparatus to play a
collaborative role in the conspiracy that serves the interests of capital.
The concerns of capital are consistent with surveillance and silencing
that preclude the politics of a prophetic music. The final scene of the
film returns us to the theater in a circular fashion with the recitation of
the actors line from the unfinished production of Pericles: Is this wind
westerly that blows? . . . Philippe Arthuyss haunting musical refrain
counterpoints the final repetition of the theatrical script; both reproduce

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the enigma with which the film began and re-present the mystery at
the heart of Rivettes cinema.
From the Literary Text to the Tableau:
La religieuse, Hurlevent, La belle noiseuse,
and La belle noiseuse: Divertimento
In some sense, Rivettes second feature film, Suzanne Simonin, la religieuse de Denis Diderot (The Nun; 19651966; released 1967) represents his refusal to adapt novel to film. He approaches the original
artwork, Denis Diderots eighteenth-century epistolary novel, through
the theater; his inaugural theatrical production of La religieuse at Studio
des Champs-Elyses defines his conceptualization of the film adaptation.
To extend one of Bazins most well-known metaphors in which he likens
the cinema to an ushers flashlight, Rivettes style of direction on the film
set of La religieuse might be likened to a flashlights fugitive beam, for
according to his featured performer Anna Karina, he was always behind
the camera, ... darting in and out of all the corners, placing himself
alongside the actors, while always looking at this or that detail (qtd.
in Frappat, Secret 132). In La religieuse, Rivettes cinematic flashlight
cuts through the theatrical footlights to transfigure the original work.
The novels story is based on the historical figure Marguerite Delamarre, who was locked up from early childhoodfirst at the convent of
the Visitation de Sainte-Marie, and then at the abbaye de Longchamp.
Modeled on Delamarre, the character Suzanne Simonin was Diderots
concoction that had been created to play a joke on a friend, the Marquis
de Croisemare, to whom he composed letters written by a young nun
who had escaped from her convent. These letters provided Diderot
with the foundation for his novel, La religieuse, fashioned as an autobiographical account of the life of the imprisoned nun. Diderots novel
inspires Rivettes austere portrait of eighteenth-century life in France.
As the film opens, Suzanne (Anna Karina) stands at the precipice of
sacred and secular worlds. Her mother Madame Simonins sin of illicit
love has condemned her illegitimate daughter to convent life. Suzanne
initially refuses her mothers selfish demand that she take the veil, but
later assents and enters Longchamp Convent. There, she meets a kind-
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12/7/11 2:16 PM
hearted Mother Superior, Madame de Moni (Micheline Presle), who

inspires her to take her holy vows.
The untimely death of the saintly Mme. de Moni is a terrible loss
for Suzanne, for once deprived of her protector at Longchamp, she
becomes prey to violent abuse at the hands of a harsh new Superior.
She resorts to the courts in an effort to have her vows rescinded, but
to no avail. Suzanne is instead transferred to a worldly convent, where
she is at the disposal of a new Mother Superior, Madame de Chelles
(Liselotte Pulver), drawn from Adlade dOrlans, a notorious abbess,
who falls passionately in love with her. Mme. de Chelles insists on an
open, idyllic order; yet the shift to a softer, calmer atmosphere belies the
madness and darker, more intense passion that is unleashed as Mme.
de Chelless desire for Suzanne becomes uncontrollable. Aided by Dom
Morel (Francisco Rabal), her confessor, Suzanne escapes. Prey to the
corrupt forces of the outside world, she finds herself trapped within a
world of salon prostitutes, and in a final desperate gesture, kills herself.
Rivette first envisioned Diderots novel as a theatrical production.
On February 6, 1963, Rivette made his theatrical debut at Studio des
Champs-Elyses directing Jean Gruaults adaptation of La religieuse.3
His choice of a classical, rather than an avant-garde, approach to miseen-scne was designed to render the young nuns story in the simplest
and most elegant manner possible. Rivette modeled the production on
the works of eighteenth-century dramatist Pierre Carlet de Marivaux,
creating a pleasant, decorative, tidy production with intermittent moments of violence. Yet the plays light, courteous presentation belied
its scandalous, confrontational content, which for Rivette was above all
feminism, a young womans claim of freedom from her family, and even
more broadly, the right of the individual to choose his/her own destiny,
viewed from the perspective of 1760. Though the play was not a financial
success, the experience was crucial to Rivettes evolution as a director.
Faced with the challenge of transposing the theatrical mise-en-scne
and Karinas charismatic presence to the screen, Rivette understood the
necessity of conceptualizing a different scenario for the film adaptation,
which would take into account the way in which the theater simplified
and accentuated all traits. Rivette would also modify his approach to the
actors while filming them to account for the audiences greater proximity
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to their performances. The film that resulted was very different in its
method and in its tone, less pleasant, less gentle, harsher, and coarser.
Neither Rivette nor its producer Georges de Beauregard could have
envisioned, however, the reception of the film by the censors. A total ban
was placed on La religieuse in April 1966 for France and for exportation,
propelling the film into the press. In one interview with Figaro littraire,
Rivette voiced his astonishment: It was as though they had guillotined
us (Le Clech). After the ban was lifted a little more than a year later, on
July 6, 1967, the film enjoyed tremendous commercial success, becoming
a succs scandale. In the interim, La religieuse had sustained harsh criticism from certain quarters, such as Guy Daussois from Le populaire, who
had criticized its portrayal of characters, which he found to be marked
by a schematization and oversimplicity that is rarely encountered, with
absolutely no human depth. Yet Rivettes schematic characterization
was actually inspired by Diderot, who in The Paradox of Acting had advocated character typing as part of a presentational, pantomimic acting
style in an effort to construct a morally vital theater (15).
The idealist notion of pure forms that underlies the greater part of
Diderotian aesthetics informed not only Rivettes method of acting but
also his critical perspective on cinema and painting. As cultural historian
George Lellis observes, this critical tendency is, perhaps, most evident
in Rivettes review of Voyage in Italy (1953) in which he compares the
work of neorealist director Roberto Rossellini with that of Henri Matisse,
emphasizing the purity of geometry and forms (18). Rivette affirms:
All you need do, to start with, is look: note, throughout the first part, the
predilection for large white surfaces, judiciously set off by a neat trait, an
almost decorative detail; if the house is new and absolutely modern in
appearance, this is of course because Rossellini is particularly attracted
to contemporary things, to the most recent forms of our environment
and customs; and also because it delights him visually. This may seem
surprising on the part of a realist (and even neo-realist); for heavens
sake, why? Matisse, in my book, is a realist too: the harmonious arrangement of fluid matter, the attraction of the white page pregnant with a
single sign, of virgin sands awaiting the invention of the precise trait, all
this suggests to me a more genuine realism than the overstatements, the
affectations, the pseudo-Russian conventionalism of Miracle in Milan;
... (qtd. in Hillier 193)
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As Lellis notes, the Platonist overtones of this passage become pronounced later in the essay where Rivette describes Rossellini as possessing this faculty of seeing through beings and things to the soul
or the ideal they carry within them, this privilege of reaching through
appearances to the doubles which engender them (qtd. in Hillier 198).
The Platonist philosophical assumptions that inflect Rivettes discussion
of painting and film connect his early critical perspective to Diderotian
aesthetics.
Diderots theories of theater and painting are reflected in the composition of his novel, La religieuse, and Rivettes adaptation of it. For
Diderot, theatrical presentation could be conceptualized as a series of
pictorial tableaux (Barthes 70; Lellis 34). Unsurprisingly, he envisioned
his novels construction similarly, as filled with pathos-laden tableaux,
as a work to be perused ceaselessly by painters; and if it were not forbidden by modesty, its true epigraph would be son pittor anchio (qtd.
in Fried 199200, n. 119). The Diderotian literary intertext informs
Rivettes adaptation, where black wipes underscore scene changes to
give each a fixed tableau definition. Certain critics have suggested that
the Diderotian tableau actually anticipates film (Lellis 35; Vexler 49).
Lellis, for instance, maintains that Diderots notion of the tableau, in
which the composition of the actors and the visual elements plays an
essential role in the production of meaning, is pre-cinematic (3435).
To support this claim, he cites Diderot, who writes, Oh! If we could
have theaters where the decors would change every time the place of
the scene had to change (35). It is impossible to know whether Diderot
was actually conceptualizing in pre-cinematic terms when he describes
such magical scenic transitions; yet it is tempting to speculate that
Diderot was already thinking of the successive tableaux of his novel as
the interface to a new art formfilm. Centuries later, Rivette returns
to Diderots notion of the tableau in La religieuse to discover a source
of fascination dependent upon a theatrical and pictorial aesthetic.
Rivettes discovery of the Diderotian tableau, already associated with
the novel La religieuse, is coincident with his movement toward Barthesian structuralism in the mid-1960s. Diderot also served as a touchstone for cultural critic Roland Barthes, who affirms in his seminal essay,
Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein, that Diderotian aesthetics rest on the
identification of theatrical scene and pictorial tableau (70). Rivettes

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decision to interview Barthes in 1963, the year that he assumed the

position of editor in chief of Cahiers, reflected his ongoing effort to
expand the journals repertoire to include key figures from the Paris
literary, philosophical, and artistic community, such as composer Pierre
Boulez, anthropologist Claude Lvi-Strauss, and even Sartre (although
the conversation never occurred). Barthess response to Rivette and his
colleague Michel Delahaye in this crucial interview signals the shift in
Cahiers in the direction of a new kind of formal filmic analysis upheld
by the theoretical apparatus of semiology, which had already taken hold
in the field of literary criticism. For Barthes, film is closely allied to literature in its material and its techniques. He dismisses the notion of a
Brechtian cinema because, he observes, the theatrical image does not
offer itself up in the same way as the cinematographic image to segmentation, duration, or perception (qtd. in Hillier 282). He maintains
that film, like literature, should provoke answers rather than give them,
assuming that very particular responsibility of form which I have called
the technique of suspended meaning. I believe that the cinema finds it
difficult to deliver clear meanings and that, in the present phase, it ought
not to do so. The best films (for me) are those, which are best at suspending meaning (my italics, qtd. in Hillier 282). In the modern world that
Barthes denounces as fatally bound to meaning, freedom in artistic
production, he concludes, should consist not so much in creating meaning as in suspending it; . . . (qtd. in Hillier 281). Rivettes La religieuse
assumes this particular form that Barthes describes as a suspension of
meaning in the contemplation of successive tableaux, for, in Barthess
words, the film resembles a gallery, an exhibition; ... , which offers
the spectator as many real tableaux as there are in the action moments
favourable to the painter (70; Diderot qtd. in Barthes 70).
Rivettes La religieuse opens with pictorial tableaux that reveal the
drawings of Longchamp Convent and a portrait of the Abbess of Chelles
in 1719, making it clear that the films story finds its source in actual
historical places and personages. The sound of an insistent knocking
or banging unexpectedly commands our attention; this is immediately
followed by three measured knocks recalling the way in which les trois
coups (the three knocks) traditionally alerted French theater audiences
to the curtain rising. The camera travels over a seated audience and stops
before an iron grille through which we see Suzanne Simonin, who enters
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the brilliantly lit up space of the sanctuary. The grille that separates the
congregation from those officiating in the ceremony creates a visible
barrier similar to the invisible fourth wall that separates the proscenium
stage from the audience. It is from behind the grille that Suzanne initially
refuses her holy vows; the vertical iron bars point to the self-enclosed
space of the chancel as an undisguised acting area. Within this initial
scene, the codes of theaterarchitectural, cultural, gesturalare encrypted within the film text. The chancel is actually a proscenium stage
where religious vows are repeated like a rehearsed script, transforming the ceremony itself into a botched theater performance that closes
with the hurried fall of the curtain. The injection of codes of theater
transforms the film scene into a striking visiona tableau. In the films
opening moments, Rivette constructs an institutional space associated
with a potentially paralyzing theatricality, which we observe, for we are
situated outside the film as if in theater seats, rather than unreflectively
identified with the cameras point of view.4
Suzannes arrival at Longchamp Convent follows her fateful decision
to acquiesce to her mothers demand and take the veil. To signify the
transition from the world of her bourgeois family to the ascetic world
of the convent, Rivette strips away all decorative excess from his set;
the decor that remains amounts to a bed, a few wooden chairs, a night
Figure 2. A tableau: Suzanne Simonin

refuses her vows in La religieuse.
27
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table, and curtains, which conceal the darker recesses of convent life as
much as they dramatically reveal its ceremonial religiosity. Drawing on
his previous experience as metteur en scne at the Studio des ChampsElyses, Rivette returns to the sparse decor of theatrical staging to focus
on what Bazin describes as theaters domainthe human soul (106).
The soul of Suzanne Simonin is the focus of Diderots novel, and thus,
Bazin would argue, her story belongs within the theatrical sphere: Like
the ocean in a sea shell the dramatic infinities of the human heart moan
and beat between the enclosing walls of the theatrical sphere. This is
why this dramaturgy is in its essence human. Man is at once its cause
and its subject (106). Rivette relies on theatrical staging to give human
priority to the dramatic structure of his film.
The profound stillness of the film, as Douglas Morrey and Alison
Smith have observed, recalls that of Robert Bressons Les anges du pch
(Angels of Sin; 1943), a somber study of sacrifice and redemption within
a Dominican convent (181). The institutionalized space of Bressons
convent devoted to the rehabilitation of women convicts mirrors that
of Longchamp, which is similarly defined by the rigid, linear corpus of
nuns who line the chapel pews. Rivette uses the slow horizontal panning
and tracking motion of his camera to accentuate this linearity. Lines of
blue habits that file through the space of Longchamp Convent are also
reinforced by architectural structures: the horizontal and vertical lines
of the grille that separate Suzanne from the secular world, the Christian
crosses that adorn the convent walls, or the crisscross maze of endless
corridors that seem to lead nowhere. The cavernous space of the chapel
recalls that of a vast theater, an impression intensified by the peripheral
placement of figures seated along the walls in pews. Drawing attention
to large, open surfaces that bear the inscription of a precise line, Rivette
captures the abstract, primitive dimension of a Matisse painting. The
sparse lighting afforded by the flickering flames of candles accentuates
the cold blue interiors of the convent, while the wind whistles beyond
its thick walls. Dialogue is gradually reduced to confidences whispered
in the corridors, sung prayers in the chapel, and the ritualistic coda of
Ave Maria, Deo Gratias exchanged before bed. The cloistered atmosphere of Longchamp is intensified by the omnipresence of witnesses
and the moral codes that these witnesses bring to bear. The punitive
Mother Superiors accusation, There is something wrong in your mind.
28
Jacques Rivette
12/7/11 2:16 PM
You have schemes is answered by Suzannes anguished confession, My

body is here, but my heart is not.
The architectural and ideological center of Longchamp is the chapel,
which reproduces the dimensions of a theater set that opens out into
the audience. Similarly, Suzannes apartment at Longchamp assumes
the dimensions of a dressing room, where she is repetitively robed and
disrobed: first, she is dressed in the bridal gown when she assents to her
role as the bride of Christ; then, she is undressed when she is forced to
wear a hair-shirt beneath her habit; again, she is re-dressed as a reward
following her sung performance at Matins; she is completely stripped of
her habit and veil following the discovery of her legal petition; finally, order is restored, and she is dressed once again before her departure from
Longchamp. Suzannes sung performance at Holy Week Matins, where
she admits to playing her role like an actress in a theater, reproduces
the temporal dimensions of an entracte, which is a performance occurring between the acts of a play that often includes music or dancing. If
Suzannes concert establishes a momentary respite, an intermission of
sorts, between the routine performances required of her at Longchamp,
it also marks a decisive interval in the progression of the film narrative.
Suzannes departure is accompanied by the dramatic shift from Longchamps dark blue interiors to light, extravagantly lush settings of the
secularized convent, where transgressive passion is soon aroused. Rivettes
mise-en-scne bears resemblance to the rococo seductions of eighteenthcentury painter Jean-Honor Fragonard that disclose the turbulent passions existing just beneath the smooth veneer of family and institutional
manners.5 The vertiginous ensemble of foliage, fountain, and cloud in
Fragonards Blind Mans Buff (1775) may have inspired Rivettes rendering of the initial rendezvous between Suzanne and Mme. de Chelles
within the convent garden. The film scene is suffused with an almost
dreamlike atmosphere that, like Fragonards tableau, associates states of
reverie with the experience of nature. Such allusions to paintings in the
film are motivated not only by the novels setting but also by Diderots
extensive writings on pictorial composition in Essais sur la peinture and
Salon de 1767. In this instance, Rivettes scenic rendering provides a visual illustration of the paintings title, for Suzanne is literally blindfolded
in the scene, spinning at the center of the band of nuns who flutter
around her. Suzannes blindness to darker forces, coupled with the blithe

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oblivion of those who surround her, serves as an ominous portent. The

disquieting intensity of her conversation with Mme. de Chelles intrudes
on the unperturbed ambiance of the convent garden, a tension marked
by the flickering contrast of light and shadow. The hushed intimacy of
the nuns inaugural tte--tte intensifies to the point of madness and
erotic delirium in the scenes that follow.
The films closing sequence makes explicit the implicit connection
Rivette draws between theatrical staging and the ideological staging of
institutions. As Suzanne prepares for her final performance as a salon
prostitute, she gazes into the mirror, her countenance hidden behind
her mask that announces her new social role. She then drifts into the
sparkling space of the salon, where she becomes indistinguishable from
the other prostitutes who, like the nuns of Longchamp, are all uniformly
dressed. In this final scene, Suzanne joins the secular world where she
is forced to recognize her own image, an ideological construction determined by yet another institutional apparatus, which mirrors the apparatus of oppression and sadistic power prevailing within the dark corridors
of Longchamp. Differences between inside and outside, sacred and
secular, chaste and unchaste collapse within this final scene, as the nun is
momentarily caught and held within an institutional hall of mirrors that
conspire to perpetually reflect her image as the crystallized creation of
theatrical and ideological staging. As though refusing her role one final
time, Suzanne moves stealthily toward an open window. She suddenly
jumps, offering a chilling parody of a theatrical exit. The spectator is
required to read this final tableau as a crucifixion and solemn requiem
for the martyred body of the nun.6
In his first film adaptation, Rivette explores the parameters of the
tableaumoving from novel, to the theatrical scene, to the pictorial tableauin full circle to redefine the theatricality of Diderots novel in his
film. In its capacity to mix art forms, La religieuse respects what Rivette
has described as the impure nature of cinema itself: It [Cinema] is an
impure art, complex, between the novel, the theater, painting, music,
dance, etc., and it is understandable that in this indeterminate place
from within the middle of the traditional arts, that we would want to look
sometimes in this direction, or in that direction . . . (qtd. in Confrence
de presse 34). Rivettes exploration of theatricality through the tableau in
La religieuse lays the foundation for his later films, Hurlevent (Wuthering
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Jacques Rivette
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Heights; 1985), an adaptation of Emily Bronts novel modeled on the

tableaux of Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), La belle noiseuse (1991), an
adaptation of Balzacs novel that features painting in its plot, and the late
work, Ne touchez pas la hache (Do Not Touch the Axe; 2007), another
Balzac adaptation structured as a series of tableaux.
| | |
Rivette returns to the tableau in La belle noiseuse (1991), as does the

Balzacian painter Edouard Frenhofer, after having abandoned it for
a certain period of time to explore alternative modes of theatricality
and their relation to the process of artistic production. His observation that There are two kinds of filmmakers, those for whom painting
serves as a departure point, and those who arrive there following their
journey reveals his own relation to the tableau, which serves him both
as a departure point and as a point of return (qtd. in Aumont, Patron
217). Awarded the Grand Prix at the 1991 Cannes Film Festival, La
belle noiseuse is an adaptation of Balzacs nineteenth-century novella Le
chef doeuvre inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece; 1831). Rivette had
contemplated this Balzac adaptation since the completion of Hurlevent.
There, he had transposed Bronts nineteenth-century novel Wuthering
Heights (1847) by modeling certain scenes on French painter Balthuss
india ink illustrations, analyzing and transforming them to form his own
unique portraits.7 Balthuss tableaux provided Rivette with an important
point of reference in recounting the tragic story of Catherine Earnshaw
(Fabienne Babe), a woman not unlike Suzanne Simonin, whose passionate love for the gypsy waif Heathcliff (Lucas Belvaux) is curtailed
because of the demands of social norms and conventional morality. At
times, there is no dialogue, only the plaintive voices of a Bulgarian choir
whose beautiful, dissonant chant laments their unrequited love. The
configuration of pictorial and theatrical tableaux found in La religieuse
and Hurlevent crystallizes in La belle noiseuse, which is, deservedly in
my view, the most critically acclaimed of Rivettes adaptations. In it,
painting provides the crucial point of commonality between the novel
and Rivettes adaptation of it.
Le chef doeuvre inconnu begins in 1612 on a cold winter morning in Paris. An aspiring painter named Nicolas Poussin paces fretfully
before the door of the celebrated court painter Porbus. The arrival of

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another mysterious visitor, Frenhofer, allows Poussin to enter the studio

virtually unnoticed. There, he gazes admiringly at Porbuss portrait of
Saint Mary of Egypt, but Frenhofer points out that it requires more
than mere mastery of artistic style to render a lifeless form into a living,
breathing woman. To illustrate his point, Frenhofer seizes the palette
and brush and transforms the tableau into a masterpiece. Poussin and
Porbus, rapt with admiration, hear about his unfinished work, Belle
noiseuse, which he has been working on for ten years but has been unable to finish because of the lack of a flawless model. Poussin becomes
possessed by an overwhelming desire to see La belle noiseuse, and so
convinces his young mistress Gillette to sit for Frenhofer. Porbus later
approaches Frenhofer with a proposition: Poussin will lend Frenhofer
his beautiful lover Gillette in exchange for the right to view La belle
noiseuse. When the moment of unveiling finally arrives, the two men,
who have been waiting just beyond the door, hurry into the studio and
look around for the much anticipated Belle noiseuse. The two are
incredulous at first, for they are only able to discern emerging from the
corner of the tableau a bare foot whose delicate beauty captivates them.
La belle noiseuse has been buried, they claim, beneath the coats of
paint that the artist has applied in his quest for perfection. Betrayed by
his viewers, Frenhofer weeps in despair and dies that night after burning
his canvases.
Rivette shifts the novels opening from seventeenth-century Paris
to contemporary France, from a dark, midwinter morning to a warm,
windy, midsummer afternoon at chteau dAssas in Provence. The
film opens in the garden of the hotel, where Marianne (Emmanuelle
Bart) and Nicolas (David Bursztein), assuming the respective roles
of Gillette and Poussin, engage in a flirtatious frolic, which scandalizes
two British tourists enjoying afternoon tea. The romantic repartee of
the couple unravels around the photograph that Marianne has just
snapped of the unwitting Nicolas scribbling in the garden. Marianne
refuses to let Nicolas see it, nor is the spectator privy to it; she provokes further debate by demanding money for it, which he disputes.
When Nicolas proposes to Marianne that she visit his hotel room to
talk business concerning ownership of the photograph, a mysterious
female voiceover narration suddenly intervenes, querying, Why was
she suddenly so uneasy? Because of the visit to the Frenhofers? The
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Jacques Rivette
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intervention of a female narrator at this point signals the shift in focus

from novel to film.
In Le chef doeuvre inconnu, Poussin plays a central role in the story
as the apprentice artist, whereas in the film, Marianne is introduced to us
as the apprentice artist, a freelance photographer who is both the creator
and owner of images. The voice of narration intervenes once again in
the couples dialogue to introduce the character Balthazar Porbus (Gilles
Arbona), who arrives at their hotel to accompany them to the artists
chteau. Rather than the painter of Balzacs story, Balthazar Porbus is an
alchemist, who collects paintings as well as houses and women. Like one
of the three kings from the Orient paying homage to the king, Balthazar
Porbus, driving like crazy, arrives from the east by way of Genevanot
to pay tribute to the artist but to purchase art. He too brings a precious gift
to Frenhofer as an offeringthe ravishing beauty Mariannedestined to
become the artists model. Rivettes referencing of the name Balthazar
does not merely evoke the notion of spiritual pilgrimage but also pays
homage to the painter Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski).
La belle noiseuse introduces the aging artist Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) as preoccupied and oblivious to time; he wanders into the courtyard,
where he joins Liz (Jane Birkin) and the guests, who are anticipating his
arrival. The back-and-forth shifting in the film between the dark, hushed
interiors of the chteau and light, lush garden settings forecloses the
manner in which disturbing passions threaten to destabilize the sanctity
of family and community. An ominous portent disrupts the groups soire
when the invited guests, engaged in casual conversation with Liz and
Frenhofer during dinner, become privy to Porbuss epileptic seizure.
Without warning, Porbus dramatically collapses. As his head hits the table,
Liz, and then Marianne, turn to look as his body falls onto the floor. The
traumatic moment erupts unexpectedly, shattering the tranquility of the
idyllic gathering. This dramatic shift in tone associated with the transition
from daylight to night, from the harmonious vistas experienced within
nature to the haunting specter of death encountered within the walls
of the chteau, invokes filmmaker Alain Resnaiss Providence (1977), in
which an aging British novelist Clive Langham (John Gielgud) makes
peace with members of his family during a late afternoon gathering at his
country estate. Resnais uses the story of an artist, as does Rivette, to reflect
on the creative process; Providence probes Clives inner experience as he

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agonizes over his coming novel. As Clives children gather around him, a
180-degree circular pan reflects on the vastness of the surrounding vista
as the day fades away. Rivette not only recirculates Resnaiss themes in his
film but also reinvents his signature shot, adopting a semicircular pan or
alternatively a semicircular cutting pattern, not simply to show the natural
environs but to provide transitional moments of reflection between the
confined space of the artists chteau and the terrifying freedom offered
in the cinematic panoramas of the Provenal landscape.
Leaving their dinner unfinished following Porbuss unexpected illness, the three men retire to Frenhofers cavelike studio. Nicolas, still
eager to see the mysterious tableau La belle noiseuse that Frenhofer had alluded to earlier, allies himself with Porbus, who proposes to
Frenhofer that he complete the painting using Marianne as his model.
As Nicolas and Porbus solidify the deal with Frenhofer, they become
allies in their quest to advance their respective ambitionsart and
finance. Both men seek access to the finished tableau, as objet dart
and as merchandise, through Mariannes body. Yet it is the signifier
noiseuse that establishes the initial connection between Frenhofer
and Marianne. She surprises him when she recognizes the word, which
she claims to have heard in Quebec, defining it as nuts like going
nuts. Frenhofer elaborates further, defining it as the beautiful pain in
the ass. The signifier reoccurs in translation later that evening, when
Marianne reproaches Nicolas for having sold her ass. The next day,
however, she changes her mind and decides to assume the role of La
belle noiseuse, thereby wreaking revenge on the men by becoming a
pain in the ass for both of them.
These initial sequences of the film retell the entirety of Balzacs
novella with the exception of three key momentsthe physical act of
painting, the unveiling of the masterpiece, and its immolation. The substantial portion of Balzacs story is disclosed during the films prologue.
The remainder of Rivettes adaptation then proceeds to chronicle the
act of creation that finds closure in the act of internment. Like Balzacs
characters Poussin and Porbus, the film spectator must also wait attentively for the final unveiling of Frenhofers tableau. Could it be that the
hours that the two characters in the novel spend waiting anxiously at
the door of Frenhofers studio determine the films four-hour duration?
Yet the film spectator, unlike Balzacs characters, is also invited to share
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Jacques Rivette
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in the process of painting itself. Rivette explains his method: We tried

truly to make a film not that talked about painting, but that approached
it. We were creating a path towards painting (qtd. in Confrence de
presse 34). By refusing to make a film of a painting, where the filmmaker uses an already completed work sufficient unto itself, Rivette
avoids the mistake that Bazin points to in Painting and Cinema where
not only is the film a betrayal of the painter, it is also a betrayal of the
painting and for this reason: the viewer, believing that he is seeing the
picture as painted, is actually looking at it through the instrumentality
of an art form that profoundly changes its nature (165).
Bazin is responding directly in this passage to the popularity of postwar feature films about famous artists that offer the spectator an anecdote instead of a painting, whereas he praises art documentaries, such as
Alain Resnaiss Van Gogh (1948), which arise from the histology of this
newborn aesthetic creature, fruit of the union of painting and cinema
(169, 168). Bazin would applaud La belle noiseuse, in which the story of a
painter precipitates a profound exploration of painting and cinema as parallel temporal processes. Rivettes study of duration in La belle noiseuse
may, in fact, have been inspired by Bazins writings on film and painting.
Bazin maintains that the two art forms present two modes of temporality,
noting that a film sequence confers a temporal unity that is horizontal
... and geographical, whereas painting develops geologically and in
depth (165). Frenhofer explains painting as a geological expedition in
which the artist returns to the sound of the origins. The forest and the
sea mixed together. Thats what painting is. Similar to geological science
that studies the earths origins, Rivettes film forces us to contemplate the
excavation of a tableau buried by time and its restoration. Frenhofers
will to deny time in the creation of a timeless work of art is mirrored
in Lizs will to arrest time by producing the replicas of animals in her
studio, where she carries on the analogous activity of taxidermy.
Rivette conceptualizes the structure of La belle noiseuse as a series
of tableaux, similar to a triptych comprised of three key momentsthe
physical act of painting, the unveiling of the painting, and its interment
which are framed by a prologue and an epilogue. Such Diderotian tableaux that provide the films structure occasionally overlap with those
of theater, offering the semblance of a classical five-act play. Through
its rigid adherence to a unity of time and place, the film establishes an

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emblematic affinity with theater, which is accentuated by the implicit

comparison Rivette constructs between the artists studio and a theater
set. Rivette refuses to adhere to Balzacs novelistic description of a cluttered atelier and instead returns to the sparse decor of theatrical staging
used in La religieuse. Indeed, Marianne entering Frenhofers studio for
the first time remarks that it looks like a church.
The atelier is not the architectural center of the chteau, as it is
segregated from the center by a labyrinthine outdoor walkway, yet it is
where the three key moments that structure the films story unfold. The
first panel of the filmic triptych places the act of painting on display. Time
is marked during the modeling session not only by the gradual shift from
daylight to darkness, but also by the jump cuts that Rivette inserts as a
reflexive reworking of the profilmic code for the passage of time. Typically, such cuts would be used to condense time, demarcating a temporal
ellipsis followed by a perceptible change in the artists drawing to show
the work accomplished. Multiple jump cuts during this spatially static
scene force our attention to the means by which cinema shows temporal
development. During the second modeling session, the focus shifts from
the artists creative process to the relation between artist and model.
As Frenhofer twists Mariannes limbs into the unendurable positions
he desires, in a sense, he takes her captive in order to realize his vision.
As Marianne extends her arms outward horizontally across the bench
where Frenhofer has positioned her, her pose momentarily resembles a
crucifixion, recalling the Passion of Suzanne Simonin. During the third
day, however, Mariannes determined nature seeks expression through
her poses. The balance of power established during the first two sessions shifts radically from the will of the artist to that of the model. She
insists, Let me find my place, my movement, my timing. It is only
when Marianne learns to rely on her own inner impulses, which provide
her with motivating power, that the process of creation can proceed. It
is only when Frenhofer learns to work in a relation of reciprocity with
her that he is able to create.
It is evident that the painter Frenhofer prioritizes the visual image,
and in this respect, his method resembles that of a film director; does
Rivette conversely work like a painter? Indeed, Rivette borrows Frenhofers palette of red, white, and blue in La belle noiseuse. Rivettes use
of primary colors in La belle noiseuse may be read, in part, as an homage
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Jacques Rivette
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Figure 3. Frenhofer takes Marianne

captive in La belle noiseuse.
to Godard, whose use of red, white, and blue in such films as Une femme
est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman; 1961), Le mpris (Contempt;
1963), and Pierrot le fou (1965) is well known (Shafto 6065). Yet the
red, white, and blue tri-colors never acquire abstract dimensions in La
belle noiseuse, as they do in Godards films, nor do they define dissociated
shapes within the environment (Shafto 65). Rivette makes use of the
blinding whiteness of the Mediterranean light, as did Matisse, and the
intensity of the blue sky, if only to accentuate the dark, hollow space of
the atelier, which, like a cinema theater, offers both the films audience
and its characters a respite from the brilliance of natural light for a
certain duration of time.
The color white designates place and time in La belle noiseuse;
it also connotes creation and decay. The blank, white canvases lining
the studio walls seem to extend the white stone walls surrounding the
chteau. Whereas the white of the tableaux invites the painters brush
stroke and the possibility of creation, the labyrinthine walls recall an
endless maze, threatening to enclose the painter within a sterile void.

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Red is used less frequently in the film but holds an especially intense
emotional and symbolic resonance. From the films first moments, red
connotes an indeterminate danger and an erotic anticipation; Marianne
wears a red blouse to greet Porbus, who first arrives at the hotel in a
bright red car that completely dominates the frame. When Nicolas first
senses the perils implicit in Mariannes modeling engagement with the
painter and feels jealous, his nose unaccountably begins to bleed; the
red blood threatens to stain his shirt and invade the chalky environment
of Lizs studio lined with chemical-filled replicas. From the outset,
Frenhofer advances the notion that blood represents the true test of
authenticity, declaring that a true work of art can be identified by blood
on the canvas. Much later, a large red cross marks the original painting,
La belle noiseuse, serving as the signifier identifying the authentic
work from its copy. A final flash of red and white is what we see when
Magali accidentally lifts up the tarpaulin to reveal a small portion of
the original painting before its final interment within the chteau walls.
The mock tableau that is unveiled the following day before the public
is a white nude posed within a blue background, betraying the traces
of the Manichean battle between blue and red waged in the war of
reworking the original.
The unveiling of Rivettes film La belle noiseuse occurred at the
Cannes Film Festival, where it received critical accolades. Immediately
following the films warm reception, the shorter, two-hour version La
belle noiseuse: Divertimento (1991) was released. Rivettes second film
was completed, in part, to fulfill a contractual obligation with his television coproducer FR 3, who had agreed to finance a two-hour film, not a
four-hour opus. His use of different takes from the original La belle noiseuse to construct a phantom film Divertimento mirrors Frenhofers reduplication of his original unfinished work. The title of Rivettes mock
film Divertimento provides a reflexive commentary on its minor
status. Rivette confided in a taped 2002 interview with Frdric Bonnaud that the title was a private nod to one of his favorite composers,
Igor Stravinsky, who drew a four-movement concert-hall suite, which
he called the Divertimento, from the complete ballet, The Fairys Kiss
(1928). A musical term, Divertimento is defined historically as an
eighteenth-century suite of movements of light, recreational music,
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Jacques Rivette
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sometimes for open-air performances for a small number of players,

whereas its meaning in the twentieth century shifts to a not-too-serious
work (Oxford Dictionary 241). We might ask whether Divertimento is,
in fact, a not-too-serious work in comparison to its predecessor.
In Divertimento, the focus on the process of artistic creation is
substantially reduced. In the long version, duration allows intimate
sounds to surface, like measured breathing, the sipping of coffee, the
scratching of pen on paper, and the high-pitched drone of the cicada.
While the abbreviated duration of Divertimento affects its tone and
texture, Rivettes decision to omit the prologue and its female narrator
affects the meaning of the film. In electing to elide the female voice
that frames the story, he shifts its focus from Mariannes evolution in
La belle noiseuse to the unchanging contractual concerns between the
men and the subsequent exchange of money. Mariannes development
is disclosed at the close of La belle noiseuse by the female voiceover,
who intervenes to interpret the characters actions for the audience:
Marianne put on her old mask again, or maybe a new one, establishing an implicit comparison between the films epilogue and the end
of a play. The voice informs the spectator, the story is coming to an
end soon and at last, reveals its identity to us, Marianne is me, it was
me. By framing the films story as a subjective flashback, the narrator
Marianne reclaims the story as her own. She openly taunts the spectator with the prospect of her mystifying departure, saying You wont
learn what becomes of Marianne tonight, refusing to be ruled by the
inevitability of a conventional happy ending. Mariannes evolution from
innocence to self-awareness in La belle noiseuse mirrors Rivettes own
mysterious trajectory. In the absent presence of the cameras gaze that
innocently celebrates the grand masterpieces lining the salons and corridors of the chteau, Rivette revisits the grand transcendental orders
of Platonic forms, individual genius, and authorship (Foster 6263);
he rediscovers them in close compositions that encourage the contemplation of the artists hands at work and the images he creates; and he
finally relinquishes them, for in staging Mariannes final departure from
chteau dAssas, the institutional domain of paternal artistic genius,
Rivette envisions his own exodus from the old transcendental orders
that painting invokes. His return to the realm of cinema is presaged
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in the release of his double film Divertimento, a work whose uncanny

reflexivity throws the status of transcendental orders into question.
Scenes are shifted in Divertimento so that the films closing scene
focuses on Porbus discussing monetary figures with Frenhofer for the
purchase of La belle noiseuse. By switching the final scene, Rivette
radically changes the films focus from the process of artistic creation
to the final product defined in terms of its market value, thus providing
an ironic metacommentary on the films relation with its coproducer.
Divertimento thus illustrates the adage: When you paint a picture for
the court, you do not put your whole soul into it; to courtiers you sell
lay figures duly colored (Chef doeuvre 38). Yet the citation also invites
the spectator to speculate: is the original La belle noiseuse truly a chef
doeuvre or lay images edited for the courtiers at Cannes?
A fascination with possession drives the final scenes of both films,
apparent in Porbuss penchant for monetary possession, in Nicolass
frustrated desire to possess Marianne, and in Mariannes acquisition of
self-possession as she assumes her masked persona. It also preoccupies
Rivette as metteur en scne, who asserts that the notion of possession
is at the core of theatrical, pictorial, and literary representations: Possession, possession ... La possession est impossible. Of course, a painter,
a writer, a metteur en scne fantasizes about the idea of possession, all
the while knowing that it doesnt exist . . . (qtd. in Confrence de presse
34). As a metteur en scne, Rivette realizes from the outset that it will
be impossible to fully possess and, thereby, reproduce the literary text,
be it by Balzac, Bront, or Diderot, yet he is nonetheless fascinated by
the possibility. It may be more than coincidence that the pictorial tableau
figures centrally in each film adaptation, for it embodies the seductive
possibility of possession, of delimiting the spatial infinity that might be
the provenance of cinema. Yet Rivette also recognizes that his illusion
of possession, which propels the adaptation, must remain unattainable,
as it is premised on a denial of cinemas domain that extends to that
diffuse space without shape or frontiers that surrounds the screen
(Bazin 107). Rivette confesses at last: Painting is among the greatest
temptations of the cinema, yet at the same time, it is only a temptation,
since everyone already knows that cinema is also the contrary of painting (qtd. in Confrence de presse 34).
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Jacques Rivette
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A Revolution in Realism, Reflexivity, and Oneiric Reverie:

Jean Renoir le patron, Lamour fou, Out 1: Noli me tangere, and
Out 1: Spectre
It was during the filming of the documentary Jean Renoir le patron
(1966), which consisted of three programs for the fledgling television
series Cinastes de notre temps (cofounded in 1964 by the late Bazins
wife, Janine Bazin, and Cahiers critic and filmmaker Andr S. Labarthe),
that Rivette discovered a new vision of filmmaking based on that of
the aging director. Rivette had felt compelled to completely alter his
course following the experience of La religieuse, when he found himself
hemmed in by his own scripted adaptation of Diderots text. He found
inspiration for a stylistic revolution in Renoir, who, in his estimation,
had created a cinema which 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 (qtd. in Aumont
et al. 11). The two weeks that he spent with Renoir, listening to him
talk about the cinema and his relationship with his actors, renewed his
desire to pursue completely different avenues in his own work. Rivette
also was inspired by the work of documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch,
whose films, he insists, uphold the tradition of realism established in
Renoir (qtd. in Aumont et al. 34). Rivettes relationship with his actors
would shift significantly following his encounter with Renoir and would
become central to the experimental style of Lamour fou (Mad Love;
1969), Out 1: Noli me tangere (Out 1: Touch Me Not; 1970), and Out
1: Spectre (1971; released 1974).
Rivettes stylistic revolution coincides not only with the completion
of his documentary on Renoir but also with the cultural revolution in
France following the events of May 1968. Testifying to the radical moment of cultural change, the nearly thirteen-hour Out 1: Noli me tangere, and the reedited four-hour version, Out 1: Spectre, represent the
culmination of Rivettes effort, which began with Lamour fou, to break
from the strictures of narrative form, from the inflexibility imposed by
a script, and from the acting style required by rigid adherence to the
script. The four-hour experimental Lamour fou (the title pays tribute
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to Andr Bretons 1937 surrealist text) initiates Rivettes exploration

of temporal duration. At the request of the films distributor, CocinorMarceau, a reedited two-hour version was also produced and released in
tandem with the original; however, Rivette did not sanction the release
of this reedited film, and so disowned it. This unauthorized version was
subsequently refused commercial distribution and thus remains unavailable for commentary. The full-length film edited by Nicole Lubtchansky
uses duration in a mise en abyme construction where Rivettes 35 mm
black-and-white film records a television crew directed by Andr S.
Labarthe, which uses 16 mm black-and-white film stock to document
a stage production of Jean Racines seventeenth-century play Andromaque (1667). Rivette uses reflexive theatricality in the film to explore
the boundaries of classical theater and the Italian Renaissance stage,
which had largely determined the mise-en-scne of both Paris nous appartient and La religieuse. In Lamour fou, Rivette pushes beyond the
boundaries imposed by narrative, script, and acting style, which he felt
had constrained him during the filming of La religieuse, to enter into
a new dimension in filmmaking, which is disclosed in this Pirandello
citation used to introduce the story outline: I have thought about it and
we are all mad (qtd. in Aumont et al. 24).
| | |
Forced to work within the severe budgetary restrictions imposed by the

films producer Beauregard, Rivette was compelled to shoot Lamour
fou in Paris with a limited production team, few decors, and in just
five weeks. The film reworks the story and structure of Paris nous appartient, moving back and forth between the world of the theater and
the world backstage, between the work of a theater director, Sbastien
Gracq (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), who oversees his troupes rehearsals of a
production of Andromaque, and the life he shares with his partner Claire
(Bulle Ogier), an actress involved in the production. While Lamour fou
shares with Paris nous appartient its focus on theater, each film provides
a singular response within its respective era. Whereas Paris nous appartient can be viewed as a prescient, political response to the menacing
rise of Gaullisme in the late 1950s, Lamour fou does not openly address
politics but rather evolves from within, and thereby reflects the pervasive
atmosphere of revolt, unrest, and uncertainty in the years immediately
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Jacques Rivette
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preceding the events of May 68. Dismissive of the film directly based
on political themes, Rivette describes Lamour fou as a deeply political
film, as his Prima della rivoluzione, because of its moral stance on
human relationships, affirming that the moral choices made by those
involved with the production, during the filming and editing, are finally
political choices (qtd. in Aumont et al. 36; qtd. in Baby 1968, 19). Rivette
did not believe that film was the medium for sermonizing: Lamour fou
instead offers a serious inquiry into films complex means of production,
which is why it remains one of the most powerful and political of films
to have come out of the New Wave.
Rivette confided to me at Caf de la Bastille in 1999 that, of all his
films, Paris nous appartient and Lamour fou were the two that he viewed
as autobiographical, to a certain extent. The figure of the director takes
center stage in both. It is not difficult to see elements of the young, idealistic filmmaker Rivette in the beleaguered theater director Grard Lenz,
who confides to Anne that he would be willing to do almost anything
to put on his play. It is well known that Rivette similarly encountered
financial difficulties during the filming of Paris nous appartient, which
was among the first of the New Wave films to go into production but the
last to be released, in late 1961. We can surmise that Rivette encountered
the moral dilemmas borne by Grard in the course of the films protracted
production process and, perhaps, was even fearful of losing his actors
and crew to well-subsidized television productions. He must have felt
himself to befar more so than his Cahiers colleaguesa chartered
member of the order of exiles that Grard insists he has been inducted
into. Whereas Grard encounters the difficulties of directing a play not
well known to French audiences, Sbastien stages a canonical classic in
a highly experimental style in Lamour fou. Unlike Grard, Sbastien
appears to be oblivious to financial considerations, expressing his disdain
for public perception: I dont think that the work can reach the public or
please them. Rivette may have similarly suspected that the experimental
textual strategies of Lamour fou and also its duration would preclude its
commercial viability; if so, his suspicions have proven correct, because
the film remains currently unavailable in any format. Unlike the solitary,
tormented director who in Paris nous appartient confronts existential
choices, the figure of the director in Lamour fou is bisected into theater
director Sbastien and television director Labarthe. The threat that had

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been implicitly posed by the media to the theater director in Paris nous
appartient invades the stage in Lamour fou and is even reflexively incorporated into the plays production. We can surmise that Rivette would
have identified easily with either role, for each, at times, mirrors the other.
At this point in his film career, Rivette was eager to examine theater
from a completely different perspective, that of documentary reportage
(qtd. in Cohn 29). Labarthe was the obvious choice to direct the 16 mm
film of the theater troupe. Rivettes admiration for the televised series,
Cinastes de notre temps, that Labarthe had cofounded, and his work
with him on Jean Renoir le patron, which had also been shot in 16 mm
black-and-white film, motivated his choice. Rivette allowed Labarthe
and cameraman tienne Becker complete freedom on the set. Labarthe
adopts a mockcinema verit style, zooming in at crucial moments to
capture an actors expression in close-up, yet he does not intentionally
interfere with the dramatic progression of the play. Offstage, he played a
pivotal role in the interviews he conducted with members of the troupe.
While Labarthe and Becker were shooting their 16 mm footage,
Rivette and his cameraman Alain Levent were simultaneously filming
the troupe from a greater distance with a 35 mm Mitchell camera.
Rivette maintains that the 35 mm camera was there to merely record
the events as neutrally as possible, maintaining the same invisibility and
proximity to the stage as that of a theater spectator (qtd. in Aumont
et al. 19). He characterizes the diminutive role of the 35 mm camera
in the theater as akin to the intruder who doesnt come too close because hell 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 doesnt even hear everything (qtd.
in Aumont et al. 18). The scenes in the theater testify to the disparity between the Mitchell and the Coutant, which Rivette describes as
two opposite forms of indiscretion, a passive one and an active one,
one sly and one bossy, respectively, while pointing to the inalterable
presence of the reality that preexists both (qtd. in Aumont et al. 18).
Rivette was well aware that the grainy, unpolished look of the 16 mm
footage would come to represent the cinema vis--vis the seeming
transparency of the 35 mm film. Yet its role in Lamour fou was not
entirely predetermined, and Rivette was surprised to discover that the
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Jacques Rivette
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16 mm brought in suspense,... not simply in terms of the fiction that

at times seemed closer to a conception of the cinema associated with
Hitchcock than Renoir, but also in terms of the very nature of the 16
mm that when intercut into the 35 mm film recharged it, plastically
and dynamically, making it possible to give the shots back the power
they had in the rushes and which they lost in the end-to-end; . . . (qtd.
in Aumont et al. 21).
The actors work and that of Kalfon in the role of metteur en scne
Sbastien take center stage in theater scenes; however, the film spectator is never permitted to remain pleasurably immersed in theatrical
spectacle. Passive identification with Rivettes 35 mm camera is virtually
impossible because of the frequent, intermittent jumps to Labarthes 16
mm images, which are complemented by the periodic appearances of
Labarthe and his TV crew filmed in 35 mm. The white, box-shaped stage,
literally housed within the Palais des Sports in Neuilly, is surrounded
on all four sides by several rows of empty seats, thus resembling, as Hlne Deschamps observes in her important study of the film in Jacques
Rivette: Thtre, amour, cinma, a boxing ring, a circus ring, or even
a blank cinema screen (22). Freed of all decor that would serve to
demarcate space and time, actors resemble astronauts cast adrift within
the vacant white chambers of a spaceship, similar to those in Stanley
Kubricks 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Onstage, these performers
rehearse scenes from Racines five-act play that reworks Greek myth to
present three interwoven stories of unrequited love set in the thick of
the Trojan War. The play is never performed in its entirety, however.
Rehearsed scenes recur in piecemeal and are scattered throughout the
film. What Lamour fou retains of Racines canonical classicist tragedy is
the residual savagery of its alexandrine verse in which, Rivette maintains, the words have the same violence as the actions of the Living
Theatres plays: words that hurt, that torture (qtd. in Aumont et al. 23).
It was, in fact, the physicality of Ogiers and Kalfons performances
in the experimental productions of fringe director MarcO that, Rivette
notes, had initially inspired him to make a film chronicling three weeks
in the lives of a couple (qtd. in Cohn 28). Well-known to the artistic
community that frequented La Coupole in St. Germain, members of
MarcOs company were practiced in the techniques of improvisation
and psychodrama, having performed in such theatrical productions as

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Les bargasses and the 1968 film Les idoles. Rivette was impressed by
these young actors, whose performance style had not been deformed by
a certain tradition associated with Le Conservatoire, which was heavily
reliant on the conventional interpretation of character psychology and
sentiment (qtd. in Cohn 28). Rivette hand-picked Ogier, whose physical
demeanor defines the role of the apprehensive actress Claire, initially
cast in the role of Hermione in Andromaque. Having already worked as
both a professional actor and also a metteur en scne of various theater
productions, Kalfon embraced the role of Sbastien, the director of
Andromaque and an actor playing the key role of Pyrrhus in his own
production. Once filming began, Rivette allowed Kalfon the latitude
to stage the play according to his own conception, and also welcomed
those actors from MarcOs troupe that Kalfon brought to the set with
him, Michle Moretti in particular, who in the role of Michle acts as
Sbastiens assistant, and also Jose Destoop who, in the role of Marta,
fills in as Claires replacement in Andromaque.
Structured self-consciously as a flashback, the film begins at the
storys end, completing a circular narration that opens and closes with
Claires departure by train to an undisclosed destination, as Sbastien
remains behind, listening to an audio recording of her voice from the
solitude of their apartment while his anxious troupe anticipates his
belated arrival at the theater. A cut from Sbastiens pensive expression to the subsequent scene in the theater where Claire is rehearsing her lines invites us to read this scene and, indeed, the remainder
of the film, from his point of view as his recollection of the past. Yet
rather than providing an immediately comprehensible visual image
of the past as would the traditional flashback, Lamour fous reflexive
presentation of both film and theatrical performance raises theoretical
issues concerning the problem of vision. As the rehearsal of Andromaque progresses, a conspicuous oscillation between 16 and 35 mm
representations of Claires performance places in question the films
visual presentation of memory. Recalling the use of the flashback in
modernist films like Alain Resnaiss Lanne dernire Marienbad
(Last Year in Marienbad; 1961) or Chris Markers La jete (1962), its
appearance at the outset of Lamour fou raises comparable questions
about the status of the image, memory, and daydream, which demand,
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Jacques Rivette
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as Maureen Turim affirms, an investigation into the means of narration, voice, and vision in films (220).
Claires subsequent refusal of the role of Hermione precipitates
her departure from the set, where Sbastien remains with Labarthe
and his TV crew. Sbastien phones his ex-girlfriend Marta, who agrees
to replace her. An experienced performer, Marta assumes Claires role
gracefully and welcomes the presence of the TV crew, even granting
Labarthe an interview, during which he assumes the self-appointed role
of psychoanalyst. Indeed, Martas rise from the stage to the stature
of televised celebrity is made possible by Labarthe and his TV crew.
Meanwhile, Rivettes 35 mm camera impassively records Claire, who
sequesters herself in her apartment, where she is beset by suspicions
that a conspiracy has formed among the theatrical players expressly to
exclude her, foremost among them Sbastien, who she believes is unfaithful to her. Claires jealous obsession recalls that of Racines proud
Spartan heroine Hermione, who is driven to seek revenge against her
betrothed, the king, Pyrrhus, because of his perceived betrayal of her
with his Trojan captive Andromaque. When Claire airs her suspicions to
Sbastien, she taunts him with flattering portraits of the other women,
Clia (Clia-Andromaque), Maddly (Maddly-Cphise), and Michle,
who work with him on the set of Andromaque. A 16 mm image of each
woman taken from Labarthes rushes shot in the theater accompanies
each description and illustrates it, thus throwing the films visual presentation of imagination into question.
As Marta recites Hermiones lines in the theater, addressing an audience of stage and screen spectators, Claire reinvents the role at home,
repeating identical lines while recording them onto the audiotape that
she replays to herself. Martas dark onstage persona mirrors that of the
fair-haired Claire, whose solar, translucent presence, as Deschamps
points out, is underscored by her association with the name White
Queen, inscribed on a brasserie marquis (53). This epithet could as well
refer to her blond American counterpart, Jeannie (Gena Rowlands), a
high-class hooker who is caught up in a frenetic whirlwind of desire and
the desperation of a couple in John Cassavetess 16 mm independent
production, Faces (1968). Unlike Cassavetess camera that relentlessly
moves forward to frame Jeannies face in illuminating close-up, Rivettes
47
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35 mm camera keeps its distance to reveal Claires evanescent bodily

appearance that seems at times to vanish within the overexposed shots
of the sun-drenched apartment she inhabits, or the passageways connecting those Paris stores she frequents. As Claires connection to the
darker world of theater becomes increasingly tenuous, she refuses its
scripted verse and instead chooses to play with sheer sound. Crouched
beneath the window of her apartment, she records various sound effects,
such as a sonorous choir on the radio, an airplane roaring overhead,
a high-pitched flute, and even her own breathing, and then numbers
them in sequence as would a sound editor planning to retrieve them for
a future film production. At one point, she even tunes in to Arthuyss
haunting musical score from Paris nous appartient playing on her radio
and rerecords it as if to resurrect the past.
As Claires isolation deepens, Martas shady seduction of Sbastien
becomes visibly evident, represented in silhouette as the two leave the
theater together at dusk. Marta clearly inhabits the lunar realm of the
theater; however, black actress Clia in the role of Andromaque is the
literal Black Queen, Hermione-Claires scripted rival for the love of
Pyrrhus-Sbastien. When her jealous fixation reaches a pinnacle of intensity, Claire approaches Sbastien as he sleeps and attempts to pierce
his eye with a hat pin. This peculiar episode, Rivette confides, represented a crisis, a bad patch, as everyone has and adds that he based
it on an actual incident that occurred in the life of dramatist Luigi Pirandello, whose wife Antoinetta was not only truly mad but also prone
to paroxysms of jealous rage (qtd. in Aumont et al. 24).8 Alone in her
apartment, Claire not only relives the role of Racines jealous heroine
Hermione but also that of Pirandellos mad wife in contradistinction to
her double Marta, who discloses to Labarthe that she assumed the name
of Pirandellos mistress, Italian actress Marta-Abba, to pay tribute to the
playwright. Martas stage name that foregrounds her professional stature
as a theater performer also places her within a double-tiered Pirandellian
scenario, which determines her relation to Claire, with whom she must
competenot only for the love of the director Sbastien-Pyrrhus but
also that of dramatist Sbastien-Pirandello. Such multilayered scenarios
continue to open up in Lamour fou that both intrigue and frustrate
the film spectator, in the same way that the Russian doll that Claire
48
Jacques Rivette
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purchases to amuse herself ultimately ensnares her within a seemingly

endless process of opening and reopening, ad infinitum.
Rivette confides that Lamour fou was ultimately a film entirely
about rehearsals/repetitions: the rehearsals of Andromaque, which are
only repetitions of the same words and the same scenes; his [Sbastien] life with Claire that unfolds repetitively, in the same places, with
the same heads, at the same bistrots where the two go twice or three
times,... (qtd. in Simsolo 88). Indeed, the metaphor of the mirror
determines the relation of repetition and difference that exists between
film formats (16 mm and 35 mm), spaces (inside and outside the theater), characters (scripted and nonscripted), directors (TV and theater/
theater and film/film and TV), and stories (Andromaque and Lamour
fou). Sbastiens role as director at times mirrors that of Labarthe, for
he remarks to Labarthe after having seen the rushes that he finds the
production to be too directed, too manipulated (which could refer
either to his perception of his own role as a theater director or to the
role played by Labarthe, who is also directing a production). Moreover,
Rivettes role is likewise mirrored in that of his alter ego Sbastien, who
claims in the course of the same conversation with Labarthe that he
finds himself to be too manipulating, later confiding to his assistant
Michle that he rejects the role of the metteur en scne papa who
feeds actors their ideas (without doubt a veiled reference to Rivettes
newfound willingness to allow actors the freedom to improvise during
the shoot). Even the intermission that begins and ends with a dissolve
of two empty chairs on the theater set divides the film into two halves
that mirror each other.
Finally, the couples separate psyches come to reduplicate each other
when, in the second half of the film, the madness that invades Claire
and that silences her finally overtakes Sbastien. This transmutation
commences in the scene where Claire rediscovers her voice when she
witnesses her own self-abnegation mirrored in his. After an evening out
at a familiar bistro, Claire expresses to Sbastien her intention to leave
him. Voiceless, Sbastien simply stands before her and begins to lacerate the shirt he is wearing with a razor blade. As it becomes apparent
that he is out of control and means to cut all the clothes in his wardrobe
into shreds, Claire, perceptibly troubled, repeats in quiet desperation,
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Stop, Sbastien, stop! and thus assumes the therapeutic role toward
him that he had previously played with her. Their shifting interaction
recalls the character dynamic in Ingmar Bergmans Persona (1966) in
which a famous stage actress starring in Electra, Elizabeth Vogler (Liv
Ullmann), is struck dumb following a psychosomatic illness, and her
caretaker, Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), then speaks for both of them
while she cares for her companion during her convalescence.
Sbastien and Claire, formerly sequestered in separate spaces of
work and play, respectively, finally reunite in the apartment where they
enclose themselves for two days. Laughing hysterically, they huddle in
bed and phone the theater, making up the entirely believable story that
Sbastien has decided to take time off to rethink the play. Like truant
children, they both don matching black bowler hats and draw largerthan-lifesized portraits of Claire on the wall above their bed. Claire
impulsively decides to cut these out and then declares triumphantly,
Each has his own work to do, in his own time! As the two cradle each
other, rocking back and forth, boundaries between their psyches begin to
blur. Bit by bit, Sbastiens mock-historical description of Andromaque
is reduced to gibberish as prerecorded sounds of the surf and waves
crashing around them obliterate his words. Claires elegiac voiceover
narration retrieved from audiotape supersedes his discussion of the
play, when it inaugurates a montage sequence in which black intervals
punctuate successive still images of the lovers intertwined bodies framed
from diverse angles. She affirms, Were like fishes. We pass each other
and meet. Then, we sleep. Early morning, late morning. Were there.
In this voiceover recitation, Claire and Sbastiens struggle acquires
an aural dimension by which each attempts to appropriate narrative
agency, each with a measure of success. Through the voice, Claire is
able to imaginatively reenvision her relation with Sbastien in a panoply
of illustrative, oneiric images. Yet, her elusive narration simultaneously
serves as the extension of the audio recording that in the films opening
sequence prompted Sbastiens flashback, and so, sutures the successive,
descriptive images into the films visual presentation of his memory. In
either instance, regardless of which aural perspective predominates to
determine a reading, the sequence remains, as Deschamps points out,
the only representation possible of emotional truth (8586).
50
Jacques Rivette
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Figure 4. Sbastien and Claire in Lamour fou

Photographer Pierre Zucca. Courtesy
of Cocinor and BFI Collections.
Dressed as deranged mountaineers, Claire and Sbastien join forces

during the latter part of the episode when they proceed in the frenzied
spirit of folie deux to chop down a wall in the apartment with an axe.
Totally improvised and unplanned, the event stands apart within a film
based on rehearsals, repetitions, and reduplications. No retakes were
possible, as the space and the decor were literally in tatters afterward.
Ogier insists that she and Kalfon were waiting for Rivette to stop them
and say, Cut! but he refused to intervene, as he was eager to see where
the actors would go on their own (qtd. in Frappat, Secret 140). In a
final crazed gesture, Sbastien tosses his axe directly into the television
screen, which implodes, emitting a brief flash of light and puff of smoke.
This visceral attempt to destroy a medium omnipresent throughout the
production of the play is as inane as it is exhilarating. Rivette has suggested that Claire and Sbastiens zany antics in this sequence recall
those of Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant) and his wife Edwina (Ginger
Rogers), who in Hawkss Monkey Business (1952) ingest a potion that
induces regression and psychically reshapes them as troublesome teens
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(qtd. in Aumont et al. 22). In the lull that follows the exhilaration of autodestructive acts, Sbastien and Claire come together in an exhausted
embrace on the balcony above Rue de Turbigo. This fated moment on
top of the world echoes that of migr gangster Tony Camonte and his
sibling moll Cesca, who in the final stand-off scene in Hawkss Scarface
(1932) similarly reunite in an incestuous embrace, throwing themselves
into a last-ditch effort to fend off the police force that closes in around
their sequestered apartment, as Cesca proclaims, Youre me and Im
you, and its always been that way.
Face to face with her lover, Claire at last understands that they have
played too much and that she no longer wishes to see Sbastien. He
phones the theater to schedule a rehearsal and subsequently returns to
work, where the television crew rejoins him. Andromaque is soon ready
to be performed in full. A slow pan follows Sbastien as he paces from
room to room through an apartment in shambles. The phone rings, and
it is Franoise at the other end who is calling to let him know that Claire
has left him. As Claire waits at the station for her train to depart, the costumed actors at the theater touch up their makeup and anxiously await
Sbastiens arrival. Claire confides to Franoise, I feel that Ive just woken
up. With this final admission, Claires eyes metaphorically open, as she
retrospectively reenvisions the films story from within her perspective
as her daydream. At that very moment, Sbastiens eyes metaphorically
shut, as his recollection of the past initiated by her audio recording has
just commenced back at the flat, reframing the films narrative from within
his perspective as a flashback. In situating the originating moment of
Sbastiens flashback at the films opening rather than at its end, Rivette
invites the spectator to fill in this temporal gap, and in so doing exposes
the films duplicitous narrative logic, which implodes, at last, to offer not a
conclusive ending, but rather an interrogation of personal identity that occurs when memories and daydreams are cut loose and dispersed. Lamour
fou ultimately calls for the murder of conventional vision and, in this way,
aligns itself with Bretons surrealist poetics of love, expressed in his own
ars poetica: Reciprocal love, such as I envisage it, is a system of mirrors
which reflects for me, under the thousand angles that the unknown can
take for me, the faithful image of the one I love, always more surprising
in her divining of my own desire and more gilded with life (93). A final
image of the vacant, white stage seems to wipe away Sbastien and Claires
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Jacques Rivette
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shared past and uncertain future, circling back to the films opening, where
the impatient audience, like the fussy, crying child recorded in synch,
awaits the recommencement of the plays performance. Rivette wryly
concedes, It is a film that wont stop ending. Thats why it lasts so long.
(qtd. in Aumont et al. 26)
| | |
Lasting twelve hours and forty minutes, Out 1: Noli me tangere (Out
1: Touch Me Not; 1970) premiered on September 910, 1971, at the
Maison de la Culture in Le Havre. Attended by a small group of roughly
three hundred spectators who had completed the trek from Paris to the
provinces, this exceptional weekend event resembled a religious pilgrimage, rather than a conventional screening experience. Characterized by
Martin Even, a reviewer for Le Monde, as a Voyage Beyond Cinema,
it would be the films only public projection of the 16 mm unprocessed
color work print (13). There have been quite a few screenings of the
finished print since then, the first of which was at the Rotterdam Film
Festival in February 1989.9 More recently and for the first time in the
United States, the restored, 750-minute version of Out 1: Noli me tangere was screened in its entirety at a complete Rivette retrospective at
the Museum of the Moving Image in New York in December 2006. At
the museums Encore presentation that I attended, the film was shown
to an appreciative, sold-out audience over a two-day weekend in eight
distinctive episodes, with brief breaks between each one. The obvious
care that the museum staff took in their programming of the event reflected their concern to remain true to Rivettes initial conception of the
film that was to have been broadcast on French national television as an
eight-part serial. Sadly, the film was not shown on television at the time
it was made because the ORTF (Office de Radiodiffusion-Tlvision
Franaise) refused to purchase it. Out 1: Noli me tangere was finally
shown as a serial on the Paris Premire cable channel in the early 1990s
after it had been restored.
Rivettes interest in serial form is reflected in his choice of the films
title, which is inspired by an ancient tableau by Giotto entitled The Resurrection (Noli me tangere, 13031306); the tableau that depicts the resurrected Christ between parallel worlds of the living and the dead forms one
part in a cycle of twenty-three scenes from the Life of Christ displayed in

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Paduas Scrovegni Chapel. While Giottos fresco cycle provides a touchstone for the films structure, the initial impetus for Rivettes experiments
with seriality, as Jean-Andr Fieschi has suggested, may have come from
avant-garde composer Pierre Boulez, whose system of total serialization
in Structures for two pianos (book one: 19511952; book two: 1961) had
revolutionized the sound world (875). In 1964, Rivette conducted an
interview with Boulez to explore the possible parallels between the composers method of guided chance and that of the metteur en scne, who
similarly wishes to reconcile chance and composition in the invention of
a kind of labyrinth, or maze, with a number of paths (Alea 31, 29).
In Sonate, que me veux-tu? (1960), Boulez had elaborated at length
on the idea of the maze in the modern work of art, characterizing it as
certainly one of the most considerable advances in Western thought,
... while opposing it to the classical conception of the work as one, a
single object of contemplation or delectation, which the listener finds in
front of him and in relation to which he takes up his position (145). In
the subsequent Cahiers interview with Rivette, Boulez confessed that he
saw the evolution of film form as comparable with that of contemporary
music, which had moved beyond a closed Copernican conception of the
universe to a universe of relative forms where it was perceived to be in
permanent revolution (24, 26). In contradistinction to Western classical music that is opposed to active participation, Boulez viewed aleatory
music as a multiple phenomenon, which permits its listener to understand
a work only by passing through it and following its course with total, active, constructive attention;... (Where Are We 462). Indeed, Boulezs
creation of a labyrinthine network of different versions of works may have
provided Rivette with the inspiration to reedit Out 1: Noli me tangere
to create Out 1: Spectre (1971; released 1974), a substantially different
work that he describes as a different film having its own logic; closer to a
jigsaw or crossword puzzle than was the other, playing less on affectivity,
more on rhymes and contrasts, ruptures and connections, caesurae and
censorship (qtd. in Baby 13). Boulezs radical enterprise of total serialism
no doubt appealed to Rivette, whose films Noli me tangere and Spectre
provide a distinctive alternative to classical continuity style in much the
same manner that Boulezs complex, serialist compositions represent an
alternative to classical tonality.
54
Jacques Rivette
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The prologue of Honor de Balzacs suite of three novellas, Histoire des treize (The Thirteen; 18331835), in which the myth of the
nineteenth-century criminal conspiracy takes shape, provides a point
of departure for the films serial structure comprised of thirteen main
characters. Balzac describes The Thirteen in his prologue: Criminals they
doubtless were, yet none the less were they all remarkable for some one
of the virtues which go to the making of great men, and their numbers
were filled up only from among picked recruits. Finally, that nothing
should be lacking to complete the dark, mysterious romance of their
history, nobody to this day knows who they were (11). While Balzacs
prologue provided Rivette with the historical backcloth and formal parameters for his almost thirteen-hour film, the novelists own use of serial
form may have also served as a source of inspiration. Balzacs celebrated
novel, Le pre goriot, first appeared in serial form in 1834, and little more
than a decade later, Balzac articulated his ambitious plan for a collection
of 144 novels that together were to comprise La comdie humaine. Not
considered a series, per se, La comdie humaine may, nonetheless, have
provided the impetus for Noli me tangere in its combination of multitudes of diverse characters drawn from every stratum of society and in
its attempt to reflect the dramatic shift in cultural values in the wake
of the French Revolution. More than a century later, Noli me tangere
chronicles Paris in April 1970, two years after the cultural revolution of
May 68. Indeed, Rivette subsequently explained that he had hoped the
audience would interpret the film as a postMay 68 reunion of sorts
where it would 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, Sedofsky,
and Adair 22). In Noli me tangere, Rivette relinquishes Balzacs authorial
autonomy, however, which is evident in the novelists ability to draw a
realistic psychological portrait of those characters who inhabit the city.
Instead, Rivette introduces the element of chance into his film, allowing
each actor to invent the social context for his/her own character and, while
filming, develop this character as he/she wished. In addition, the actors
were kept in the dark during the shoot as to what the others were doing.
In inflicting such an unorthodox method on his actors, Rivette follows the
precepts of Boulez, who had insisted that the aleatory work, like a railway
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station, must keep a certain number of passageways open by means of

precise dispositions in which chance represents the points, which can
be switched at the last moment (Sonate 146). Like a pointsman in
the midst of a mazelike assemblage, Rivette allowed chance meetings
to proceed between characters, often at unanticipated moments, which
would thereby produce unexpected outcomes. In this manner, the film,
like the aleatory work, permitted the element of surprise.
An exemplary illustration of Boulezs method of guided chance,
the films labyrinthine evolution ultimately would present all its participantsthe actor, the director, and the spectator alikewith different
pathways to follow. Noli me tangere opens with the dual stories of rival
theater troupes (Michle Moretti in the role of Lili, who is performing Aeschyluss Seven Against Thebes with her collective, and Michael
Lonsdale as the director Thomas, who is rehearsing Aeschyluss Prometheus Bound). Aeschyluss plays staged in the film originally required
a chorus: the Chorus of Oceanides orchestrates the action of Prometheus
Bound, as the Chorus of the Theban Women reflects the dramatic action in Seven Against Thebes. In classical Greek dramaturgy, members
of the chorus encircle the principal characters of the drama; their ritual
recitations build gradually to a feverish, bacchic frenzy, where movement and gesture become integral to the drama (Matheson 14355).
The sonority of Aeschylean poetry, which the chorus accentuates in a
succession of long and short intonations, is at least as important as the
words themselves. French playwright Paul Claudel, who translated Aeschyluss Oresteia, compared the Aeschylean chorus with a living harp
(410). In Noli me tangere, however, filmed rehearsals present delicate
slivers of Aeschyluss plays in piecemeal. In this manner, Rivette strips
Aeschylean verse of its dramatic signification and divests the actors gestures and movements of significance. What remains in the film are empty
signswords, gestures, movementsremoved from their Aeschylean
context, that stand in the present tense of the film as the signs of residual
theatricality, a theatrical remainder with meaning factored out.
It is through Aeschylus that Rivette rejoins dramaturge Antonin Artaud, who was an adaptor of the Greek dramatists. Artaud prefaces his
adaptation of Senecas Thyestes, claiming, All the Great Myths of the
Past dissimulate pure forces and affirms that he wants to attempt, by
means of an adaptation of a Mythic tragedy, to express their natural forces
56
Jacques Rivette
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Figure 5. Lili and her collective in Out 1:

Noli me tangere.
Photographer Pierre Zucca.
Courtesy of Cocinor and BFI Collections.
on the stage and to deliver the theatre to its true goal and calling (qtd.
in Sellin 36). Artaud used Greek drama to restore to the theater its ritual
dimension and so liberate it from its servitude to psychology. Pointing to
the connection between Artaud and Rivette, Lauren Sedofsky observes:
Like Artaud, Rivette has created a nontheological space (Derrida),
which admits the tyranny of neither text nor auteur. It is a space in which
the actors grammar of gesture and voice may play creatively without
impediment (Rosenbaum, Sedofsky, and Adair 19). Artaudian theatricality informs the first three hours or so of Noli me tangere, in which
Rivette moves back and forth between long rehearsal sequences, while
the spectator, like the members of each troupe, experiences the sonority
and incantatory qualities of language, and thus must question the status
of the meaningful, spoken word. The filmed rehearsals of Aeschylus accomplish a fusion of sound and sense, of theatrical and profilmic space,
and thus may be understood, in Boulezs terms, as no more and no less
than an attempt to organize delirium (Sound, Word, Synthesis 182).

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The protracted temporal dimension of the thirteen-hour version

is associated from the outset with its intensive focus on theater. This
feeling of time created in the first three hours in which almost nothing happens, Rivette affirms, distinguishes the experience of Noli me
tangere from that of Spectre, which was treated much more as a fiction
about certain characters (qtd. in Rosenbaum, Sedofsky, and Adair 22).
To condense time, Rivette relinquishes episodic form in Spectre. Thus,
black-and-white outtakes do not introduce the successive episodes, as in
Noli me tangere, but instead are scattered throughout the four-hour version. Moreover, Rivette adds sound to black-and-white stills in Spectre,
so that they generate what he describes as a meaningless frequency,
as though transmitted by a machine, sometimes in relation to what has
already been seen or what will be seen, and sometimes with no relation at all (qtd. in Rosenbaum, Sedofsky, and Adair 23). Assailing the
audience with seemingly random images and automated sounds, Rivette
sought to interrupt[s] the general dream of the characters in Spectre
(qtd. in Hughes). Rivette does retain the long versions fictional core,
however, to produce a shorter film, which he describes as much tighter
and much more compelling than he had initially anticipated (qtd. in
Eisenschitz, Fieschi, and Gregorio 47).
In Spectre, it is the characters Colin (Jean-Pierre Laud) and Frdrique (Juliet Berto) and their escalating involvement with the machinations
of the Thirteen that take precedence from the outset. Colin makes his
initial appearance in both versions careening through sidewalk cafs,
while attempting to pass himself off as a deaf-mute. The modulations of
his harmonica replace words, as he moves from table to table passing out
greeting cards marked Message of Destiny to solicit donations from
the clientele. Colin becomes implicated in the intrigues of the Thirteen
almost immediately when a cryptic message is passed to him in a caf
by Marie (Hermine Karagheuz), a member of Lilis collective. To crack
the code of the conspiratorial web at work around him, he rummages
through his collection of novels and falls upon The Thirteen. He scrawls
the number 13 on the blackboard alongside the authors name, Balzac. Jean-Pierre Laud/Colins position as a student at the blackboard
and his obsessive engagement with Balzac recall the actors earlier role
as the preoccupied adolescent Antoine Doinel, who in Truffauts Les
quatre cent coups (The Four Hundred Blows) sets his bedroom on fire
58
Jacques Rivette
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with a candle-lit shrine to Balzac. The characters name Colin opens

up yet another field of references, invoking Balzacs mutable character
Jacques Collin (a.k.a. Vautrin, Trompe-la-Mort, Abb Carlos Herrera)
who in Splendeurs et misres des courtisanes is also a thief, of sorts. While
filching from Balzac to create his own character and story, Colin often
uses words to achieve a dislocation of realityrather than the illusion
of reality constructed in the classic readerly nineteenth-century novel
(Ionesco 26). The spectator is forced to use the film text as the character
Colin uses Balzacas a pretext for the purposes of discovery.
As the mystery deepens, Colin and Frdrique both find their way to
the elusive Pauline-milies (Bulle Ogier) hippie boutique. Posing as a
journalist from Paris Jour, Colin first gains access to the out-of-the-way
boutique, Langle du hasard (The Crossroads of Chance), which serves
as a front for an underground newspaper that could be allied with the
Thirteen. He suspects as much and begins to frequent the boutique,
where he falls under the spell of the charismatic Pauline-milie. At the
point where Colins inquiry virtually derails because of the exigencies of
courtship, Frdrique takes up the baton. She discovers the Thirteen,
their plans for a new city, and their cover provided by the Crossroads
of Chance from personal correspondence filched from the desk of an
unsuspecting chess player, tienne (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze), whom
she has playfully hoodwinked. When her subsequent attempts to blackmail this chess player and the lawyer Lucie (Franoise Fabian) using
the letters fail, she makes her way to the Crossroads of Chance where,
disguised as a dapper young hustler, she attempts to shake down Paulinemilie and later succeeds, exchanging the stolen letters for cash.
Whereas the fictional center remains very similar in the short and
long versions, the final hours of Noli me tangere are largely given over to
long sequences, which place on display the disintegration and, in certain
instances, the demise of a character, as in the case of Frdrique, who
in the long version is gunned down in the street.10 A dreamlike logic
would seem to determine the conclusion of the thirteen-hour version
when the locus of action inexplicably shifts from the city to the beach.
Like sleepwalkers, the Paris denizens migrate in succession, one after
the next, to the haunted seaside villa of Aubade, as if in search of a
dawn serenade (the translation of aubade), a sanctuary in the wake
of an apocalyptic misadventure.11 Perhaps the most disquieting moment

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on the beach occurs when Thomas and several members of his troupe
retreat to the shoreline where they commence a chant, the residue of a
theatrical rehearsal gone awry. Dazed, Thomas collapses, crying at first
but then laughing, until he at last falls silent. The prominence of the
beach in the closing moments of Noli me tangere recalls its import within
the final iconic shot of Antoine Doinel/Laud in Les quatre cents coups,
where, as Fiona Handyside points out, the seascape marks the very final
edge of the nation and so intensifies the characters aimlessness and
lack of direction (148).
Left behind in the deserted industrial wasteland of Paris, Colin must
reconcile himself to the apparent dissolution of the Thirteen and his
failed romance with Pauline-milie. In a lengthy improvised sequence
in Noli me tangere, the camera records Colin as he confides his woes to
the writer Sarah (Bernadette Lafont), who before she returns to Aubade
gives him a magic charm, an Eiffel Tower key chain, to console him.
Colin slowly walks away, murmuring, Pauline, Pauline . . . and later
tries to conjure up her love, flicking the charm so that it swings around
above his hand, as he counts to see whether it rotates thirteen times.
When this fails, he drops the trinket and directly addresses the camera,
muttering, It didnt work. In Spectre, the decontextualized close-up
of Colin flicking the Eiffel Tower trinket is all that remains. It is repositioned at the close of the four-hour film where it might be understood
as a wry allusion to the inadequacy of utopian political groups and their
mantras to inspire revolution. Yet such an allegorical interpretation
could be seen to offer a seductively patent conclusion. The final image
is designed to tempt the spectator who, like Colin, may feel compelled
to solve this textual jigsaw or crossword puzzle, for as Morrey and
Smith have observed in their discussion of games and play in Rivettes
films, Spectre plays with the audience, ... in the sense that one plays
with a toy, or a cat with a mouse. Authorial control and superiority is
established and constant (128). Given this, we might revisit the final
emblematic image of Spectre and read it, alternatively, as a reflexive
authorial commentary on the inability of the reedited four-hour version
to reproduce the more profound moral stance of Noli me tangere, a film
that in its respect for durations rejoins the tradition of realism found in
the cinema of Renoir and Rouch insofar as it refuses to impose meaning
but instead allows for the element of chance.
60
Jacques Rivette
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An orderly anarchist in the tradition of Boulez, Rivette desires

to confront the audience and transport it from its habitual notion of a
film where characters and events are readily comprehensible and actions are governed by a deterministic causality (Jameux 270). Taken
together, Noli me tangere and Spectre contribute equally to the kind
of cinema Rivette had called for in the aftermath of May 68, a cinema
that would provide at least an experience, something which makes
the film transform the viewer, who has undergone something through
the film, who is no longer the same after having seen the film (qtd. in
Aumont et al. 37). For Rivette, this experience is at times incantatory
and violent, associated with Artaudian theatrical aesthetics and Greek
dramaturgy. At other times, this experience is silent and dreamlike, an
effect accentuated by uncanny duplications and multiplications (doubled
scenes, doubled theater and theater/film directors, doubled theatrical
spaces and scripts) that are endlessly mirrored in (and by) Spectre.12 In
permanent revolution, the serial films Noli me tangere and Spectre
draw the audience into their imaginative sphere, while providing the
final trace of a transitional decade.
Sounding Out the Operatic: Les filles du feu (Duelle
and Norot), Merry-Go-Round, and Le Pont du Nord
Rivette reconceptualized the notion of the film serial in the mid-1970s,
when he conceived of Les filles du feu (Girls of Fire), a cycle of four films.
He borrowed his film tetralogys title from Grard de Nervals publication Les filles du feu in which the celebrated poem El Desdichado (The
Disinherited) appeared in 1854. That Rivette borrows his title from this
nineteenth-century poet is highly significant, as Nervalian verse resonates with the musicality of magic formulas, their power of suggestion
surpassing their intelligible content. The everyday world and memory are
transfigured through dream in Nerval; the poets memory is thus able to
move beyond temporal boundaries, and his individual past merges with
that of all humanity to proclaim a mystical future. Such preoccupations
clearly provide the impetus for the cycle of films whose official title
submitted to C.N.C. (Centre national de la cinmatographie), Scnes
de la vie parallle (Scenes from a Parallel Life), reflects Rivettes intent
to look beyond those things linked, either closely or distantly, to what

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was going on in France at the time (qtd. in Daney and Narboni 327:
13). In recasting the chimerical Nervalian dreamscape in Les filles du
feu, Rivette turns his glance from the conservative backlash of the 1970s,
which had been put into place with the election of Giscard dEstaing,
whose politics provided the French citizenry with a modern and moderate alternative to Gaullism. Rather than focusing on contemporary
history, Rivette constructs a mythological universe in Les filles du feu, a
musical landscape inhabited by ghosts and goddesses.
Clearly, the cycle represents the culmination of Rivettes dream of
a cinema showing continuous programs, which was initiated in Out 1:
Noli me tangere, and in some sense can be viewed as a supplement to
the unfinished serial, Out 1, 2, 3 ... Rivette confirms that each of the
four films in the cycle was to have represented a different genrea
love story, a film of the fantastic, a western, a musical comedyand that
certain characters were to appear from film to film in different guises
(Daney and Narboni 32324: 48). Unfortunately, the four films that
Rivette envisioned were never completed; however, he did finish filming
the fantastic thriller Duelle (Duel; 1976) and Norot (Northwest Wind;
1976), which were to serve as the second and third parts, respectively,
of the four-part film series. Duelle is a fantastic tale in which phantom
goddesses move freely through Paris locales that are transformed into
magical spacesfrom modern hotel to metro station, from an aquarium to a dance studio, from a deserted park at dawn to a spectacular
nightclub. Sun and moon goddesses Viva (Bulle Ogier) and Leni (Juliet
Berto), respectively, launch an investigation into the whereabouts of a
missing Lord Christie, and their quest results in double murders and
mysterious duels. Though originally conceptualized as a western, Norot
returns to an uncanny terrain of medieval myth and island piracy where
Celtic goddess of the sun Giulia (Bernadette Lafont) and goddess of
the moon Morag (Graldine Chaplin) enter into treacherous intrigues
that end in a macabre duel to the death.
The fourth and final film of the cycle never went into production.
Eduardo de Gregorio, the co-scenarist of Duelle and Norot, recalls it
as a comedy set in a palace featuring Anna Karina, the Italian Walter
Chiari, and Jean Marais in the role of a Catholic cardinal (qtd. in Frappat,
Secret 152). The film that was to have formed the first part of the cycle,
Marie et Julien (Marie and Julien; 1975), remained unfinished. Rivette
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had only shot several scenes of it before he was forced to abandon the
set and the shoot altogether, succumbing to a state of nervous exhaustion. The film scripted by Gregorio, Maril Parolini, and Claire Denis
was to have featured Albert Finney in the role of a solitary man who is
haunted by the memory of a woman whose identical double, played by
Leslie Caron, seduces him. The recent release of Histoire de Marie et
Julien (The Story of Marie and Julien; 2003) is a retooling of this old
project from the 1970s.
In a 1981 interview with critics Serge Daney and Jean Narboni,
Rivette revealed that he conceived of uniting his cycle of films through
a progression of complication linked to the intervention of music on
action (qtd. in Cahiers 32324: 48). Rivette has never elaborated on the
precise type of musical rapport he envisioned, yet he insisted that this
experience of real sound and improvised music is something I would have
liked to pursue; we commenced this practice with a certain reticence in
Duelle and Norot; we will go further in the fourth (qtd. in Daney and
Narboni 327: 18). Although Merry-Go-Round (19771978; release 1983)
is not considered part of the unfinished tetralogy, the film takes shape
through its relationship to the music of Barre Phillips and John Surman.
The film relies on musicians improvisation, as do Duelle and Norot, yet
in Merry-Go-Round the musicians recital occurs in a different time and
space (and thus in different shots) from the time and space of the actors
performance, thereby creating a unique perceptual experience unlike that
of the other two films. While this formal feature sets it apart from those
in the cycle, Merry-Go-Round is informed by the genre conventions that
shaped Rivettes overall conception of the tetralogy. Its story primarily
relies on the codes of the detective film and the road movie. The film
opens as two young drifters, Lo (Maria Schneider) and Ben (Joe Dallessandro), turn up at Charles de Gaulle airport to await the arrival of a
third party known to both of them, lisabeth (Danile Ggauff), who is
not only Los sister but also Bens girlfriend. They exchange notes and
discover that lisabeth has arranged a rendezvous with both of them, and
so are concerned when she fails to appear. The two commence the search
for the missing lisabeth, which takes the form of a rambling odyssey
through the environs of Paris. Merry-Go-Round closes, as do the other
two films in the cycle, with a duel that occurs within a magnetic field. In
each of the three films, the improvisation of musiciansJean Wiener on

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piano in Duelle, the Cohen-Solal brothers on drums and flute in Norot,

and Barre Phillips and John Surman on bass and clarinet in Merry-GoRoundcomplement the actors improvisational style. A fraught attempt
to reinvent multiple genres within an experimental form, Merry-GoRound was not released until 1983 and received sparse attention from
critics. The films innovative use of improvised music, however, provided
the impetus for Rivettes subsequent work in such landmark films as Le
Pont du Nord (1982).
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Throughout the decade of the 1970s, Rivette is concerned to accord a

certain import to music in the production of meaning and, in this way,
he moves his art into the realm of operatic dramaturgy. Of the films
that comprise the cycle, Norot is perhaps the most straightforwardly
operatic, the most indebted to opera in its conception. Norot represents
Rivettes attempt to bring together the three artsmusic, dance, and
poetryand in this respect the film bears resemblance to the composite
work of art, the Gesamtkunstwerk, which in Richard Wagners terms
becomes the mutual compact of the egoism of the three related arts
(5). Rivette achieves an effective interplay between the three arts in
his film; yet music does not underscore the words in the manner of
Wagnerian opera but follows a parallel path, creating an independent
adjacent atmosphere that makes its own comment on the actions. Film
music has more often followed the Wagnerian concept, underscoring
the script to create atmosphere and build emotional climaxes (Kernodle
17). Rather than using music to establish a linear, oriented dramatic
time, Rivette uses music in Norot to instate the predominance of lyrical timethat of an impressionist opera. Rivette uses music to frustrate
meaning, creating a film that slips from the reality principle associated
with the temporal progression of narrative events into the pleasure principle elicited through music.
It is through operaspecifically, Claude Debussys impressionist
work Pellas et Mlisandethat Rivette remembers his friend and mentor Jean Cocteau. In 1962 poet and cinaste Cocteau designed the decor
and costumes for the Marseille production of Pellas, which went on
to Metz and Strasbourg, and then in 1963 replaced the centenary production at the Opra-Comique (Nichols 162). Cocteaus designs were
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modeled on the original Jusseaume and Ronsin designs produced for

the operas premire performance in 1902. Shortly before his death
in 1963, Cocteau disclosed plans for a filmed version of Debussys opera that was, unfortunately, never produced (Touzot 403). During this
time, Rivette enjoyed a particularly close, even filial, relationship with
Cocteau. Indeed, Rivette disclosed in a personal interview in 1999 that
Cocteau was the guilty one whose concern and camaraderie brought
him to a career in filmmaking. In this context, we may be tempted to
characterize Rivettes film as the posthumous completion of Cocteaus
final projectthe opera-film of Pellas et Mlisande. At the least, Norot
discloses the legacy of a theatrical and operatic style passed on to Rivette
from Cocteau and, ultimately, from Maeterlinck and Debussy.
The story of Norot is not based solely on the opera Pellas et Mlisande. The film also announces itself as an adaptation of Elizabethan
dramatist Cyril Tourneurs play, The Revengers Tragedy (1607), and
as such, must be considered as a central work within any discussion of
theatricality in the films of Rivette.13 Black title screens divide the film
into five acts, underscoring its source in Tourneurs play. Rivettes choice
of Tourneur is highly significant, for it is through this revenge tragedy
that Rivette pays tribute to Artaud. The Revengers Tragedy was among
the plays Artaud most admired, and he had specifically planned a production of it at Thtre Alfred Jarry in the 19271928 season. Rivette
rejoins Artaud through Tourneur, whose themes of revenge and betrayal
are especially well suited to his engagement with conspiracy narrative
and with theatrical or filmic fictions as forms of conspiracy. From this
perspective, the spectator is invited to read Norot as the realization of
both Cocteaus and Artauds unfinished film and theater productions,
respectively. While the story of Norot is prismatic, as it is informed by
the multiple intertextual sources, it does conform to classical Aristotelian form when viewed from a singular perspective of theatrical style.
Beyond its contribution of character motivation, decor, and script, The
Revengers Tragedy provides Norot with an Aristotelian dramatic form,
thus determining a beginning, a climax, and a conclusion. Although
the film adheres to Aristotelian tripartite form, it is not driven by the
dynamics of Aristotelian dramaturgy found in Tourneurs play. Rather
than the arrow of teleology of the Aristotelian drama, in Norot we have
a field of intertextual forces where the intersection of theater and opera

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styles disturbs stable signification, leaving moments of incoherence in

the construction of meaning. The synopsis of the film that follows will
show the manner in which the film story adheres to the singular stylistic
register of Tourneurs play, focusing on those moments where film and
play overlap.
The film begins on a deserted beach set on A small island in the
Atlantic, off the coast of a larger one. Like a compass, the films title Norot, which translates Northwest Wind, points to the films geographical
coordinates vis--vis the central locale of Paris. Sounds of the ocean surf
blend with those of a womans voice mourning the death of her brother
Shane (a respectful nod to George Stevens 1953 western, Shane). In
this opening scene, we first meet Morag (Graldine Chaplin), who is lying prostrate on the beach, bent over Shanes body. Framed against an
unforgiving horizon, a disconsolate Morag declares her desire for revenge
and then proceeds to recite a passage from the opening of Tourneurs
play that mirrors the revenge theme proclaimed in her opening monologue: O thou goddess of the palace, mistress of mistresses/to whom
the costly-perfumd people pray (I.iii, lines 67). As she speaks these
lines, she assumes the theatrical role of the Revenger Vindice, who at this
point in the play dons a disguise that will enable him to seek revenge in
secret for his mistress death. Like Vindice, Morag will engage in complex
schemes of revenge to avenge Shanes murder.
Tourneurs play motivates Morags movements in Norot. Like Vindice, Morag seeks revenge, and so attempts to infiltrate the court presided over by Giulia (Bernadette Lafont), the female counterpart to
Tourneurs philandering Duke. Giulia not only governs the court but the
coastline as well. Along with her lieutenant Arno (Anne-Marie Reynaud),
she leads her band of pirates who carry on occasional looting and raids.
Thus, Giulia understands the potential for disloyalty and fears imminent
betrayal from her lovers Ludovico (Larrio Ekson) and Jacob (Humbert
Balsan), who are trying to discover where her treasure is hidden. She
confesses this fear to her confidante at court Erika (Kika Markham),
who later will betray Giulia and serve as Morags accomplice. Facilitating Morags efforts to infiltrate the court, Erika encourages Giulia to
hire a bodyguard and suggests Morag. Morag and Erika then conspire,
attempting to sabotage a pirate attack led by Giulia, which succeeds in
spite of their efforts. Consequently, they seek their own bizarre brand
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of revenge, secretly staging rehearsals for a performance of the play, The

Revengers Tragedy. Morag and Erikas scheming activities culminate in
an apocalyptic duel between Morag and Giulia on the ramparts.
If Tourneurs revenge drama motivates Morags actions, the cinema,
specifically Fritz Langs Moonfleet (1955), motivates Giulias and provides
the impetus behind the pirate subplot. The films opening images of the
Dorsetshire seacoast mirror those of Norot. Waves crashing over austere
cliffs greet an orphaned boy who has arrived in Moonfleet in search of
his mothers lost love Jeremy Fox (Stewart Granger), a jaded rou who
has since become the leader of a local smuggling ring. The dark world of
intrigues that Fox inhabits provides the backdrop for the construction of
Giulias character, a ruler who, like Fox, oversees smugglers stratagems
and colludes in schemes of high seas piracy. While Giulias militant role
and the associated images of swashbuckling piracy are largely derived
from those of Moonfleet, Langs depiction of smugglers as a grizzly group
of hardened thugs diverges from Rivettes portrayal of the pirates, who
in Norot more closely resemble trapeze artists or acrobats, moving with
grace and agility, swinging and spinning from hanging ropes that could
be mistaken for circus slacklines. The Cohen-Solal brothers dissonant
rhythms enhance the macabre carnivalesque ambiance. In Norot, as
Morrey and Smith observe, [t]he state of being a pirate is a kind of
dance . . . (161). In Moonfleet, piracy represents the state of the soul,
the final temptation to abandon all scruples for easy rewards. At the core
of pirate lore is the discovery of lost treasure. In each film, this discovery
precipitates a turning point: in Moonfleet, the retrieval of the missing
diamond of local legend affords Fox a final moment of moral redemption
that ends in his death alone, adrift on a quiet sea, whereas in Norot, the
discovery of Giulias treasure is the prelude to a final dancelike duel to
the death between the deities.
This decisive duel between Giulia and Morag marks the end of a
murderous masque on the ramparts, which is most obviously an adaptation of the corresponding scene from The Revengers Tragedy. In
the masque sequence that includes spectacle, instrumental music, and
dance, Rivette clearly transposes Tourneurs drama, creating a far more
Artaudian scene. Yet at the same time, the mise-en-scne of the masque
draws on Celtic symbolism. Maurice Maeterlinck, author of the play
Pellas et Mlisande, had been inspired by Celtic legend. The masque

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is infused with Celtic imagery and myth, opening with an image of black
clouds passing over a full moon, an image demarcating the close of the
forty-day festival period during which goddesses can appear on earth
and converse with mortals. The magical temporal zone of the masque
is based on the mythic Celtic battle Samhain, which Miranda Green
has described as a liminal, dangerous occasion when time and space
are suspended, and the barriers between the supernatural and earthly
worlds are temporarily dissolved (44). Thus, the final duel sequence of
Norot does not simply demarcate narrative closure within the register
of theatrical style, for the rules governing cinematic time and space
are suspended, as montage series are periodically replicated and later
replayed as red or black-and-white duplications. The uncanny, mirroring
effect produced by the repetition of images creates the highly fantastic dimension of the masque, which entails the collapse of boundaries
between supernatural and earthly worlds. Shifting into their respective
roles as Celtic goddesses of sun and moon, Giulia and Morag remain
poised throughout the masque between two worldsthat of humans
and that of the spirits.
Maeterlincks fascination with Celtic myth is evident in the composition and appearance of characters in Pellas et Mlisande. Opera
historian Richard Langham Smith observes that Celtic imagery had
Figure 6. The final duel between

Giulia and Morag in Norot.
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provided the inspiration for Maeterlincks character Mlisande, adding

that even the spelling of the other characters namesYniold, Arkl, and
Golaudadded Celtic color (45, 15). According to Smith, Maeterlinck
had been especially taken by the visual art of second-generation preRaphaelites Sir Edward Burne-Jones (18331898) and Walter Crane
(18451915), drawing this comparison: The haunting figures of BurneJoness pallid damsels, their dilated eyes on the verge of tears, distilling
the worlds sorrow, were clearly implicated in the genesis of Mlisande
(4). Rivettes representation of Morag draws heavily on Maeterlincks
pre-Raphaelite figure Mlisande. Both the mise-en-scne of Norots
opening sequence and composition of the character Morag bear striking
similarity to the corresponding scene from Pellas et Mlisande. As the
opera opens, we meet Golaud, prince of Allemonde, who hears sobbing
and turns to discover the mysterious Mlisande crying by the waters
edge. Mlisandes origins remain unknown both to herself as well as to
the spectator; like Morags inexplicable appearance on the shoreline,
both characters are enigmas by design. Mlisandes musical motif is
soft, calm, and slightly sad, as is the melancholy flute refrain that defines
Morag in this scene. On the surface, the capacity of Rivettes characters
to seek revenge and persist in diabolical schemes places them closer to
those of Tourneur and Lang; however, their underlying power resides
in their capacity to convey the atmosphere of dreamlike incertitude that
pervades Debussys opera.
It seems useful briefly to review the plot of Pellas before examining the similarities between it and Rivettes film. The opera opens with
Golauds discovery of Mlisande weeping. Unable to discover who she
is or where she is from, Golaud convinces her to follow him. Sometime
after her marriage to Golaud, Mlisande seeks relief from the gloomy,
dark environs of the castle and retreats to its seaward side in search
of light. She is joined there by Pellas, Golauds younger half-brother.
Pellas later brings Mlisande to the well where he comes to escape
the midday heat. Mlisande begins to play with Golauds wedding ring,
throwing it into the air, but suddenly, the ring falls into the well and
is lost. Terrified of Golauds wrath, Mlisande lies to him, telling him
that her ring fell off in a grotto by the sea. Pellas accompanies her
to the sea cove, where they pretend to search for the ring, which, of
course, is lost forever. We later find Mlisande seated at the tower

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window of the castle, singing a simple lament. Pellas passes beneath

her window and becomes enmeshed in her hair. Golaud sees them
flirting and becomes jealous. He wanders through the castles cavernous vaults, encouraging Pellas to smell the stench of death from the
underground lake. Anguished, Pellas makes plans to leave the castle
forever, yet before his departure, he decides to meet Mlisande for a
final rendezvous at the well. Hidden in the forest, Golaud sees them
together and strikes Pellas down by the wells edge. Later, we find
Mlisande, who lies dying. Golaud questions her, but she dies quietly,
a tranquil, mysterious creature.
The decor of Norot is unmistakably indebted to Cocteaus decor
from the centenary production of Pellas et Mlisande that gives expression to the poets earnest wish to re-create the original Jusseaume/
Ronsin designs. Indeed, Norot represents the culmination of a chain
of homage, for it is with this film that Rivette pays homage to Cocteaus
Pellas, who, in turn, pays tribute to Debussys production. From the
films scenes of dark forest, grotto, garden, and coast to the interiors of
the castle, resemblances to those of Debussys opera are striking.
While the dreamlike atmosphere of Debussys opera was captured by
the dark and light elements of its mise-en-scne, shadow and light define
two poles of dramatic action in Norot as well. In both film and opera,
landscape elements such as the sun and the moon presage the forces of
destiny. The moonlit grotto is a magic landscape in both film and opera,
which determines the fate of the characters. Like Pellas and Mlisande
in search of Golauds lost ring, Elisa and Ludovico approach the sea cave
in search of Giulias lost treasure. Elisas approach to the grotto seems to
draw on Pellass description of the caves entrance: Lets wait for the
moonlight to break through that big cloud; it will illuminate the entire
grotto and then, we can enter without danger. There are treacherous
spots, and the path is very narrow, between two deep lakes (II, iii, line
179). The films mise-en-scne resembles the operas decor in which the
grotto is draped in blue shadows from moonbeams. The dark and light
symbolism that is so striking in the film is significant for Maeterlinck. In
his essay on Mystic Morality, Maeterlinck uses imagery strikingly reminiscent of that of Pellas and of Norot: We believe we have discovered
a grotto that is stored with bewildering treasure; we come back to the
light of day, and the gems we have brought are falsemere pieces of
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glassand yet does the treasure shine on, unceasingly in the darkness
(qtd. in R. L. Smith 110). Indeed, in Norot the treasure discovered by
Ludovico and Elisa illuminates the dark grotto with its red radiant light.
The sea cave scenes from both Norot and Pellas profit from a dreamlike atmosphere in which a poetic moment is grafted onto the dramatic,
producing in both an instantaneous translucence.
Rivette clearly borrows his symbolism not only from Maeterlinck but
also from Lang, for whom the sea is similarly associated with past and future journeys toward and away from the destiny of a patriarchal fiefdom.
In both films and in the opera, the sea is viewed as a source of mystery, an
agent of destiny that brought the innocent child to Moonfleet, Mlisande
to Allemonde, and Morag to the island kingdom. Whereas the sea is a
dark portent in all these texts, the space and light of the sea on a clear
day can alternately serve as a source of deliverance. Many scenes from
Norot are structured around elements of space, light, and sea. Several
scenes from the film stand out in this regard, but perhaps the most visually stunning is the sword duel scene between Ludovico and Jacob on the
castle ramparts. Sea, sky, and sun are transformed there into a symbolic
force field brought to life by the instrumental music of the Cohen-Solal
brothers (flute, bass, and percussion), who improvised the entire scene
with utter spontaneity and freedom. The sonic persona of the ocean surf
contributes an additional dimension to the instrumentalists music; in
this manner, the sea itself plays a participatory role in the total musical
performance. Rivette allowed the musicians improvised performance
to provide his actors with inspiration for their stylized movements and
gestures. He found inspiration for music and mise-en-scne in the choreography of American dancer Carolyn Carlson, whose rehearsals he
had attended at the Paris Opra. Rivette describes his experience at the
Opra: Carolyn Carlson and her dancers were doing their exercises,
while at the same time, two musicians, a pianist and a flutist, were there
off to one side: there was the body work, the gymnastics of the dancers,
while these two musicians continued to play, without the least concern
for synchronization, from either group. This rapport pleased me, and I
wanted to achieve it, in a certain way in my four films (qtd. in Daney
and Narboni 327: 18). The asynchronous relation between dramatic action and music that Rivette had admired in Carlson inspires the staging
of music and musicians in the film.

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The sword duel scene stands out for its experimental use of direct
sound, music, and dance. It also contributes to the serial dimension of
the cycle, serving as a segue to Duelle, the second film in the tetralogy.
In this film, a cosmic duel between sun goddess Viva and moon goddess Leni takes place within a labyrinthine maze of mirrors lining the
walls of a contemporary Pigalle dance club, The Rumba. This duel is
precipitated by the seemingly artless gesture of a mortal Pierrot, a role
created for the celebrated dancer Jean Babile, who is, perhaps, best
known for his performance in Roland Petit and Cocteaus ballet in one
act, Le jeune homme et la mort (The Young Man and Death; 1946), a
mimodrama to which Cocteau contributed the libretto. When Pierrot
deftly touches a mirror, it shatters instantly, as do all existing boundaries
between earthly and supernatural worlds. The scene pays homage not
only to Cocteaus ballet but also his surrealist film, Le sang dun pote
(Blood of a Poet; 1930), precisely the moment when the poet moves
through the mirror to an oneiric realm. Rivette does not restrict himself
to film citations from the Coctelian oeuvre, however; indeed, Cocteaus
legacy of theatrical style is everywhere apparent in Duelle, which takes
its inspiration directly from his three-act play, Les chevaliers de la table
ronde (The Knights of the Round Table; 1937).
In the aftermath of his opium cure, Cocteau dreamed the enchanted
universe of Les chevaliers where the parallel realities of the human and
the supernatural struggle for dominance within King Arthurs court,
whose members are possessed by evil doubles governed by the magician Merlin. Perhaps it was in the series of mirror images structuring
the narrative universe of Les chevaliers that Rivette found inspiration
for the mise-en-scne of Duelle, and also the conceptual impetus for
Scnes de la vie parallle. In Duelle, the sun and moon goddesses occupy a magical temporal zone, une quarantaine (forty-day period), as
they search for the ring that will enable them to remain on the earth;
whereas in Les chevaliers, Queen Guinevere and those at the court
dwell in a dim twilight where there is no difference between night
and day, as they search for this inexplicable phenomenon, that is the
Grail, which left us (261). Duelle not only reflects the symbolism and
structure of Cocteaus play but also directly cites characters lines from
it. Perhaps the most powerful instance of this occurs at the films close,
when Pierrots sister Lucie (Hermine Karagheuz), who has come into
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possession of the ring, demonstrates that she has the last word when
she recites to the covetous moon goddess Leni the magician Merlins
demented spell, two plus two no longer equal four/ all the walls can fall
away, and then the enchanted numbers, 7. 8. 9. 5. 3. 6. 2. Both mortal
and moon goddesses seek deliverance as they subsequently vanish from
the twilight world of the quarantaine into darkness beneath the roar of
the metro, an enigmatic moment that recalls those occasioned by the
magicians verses within the enchanted landscape of Les chevaliers.
Rivettes invocation of Les chevaliers de la table ronde in Duelle not
only reflects his enduring preoccupation with the relation between theater
and cinema but might also be viewed as part of a personal response that
culminates in Norot, a tribute to the legacy of poet-cinaste Cocteau.
In this transposition of Debussys opera, Rivette explores the legacy of
operatic style, which determines the parameters of personal and generic
recollection in the film. In Norot, he transforms a closed memory associated with operatic ritual into an open memory, the singular experience
of the stage into a universal one. Just as opera ensures the spectators
centripetal movement toward interiority and the imaginary of the past,
film encourages a concurrent centrifugal, exploratory movement directed
toward the world and the present (Moindrot 20). The essence of mystery
and ambiguity found in Pellas and captured in Norot remains consistent
with Rivettes early theoretical speculations, when he affirmed that an ontological mystery forms the essence of cinema and of all the arts. The tone
of Norot that intentionally maintains a sense of mystery is attributable,
in part, to Rivettes theoretical convictions; the films fantastic dimension
created through verse and music is inspired by Pellas, Debussys opera
of uncertainty.
| | |
Music and movement inspire the opening scene of Le Pont du Nord

(1982), in which we encounter a young woman, Baptiste (Pascale Ogier),
entering Paris on her motorbike. Following her circular movement
through an intersection, the camera frames her point of view to reveal an
army of lions appearing before her. Astor Piazzollas Argentinean tango,
which Rivette situates somewhere between the music of a bordello
and that of a church, connects the series of statues with the cameras
movement to produce a whirlwind (qtd. in Daney and Narboni 327: 11).

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Following the films release, Marguerite Duras remarked to Rivette,

Listening to your film, this is how I see it (my italics, 15). A folk song
derived from a legend from the Middle Ages inspired the films title.
The legend recounts the dire fate of disobedient children who, having
disregarded their mothers wishes, attend a ball on the Pont du Nord.
When the bridge collapses into the river, the children all drown, providing justification for the curse, Such is the fate of obstinate children
(Duras and Rivette 16).
Although Rivette has never confirmed his intent, I personally regard
Le Pont du Nord as the final film within a trilogy, which includes Paris
nous appartient in 61, Noli me tangere in 71, and the aforementioned
in 82, in which each successive film takes the pulse of the city at the
close of the preceding decade. Of the three, Le Pont du Nord provides not only the most pessimistic but also graphically orchestrated
representation of political conspiracy within the city. Rivette returns
to the terrors and pleasures of the contemporary cityscape in Le Pont
du Nord, casting his glance once more over a Paris that was still in the
grip of Giscardianism (Rivette regrets that the film was released after
the decisive election of May 1981 when Franois Mitterrand and the
Socialist Party assumed power). The film might be read as either a political allegory or hailed as a modern-day ballad, which chronicles the
perambulations of its two errant heroines, former prisoner Marie Lafe
(Bulle Ogier) and her young cohort, Baptiste. The two appear within
a mythic, timeless Paris, each gravitating to the other in a courageous
attempt to combat those forces that menace them. Marie, haunted
by her recent imprisonment that was the result of her former life as a
terrorist, remains claustrophobic. Rivette came up with the idea of the
characters claustrophobia to accommodate the shortage of funds available to shoot interiors, as the C.N.C. had refused Rivette funding for Le
Pont du Nord no less than three times. Indomitable on her motorbike
and armed with the dancelike movements of karate, Baptiste battles
the menacing armies of Max, mysterious enemies who can appear
at will in the form of lions in the streets and public squares. Baptiste
comments, Max are everywhere. They watch everything that moves.
As in Paris nous appartient, an ominous conspiratorial force becomes
associated with a panoptic gaze that oversees the city. When confronted
with it, Baptiste violently rips the eyes out of billboard models appearing
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in a replicated series, as if attempting to eradicate the look complicit

with capitalist commodity culture.
Sleeping rough, Baptiste and Marie huddle together at night, attempting to insulate each other from the chill of late autumn; each day,
they must face not only the peril of conspiracies fabricated by the Max
but also Maries past that resurfaces in the figure of an old lover, Julien
(Pierre Clmenti), whose underworld associations place them in imminent danger. Suspicious of Julien, Baptiste steals his briefcase, uncovering
a portfolio of newspaper clippings, accompanied by a map of the city
and a peculiar grid that on first glance would seem determined by an
occult symbology. Marie grasps the gravity of her situation when the two
flip through news headlines that point to the financial scandals, political
assassinations, and corruption that had permeated French political life
throughout the 1970s. Finally, Marie comes across her own photograph
appearing in a news story detailing her participation in a bank robbery.
We learn that the heist had been orchestrated by an international terrorist cell whose members had persuaded her to join their ranks. Maries
criminal status, as Morrey and Smith observe, could be said to confirm
suspicions about the ruling classs displacement of its own criminal activities on to a terrorist enemy and thus, becomes symptomatic of a
stratified society where violence has become the preferred mechanism
for social change (32).
Eluding the Max, the two take shelter briefly to inspect the curious map, which Marie identifies as a jeu de loie (a game of Snakes and
Ladders) that she describes as a childrens game, a game of chance.
The numbered squares of the game board would seem to align with the
numerical arrondissements in Paris; however, certain squares are spatial
traps, which constrain the players. Marie identifies one trap as the Prison,
and thus can make sense of her own period of detention from within the
games labyrinthine schema, while the other traps known as the Tavern,
the Well, the Maze, and the Bridge permit the two women to chart their
course within the city. Traversing a city in ruins, in which each terrain
becomes a square in the spiral trajectory of the game, the two wage
war with the Max, whom they encounter at a construction site where
anonymous high-rise apartments are being erected. Later found imprisoned within a synthetic cocoon spun mechanically by a Max, Baptiste
is liberated by Marie, who is able to cut away the fibers that threaten to

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permanently encase her. The heroines destinies reunite on the rails of

the abandoned Petite-Ceinture (Little Belt) line that had encircled and
serviced Paris since the mid-nineteenth century. En route, the two trace
the circumference of the cityscape where, as Duras observes, they can
no longer stop, they roll along like automobiles, like the news, like New
York in Europe, like the cinema, like eternity (15). It is, perhaps, Agns
Vardas rootless hitchhiker Mona (Sandrine Bonnaire) in Sans toit ni loi
(Vagabond; 1985) whose aimless wanderings and transient occupation
of vacated houses, barren woods, and anonymous train stations preserve
the essence of the film and its predecessor, Merry-Go-Round.
On the fourth and final day of their journey, Marie and Baptiste
arrive at the Bridge, a spatial trap on the game board that within the
film overlooks the Canal de lOurcq at the Bassin de la Villette in the
far northeast corner of Paris. In the early nineteenth century, Napoleon
Bonaparte ordered the construction of the Basin of la Villette so that
water from the river lOurcq running through the woodlands north of
Figure 7. Baptiste battles a Max

on the bridge in Le Pont du Nord.
Photographer William Lubtchansky.
Courtesy of Collection Cinmathque Franaise.
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Paris could be channeled into the city. The Basin thus possesses a twofold significance, as both a source of life for its citys inhabitants and
also as the paradoxical source of their demise having made possible the
industrial wastelands of the late twentieth century. The historical import
of the Basin of la Villette corresponds with that of the Bridge, which
is recounted in the folk song for which the film is named. Both sites
offer the citizenry of Paris the possibility of productivity and pleasure.
Yet both are traps, not only in the specific sense of the game board but
also in the broader sense of their historical and cultural significance. In
the song, it is those inattentive, irresponsible citizens whose excesses
destroy the Bridge who fall to their Death; whereas in the film, it is the
solitary, tragic ex-prisoner Marie, lingering like a melancholy refrain by
the canal, where she meets her demise at the hands of a lover whose
collusion with conspiratorial forces she could never have anticipated.
As she falls, like a pawn from a game board, Baptiste commences a
dancelike battle on the Bridge with a Max (Jean-Franois Stvenin),
who seeks to initiate her. In accordance with the rules of the game, in
which the square of Death leads to a Recommencement, the two players
maneuver across the Bridge, mirroring each others combative stances.
Gridded shots suddenly frame their performance, as if to call attention
to the graphic dimensions of the game and its perilsincluding those of
the film itselffrom the perspective of the filmmaker. While seeming
to impose a fatalistic, predetermined perspective onto the players and
the city, Rivettes camera, paradoxically, embraces the immediacy of the
theatrical ritual before it, a combative dance in which the movements
and gestures of the players and the director alike conspire to liberate
Paris for other films (qtd. in Duras 16).
Reenvisioning Genres: Haut bas fragile, Jeanne la pucelle,
Secret dfense, and Va savoir
An intoxicating excursion into genre filmmaking, Haut bas fragile (Up
Down Fragile; 1995) chronicles the daily lives of three women, Louise,
Ninon, and Ida, who live in Paris. Characterized as a sleepwalker,
Louise (Marianne Denicourt) is recovering from an accident that left
her in a coma; Ninon (Nathalie Richard) is a delivery girl perpetually
traveling from address to address on her mobylette or her roller blades;

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the librarian Ida (Laurence Cte), an adopted child, searches continually for the source of a song she thinks she hears or heard before she
was born. Haut bas fragiles decor points to the labyrinthine fixity of
institutional structures, such as the Paris streets that imprison Ninon
in a low-paying job, or the library stacks that reinforce Idas sense of
her own dispossession, or the empty, clinical apartment buildings that
encase the upper-middle-class Louise, rendering her infantilized and
helpless, a prisoner of her fathers overprotectiveness. The occasional
intrigues that engage the three women, such as the mysterious double
dealings of the Backstage gang or the missing documents discrediting
Louises father, become mere pretexts for musical performances that
seduce characters who meet briefly and then disperse.
Music in the film provides all three women with the means to oppose
those forces that threaten to contain or erase them. A missing melody
motivates Idas search through apartment stairwells and Paris record
stores. She alone hears the song My Lost Love and its lyrics, I will do
anything to find you again, to see you and hold you again. During these
interludes, the lost refrain becomes associated with the adopted Idas
obsessive desire to retrieve her sense of selfhood. Music here presents
the possibility of a feminine identity, in absentia. This use of music can be
traced to what Grard Loubinoux describes as chant within the chant,
an operatic form where characters are inhabited, haunted by some
archaic song that awakens strange resonance in them, which exercises
a mysterious power of fascination and precipitates peculiar exchanges
between them (86). While observing herself in her bedroom mirror,
Ida remarks: Behind me there is nothing. As if I had no past. A real
black hole. As if my legs had no feet. These words of solitary introspection, which Ida begins to sing while observing her mirror image, soon
become allied with her obsession with finding the source of the old
song, My Lost Love, that only she hears. Idas recitative mirrors that
of Desdemona during the final act of Verdis opera in which Desdemona,
deceived in love, remembers her mothers maid and the sad song she
used to sing. Seated before her bedside mirror, Desdemona sings the
song of the willow: She wept as she sang on the lonely heath/ the poor
girl wept, O willow, willow, willow! While gazing into the mirror, both
Desdemona and Ida seek solace in a melancholic refrain, which recalls
the archaic presence/absence of the mother. In both Rivettes film and
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in the opera, the chant within the chant emerges from a primitive,
archaic universe, which subtends a superficial world of social conventions and hypocrisy.
Complementing musics role in the lives of the three women, the
occasional performances of Backstage singer Anna Karina, feminine icon
par excellence of the New Wave, make reference to her appearances
within a 1960s cinema de la jeunesse. At her nightclub Sarah Saloon,
Karina reinvents old song and dance routines from Godards paean to
the American musical Une femme est une femme (A Woman Is a Woman;
1961) as well as dance numbers from his later films, Bande part (Band
of Outsiders; 1964) and Pierrot le fou (1965). While Karinas backstage
performances evoke New Wave locales, Rivette intimated in a personal
interview (1999) that the club Backstage was modeled on the New York
taxi-dance hall, which became popular following the First World War.
In his sociological study of the taxi-dance hall, Paul G. Cressey explains
that at the beginning of each musical number, the taxi-girl received a
ticket from the patron, which she tore in half, giving one part of it to
the ticket collector and storing the other half under the hem of her silk
hose (6). At the end of the evening, she redeemed the tickets from the
management for a nickel each, and so was often called a nickel hopper.
The commercial and instructional dimensions of the taxi-girls role is
captured in Rogers and Harts well-known song Ten Cents a Dance
from the musical Simple Simon (1930). Ruth Etting interpreted its lyrics in the show, crooning: I work at the Palace Ballroom/but gee, that
Palace is cheap/ When I get back to my chilly hall room/Im much too
tired to sleep. /Im one of those lady teachers/a beautiful hostess, you
know/ One that the Palace features/at exactly a dime a throw. As the
song lyrics suggest, taxi-dance halls were usually located at interstitial
areas of mobility, such as tenement districts where small apartments,
furnished rooms, and inexpensive residential hotels predominated, thus
offering a ready-made clientele. These places of amusement were tinged
with an element of social danger, partly because of the inevitable commingling of classes or ethnicities in less expensive venues. Such diversity
was the real crux of the anxiety about taxi-dancing.
The taxi-dance hall actually cultivated an alternative countercultural community open to diverse nationalities, races, and age groups. In
Tropic of Capricorn, Henry Miller describes his hallucinatory encounter

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with the nymphomaniac taxi-girl Paula, who he recalls had the loose,
jaunty swing and perch of the double-barreled sex, all her movements
radiating from the groin, always in equilibrium, always ready to flow,
to wind and twist and clutch, the eyes going tic-toc, the toes twitching
and twinkling, the flesh rippling like a lake furrowed by a breeze (107).
The anonymity of the taxi-dance hall allowed the bystander to project
himself/herself into different roles, keeping his/her real identity a disguise. This capacity to project the self into alternative theatrical roles
was not limited to patrons but also included the taxi-girls themselves,
who would each adopt a professional name that was suggestive of
her new self-conception. While the professionalism required of the
taxi-girl is often associated with prostitution, Rivettes references to this
subculture in his film are designed to subvert the sentimental vision of
the heterosexual couple offered in the Hollywood musical. Rather than
affirming those values associated with a respectable bourgeois culture,
Rivettes dance hall aesthetic offers an implicit critique of these values,
providing the spectator with a pedagogical dance lesson.
The myth of the American taxi-girl is musically interlaced with French
film tradition in Haut bas fragile, for Rivette borrows his taxi-dancers
name Ninon from the song Pauvre Petit Coeur de Ninon at the close
of Jean Renoirs La bte humaine (The Human Beast; 1938), the Zola
adaptation. The songs lyrics tell the story of a fictitious, bewitching girl
who breaks mens hearts, referring indirectly to the films heroine Sverine
(Simone Simon), whose sensual allure drives the crazed train engineer
Jacques Lantier (Jean Gabin) to commit murder. Although the film aurally
invokes Zolas obsessive character Lantier, it is Millers feverish voyeuristic
engagement with the taxi-dancer at the Roseland dance hall that bears
marked resemblance to Rivettes mobile camera eye and enlists our entranced participation in Ninons dance performances at Backstage.
Haut bas fragiles theatrical staging of musical numbers does not
simply reflect the New York dance and cinema subculture of the 1920s,
but simultaneously refers to the Hollywood backstage musical through
its incorporation of carefully choreographed dance numbers. The films
opening scene sets up the semantic elements of the taxi-dance hall narrative, introducing Ninon as a taxi-girl who aggressively demands her
cut of wages from the management. She definitively decides to seek
new employment after she witnesses her boss violently stab a lecherous
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patron in a back lot. As a delivery girl, presumably of those packages

marked haut bas fragile (up/down/fragile), Ninon initiates a romantic interlude with Monsieur Roland, a set designer. As the unsuspecting
Roland enters the doorway of the delivery service, Ninon brazenly kisses
him, distracting the attention of others and deflecting their suspicion of
her following their discovery of a theft from the open cash box.14 The
subsequent dance number at Rolands studio introduces the semantic
elements of the 1930s backstage musical, which include the opposition
of reality and art. A product of the Depression-era economy, some early
1930s backstage musicals revealed daily life as a constant fight against
joblessness and hunger. This lackluster existence is balanced by the
joy of production numbers, in which screen characters, as well as the
audience, are permitted to temporarily forget their real situation. The
characters break out of the normal world into a realm of performance
and art, where stylization and rhythm provide a sense of community and
beauty absent from the real world.
The Hollywood musical is characterized by the audio dissolve, which,
as Rick Altman observes, is a technique that makes possible the seamless passage from the diegetic track of conversation to the music track
of orchestral accompaniment (63). In the musical, the audio dissolve
transports the spectator from a realm of unrelenting reality (action produces sound) to a magical world (music produces action). In the atelier
dance number between Ninon and Roland, Rivette experiments with
a variation of the audio dissolve. The scene shifts from diegetic sound
without music to nondiegetic music without diegetic sound as Roland
and Ninon exchange half-sung lyrics based on metrical repetitions, an
interchange that in French plays upon the words Per-tur-b (Dis-turbed) and Gn (Flustered). During this exchange, the linguistic bonds
that produce meaning become relaxed, allowing words to return to their
primal characteristics of rhythm and rhyme. By melodizing their voice
patterns, the couples movement from diegetic conversation to nondiegetic song is made continuous and imperceptible. Their speech grows
more and more rhythmical, thus calling forth and justifying, as it were,
the entrance of the musical accompaniment. As Ninon slips naturally
from speech to song, she repeats the exercise by subordinating all her
movements to the songs rhythmat an undetermined point we suddenly recognize that the couple is dancing, yet we never saw them begin

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to dance. Just as their slow slipping from speech to song justifies a further
sliding from song to musical accompaniment, so their transition from
walking to dancing turns the space around them into a stage. Roland
mocks Ninons semicircular movements, and she, in turn, imitates his.
In Haut bas fragile, the intricate interweaving of different dance
traditions accentuates rather than diminishes the films disjointed tone.
For instance, the atelier dance number between Roland and Ninon,
which relies on codes and conventions of the 1930s backstage musical
number, is almost immediately followed by Enzo Enzos performance of
the haunting song The Willing Castaways at the dance hall Backstage.
The lyrics seem to chart the characters movement across the dance floor
and within the films diegesis: Nothing can be done for the castaways
who ride the great wave/that rocks them to mysterious islands/ Without
a craft, without a raft/without leaving land, the castaways wander. The
music that animates the willing castaways suspends the flux of narration, yet the dance aesthetic differs from that of the Hollywood musical,
where the star couple remains centered and is always facing the camera.
Rivettes camera imitates a dancers movement, as it sweeps past anonymous couples and then spins completely around in a 360-degree circle
(Delfour 169). The camera focuses briefly on Ninon as a solo figure,
whose pirouettes across the floor seem to replicate those of the camera.
A single shot frames her face, which seems to return the cameras look, as
though the camera apparatus had become her partner. At this moment,
dance movement is suspended as the camera situates the spectator as a
participant within the space of the profilmic performance. Within this
scene, the camera reproduces the movements of a dancer, thus transforming the passive spectator into an active participant engaged in the
profilmic performance. Similar to Millers New York taxi-dance hall,
Backstages circumscribed performance space preserves the anonymous
character of the taxi-dance hall encounter, thus permitting the spectator
to project him/herself into different class, gender, or racial roles. This
capacity to identify with alternative theatrical roles is preserved through
the profilmic performance space of Rivettes taxi-dance hall.
Unlike the nondiegetic music of the Hollywood dance number that
provides a release from the causal constraints of the diegesis, the diegetic
music at Backstage establishes a causal connection to everyday events
within the world. Ninons easy movement through Paris back streets on
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rollerblades creates a continuation of the spontaneous dance begun at

Backstage the previous night. She arrives at the home address of Louise, to whom she delivers a bouquet of roses, a gift from Roland. Ninon
initiates a confrontational conversation with Roland later that night at
Backstage, but her revenge on him is not complete until she joins forces
with Louise against him. The two dancers perform a viciously liberating duet in which nondiegetic music propels the two up and down the
staircase. Once again, the scenes dance choreography mimics that of
the Hollywood musical, as Louise and Ninon melodize their voice patterns as the lead-in to the commencement of musical accompaniment
and dance movements. The extreme high and low angles that animate
their dance number celebrate the reunion of two womenone from
the haute bourgeoisie and the other from the lower classthrough the
everyday ritual of female friendship. The homoerotic power of their
dance is enormously powerful and subversive, initiating an alternative
space of musical performance, which resembles that of a taxi-dance hall
where dancers, as well as sideline profilmic spectators, may indulge in
homoerotic fantasies.
Through its intricate interweaving of different dance traditions in
consecutive scenes, the film sets up a performance continuum designed
to break down the borders between narrative and musical number. The
Figure 8. Ninon and Louises liberating

dance number in Haut bas fragile.
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film supplants the syntactical logic of the Hollywood musical, which

determines the division between narrative and number, with its own
idiosyncratic performance style. The borderline that distinguishes the
world of the diegetic event from that of the dance number is intentionally blurred. The final scene between Louise and her bodyguard Lucien
on the veranda of her apartment exemplifies the conflation of narrative
event and musical number. As Louise moves from the apartment onto
the veranda, she spins completely around, smoothly integrating her dance
step into her stride. Lucien then mimics this movement, spinning around
a chair. Louise again reciprocates and rotates around toward the same
chair. The give-and-take conversational exchange of the couple remains
natural up until this point, but here both characters begin to repeat lines,
making their voices conform to a rhythmic pattern. Brushing against a
rocking chair, Lucien begins with the remark, I love you so. I do everything backwards. Louise replies, Say nothing. Keep quiet. Backwards
and forward. The rocking movement of the chair that begins to move
back and forth like a metronome mimics that of the characters bodies
and the content of their verbal exchange. At this point, the characters
speech patterns and body movement seem to justify the entrance of
musical accompaniment, as would occur in a Hollywood musical number.
Yet, this scene frustrates the spectators expectations. The couples shift
to balletic rotations and metrical voice patterns anticipates the musical
accompaniment that never comes. During the scene, Louise and Lucien
appear indefinitely suspended between the diegetic event and dance
steps. The scene refuses to offer a musical affirmation or conventional
closure. Like the characters, the spectator remains transfixed, momentarily suspended between meaning and movement.
This continual oscillation between meaning and motion in the film
recalls Idas search for the source of a song she thinks she hears, or
overheard before she was born, and the anxiety of the girl-childs search
for the first lost object, the Mother (or her synechdochic stand-inher
maternal voice). Like the rocking movement of objects and characters,
Idas incessant search throughout the film for a missing musical refrain
literalizes aurally (and narratively) the backward and forward movement
of the fort/da game, a childs game of repetition designed to diminish
the unpleasure caused by the absence of the mother. This imaginary
game, in which the child repeatedly pulls a toy reel back and forth,
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marks the childs initial attempt to master the drives through entry
into language. This game of repetition, premised on the alternation
of lack and plentitude, is set into motion in the films unfolding. In his
reformulation of Lacanian theory, Guy Rosolato has characterized the
maternal voice as a lost object, which comes to represent what alone
can make good the subjects lack (qtd. in Silverman 85). Rosolato observes that the primordial listening experience is the prototype for the
pleasure that derives from music, affirming that it is the whole drama
of separated bodies and their reunion, which supports harmony (qtd.
in Silverman 85).
It is through music that Haut bas fragile works to interrogate the relationship of the spectatorabove all the female spectatorto the cinema.
The camera implicates the film viewer in Idas attempt to recover the
source of the aural lost object, shadowing her movement from a downtown record store into a vacant hallway or stairwell, or from the dimly
lit Sarah Saloon to the open-air hot dog stand frequented by Monsieur
Paul, played by Rivette, in pursuit of a haunting refrain. Music gives the
film as well as the librarian Ida (whose job at the Cabinet des Estampes
in the Bibliothque nationale is to oversee its etchings and photographs)
an additional dimension. Music suspends the flux of narration created
through linguistic and iconographic sign systems, leaving the spectator
momentarily entranced by its hallucinatory rhythms, harmonic resonance,
and passion. The final shot of the film frames Ida in Renoirian style, in
a deep focus long take that follows her flight down an empty boulevard.
Unexpectedly, she refuses singer Anna Karinas offer of a cozy Paris apartment, forfeiting her final opportunity to secure a safe haven and retrieve
the source of the mysterious musical refrain. Ida is destined to remain a
rootless castaway, as is the film spectator, continuing to search for the
coherent selfhood and sense of mastery that the myth of cinema and its
music can no longer provide. Like Rivettes three flneuses, the spectator
is generously invited to become an impassioned participant in, as well as
observer of, the everyday rituals of the city.
| | |
Art house star Sandrine Bonnaire takes center stage in the two-part
historical epic, Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Maid; 1994; 1. The Battles 2.
The Prisons), and the film policier (translated as French detective film)

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Secret dfense (Secret Defense; 1997). In these films from the 1990s,
Rivette transposes disparate genres to fabricate two modern-day feminist
parables. Rivette casts Bonnaire in the role of the medieval Christian
martyr, la pucelle, reinventing the Hollywood genre commonly associated with monumental scale, male spectacle, and nationalist themes to
create what he describes as an bauche (preliminary draft or sketch)
of the work possible on Jeanne (qtd. in Grassin and Mdioni). In Secret
dfense, Rivette casts Bonnaire in the role of researcher and criminal
investigator Sylvie Rousseau, reworking the popular French genre of
the film policier, through reference to the Electra myth. Not only do
both films construct their central female role around the persona of
Bonnaire, they both reveal a deep personal connection to the director.
Rivettes childhood in Rouen, the Cathedral City of Normandy
where Jeanne was imprisoned and burned at the stake, influenced his
decision to make the film. As a child, he was nourished by the work of
Charles Pguy, whose three-part dramatic work Jeanne dArc provides
the impetus for the film, particularly the second play entitled Les Batailles (The Battles). The epic expanse of Rivettes film distinguishes it
from the microscopic study of Jeannes suffering, sadness, and martyrdom in Carl Dreyers contemplative silent classic, La passion de Jeanne
dArc (1928). Rivettes film also offers a radical alternative to Robert
Bressons portrait of an unyielding, stoic Jeanne in Le procs de Jeanne
dArc (The Trial of Joan of Arc; 1962). He hand-picked Bonnaire, who
he viewed as a corporal performer able to incarnate the popular side
of Jeanne, rather than her purely poetic side expressed in the earlier
films (qtd. in Grassin and Mdioni). It was, perhaps, for this reason that
Rivette chose the vernacular epithet la pucelle (the Maid), for as Jean
Collet notes, the name is associated with the Middle Ages, tying Jeanne
to a historical trajectory, rather than to a cold, abstract ideal of sainthood
(Histoire 152). In contrast to an austere judicial ritual, Rivettes intent
was to depict Jeanne in motion. Indeed, Rivette decided on the spur of
the moment to play the role of Jeannes confessor at Vaucouleurs, who
intercedes for her at a crucial moment in her journey and enables her
mission to proceed. Catalan musician Jordi Savalls original score based
on Gregorian-based compositions of the epoch sounds out the contemplative, uncertain dimension of Jeannes journey. As the film progresses,
the camera moves continually, not simply recording but researching the
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Jacques Rivette
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historical personage of Jeanneas enigmatic creature, as seductress, as

saint, as madwoman, or as sorceress.
Whereas Jeanne la pucelle represents the directors only attempt to
produce a historical epic, Secret dfense remains the sole film considered
part of the genre known in France as the film policier. As the founding
historian of the genre, Franois Gurif observes, its source is the roman policier (French detective novel), a popular literary form that can
be traced to the nineteenth-century works of Balzac and Eugne Sue,
whose melodramas had formed the basis of Noli me tangere (17). For
Rivette, the roman policier would summon up not only Balzac and Sue
but also Gallimards srie noir, translations of Raymond Chandler and
Dashiell Hammett novels that shaped the evolution of the detective film
in the 1950s and inspired numerous film adaptations (Gurif 1731;
Powrie 76). Embracing its literary roots, the film policier remains one
of the most popular and durable genres in French cinema, serving as
the testing ground for young directors who desire a career in filmmaking
(Gurif 29; Powrie 75). Curiously, the genre eludes precise definition,
for as Gurif observes, it encompasses different categories, such as the
mystery, the thriller, the film noir, the psychological drama, the moral
tale, etc. (31). For Rivette, the policier would bring to mind American
noirs and Alfred Hitchcocks thrillers, summoning up his early years at
Cahiers when Bazin had fondly dubbed him and his New Wave cohorts,
the Hitchcocko-Hawksians. It would without doubt invoke French
iconic stars Jean-Paul Belmondo and Alain Delon, and directors JeanPierre Melville and Claude Chabrol. Chabrols own early interest in the
genre is reflected in a piece he published in 1955 in Cahiers, volution
du film policier. In Secret dfense, Rivette pays homage to his mentors,
reinventing the criminal world of the policier to create a film where
the conventional line between judge and assassin, hunter and hunted,
victim and perpetrator is blurred; where the female heroine Sandrine
Bonnaire assumes the central male role of the detective and is thereby
empowered to penetrate everywhere and to expose the hidden truths
that the world conceals (Gurif 31).
Secret dfense chronicles the investigation launched by cancer researcher Sylvie Rousseau and her brother Paul (Grgoire Colin) into
the mysterious circumstances surrounding their fathers death. Sylvies
father, Pierre Andr Rousseau, had fallen from a moving train five years

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earlier and was killed instantly. Although at the time, his death was attributed to his accidental fall, Paul discovers new evidence that throws
suspicion on his fathers business associate, Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who is also his mothers lover. A blurry photograph of their father,
who was being shadowed by Walser, provides Paul and Sylvie with the
main source of hard evidence, and ultimately serves to visually connect
his sudden death with their sisters years before, whose absence is also
marked by a fuzzy photo. Sylvie decides to take over the investigation
herself and, in this respect, recalls the tenacious investigator played by
Fanny Ardant in Truffauts final film, an affectionate pastiche of the film
policier, Vivement Dimanche! (Finally Sunday!; 1983). Sylvie travels by
train to her hometown to confront Walser. When she points a gun at him,
his young secretary Vronique (Laure Marsac), in a desperate attempt to
protect him, jumps her. During the brief struggle that follows, the gun
goes off, and Vronique is killed. Sylvie thus becomes ensnared in the
cycle of crime and criminality that ultimately affects the entire family.
Vroniques identical twin sister Ludivine soon appears and begins to
inquire as to the whereabouts of her sister. Walser subsequently seduces
her and invites her to stay with him at his estate. Traumatized by the
sequence of events, Sylvie returns to Paris. Her suspicions about her
fathers death are later confirmed when Walser visits her and confesses
Figure 9. Sylvie confronts

Walser in Scret defense.
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to killing him by throwing him from the train. When Sylvie later informs
her mother, Genevive Rousseau (Franoise Fabian), of Walsers confession, she is shocked to learn of her mothers complicity in the murder and
the reason behind it. She returns to Walsers estate, where she prevents
Paul from killing him by taking away his gun. Yet Sylvie is not entirely
successful in averting violence. While there, she inadvertently blurts out
that Vronique is dead, inciting in Ludivine an irrepressible rage. Accusing Walser of the crime, Ludivine takes aim at him with her loaded
pistol. When Sylvie tries to protect him by throwing herself in harms
way, she is accidentally shot and killed.
Darkness, multiple murders, and the presence of the investigator all
place Secret dfense within the world of the film policier, while returning us to Aeschylean dramaturgy through the Electra myth. The film is
a loose adaptation of the first two plays of Aeschyluss Oresteia, which is
composed of three plays in sequence, Agamemnon, Choephoroi, and Eumenides. Sylvies story is modeled on that of Electra, the bright one, who
in Choephoroi conspires with her brother Orestes to avenge the death of
their father Agamemnon by murdering their mother Clytemnestra and
her lover Aegisthus. In Secret dfense, Sylvie becomes the avenger of
her fathers deatheven though her assassination attempt misfires. Her
story of revenge is also modeled on Jean Giraudouxs Electre (Electra;
1937), an updated version of the Greek legend. In Giraudouxs play, the
character Electra is an inspirational, mythic figure, similar to Jeanne la
Pucelle, who is destined to serve as the moral scourge of a nation defined
by a lack of mission, initiative, and spirituality (Cohen 115). Giraudoux
believed that in every epoch surge forth these pure human beings who
dont want the crimes to be absorbed, and who prevent that absorption
and call a halt to these means, which only provoke more crimes and
new disasters. Electra is one of these beings. She attains her goal, but
at the price of horrible catastrophes (qtd. in Cohen 106). The legacy of
Jeanne la Pucelle lends credence to Bonnaires interpretation of her role
as Electra in Secret dfense.
Pauls role that is modeled on that of Orestes remains peripheral in
the film. In one highly significant scene that Rivette retains from Choephoroi, Orestes arrives at the estate of Clytemnestra and Aegisthus
disguised as a foreign traveler bearing the news that Orestes is dead.
He discovers that his childhood nurse is the sole character who truly

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mourns him. The nurse is an important figure in Choephoroi, for she is an

insider who understands the secret motivations of those in the house. In
the film, the figure of the nurse appears in a seemingly gratuitous scene.
Pauls unexpected disappearance for several days prompts Sylvies frantic
search for him. She finally discovers that he is recovering from a minor
motorcycle accident in the Salpetrire hospital and is being cared for by
a nurse, played by Hermine Karagheuz, known for her previous role in
Noli me tangere as a member of Lilis collective performing Aeschylus and
the suspected messenger of the Thirteen. Modeled on Orestess nurse in
Choephoroi, Karagheuz is an intertextual insider who understands the
hidden motivations of those cast members (such as Franoise Fabian/
Genevive Rousseau, who reenacts her role as coconspirator in Noli me
tangere), in Rivettes house engaged in another adaptation of Aeschylus.
Rivette refashions the Electra myth in his film by interlacing it with
elements of Raymond Chandlers and Billy Wilders noir thriller Double
Indemnity (1944), in which Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and Phyllis
Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) conspire to stage her husbands death
as an accidental fall from a train. The blurred image of Walser on the
train platform that Paul produces as his key piece of evidence can also
be read by the film spectator as Rivettes intertextual referencing of the
noir classic and the name of the murder suspect Walser as the directors
pun on the name of Wilders character, Walter. Double Indemnity is
not the only American film intertext that emerges in the film, however.
Walsers seduction of both Vronique and her twin double Ludivine
recalls the detective Scottie Fergusons (Jimmy Stewart) seduction of
both the mysterious Madeleine (Kim Novak) and her double, Judy, in
Hitchcocks classic Vertigo (1958). Just as we participate in Scotties
emotional crisis, identifying with his gaze as he surveys the San Francisco
Bay area through his car windshield, in similar fashion, we participate
in Sylvies crisis through her point of view as she contemplates the Paris
cityscape from the metro or the verdant countryside from the window of
the ultramodern TGV. The train system that Sylvie frequents throughout
the film also pays tribute to Hitchcocks thriller Strangers on a Train
(1951), in which a tennis player, Guy Haines (Farley Granger), meets
Bruno Anthony (Robert Walker) on a train, where they talk about swapping murders. In Secret dfense, Rivette returns to the policier, while
liberating it from the conventional demands of the genre. Secret dfense
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mobilizes film and theatrical stylesthe monumentality of Aeschylean

drama, the complex crime patterns of the film noir, as well as the darkness and mystery associated with the Hitchcockian crime thrillerin
order to align the everyday world and the ceremonial space of the film.
| | |
Va savoir (Why Knows?; 2001) is a dazzling romantic comedy that chronicles a week or so in the lives of three men and three women. The story
opens as Camille Renard (Jeanne Balibar), a prominent French actress,
returns to Paris accompanied by her companion, an Italian theater director named Ugo Basani (Sergio Castellitto). They are costarring in Luigi
Pirandellos play Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me; 1931). The play
is never viewed in its entirety, yet in Va savoir, the audience is privy to
select scenes from the finished production of the play, rather than mere
rehearsals. In a videotaped interview with Frdric Bonnaud, Rivette
acknowledges that Va savoir works according to the principle of ellipsis, whereas the original long version of the film, Va savoir + (3 hr. 40
min.), is based on temporal continuity. He affirms that the duration of
Va savoir + allows Pirandellos play to be understood by the audience as
yet another character that coexists alongside the others. I personally
find Va savoir + preferable to the short version for its leisurely, nuanced
exploration of theater performance; however, the long version was never
commercially distributed and played at only a single cinema in Paris, Le
cinma du Panthon, for seven weeks. Because only a handful of mostly
French spectators will have had the opportunity to see this magnificent
film, I will confine my discussion here to Va savoir, where the theater
serves to counterpoint the melodic lines of the actors lives and their
romantic intrigues. The light, humorous tone of the actors backstage
machinations offsets the reflective quality of Pirandellos play, which
offers a serious study of madness, feminine identity, and representation.
Rivette pays homage to filmmaker Howard Hawks in Va savoir, where
the conventions of the screwball comedy are cautiously intertwined with
those of Pirandellian drama, accomplishing the perilous kind of equilibrium that Rivette argues Hawks achieved in such screwballs as Monkey
Business (1952) (qtd. in Hillier 126). The institution of marriage can
provide the subject matter for Hawkss comedies where wedding plans
are thrown into disarray or the couples reunion resolved through comic

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high jinks rather than an officious ceremony. In Va savoir, Camille and

Ugos questionable commitment to each other becomes the source of
screwball scenarios that at times threaten to disrupt the production of
Pirandellos play. In Come tu mi vuoi, Camille assumes the plays title role
of The Strange Lady, a lost soul whose disreputable life in Berlin with
her lover, Salter, following World War One is suddenly transformed by
the arrival of a Venetian named Boffi, played by her partner Ugo. Boffi
recognizes in her the beloved Cia, the missing wife of a wealthy Italian
landowner, Bruno. Boffi implores her to leave behind her desperate life
to return to her husband, who has been awaiting her return for ten years.
The Strange Lady agrees to play the role of Cia in flight from herself,
claiming that she is merely a body, a body without a name, waiting for
someone to come and take it! (67). Haunted by the vision of a woman
who might be herself, The Strange Lady consents to be his Cia, so
that he can re-create me, and give a soul to this body, which is that of
his Cia, thus building out of his own memorieshis owna beautiful life, a beautiful new life (67). The Strange Lady is subsequently
obsessed with the desire to breathe life into an image of the past, which
is emblematically displayed in the oil painting of Cia, which haunts
the Villa Pieri. She is simultaneously terrified by the possibility that she
is an imposter, as she attempts to conform to the image of Cia in all
its particularities.
The films opening scene isolates Camille in a bright spotlight. The
lights subsequently fade up to reveal a theater set. Backstage buzz reveals
that the troupe is not doing well financially. Here, Rivette intentionally
underscores the resemblance between the struggling director Ugo and
Grard in Paris nous appartient. Unlike their fictional troupes, however,
Pirandellos actual stage production of As You Desire Me experienced a
phenomenal run in New York theaters and was subsequently picked up
by MGM studio. The MGM adaptation As You Desire Me (1932) received
critical accolades on its release and featured Greta Garbo (The Strange
Lady), Melvyn Douglas (Bruno), and Erich von Stroheim (Salter). Given
the films critical reception and its singular cast, it would seem possible
that Rivettes first encounter with the Pirandello play was not at a Paris
theater, but at the cinmathque. Rivette refuses, however, Hollywoods
fabrication of a happy ending in which the identity of The Strange Lady
is finally affirmed in a blissful reunion with Bruno. He instead retains the
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plays tragic, ambiguous ending in which The Strange Lady is replaced

by her double, The Demented Lady, and thus remains condemned to
her former ruinous existence with Salter in Berlin.
Rivette revisits the 1930s in Va savoir, not only in his references to
both the Pirandello play and its film adaptation, but also in his return
to the screwball comedy. In Va savoir, he revisits the genre, invoking its
conventions in order to radically transform them. In screwballs such as
Hawkss Bringing Up Baby (1938) or His Girl Friday (Hawks; 1940),
the narrative is driven by a sexual confrontation between an initially
antagonistic couple whose ideological differences heighten the conflict
between them. As in these screwball comedies, Va savoir opens with
an initial sexual confrontation between Ugo and Camille, following the
opening-night performance of As You Desire Me. Camille leaves the
theater before the final curtain call, and Ugo returns to their adjoining
hotel rooms, where he confronts her. Echoing the sentiments of The
Strange Lady that she performs in the play, Camille is terribly ambivalent about her return to Paris, her reunion with her ex-lover Pierre
(Jacques Bonnaff), and the memories associated with both. Her evident
preoccupation and distress during the performance when she blanks
out on stage precipitate a lovers quarrel between the couple. During
the hotel scene, the character Camille is doubly motivated through dual
Figure 10. Camille and Ugo

perform Pirandello in Va savoir.
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intertexts: her memory lapse invokes Pirandellos character, The Strange

Lady, while simultaneously initiating the battle of the sexes, a convention of the screwball comedy. Scenes in the couples hotel rooms, which
are adjoined through a shared doorway, pay tribute to the archetypal
screwball comedy, It Happened One Night (Frank Capra; 1934), specifically invoking the celebrated scene where Ellen (Claudette Colbert) and
Peter (Clark Gable) sleep together separated by a blanket partition
called the Walls of Jericho. At the scenes end, the closed hotel door
that seals off their separate bedrooms resembles the walls of Jericho in
Capras comedy; however, it serves in this scene to underscore the notion of chastity between a couple that is already sexually intimate, while
paradoxically permitting each the privacy to pursue other sexual partners.
While the disputes that characterized screwball comedies during
the 1930s focused on a variety of issues, the ideological differences
that inflect the relationship between Ugo and Camille are played out
reflexively in Va savoir in terms of theater and cinema genres. Camille
becomes associated with the popular film genre of screwball comedy,
Ugo, the stage and the classical form of Italian theater. The morning
after their quarrel, Ugo leaves the hotel and Camille behind to inquire
into a missing manuscript, Destino Venetiano (Venetian Destiny), written by eighteenth-century playwright Carlo Goldoni, a well-known
reformer of the commedia dellarte and an opera librettist. His research
leads him to the library of Nicolas Vernet at the home of Madame
Desprez (Catherine Rouvel), where he meets her daughter, the young
thesis student Dominique (Hlne de Fougerolles), who is known as
Do, and her half-brother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini). Ugos casual
flirtation with the student Do, which unfolds around their shared search
for the missing Goldoni manuscript, recalls the obsessive investigation
of theater director Grard and the student Anne into the whereabouts
of the missing audiotape in Paris nous appartient. In both films, theater
directors, accompanied by student protges and their half-brothers,
search for a textwritten or auralthat makes a performance possible. A sunlit stroll along the banks of the Seine inspires the aging
Italian director Ugo to kiss the young student Do, recasting the darker
Paris landscape of Paris nous appartient where Grard and Annes
promenade across the pont des Arts metamorphoses into a mysterious
scenario of murder and conspiracy.
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As Ugo and Do remain preoccupied with their mutual search for the
missing manuscript, Camille initiates her own research into the whereabouts of her ex-partner Pierre, a professor of philosophy in Poitiers.
While the playful flirtation between Ugo and Do reinvents the sinister
story of Paris nous appartient, which unfolds around the Shakespearian
stage, the rekindling of romance between Camille and Pierre relies on
the conventions of the screwball comedy, in which men often become
the object of the womans gaze, an indication of an increased autonomy
and power. At his favorite park, Camille contemplates their reunion
reflexively in terms of vision: I will see you; you wont be there. I wont
see you; you will be there. I wont see you; you wont be there. She stops
speaking when she catches sight of him through the trees. The camera
tracks to follow her gaze, as she tiptoes to position herself directly before
him, where she completes her quiet refrain, Yes, I see him; hes there.
Camille wields control over the cameras voyeuristic gaze, as does the
screwball heroine, demonstrating that she is a free subject capable of
desire and choice.
The playful flirtation between the two increasingly mirrors that of
Ugo and Do. Ugo and Dos romance revolves around their shared search
for a theatrical text, whereas Camille and Pierres shared past is associated with a literary text, his unfinished thesis on the German philosopher
Heidegger, which he has since renamed Heidegger, the jealous one.
The walls of Pierres apartment, where he indulges in reminiscences with
Camille, are lined with books, and thus mirror the public and private
libraries where Ugo and Do are spending their afternoons in their quest
for Goldonis Venetian Destiny. While Pierre attends the performance
of As You Desire Me to see Camille, meeting her afterward outside the
theater, Do and her mother visit Ugo backstage following a different
performance. As Ugos emblematic association with the classical form
of Italian comedy extends to the epic scale of Greek myth when he recounts for Do the tale of the goddess Andromedas sacrifice, Camilles
relation with Pierre increasingly moves toward the zany antics, comic
violence, and visceral energy associated with the screwball comedy. The
genteel restraint of their initial reunion in the park is knocked for a
loop during their later rendezvous in Pierres apartment. Camille has
come to explain that she loves Ugo and that while working under his
gaze in the theater, she has grown up. At first, Pierre seems unwilling

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to accept this, but he abruptly relents and brusquely escorts Camille to

the door. Camille objects, but before she can complete her sentence,
Pierre grabs her and shoves her into a storage room, locking her in before leaving. Aware that she must perform that evening, Camille takes
drastic measures. Crawling though the skylight to the roof, she surveys
the cityscape and finds her escape route by climbing down the outside
ladder. Camille resembles the screwball women protagonist, sharing her
vitality, physical freedom, spontaneity, and vivaciousness.
In the role of screwball heroine, Camille extends the genre conventions to same-sex relations when she establishes the rapport of accomplices between women. Camille and Pierres partner, Sonia (Marianne
Basler), are initially linked through respective performance spaces:
Camille, the stage, and Sonia, the ballet studio where she instructs her
young pupils. Following a disastrous dinner party attended by both
couples, Camille visits Sonia at her studio to apologize for Ugos contentious behavior, and later, Sonia attends the play. One evening, Camille
spots Sonia in a caf, where she is embracing Arthur Delamarche, Dos
half-brother. The next morning, Sonia awakens in her studio under
the watchful eye of Camille. In the course of their conversation, Sonia
discovers that Arthur has not only drugged her but also stolen her ring.
The two women become accomplices, and together form a secret pact:
Camille promises to get the ring back from Arthur on the condition
that Sonia never inquires how she did it. Camille arrives at Arthurs flat
and makes a proposition: she will offer him one night with her, but on
the condition that he never again approach her. Arthur agrees, and the
following morning, Camille retrieves the ring from the flour jar. Like
the screwball heroine, Camille uses her sexual prowess to achieve her
own ends and those of her accomplice, Sonia. The ring and its inscription Tempus fugit, manet amor serve as a talisman that safeguards
the womans soul, legitimating a feminine agency that surpasses the
heterosexual romance legally sanctified in marriage.
While Camille and Sonia solidify their female friendship, Ugo and
Pierre face off in a duel to the death. Pained at the thought of losing
Camille to Pierre, Ugo finally visits the professors flat to challenge him
to a mysterious duel, which will take place at the theater. To the offended goes the choice of place and arms; thus, Ugo leads Pierre to the
flies, a sort of gangplank above the stage, where they each must down
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an entire bottle of vodka until one of them falls over. After a half bottle,
the men agree that they might have been friends had circumstances
been otherwise. After loudly proclaiming a passage from Heidegger,
Pierre falls, causing the spectator some cause for concern. The cut that
immediately follows, however, reveals Pierre caught in a net, where
he is thrashing about in a futile effort to find the exit. At that point,
all the players return to the set of As You Desire Me. Marie-Pierre arrives with a Black Forest cake that she has baked for the troupes final
night in Paris; Do enters from the side entrance armed with Goldonis
manuscript, aptly entitled Festino Venetiano (Venetian Feast), which she
discovered by accident shelved among her mothers cookbooks. Camille
strides down the center aisle, declaring that she is looking for Pierre,
who is in danger. She spots him hanging above her, and subsequently
decides to climb up to join him. Before doing so, she rejoins Camille,
who has descended the staircase where the portrait of Cia is hung.
Camille returns Sonias ring to her, but Sonia refuses it and gives it
back to her. Camille then passionately embraces Ugo, who proclaims,
The theater is saved, the troupe is saved, the world is saved, to which
Camille responds, We are saved. Having lost both the girl and the
ring, Arthur sits sulking at the table, but rises to the occasion when he
invites Do to dance. Camille and Ugo follow suit and form another
dance couple, quietly exiting by the staircase. As the stage lights dim,
Peggy Lee croons the lyrics of Senza fine, underscoring the sentiment
of the moment: Theres no end to our love, our hearts, our dreams, our
sighs./ No end at all, no sad goodbyes./ No fears, no tears, no love that
dies./ The sunlit days, the moonlit nights, the sea, the sand, the starry
heights are yours and mine forevermore.
It is the figure of the theater director to which Rivette returns in Va
savoir. In this recent work, the relation between theater and cinema
might be characterized as asymptotic, resembling a geometrical figure
that measures the distance as a moving point on a curve that travels an
infinite distance from its origin on a perpendicular line: Rivette recommences at the point along the curve where profilmic performance is
furthest from the locus dramaticus, which is defined as the place of the
plays performance. Yet as we follow the films narrative trajectory, the
two separate domains of theater and cinema, linked by the intersection
of classical and popular comic genres that represent the auteur inscrip
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tions of Pirandello and Rivette, respectively, move closer and closer

together until in the closing scene, they have reached the point of infinityseemingly indistinguishable from each other, yet never identical.
Indeed, Rivette returns to a point of origin in Va savoirthe mysterious
moonlit nights of Paris nous appartient return to haunt the sunlit days
of Senza Fine. The repetition and circularity of the films narrative
structures, from the relationship between the theater director and the
student in Va savoir to that in Paris nous appartient, reflect Rivettes
return to the labyrinthine decor characteristic of his early work and to
the semiautobiographical story elements that characterized it.
An Occult Theatricality: Cline et Julie vont en bateau
Phantom Ladies Over Paris, Lamour par terre, La bande
des quatre, Histoire de Marie et Julien
An occult theatricality shapes the story of Cline et Julie vont en bateau
Phantom Ladies Over Paris (Cline and Julie Go Boating; 1974), a film
whose commercial release coincided with the onset of post-68 feminism.
Rivettes most well-known film among international audiences and critics, Cline et Julie enjoyed an immediate and far-reaching success that
has been unparalleled in the history of the Rivette oeuvre. We could
attribute this to the timeliness of the films feminist story, which explores
the dimensions of female friendship in its depiction of a librarian and
a magician, who both witness a bizarre melodrama being staged within
a haunted house. We might speculate along with Jonathan Rosenbaum
that the films tremendous popular appeal owes to its exploration of the
cinema of pleasure, slapstick comedy, cartoons, musicals, childhood
fantasy, and thrillers (Review). Yet beyond its pleasurable appeal to
audiences, Cline et Julie remains, in my view, as important to the history of cinema as Jean Renoirs chef doeuvre, La rgle du jeu (Rules
of the Game; 1939). Indeed, Renoirs influence is everywhere present
in this landmark film in which Rivette revisits notions of theatricality,
casting the Phantom Ladies as actresses who magically intervene in
the theatrical scenes that are being rehearsed in the haunted house.
The opening sequence of Cline et Julie draws on a nostalgic ambiance elicited by the codes and conventions of silent cinema, the esoteric
conveyed by magic formulas, and the remoteness of a supernatural world
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that surpasses the everyday. Ornamental titles introduce the films story,
Most of the time, it began like that . . ., which are accompanied by
a piano playing softly while a woman sings, nostalgically recalling the
silent film era. We first see Julie, who is enjoying the summer breeze
in a Paris park and reading a book about magic. Closing her eyes, Julie
(Dominique Labourier) murmurs a magical incantation and, before
long, Cline (Juliet Berto) hurries by, dropping her glasses and, later, her
scarf. Julie hails her and proceeds to chase after her through the streets,
secluded passageways, and finally up the steep ascent of Butte Montmartre. As the chase through Paris commences, the films mood and
tempo shift. Rather than the depiction of a leisurely, dreamy otherworld,
Rivettes camera creates an impression of spontaneity and immediacy,
as it weaves through crowded streets, swerves around bookstalls in an
open-air market, and is amiably jostled by busy shoppers. The manner
in which Rivettes portable 16 mm camera appears to seize improvised
events on the streets of Paris, capturing Berto and Labouriers comic
antics that are staged there, may reflect Rivettes involvement with the
documentary film movement cinema verit (cinema truth), which was
launched with the release of Jean Rouch and sociologist Edgar Morins
Chronique dun t (Chronicle of a Summer; 1960). Rouch and Morins
film is presented as an inquiry into the daily lives of a group of Parisians
in the summer of 1960. Rivette makes an uncredited and elliptical appearance in it as the boyfriend of one of the interviewees, Maril Parolini, who has continued to work with him as a still photographer and
co-scenarist on numerous productions.
Chronique dun t combines the techniques of reflexivity, theatricality, improvisation, and provocation that Rouch had developed from his
previous documentary work in Africa. It was not only Rouchs method of
improvisation but also his ethnographic research into West African ritual
that had, in all likelihood, inspired Rivettes exploration of the occult in
Cline et Julie. In On the Vicissitudes of the Self, Rouch elaborates
on the phenomenon of the bia, the double, which underlies theories of
the self in sub-Saharan Africa. Rouch explains that each mortal being
possesses a bia, or double, who lives in a parallel world, that is, a world
of doubles (96). The relevance of this notion to the magical connection
established between Cline and Julie in their initial encounter becomes
increasingly clear in subsequent scenes where the two form a telepathic

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rapport and alternately revisit a mysterious house that, while located

on 7 bis rue du Nadir aux Pommes, could easily be situated within the
parallel world that Rouch describes. As the films story unfolds, the
spectator will repeatedly accompany Cline and Julie to this parallel
world, which as Rouch explains, is not only the home of the bia, or
doubles, but also the home of the imagination, which includes dreams,
reveries, and reflections, as well as the abode of transient magicians and
sorcerers (96).
Rivettes work rejoins African ritual not only through Rouch but also
through avant-garde theater director Peter Brook, who in 1972 led his
entourage of actors to Africa, where they played improvised carpet shows
in isolated villages. Brook saw in the parallel world that Africans inhabit
the basis of theatrical experience, which is associated with a childhood
state of oneness: The African who has been brought up in the traditions
of the African way of life has a very highly developed understanding
of the double nature of reality. The visible and the invisible, and the
free passage between the two, are for him, in a very concrete way, two
modes of the same thing. Something which is the basis of the theatre
experiencewhat we call make-believeis simply a passing from the
visible to the invisible and back again. In Africa, this is understood not
as fantasy but as two aspects of the same reality (128).
Brooks deep interest in Africa, which was shared by Rouch and
Rivette, is connected to modernisms fascination with the so-called primitive. The paradoxical aspect of modern primitivism became evident
during the interwar period of the 1920s and 1930s, an era that saw, on
the one hand, the triumphant consolidation of European colonialism
and, on the other, the dispersal of artists and poets across the globe in
search of a primitive world that offered the contrary of Europe (Shelton
326). Pablo Picasso, Jean Palhaun, Blaise Cendrars, Tristan Tzara, and
Georges Bataille, as Marie-Denise Shelton observes, were among those
who found a source of inspiration in the so-called primitive world
(326). Indeed, the revolutionary experiments of the Dadaists and the
surrealists were predicated on a return to the primitive structures of
affective experience (Shelton 326). While economic exploitation and
violent political oppression were undeniably responsible for Europes
initial exposure to African art and cultural history, as cultural theorist
Sieglinde Lemke points out, the fact that European writers and artists
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found in African experience a source of inspiration cannot be completely

written off as cultural imperialism (412). Modern primitivism provided a
means to rethink the relation between black and white cultures as a vital
hybrid, which would destabilize the opposition that the colonialist enterprise was founded on (Lemke 409). This trend in modernism, which
Lemke defines as the primitivist modernist aesthetic, is composed of
art works in which the influence of African expression manifests itself
not in terms of thematic content but in a blend of forms (410).
Rivettes film reflects the primitivist modernist aesthetic in its understanding of parallel realities associated with the African experience. The
mythic parallel world of Cline et Julie forms the formal and conceptual
foundation of Rivettes work throughout the decade, particularly Scnes
de la vie parallle (Scenes from a Parallel Life). Yet Cline et Julie holds
a unique place in the directors oeuvre, for it is his first comedy. In the
key 1974 interview with Rosenbaum, Sedofsky, and Adair, Phantom
Interviewers over Rivette, Rivette insists that he had the desire from
the very beginning to do something close to comedy, and even frankly
commedia dellarte (21). Rivette may have found inspiration in the work
of early film comedians, whose comic routines relied on strategies of
the commedia, such as Charlie Chaplin, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and
Hardy, and W. C. Fields. He might also have watched the performances
of Rouchs African actors, who Enrico Fulchignoni compares with those
of the commedia, as they are types, wear masks, and thus are able to
facilitate the elaboration of plots, of canvases that can be infinitely
multiplied (180). Aware of Rouchs methods, Rivette similarly allowed
Berto and Labourier latitude to invent their scenes but reasserted control over the films complex structure, producing a final product that, as
Berto exclaims, was Calculated to the millimeter! (qtd. in Jordan 23).
Rivette relies on comic devices of the commedia in Cline et Julie,
particularly its word play lazzi. Generally, one could describe lazzi as
comic routines, planned or unplanned, that relied on broad physical
gestures, improvised dialogue, and clowning. The interactions between
the two women characters often resemble comic routines that rely on
word play lazzi, which can include the strange use of language, constant
repetition, misunderstood words, puns, insults, and storytelling (Gordon
56). The first word play lazzo that occurs in the film stands out in sharp
contrast to the virtually silent opening chase sequence. Following the

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intertitles denoting the passage of time, But the following morning

. . ., Cline proceeds to lure Julie into the parallel world that she
inhabits, appearing out of the blue at the library where Julie works and
later that afternoon at the door of her flat. Bemused, Julie invites Cline
in to take a shower and listens while her new acquaintance recounts a
bizarre, intricate tale about her African safari. In view of Rivettes engagement with the work of Rouch and Brook, it is perhaps no coincidence
that Africa serves as the linguistic thread that begins to unravel into a
fantastic lazzo. Cline begins: We were dying of heat, every day in the
savannah chasing animals. I had a boa conquistador. Here, Cline replaces the term appropriate to her discussion, boa constrictor, with her
own combination boa conquistador, which not only shifts the cultural
context from Africa to Spain, but also the species, from animal to man.
Either man or animal could potentially work within the context of her
subsequent description: I had a boa conquistador that quite adored me.
He wasnt dangerous. Id put him around my neck. In the next room,
Julie enters into the play with meaning, as she fondles Clines feather
boa and wraps it around her neck. Next, Julie tries on her clownish
mask of mustache and glasses, becoming a Groucho Marx look-alike,
while Cline describes her traumatic escape from the jealous Zouba,
the giantess, who had wanted to skin her alive. Cline borrows the name
Zouba from a delirious Jerry Lewis monologue in Frank Tashlins musical comedy, Artists and Models (1955), which served as a direct source
of inspiration for the sequence. After her shower, Cline finishes her tall
tale, disclosing that in the wake of her trauma she had seen a Japanese
acupuncturist in Hong Kong and that following her treatment, her hair
that had fallen out grew back inall redlike Julies, only afterward
returning to normal. The entire scene might be read as a tribute either
to Jerry Lewiss inspired performance or the Marx Brothers wacky use
of lazzi; it could also be understood as directly participating in the comic
lineage of the commedia.
The following morning, Cline pretends to be Julie when she answers her phone and engages in conversation with the latters childhood
boyfriend, her provincial cousin Grgoire, a.k.a. Guilou. Unbeknownst
to Julie, Cline arranges a rendezvous later that afternoon with Guilou
(Philippe Clvenot), whose black-and-white photo she spots on Julies
bulletin board. Wearing her femininity with the exaggerated self-aware102
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ness of masquerade, Cline arrives at St. Vincent Square sporting a widebrimmed white hat and lace dress intended to mimic a bridal gown.
Taken in by this performance, Guilou solemnly rises from the bench
where he is seated and grandly proposes to Cline, offering her a ring.
Cline swoons, sweeping her hand across her brow and knocking her
hat off. When music and dance commence to fte the occasion, Rivette
reframes the couple, who quick-step their way into the realm of musical theater. The romantic illusion is utterly shattered, however, when
Guilous pants drop to the ground, and Cline tells him to go jack-off
among the roses. As the scene unfolds, the spectator becomes complicit
in Clines masquerade and participates alongside her in a manner best
described with reference to the films title, which contains the phrase
vont en bateau (go boating) that could be understood as montent
un bateau quelquun (take someone for a ride or to play a practical
joke on someone). While Cline mercilessly rejects and humiliates the
distraught suitor who she takes for a ride, we empathize with her and
revel in her charade. Rather than confirming the inscription on the back
of Guilous photo, the child who has become a man, we identify with
Rivettes heroines, girls who have become women.
The manner in which Cline works Julies fianc, conning him out of
an engagement ring that she subsequently gives to an anonymous woman
onlooker, recalls those scenes from Czech filmmaker Vera Chytilovs
revolutionary Daisies (Sedmikrsky; 1966) in which two beautiful women,
the blond Marie 1 (Jitka Cerhov) and the brunette Marie 2 (Ivana Karbanov), entice rich suitors into paying for extravagant meals in exchange
for sexual favors that the two girls never deliver. In both films, canny
heroines assume alternate or fabricated identities in order to dupe the
men, who delude themselves that they are passing as worldly, seductive,
and authoritative. The subversive role-playing of Chytilovs heroines
finds its parallel in another scene from Cline et Julie. This scene shows
how Julie substitutes for Cline, mirroring Clines substitution for Julie
in the earlier scene, when she fields a phone call from the latters boss,
Msieur Dd, who runs a club in Montmartre. Cline performs there
nightly as the magician Mandrakore, reinventing the Depression-era
comic strip character Mandrake the Magician. Switching the name of
the act from Mandrakore to Kamikaze, Julie enters the spotlight dressed
in a top hat, black tights, and tails. At first, she provides the two men in

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sunglasses seated in the audience with the provocative striptease that

they are anticipating, but then on an impulse, challenges them, And
you, what can you do? Here you are ogling every inch of me behind
your refrigerated glasses! As her frustration and anger mount, she yells
outrageous insults at them: Cosmic twilight pimps! Voyeurs, perverts!
The confrontational quality of this cabaret performance, as Robin Wood
notes, pays tribute to Maureen OHaras performance as the frustrated
ballerina Judy, who in Dorothy Arzners Dance, Girl, Dance (1940) turns
on her male audience and harshly scolds them for their shameless attempt to objectify her as a sexual image for the male gaze (9).
The choreography of the audition scene from Cline et Julie undeniably sets the stage for feminine defiance. In their respective films,
Rivette and Chytilovs heroines adopt theatrical personas to subvert
the predetermined script of patriarchy, moving from ostensible docility
to outright defiance. Chytilovs defiance and daring improvisational
method enthralled Rivette, propelling him toward his own high-spirited
act in Cline et Julie. Rivettes film, in turn, inspired a new generation
of French directors, such as rick Zonka, whose film La vie rve des
anges (The Dream Life of Angels; 1998) pays tribute to Cline et Julie
in a scene in which the two young heroines, Isa (lodie Bouchez) and
Marie (Natacha Rgnier), audition for hostess positions in a French club
with a Hollywood theme. Rather than openly contest the female starlet
stereotype, as Julie had done, the two women conform to it but in such
a way as to implicitly critique it. Dressed in scruffy street clothes and
with a thick accent, Isa commences a hilarious improvised performance
of the pop diva Madonnas hit number Like a Virgin, while the svelte
blond Marie saunters across the stage as a sultry Lauren Bacall. Although
neither girl gets the job, their performances succeed in exposing the
enormous gap between the real life of working-class girls and the idealized dream life of starlets.
While the heroines of La vie rve des anges and Dance, Girl, Dance
explore the alternately tragic and comic import of female role-playing
and competition between women, the two heroines of Cline et Julie
command the double or bia not only to form their own reciprocal relation
but a reciprocity between double worlds: the everyday world of home and
work in relation to the parallel world of the imagination, located within
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the Phantom House on 7 bis rue du Nadir aux Pommes. Residing

within the Phantom House, a second pair of women, the brunette Sophie
(Marie-France Pisier), who often appears in blue satin, and the blond
Camille (Bulle Ogier), typically dressed in red, serves as the double of
their Parisian counterparts, Cline and Julie, respectively. The phantom
ladies Sophie and Camille not only inhabit a different space from their
Parisian counterparts but also a different story, which demands a distinctively melodramatic comportment, speech, and attire. While Rivette has
confided that the commedia provided a source of inspiration for certain
scenes involving Cline and Julie, he later indicates that the theatricality
of scenes in the house was unplanned: Even when the theatre is not
present in a clear way, it appears in a manner that is almost involuntary.
In Cline and Julie Go Boating, for example, this happened little by
little in the house that became a theatrical space. This was predictable,
to some extent, and was subsequently accentuated during filming. I was
occasionally struck during the editing to see that certain things were
more theatrical than I had foreseen (qtd. in Armel 63).
The phantom ladies Camille and Sophie are characters within a story
that is a loose adaptation of Henry Jamess novel The Other House (1896).
Rivettes scriptwriter Gregorio came up with the idea of the James story,
and it was Gregorio, along with Rivette and the three principal actors
Ogier, Pisier, and Barbet Schroeder, who wrote the dialogue for the
scenes within the house. In addition to the collaborative work of composition, the literary history of Jamess novel also affected the process
of adaptation, for The Other House was in origin dramatic. The novel
first appeared as a play scenario under the title of The Promise, was then
published as a serialized novel in 1895, and later, in 1909, was adapted
into a play. James describes the story as that of a young widower who
has lost his wife and has a little girl. After several years, the widower
meets a young woman, Jean Martle, with whom he falls in love. Jean
Martle, who James describes as his Good Heroine, returns the widowers passionate affection and perhaps, even more important, shares
his love for the little girl (viiiix). Another woman, Rose Armiger, also
figures prominently in the story. James describes this woman as the Bad
Heroine, who has loved the widower from the instant she saw him and
who has known him from before his wifes death (viiiix). On the fated
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day of his daughters birthday, the Bad Heroine, Rose, wreaks vengeance
against the widower, drowning his child in the river and implicating her
rival, Jean, in the crime.
In the film, Rivette modifies the characters from The Other House
and overlays them onto those taken from one of Jamess short stories,
The Romance of Certain Old Clothes, the writers first tale of the
supernatural. This tale of the occult chronicles a similar story of jealous
rivalry between two sisters and their mutual relationship with a man
that they both love. Rivettes film mostly relies on the storys climactic
close in which the jealous older sister races off to the attic to open a
mysterious Pandoras box, a locked trunk containing her dead sisters
dresses and finery. When her husband ascends the stairs to the attic to
find her, he is shocked to discover the hideous sight of his wife, who has
fallen beside the open trunk, her face marked by ten wounds from two
revengeful ghostly hands.
The occult element from the James short story blends well with the
melodramatic dimensions of The Other House in Cline et Julie. While
the threads of the two James stories are intricately interwoven within
the Phantom House, its principal characters, which include the dour
widower Olivier (played by the films producer, Barbet Schroeder), the
jealous older sister Camille, and the sinister seductress Sophie, shift
in and out of roles, which at times could be derived from either story.
The murder of Madlyn in her bed is the pivotal event from the film
that draws the threads of the two stories together: the imprint of the
red hand that stains her bed sheets not only invokes the occult event at
the close of Jamess short story but also the melodramatic climax of the
childs murder in The Other House. Logic dictates that either heroine
in Cline et Julie could potentially be the culprit, for just as the icon of
the red hand serves as the formal marker implicating the hemophiliac
Camille in her sibling role from The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,
the scenes content equally condemns the child murderer Sophie, playing
the part of the Bad Heroine Rose from The Other House.
While the nurse is a minor character in both James stories, in the
film, it is this pivotal figure, Miss Angle, a.k.a. Mys-tre-Ang-le (Mystery Angel), who provides Cline and Julie with an entry point into the
Phantom House. Julie discovers her own peculiar transformative power
through that of the character Miss Angle on her return from her initial
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visit there. Propelled from the house as though tossed from a wind tunnel, Julie returns from a voyage that recalls that of the poet in Cocteaus
Orphe (Orpheus; 1950), who is hurled through the zone that provides
a passageway between the land of the living and the dead. Just as she is
catching her breath in a cab, a piece of hard candy unexpectedly emerges
from her mouth. Pieces of candy continue to allow both heroines the
latitude to move back and forth freely between the space of the Phantom
House and that of the city. Bonbons make available to them an interior
story, which takes place in the manner of the dramatization of The Other
House from which it is derived, in the halls that interconnect drawing
rooms to stairwells. The rigid camera that frames the characters violent
gestures and histrionic responses accentuates the restricted, theatrical
space that they inhabit. The theatricality of the Phantom House draws
not only on the melodramatic manner of the stage but also silent cinema. As Julie remarks, Its an entire epoch ... a school! The Odeon.
A tragedy. ... They smell like mothballs. This parallel world not only
holds an irresistible fascination for its heroines Cline and Julie but also
for Rivette, who remembers his first encounter with the Griffiths, the
Stillers, the Fairbanks, all the cinema of the 1910s and 1920s, which
left him with the very strong feeling that there had actually been in
the great films of Griffith and Stiller and Stroheim, or the first films of
Dreyer and Murnau, an innocence, which had been irretrievably lost
(qtd. in Frappat, Secret 64). The parallel world, which the heroines
revisit, thus evokes not only the innocence of a childhood memory for
them but also the innocence of an art form, which is shadowed by its
theatrical ancestor.
Cline and Julie command an authoritative use of the double or bia
to return to the Phantom House, where they revisit the curious female
characters of early crime melodrama and uncover an infanticide. Theatricalization opens up the possibility of transformation for Cline and
Julie, who self-consciously deploy theatrical conventions to reenvision
their roles and thereby liberate themselves and their cohort Madlyn
from scripted lives. Wearing matching magical dinosaur rings, the
heroines arrive together at the Phantom House and quickly retire to a
vacated room, where they dress in identical nurses uniforms. After their
arrival at the house, the heroines rapidly transform it, selecting their own
dressing room, similar to the one occupied by Suzanne Simonin in La

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religieuse. Before their entrance onto central stage, they click their rings
together and recite an esoteric chant: One, two, three. Eye of a lynx
and head of wood! While this singsong mantra is intended to bring the
two heroines good luck, it also magically breaks time and space within
the house into three dramatic acts. Cline and Julie recite it three times
just prior to their alternating performances as Miss Angle, imposing
an ulterior dramatic logic that had not been previously apparent. They
also transform stately salons into theatrical wings where they can meet
backstage between acts to relax and have a smoke, clown around, or
exchange notes on their criminal investigation. They are unable to adjust
their acting style to the manner of stagey melodrama, however, for they
arrive late, muff their lines, miss their cues, and even enter the same
scene simultaneously to play the same part. We are provided an intermission of sorts when there is a cut to black accompanied by off-screen
applause.
When their attempts to recite lines and mimic pictorial gestures
within the terms of the tragic melodrama utterly fail, the two re-create
the role of Miss Angle within the terms of the commedia as a stock
comic type known as the servetta. Like Miss Angle, the servetta also
serves two mistresses in a play: the prima donna is the most poetical and
lackadaisical, thus closely resembling Camille, and the seconda donna is
her darker shadow, thus recalling Sophie (W. Smith 5). Rather than the
stern countenance and robotic, restrained responses of the nurse, who
simply plays her part in the tragic melodrama of the Phantom House,
the role of the servetta that both heroines adopt combines the traits of
a sixteenth-century Franceschina with those of a seventeenth-century
Columbina. Franceschina, who is typically clad in a simple nurselike
uniform with mobcap and apron, is described as supple and strong like
a circus artist, whereas the younger Columbina is presented as buoyant
and vivacious, possessing a keen wit that enables her to emerge effortlessly from the most involved intrigues (Nicoll 9697). Be it the robust
Franceschina or the clever, sprightly Columbina, the servetta remains
on the periphery of the action and, consequently, becomes a spectator
herself, who observes the plotting of others and colludes with the audience in the sense that she can discern the machinations of those around
her. Assuming the role of servetta, Cline and Julie likewise collude with
the spectator, who revels in their clownish antics and listens to their
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chanting, while Olivier, Sophie, and Camille remain impervious. The

two heroines improvise openly when they opt for a delectable Argentine
tango instead of the subdued, programmed music of the mlo. Cline
and Julie grasp each other and invent their own bravura interpretation,
paying tribute to the light-hearted spirit of Columbina and her entracte
performances embellished by the tambourine. Rather than celebrating
the reunion of the heterosexual couple, the heroines rollicking dance
number defines an intense and potentially transgressive relationship
between two female characters.
Madlyns game of Grandmothers Steps, which is marked by her
count, One, two, three, echoes the heroines magical mantra that
enables them both to appropriate dramatic space within the Phantom
House and move freely within it. The childs game demands that the
three Phantom characters stop suddenly and assume statuesque poses
as though situated within a tableau, a nod to the nineteenth-century
pictorialism that serves as the limit point of the actors performance
within their melodramatic scenario. Subject to perpetual regression in
Figure 11. Cline and Julie opt for an Argentine

tango in Cline et Julie vont en bateau.
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time and space, the three characters, Camille, Sophie, and Olivier, are
struck dumb and deprived of movement, frozen momentarily within
the tableau of domestic melodrama. In an effort to escape from the
three petrified puppets, Madlyn and her cohorts swallow the bonbons
while once more repeating the charmed words One, two, three, a
combination that now indicates the formation of an alternative female
threesome that possesses the supernatural power necessary to move at
will between two worlds. Transported magically back to their Paris flat,
the two heroines are enormously relieved to find Madlyn blindfolded
and standing in their bathtub, where she is anticipating yet another
game. Cline and Julie invite her to go boating with them. An extreme
long shot shows the three ladies in a boat rowing leisurely upstream.
Their immersion in the sensual pleasures of the summer sunlight is
suddenly interrupted, however, when they simultaneously turn to look
at something that lies outside the limits of the frame. Insisting once
again on the charmed number three, we are shown three consecutive
close-ups of Julie, Cline, and Madlyn, who are all looking intently at
something that we do not see. A cut reveals only the suns rays reflected
in the motionless water, when suddenly, a second rowboat silently glides
into view. We share the point of view of all three ladies, who watch
while the ghostly, frozen figures of Camille, Olivier, and Sophie float
quietly by. A panoramic perspective subsequently reveals the two boats
drifting apart in opposite directions, one moving toward the light, the
other into shadow.
This arresting image that depicts parallel worlds in transit might be
viewed retrospectively as an emblematic allusion to a crucial point of
passage in Rivettes stylistic evolution. Like two vessels moving through
uncharted waters that meet at last, the two distinctive trends that inform
Rivettes style prior to Cline et Juliethe introspective tableaux of La
religieuse and the improvised performances of Noli me tangereconverge in this film, where they finally find their culmination. Much like
his heroines who pass into a world of childhood memory, Rivette revisits
an earlier phase in his artistic evolution, that of the tableau. He returns
to theatrical and pictorial aesthetics, specifically those contemporaneous
with Jamess literary works, thereby consolidating his earlier approach
to the adaptation of Diderot. He relies on the codes and conventions of
theatrical melodrama and silent cinema to construct the profilmic space
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of the Phantom House, which becomes progressively associated with the

paralyzing theatricality that condemns its soulless inhabitants. Those very
boundaries that had constrained Rivette in La religieusestory, script,
and acting styleare insisted upon within the Phantom House, where
they ultimately accede to the spontaneous, improvised performance style
associated not only with his earlier work, Noli me tangere, but also the
strategies of the commedia.
The films final scene returns us to where we began. Cloaked in her
blue feather boa, Cline appears to be napping on the same park bench
where the chase between the two women had begun. She is startled by
the sudden appearance of the redhead who, as she races past, drops her
magic book. Cline hails her, but to no avail. She then jumps up and runs
after her, thus reentering the tale at its point of commencement. This
final textual pirouette in which the two heroines exchange roles illustrates
the fully reciprocal nature of a relationship in which each forms the bia
or double of the other, transforming crime melodrama through comedy,
silent tableaux through virtuoso lazzo, patriarchal domesticity through
feminine telepathy. The parallel worlds that the two inhabit, here, become indiscernible; the everyday world mutates with the dreamlike world
of imagination to become one with it. Rivette finally rejoins both heroines
in their pursuit of a parallel world, for as the taker (recorder) and giver
(reproducer) of doubles or souls or reflections, he similarly assumes the
role of the magician who entices us with this possibility.
| | |
In certain respects, the theatricality of Lamour par terre (Love on the

Ground; 1984) and La bande des quatre (Gang of Four; 1989) represents
a departure from the formal concerns that had preoccupied Rivette during the previous decade. In these two films, theater is no longer associated with improvisational stylistics or an operatic, esoteric mise-en-scne
where chants resonate within cosmic force fields. In both films, theatricality becomes equivalent to the work of a dramatic text. In Lamour par
terre, actresses Emily (Jane Birkin) and Charlotte (Graldine Chaplin)
rehearse dramatist Clment Roquemaures (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) new
play within his isolated, haunted villa located on the outskirts of Paris.
In La bande des quatre, four actresses and another attend the reputable
theater course taught by Constance Dumas (Bulle Ogier), successively

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taking their places on the proscenium stage to recite the lines of Enlightenment playwright Pierre Carlet de Marivauxs The Double Inconstancy.
While both films revisit the exteriorized theatricality of Paris nous
appartient and Lamour fou in which the metteur en scne, the troupe,
and the text are placed on display, they also reinvent the representation
of the occult found in Cline et Julie. Recalling Jamess three spectral
figures who reside in the Phantom House, ghosts haunt the houses of
Lamour par terre and La bande des quatre, becoming as audible as an
ocean from behind a locked door or soft footsteps from within hollow
walls, as tangible as an invisible hand extended from a chimney or an
unanticipated oneiric vision.
In Lamour par terre, an unfinished theater script provides the pretext for the films story in which metteur en scne Clment Roquemaure
introduces himself backstage to the two actresses, Emily and Charlotte,
who are appearing in his play and invites them to his villa. The next
day, the two actresses arrive at his residence in St. Cloud, where they
discover the magnificent villa Gounod, which also appeared in Alain
Robbe-Grillets La belle captive (The Beautiful Prisoner; 1983). Its labyrinthine corridors and baroque enormity recall those of the luxurious
palace in Robbe-Grillet and Resnaiss modernist classic Lanne dernire
Marienbad (Last Year at Marienbad; 1961), a film whose experimental
strategies with time and sensual visual patterning provide Rivette with
an important source of inspiration. When Charlotte and Emily arrive
at the villa, they come upon Roquemaure encased within the vermilion
tiger-striped walls of his lair. They agree to appear with another actor
Silvano (Facundo Bo) in a single performance of the authors unfinished
play, which is based on a romantic episode from his past. As the two
prepare to assume their new roles and names from the play, their own
names within the films fiction, Emily and Charlotte, invoke those of the
nineteenth-century Bront sisters, anticipating Rivettes subsequent film
adaptation of Wuthering Heights.
While bearing British authors names, the two characters are also
modeled on their French predecessors Cline and Julie, as they adopt
theatrical roles to intervene within the story of the haunted villa. Resembling Cline and Julie, who envision themselves as their doubles, Emily
and Charlotte also are able to see phantom reflections of themselves in
certain rooms in the villa Gounod where, as Charlotte remarks, It was as
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if there were a mirror. The two come into contact with a conjurer, Paul
(Andr Dussollier), who resides there and possesses a gift that enables
him to bestow visions on Emily and Charlotte, simply by touching them.
The spectator is invited to share their visions, which could be interpreted
as the reflection of a mood or a premonition. At one moment, we watch
as a slow lateral pan redirects our gaze away from Emily, who is embracing Paul, to reveal her vision of an adjacent room, where she suddenly
appears to herself as a corpse overseen by a mysterious young woman
in red. We initially share her alarm but later realize that this hallucination is the key scene central to the completion of Roquemaures play.
While the phantom reflections of the two actresses haunt certain rooms
in the villa, recorded sound occasionally escapes from others, such as
the screeching of tropical birds that have migrated from a rainforest,
grand orchestral flourishes, or the roar of ocean waves accompanied by
the occasional cry of a seagull. When Emily attempts to determine the
source of such sounds, she discovers only a single crab crawling across
the floor. She later wonders during dinner whether or not the crab that
she and the other guests are served had been washed in with the waves
crashing behind the closed door, bearing a supernatural significance akin
to the signs of the Zodiac that adorn the circular vestibule.
Like the conjurer, the metteur en scne Barbe Bleu (Bluebeard) also
commands doubles. He casts Charlotte in the central role of BarbaraBatrice, the phantom woman in red from his past who has mysteriously
disappeared from the villa and from the lives of those who remain. Emily
is cast in the male role that corresponds to the conjurer Paul, while Silvano plays the part of Roquemaure. The theatrical and cinematic scripts
converge when, one night, Charlotte confesses to Emily that she not only
is rehearsing the role but believes herself to be Roquemaures Barbara
in flesh and bone. Rivette once more calls our attention to the relation
between the dramatic role and the real, the replica and original, in a subsequent scene in the garden where Charlotte grapples with LAmour. She
initiates a playful flirtation with the statue of LAmour but subsequently
discovers in the course of mounting it that it is not a marble original but
a plaster knockoff when it crashes to the ground and breaks into shards.
Rivette finds his source of inspiration for this scene and also the films
title in symbolist Paul Verlaines poem, LAmour par terre, which begins
with the line, The wind the other night has cast down Love/ which, in

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the most mysterious corner of the park,/ was smiling while maliciously
tautening its bow, and continues in the second stanza, Its sad to see the
pedestal where the name of the artist/ can be read with difficulty among
the shadows of a tree. The fragile replica of LAmour that lures Charlotte
and the audience like a red herring serves as the metaphoric double of
the theatrical production in process in the villa. It also anticipates the
trite tableau that Frenhofer offers to his audience in lieu of the interred
original in La belle noiseuse. Roquemaure ultimately demands that the
broken statue be replaced with a replica of the replica, a moment that
Rivette underscores in the final shot of the film as though to point to the
sutured aspect of his own story of LAmour.
While theatrical reflexivity is central to the two-hour version of
Lamour par terre, Rivettes exploration of duration and visual patterning is more in evidence in the original 170-minute uncut version
of the film, which did not receive commercial distribution until the
2002 release of Arte-Vidos restored DVD edition. In the videotaped
interview with Frdric Bonnaud available on the Arte editions Complments de Programme, Rivette affirms that he had been forced at
the time to cut the film to approximately two hours to conform to the
demands of its distributor. To explain how the editing process was
accomplished, Rivette describes his approach to the original version,
which he affirms was structured similarly to Raymond Roussels New
Impressions of Africa, where there is a phrase, and then a parenthesis,
which is tied to yet another phrase, and another parenthesis, ad infinitum (qtd. in Bonnaud). He claims that to go from two hours and
fifty minutes to two hours he simply lifted the parentheses (qtd. in
Bonnaud). Such parentheses permit Birkins character Emily sufficient
time and space in the original film to indulge in random encounters
with offbeat characters on the metro, or Chaplins character Charlotte
to converse easily in a bar one night with the elusive woman from
Roquemaures past, Barbara-Batrice, who in the two-hour version
appears only within the parameters of Roquemaures play and in his
villa. While not entirely dissatisfied with the shorter version, Rivette
feels that it unfolds more in one key, while the uncut film is more
complex, and its tone, more melancholic (qtd. in Bonnaud).
Rivettes interrogation of the boundaries between theater and cinema that characterizes Lamour par terre crystallizes within the opening
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sequence of La bande des quatre. We watch as Anna (Fejria Deliba)

finishes her espresso in a Paris caf. She leaves and enters a nearby
building, where she becomes engaged in conversation with another
woman who enters immediately afterward. We do not realize that we
are watching two actresses rehearsing the opening scene of Marivauxs
The Double Inconstancy until the offscreen voice of Constance Dumas
(Bulle Ogier) intervenes, instructing Raphale (Caroline Gasser) not
to rely on her pocket notes during a performance. The film thus begins
with an exploration of the parameters of theatrical and profilmic space,
inviting us to reflect on our implied position as members of an onscreen
and offscreen audience.
Theatrical and cinematic scripts converge within the opening scene
of La bande des quatre but then diverge in scenes that follow. Theater
rehearsals take place on a proscenium stage in an old Paris theater where
the mysterious actress and metteur en scne Constance Dumas lives
and works.15 Repeated traveling shots of a commuter train transport the
apprentice actresses as well as the spectator back and forth between
Dumass Paris theater and the haunted house in the suburbs of Montfermeil where the four theater students, Claude (Laurence Cte), Anna
(Fejria Deliba), Joyce (Bernadette Giraud), Lucia (Ines dAlmeida),
and another, Ccile (Nathalie Richard), share their scripts, their stories,
and their lives. We are introduced to the house and its inhabitants just
as a new student from Portugal, Lucia, is moving into her room, and
the lithe, blond Ccile is leaving to pursue a romantic liaison. Ccile
jokingly warns Anna, who is taking advantage of Lucias arrival to move
into Cciles old room, that a ghost persists in occupying the chamber.
Unlike the Jamesian occult in evidence in the Phantom House of Cline
et Julie, the ghost of Montfermeil maintains a complicitous relation with
its heroines.16
In La bande des quatre, the words of the author take precedence in
the actresses individuated interpretations of them. Intervening from
the audience in the films opening scene, Constance interrupts Anna
and Raphales performance of the respective roles of Silvia and Trivelin from Marivauxs The Double Inconstancy. The play tells the story
of two young lovers, Harlequin and the idealized country girl Silvia,
characters who clearly reflect the commedia dellarte tradition. The
Prince, who has fallen in love with Silvia, puts her love for Harlequin to

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the test when he imprisons her in his palace. Flaminia, a woman of the
court, conspires with the Prince and his servant Trivelin to destroy the
love of Silvia for Harlequin. The Prince disguises himself as a common
guardsman to seduce Silvia, while Flaminia proceeds to lure Harlequin,
who has been brought to the castle to appease Silvias fury. Against his
best intentions, Harlequin falls in love with the duplicitous Flaminia,
while Silvia is smitten with the guardsman, whom she later realizes is
her Prince. Assessing Annas interpretation, Constance cautions her
students: its necessary to express the words, and the words arent your
words, they are the words of Marivaux. Here, Rivette invites us, like
the students seated in the theater, to contemplate the work of the text,
for he believed, The work is always much more interesting to show
than the result. I can watch a coppersmith in a Rouquier film for three
hours. A caldron, even if it is the most beautiful in the world, I will have
viewed from all angles in three minutes (qtd. in Skorecki 29).
During other rehearsals, the actresses perform passages from the
classic works of seventeenth-century dramatists, such as Pierre Corneilles little-known tragedy Surna, Jean Racines Iphignie and Esther,
and Jean-Baptiste Molires comedy Les femmes savantes. The continual
shifting between theatrical registers throughout the film forces our attention to the notion of performance. At one point, Constance reproaches
Ccile for her overwrought interpretation of a passage from The Double
Inconstancy and admonishes her for transforming Marivauxs comedy
into a tragedy. Claude counters that she knows how the passage should
be interpreted, as other students in the class join in to respond with this
light ditty: I dont want a Prince and I want a Baron even less. Tra, la, la
... I want my friend Pierre, who is now in prison. The lyrics foreshadow
the fate of Cciles romantic involvement with Antoine Lucas, who is
later arrested and wrongly convicted of a crime.
In the film, Cciles boyfriend, Antoine Lucas, appears only as a
televised image and voice broadcast over the radio. Rivette bases his
characterization on a fait divers detailing the infamous trial of French
writer Roger Knobelspiess that was taking place in Rouen at the time of
the shoot. Knobelspiess had already been convicted and served time for
petty theft, a crime that he denied. Following his release, he was again
picked up for theft and placed in a high-security prison. Knobelspiess
constantly fought against his false imprisonment and became a cause
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Figure 12. The rehearsal of Surna,

where students discuss Antoine Lucass
escape in La bande des quatre.
clbre within the French intellectual and artistic community. Michel

Foucault even provided the preface of Knobelspiesss book, entitled
Q.H.S.: Quartier de haute scurit (1980). After the left gained power
in 1981, Knobelspiess received a retrial and was at last liberated. His
subsequent arrest and trial, which was concurrent with the filming of La
bande des quatre, were discursively constructed by the right-wing press
as symptomatic of the laxity of the left and the irresponsibility of intellectuals. The tragic dimensions of Knobelspiess, who Rivette viewed as
a modern-day Jean Valjean, inflect his filmic representation of Lucas
(qtd. in Boujut 95). Rivette confides, In this film, I wanted to look at,
along with the little predicaments of my actresses, the dramatic aspect
of our lives in contemporary France (qtd. in Boujut 95).
To stage a mock trial of Lucas/Knobelspiess, Claude, Lucia, Anna,
and Joyce band together in a room whose strident red, white, and blue
decor invokes the symbolic colors of French statehood. Invading the
enclosed space of the theater room where the actresses assume their roles
as judge, jury, and accused, an occasional gust of wind intrudes on the
performance. We might be provoked to ask, Is this wind westerly that
blows, thus reiterating the memorable line from Pericles, or we might
think of it as a blast of air from the passing train that throughout the film

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is moving between stations and scenes. Marivauxs play, which derides the
decadence of the French throne and the frivolity of its subjects, unfolds
in parallel with the actresses parodic performance, which exposes the
corruption of the contemporary French state and the mindless complicity
of its citizens. The implicit comparison that the film provides between
classical and contemporary periods forces the spectator to ask: To what
degree do Marivauxs Enlightenment subjects who allow themselves to
be conned in affairs of the heart resemble those contemporary French
citizens who permit themselves to be duped in matters of human rights
and justice? At the close of their performance, the actresses sing these
verses: There are things hidden behind things, endlessly, its tiring/There
are reasons for things seeming wrong/never miss anything/When things
seem wrong, you look for a cause/and the cause is the innocent/Ah, ah,
ah, yes indeed! The innocent make the best victims. The phrase things
hidden behind things, on the surface, implicates the media conspiracy
that ensnares Lucas and the actual personage Knobelspiess on which the
Lucas character is based; it reflexively implicates the royal conspiracy,
which entraps the commedia characters Harlequin and Silvia.
In their attempts to aid Ccile and Antoine Lucas, the troupe has
most to fear from the false seducer Thomas Santini (Benot Rgent),
a.k.a. Lucien, a.k.a. Henri de Marsay. He approaches each actress by turn
under a different pseudonym in an attempt to gain access to their house,
where keys to a safe containing incriminating documents are hidden.
While driving Anna home after her debut at a photography exhibit, he
first introduces himself to her as a printer of false identity cards, then as
a painter of stolen cars, and finally as a printer of art catalogs. He later
seduces Claude, claiming that he is searching for Frenhofers stolen
painting, La belle noiseuse; however, his penchant for profit from
the spoils of mechanical reproduction anticipates the character Porbus
from Divertimento. Joyce later describes him: This kind of guy, hes a
Walmart where you can find everything: friendship, trafficking, loyalty,
cheating, ballistics, slick, cultured. Were he a perfume, Anna claims, he
would be a potpourri. Joyce and Anna take turns speculating on whom he
would be were he a famous man, throwing out the names of Casanova,
Pasqua, Jekyll, and Hyde. His Machiavellian character might appease
Rivettes wish to show those cold monsters that are unshowable: the
State, Money, the Police, the Party. ... Everything that terrifies me!
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(qtd. in Boujut 95). After Thomas reveals his (false?) identity card to the
actresses to prove that he is, in fact, a criminal investigator, he proceeds
to stake out their house to entrap Lucas following the latters escape from
the police. When Lucias attempt to poison Thomas fails, he roughs her
up and gets the keys off her. These are not only the keys that open the
safe but also the phantoms keys, which can open the magical theater
room. As Thomas attempts to flee, the four women rise up against him
and slay him in an effort to save their friend Ccile and liberate Lucas.
In this manner, they retain control of the keys that unlock their feminine
potential and allow them to take control of their lives and their art.
Rivette dedicates his film to the prisoners, to one among them, to
those who await them. The dedication could be addressed to the contemporary personage Knobelspiess and his cinematic surrogate Lucas,
the commedia dellarte figures, Harlequin and Silvia, the missing actress Joyce, who we assume is arrested for Thomass murder, and the
metteur en scne Constance Dumas, who is ultimately detained for her
complicity in Lucass escape. The films visual and verbal rhetoric that
accomplishes an incessant back and forth shifting between arcane past
and media-saturated present, comic and tragic theatrical registers, and
theatrical and cinematic role playing, invites the spectator to contemplate
the moral vacillation between truth and fabrication at the heart of the
French state. The actresses for whom acting is not lying, but searching
for truth continue courageously with their dress rehearsal of the final
scene, in which Lucia recites Silvias parting words to Harlequin, Console
yourself as you can. ... Then leave me alone, and thats the end of it.
While her line could be read as a reflexive, auteurist remark directed at
the film audience, Rivette might remind us, Its a rehearsal, which is still
not theater. The theater commences later, when we are no longer there,
when the film has ended (qtd. in Skorecki 29). In the months following
the release of La bande des quatre, Rivette returned to the theater in the
role of metteur en scne for the first time since his 1963 stage production
of La religieuse. At Thtre Grard-Philipe in Saint-Denis, he directed
productions of Corneilles Tite et Brnice and Racines Bajazet with the
same group that had performed in La bande des quatre, including Laurence Cte, Fejria Deliba, and Bernadette Giraud.
| | |
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The phantom film, Marie et Julien (1975), was to have been the first film
in the tetralogy Scnes de la vie parallle, which, until recently, seemed
destined to remain unfinished. When Rivette suddenly disappeared
from the set after only three days of filming, novelist Marguerite Duras
offered to step in and complete the film, but Rivettes team of actors
refused to proceed without him. The few shots that Rivette filmed on
the set of Marie et Julien have never been found; all that remains is a
skeleton script, which was written by filmmaker Claire Denis along with
scriptwriters Gregorio and Parolini. The new version closely conforms
to this original script, although Rivette was forced to reconceptualize
the love story to suit the requirements of his contemporary team of
actors, which included Emmanuelle Bart (Marie), with whom he had
already worked on La belle noiseuse, and Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Julien),
the equivocal Walser in Secret dfense. With scriptwriters Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent, Rivette developed the mysterious third
figure of Madame X (Anne Brochet), who in the contemporary version
becomes almost as important as the other two characters. Although
Rivette had acquired an entirely new team of actors and writers, he
rejoins cinematographer William Lubtchansky, who had worked with
him on almost every film since Les filles du feu (with the exception of
Hurlevent, La bande des quatre, and Haut bas fragile). It is the lens of
Lubtchansky that in Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Story of Marie and
Julien; 2003) recaptures the visual magnificence of the quarantaine, the
magical temporal zone during which goddesses can appear on earth and
converse with mortals. Rivettes interest in magic and fantasy as sources
of female empowerment resurfaces in the recent film from its source
in the supernatural feminine cosmology of Les filles de feu and also in
the commedia high jinks of Cline et Julie.
While thematically and visually tied to the tetralogy, Histoire de
Marie et Julien lacks the improvised music that provided a formal connection between Norot and Duelle. Yet, the chiming and ticking of
clocks in the rambling home of the clocksmith Julien could be said
to unite the film with the 1970s cycle through a hollow sonority that
Rivette intended. It is through Juliens point of view that the film begins.
A traveling shot through a grassy, sun-swept park is retrospectively
attributed to the reflective bachelor Julien, who is seated alone on a
bench. We share his point of view as he looks up at the foliage of a tree
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above him. His seemingly arbitrary glance upward recalls that of Julie,
who seated in a similar park in Cline et Julie glances at the rustling
leaves above her just before noticing Cline. When Julien looks down,
we identify with his gaze as he spots the spectral Marie, dressed in
an all-white suit, walking before him. Unlike the distracted Cline,
who scurries away, Marie recognizes Julien immediately and stops to
chat. They reminisce about their last rendezvous more than a year ago,
and each describes to the other intimate details from the recent past.
Suddenly, Marie pulls a large knife on Julien. There is an abrupt cut
to a caf, where Julien, hunched over the table where his unfinished
beer remains, is just waking up after having momentarily dozed off.
The entire opening park scene must then be read retroactively as his
dream. During a videotaped interview with Frappat in 2004, Rivette
acknowledged the influence of Luis Buuel. In my view, the opening
dream sequence borrows from the postsurrealist classic Belle de jour
(Buuel; 1967), which opens with a sado-masochistic ritual in which
the beautiful bourgeoisie Sverine (Catherine Deneuve) is violently
whipped in the Bois de Boulogne, an event that is only retrospectively
understood as the heroines dream following an abrupt cut to her husband watching from their bedroom. In both films, the space of the real
ultimately becomes increasingly indistinguishable from the space of
dream and erotic imaginings.
The rhythmic repartee between Marie and Julien in the opening
scene in the park unfolds in a dreamlike manner that recalls that of
Resnaiss La dernire anne Marienbad, specifically the exchanges
between its three somnambulist characters, X (Giorgio Albertazzi),
M (Sacha Pitoff), and Ms mistress A (Delphine Seyrig). Resembling Resnaiss characters, who appear to be enclosed within their own
dimension, Marie is trapped between the living and the dead. She is a
revenante (a spirit who comes back), a phenomenon that, Rivette observes, is applicable to those persons who for one reason or another
did not succeed in crossingbe it the river, path, tree, hillthe frontier that separates our world of the living and the world of the dead,
which lies in the direction of Norot (the northwest), and consequently
are condemned to passing certain tests that will allow them to leave
this state, which is quite uncomfortable, between the two worlds (qtd.
in Frappat, Entretien). Marie confides to Julien that she is seeking

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deliverance, although he is initially oblivious to the meaning behind

these words and unaware of his role as her mortal liaison.
Immediately following this oneiric encounter, Marie meets Julien at
night on a vacated Paris boulevard. Streetlamps coat the urban landscape
with a shimmering yellowish cast, which creates a transitional space between light and the darkness that sets the stage for Juliens subsequent
rendezvous with Madame X. Emerging from a shadowy, lunar landscape
that bears traces of urban industrialization, the third character, Madame
X, is impatient for Julien to arrive. Dressed in a tailored blue coat and
sporting an oval onyx pendant, this poised figure casually surveys Julien.
He asks her, Madame X, who? to which she responds, Madame X,
too short of funds. A dealer in fake antique silk, Madame X is utterly
vulnerable to Juliens attempt to blackmail her. Her dark presence provides a sharp contrast to the bright, warm sensuality of Marie, recalling
the dichotomous divide between the lunar and solar goddesses of Duelle
and Norot. This contrast is repeated once again in another female pair,
which is introduced in a black-and-white photograph depicting Madame
X and her blond younger sister, Adrienne, who, like Marie, is also a revenante. Like Marie, Adrienne (Bettina Kee) desires death as a means of
deliverance from the in-between zone where she has been condemned
to wander. Only reconciliation with her mortal sister, Madame X, will
provide her with an entre to the realm of the dead.
Marie initially seeks deliverance through her amorous companion
Julien, inviting him to dinner. During their evening soire, she confides to him that her boyfriend Simon was killed in a car crash, and
Julien reciprocates with a similar story, revealing that his ex-girlfriend
Estelle returned to her home in provincial Montelban (a place name
that invokes the suburb of Montfermeil where the students lived in La
bande des quatre). They make love, but the following morning Marie
disappears. Julien traces her to a hotel room on rue des Ecoles, evoking similar secluded hotel locales in Duelle. At this point in the film,
Julien is interposed between two women who, while not goddesses, are
visually and symbolically associated with the moon and the sun, as he
alternates between clandestine meetings with Madame X and quixotic
interludes with Marie, respectively. Recalling the duplicitous Thomas
Santini from La bande des quatre, who acts by turns as seducer and
sinister culprit, Julien is both a blackmailer who appears to be part of
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an insidious criminal underworld and an amiable, lonely bachelor whose

sole companion is his playful cat, Nevermore. When he invites Marie to
move into his house with him, her assent expresses not only her desire
for him but also her need for deliverance.
Marie soon becomes unduly jealous of his ex-partner Estelle, the
girl from Montelban. The morning after she moves into his house, Marie descends dressed in Estelles blue bathrobe and asks, Why did she
leave her things? She later tries on Estelles coat, which dwarfs her slight
frame, and then her shoes, recalling the scene in Hitchcocks Vertigo in
which Judy dresses in the identical style of her double Madeleine to appease the fetishistic desires of her suitor. Marie distracts herself from her
jealous preoccupations by redecorating a cluttered storage room, which
she does not permit Julien to see. In this musty attic room, she inspects
the old furniture, knickknacks, and forgotten paintings, finally uncovering a large mirror in an ornate frame. She contemplates her reflection
in it, a mirror image that indicates her duplicitous status as a revenante,
a supernatural being who spans two worlds, whose soul is split in two.
One is dead, the other is living, Marie remarks when she sees the photograph of the two sisters, Adrienne and Madame X, respectively. Yet this
synoptic description is also a covert reflection on her own double status
stratified between two worlds, torn between her desire to replicate the
living Estelle and her need to achieve deliverance in death.
After cleaning and rearranging furnishings in the blue room, she carefully positions a stepladder in a central spot, then climbs up to the top
step, where she sits and gazes directly up at the rafters. She then recites a
Gaelic incantation, which Rivette identifies as the geis, a magical incantation derived from Celtic druidism (qtd. in Frappat, Entretien). Historian Jean Markale explains the significance of Celtic myth for Rivettes
work when he asserts, Societies that are determinedly patriarchal have
at all times been suspicious of everything Celtic (official Christianity is a
notable example), because Celtic thought is not consistent with the patriarchal ideal (16). Markale notes that those historical periods in which
the role of women blossomed were marked by a certain renaissance of
Celtic thought, such as the Courtly Period of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries when Celtic legends reappeared in European literature (16). Its
power surpassed divine and human laws, initiating a new order through
the wishes of those controlling it. When Marie invokes the supernatural

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power of the geis, she echoes her pagan predecessors, priestesses, witches,
and women lawgivers who imposed their will by ritual and magic means.
The literal meaning of Maries Gaelic chant remains open to interpretation, yet we might conjecture that this geis compels her to reenact her
own suicide in order to achieve deliverance. Julien ultimately discovers
her secret after a curious conversation with Madame X, who reveals Maries true status as revenante to him. Initially in disbelief, Julien contacts
her old friend Delphine (Nicole Garcia), a documents researcher whose
name recalls Resnaiss leading lady, Delphine Seyrig. She confides to
Julien that Marie had gone a bit crazy before her suicide and become
someone else, a prisoner to love, perhaps. Julien retraces Maries steps
to her final residence, where a peculiar porter (Mathias Jung) ushers
him to her apartment. Julien is shocked to see that it is identical to the
refurbished attic roomred curtains, green world globe, blue walls,
and mirrorexcept for a single hook extending from the ceiling. The
porters eyes widen as he recounts the gruesome discovery of her body
spinning around accompanied by the telltale sound that could be Edgar
Allan Poes pendulum, tic toc, tic toc. It becomes clear to Julien that
Marie has re-created the site of her suicide in the secret blue room that
seems destined to become her tomb.
The films final section offers a shift in perspective that is marked
by the caption Marie, as the films oneiric opening is entitled Julien.
The section commences with her decision to return to Juliens home
following her sudden disappearance and brief stay at Htel lAveyron.
She curls up in his armchair and soon falls asleep. Upon awakening,
she extends her hand to Julien and leads him to the attic room, where a
noose hangs ominously from the rafters. She begins to climb the stairs
of the stepladder but swoons, falling back into Juliens arms. A sudden
cut returns us to Julien contemplating Marie, who is still asleep in his
armchair. Upon awakening, Marie confides to Julien that she has had a
dream that resembled an order and must be obeyed. Silhouetted in a
scene of ritualistic lovemaking that night, Marie begs Julien to stop her
from sleeping. Yet, once again, she sees herself leading Julien trancelike
through the house to the blue attic room, where she insists that he watch
her hang herself. From this, we can conclude that, for Marie, dreams
are manifestations of the geis.
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The following morning, Marie rises early to meet her double Adrienne
in a space situated between indoors and outdoors, the world of the living
and the dead. Seated on a red park bench, the two could be in an openair garden or a greenhouse, yet the pastel yellow stained glass recalls the
interior of a chapel. In this ambivalent place that serves as the vestibule
to another realm, Marie confides to Adrienne, I no longer want to be
delivered. Upon her return home, she discovers Julien in the attic room
attempting to hang himself in an effort to rejoin her forever. She angrily
warns him: If you die, you will not come back. He tries to take his life
once more, cutting himself with a butcher knife. Marie struggles with
him, and as he pulls away, he slashes his hand and also her wrist. Mindful
of the gravity of their dilemma, Marie invokes the geste interdit (gesture
of prohibition) as she covers her face with both hands, her fingers fully
extended as though forming a mask. This gesture empowers Marie, rendering her invisible and nonexistent to those who inhabit the temporal
zone of the living. It ultimately allows her to wield control over her own
destiny, giving expression to her deep desire to remain with Julien.
This extraordinary gesture of prohibition, which like the geis is culled
from Celtic epic tradition, was salvaged from the margins of the original
Figure 13. Marie performs the

geste interdit (gesture of prohibition)
in Histoire de Marie et Julien.
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film script. Rivette and his former co-scenarist Denis had completely forgotten its intended meaning, and so he and his new team of writers gave it
a new visual form and magical import. Maries invocation of supernatural
forces through gestures and incantations recalls the pagan power of the
seductress Grainne, who in the Celtic tale of Grainne and Diarmuid imposes her will upon her lover Diarmuid by the magical means of a geis,
forcing him to flee with her and thereby transgress an incest prohibition.
The geis that projects pagan, feminine power not only governs the vast
epic tableau of Grainne and Diarmuid but reappears in the Celtic legend
of Tristan and Iseult, where it is transformed into a magical aphrodisiac
potion to justify the two lovers disregard of conventional Christian morality (Markale 20812). In Histoire de Marie et Julien, Rivette returns
to pagan mythology to restore the exceptional role of the woman who,
in the original tale of Grainne and Diarmuid, is the driving force, able to
control her future world, manipulate the man effectively, and bring about
his psychic and spiritual metamorphosis as well as her own.
Marie is destined to rejoin the world of the living in the fashion of her
powerful Celtic predecessor Grainne, while her blond double Adrienne
is fated to vanish forever from the world of the living. When Madame
X unexpectedly appears at Juliens door that evening, neither she nor
Julien are able to see Marie, who is seated in the armchair watching
them. Madame X has come to retrieve Adriennes letter implicating
her in her sisters death. Julien hands it over, and she burns it, fondly
bidding Adrienne adieu. Still seated in the living room, Marie quietly
contemplates Julien seated in the adjacent armchair holding Nevermore,
who is oblivious to her presence. She begins to cry, and her tears trickle
down her cheek, falling on the open gash on her arm where Julien had
cut her earlier. She is incredulous when she suddenly notices blood
flowing from her arm. A fade to black is followed by a medium shot
of Julien waking from a nap. He automatically asks the time, but then
seems perplexed by Maries presence and continues to question her,
What are you doing here? Who are you? She responds, Marie, the
one you love. When he expresses his astonishment and adds that she
is not really his type, Marie merely replies, Thats what you think. Give
me a little time. This singular moment shared between the lovers that
surpasses temporal boundaries returns us to their initial somnambulistic
encounter and to Rivettes earlier reflection on the nature of cinema,
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which he claims 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 clich becomes true (qtd. in Aumont et al. 37). In the fashion of
solar Celtic goddesses Grainne and Iseult, Marie is destined to share the
future with her lover in passionate, unending cyclical love, a feminine
destiny that is celebrated in the recommencement of the 1970s cycle.
From this perspective, Blossom Dearies upbeat rendition of Our Day
Will Come at the close of Histoire de Marie et Julien offers a final flash
of hope, a resonant melodic line that celebrates feminine possibility.
Cyclical endings are recurrent in Rivettes work. Within the final exchange of glances between Marie and Julien, which retrospectively resituates the films oneiric opening within a feminine perspective, Rivette
returns to the perennial theme that inflects all his films: time. Similar to
the clocksmiths desire in Histoire de Marie et Julien to repair the works
that line the rooms of his house, the director Rivette seeks to repair time
through patience, persistence, and passion for his craft. Clockworks that
clutter the films mise-en-scne point to the directors ongoing obsessiona director who now is no longer young and who acutely senses
the preciosity of time remaining to complete those projects destined to
otherwise remain unfinished. Not unlike the clocksmith whose mastery
is measured in the practical, affective relationship he maintains with an
artisanal, manual trade, Rivette merits the title of patron (boss), the
term that Rivette had formulated while filming Jean Renoir le patron to
describe the stature of the director within the profession.
Returning, Departing: Ne touchez pas la hache
and 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
Rivette returns to the historical costume drama in his largely faithful
adaptation of the second novella, La duchesse de Langeais (between
Ferragus and La fille aux yeux dor), of Balzacs nineteenth-century
trilogy, Histoire des treize (The Thirteen). As we recall, the prologue of
The Thirteen had provided the impetus for the ambling, improvisational
serial film Noli me tangere decades earlier. In this recent adaptation that
strives to remain faithful not only to the spirit but to the letter of the text,
Rivette returns to the novellas original title, Ne touchez pas la hache

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(Dont Touch the Axe; 2007), and to the tableau, revisiting the themes
of desire and possession that, to a greater or lesser degree, inspire all
his adaptations. As critics have noted, Rivettes theatrical structuring is
very much in evidence in the films prologue, when we first encounter
Sister Thrse, formerly known as the Duchess Antoinette of Langeais
(Jeanne Balibar) (Naremore, 31; Romney, 67; Thirion, 10). Her dramatic
appearance from behind a closed curtain where she is cloistered behind
the grille of a Carmelite nunnery recalls the encrypted theatrical tableaux
at the commencement of La religieuse. The intensity of this moment is
elevated here because of two previous scenes in the Carmelite chapel
that define the Duchess as the lost love of General Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu), a celebrated French military officer
who has been desperately searching for her for the past five years. His
search ends where the film begins, at an organ recital in a chapel on
the island of Mallorca, where he recognizes the melancholic strains of
River Tage (lyrics by J. H. Demeun and music by B. Pollet), a ballad
that he continues to associate with his former lover, the Duchess, and
their ill-fated romance in Paris.
Framed in a flashback, the films central story begins five years earlier
in Restoration Paris. A heavy brocade curtain is drawn to reveal a dimly
Figure 14. A tableau: General de Montriveau

discovers Antoinette in a Carmelite
nunnery in Ne touchez pas la hache.
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Jacques Rivette
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lit drawing room in the fashionable neighborhood of Saint-Germain.

Returning to the structure of his earlier Balzac adaptation, La belle
noiseuse, Rivette conceptualizes the structure of La hache as a series of
brilliantly choreographed tableaux that create the impression of a classical five-act play comprised of three key central actsthe Duchesss
theatrically orchestrated seduction and humiliation of the General in
her boudoir, the Generals vengeance on the Duchess in his lair, and
their final missed rendezvouswhich are framed by the aforementioned
prologue and an epilogue that also takes place at the nunnery, where the
General finds that Antoinette has died of an unknown malady. While the
central moments in the film take place in the couples private quarters
that preserve the intimacy of their exchanges, the social space of the
salon remains the architectural and ideological hub of the story. It is
where the Duchess first encounters the dashing General, described by
some as the student of Bonaparte, who has recently returned from an
expedition to central Africa. The palpable ease and grace with which the
Duchess navigates the space of the salons seem to emerge from within
a world of aristocratic entitlement oblivious to the obtrusive thump
of the Generals wooden leg as he marches over to meet her, bowing
deeply. While she is presumably entranced by the tale he tells of his
voyage across burning desert sands, it is evident that she has already set
her sights on him and intends to take him captive, transforming him not
into her lover but her prey. Flattered by the Duchesss obvious interest
in him, Montriveau agrees to continue his story the next night at her
home, but before he retires vows to have her as his mistress. Neither is
motivated initially by amorous fervor, as Morrey and Smith have noted,
but by a taste for conquestfor possession (247).
The three central tableaux place the act of seduction on display. An
accomplished actress, Antoinette feigns illness and devises a convincing
mise-en-scne, which she cunningly unleashes upon the unsuspecting
General. In preparation for his arrival, she slips out of her ceremonial
evening dress into a strapless dressing gown, checking repeatedly in
her dressing room mirror to ensure that her dcolletage is complemented by a distraught demeanor that will produce its intended effect.
When Montriveau arrives, he finds her in a fire-lit boudoir, barely
visible, draped across a divan, her hair down but discreetly cloaked in
a chiffon scarf. In the second central tableau, Armand demonstrates

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that he is equal to her measure, for as Jonathan Romney points out,

he emerges as the master of melodramatic mise-en-scne and every
bit as much an actor as she (67). At ease in his lair, he painstakingly
restages their inaugural rendezvous, shifting the balance of power
to his advantage. Puffing on a cigar, he calmly complains to her of
a headache, as she lies cowering on his sofa. Rather than the warm,
romantic fire of the Duchesss hearth that had helped to kindle his
amorous feelings, mysterious red flames crackle and masked men mill
about in the adjoining antechamber. Inured to her advances, Armand
tempestuously threatens to brand her forehead with a hot poker to
mark his possession of her permanently, but recants when she proclaims her willingness to submit to his every whim. Montriveau and
the Duchess alternately demonstrate their mastery of mise-en-scne
in these successive tableaux in which both wear masks, as Rivette observes, not only to conceal the truth of their feelings from each other
but from themselves (qtd. in Mrigeau 65). Crucially, however, neither
possesses a sense of timing, the capacity to sense at what moment to
strip the mask away. A missed rendezvous precipitates the Duchesss
final departure, marked by a cut to black and intertitles that reproduce
Balzacs text: From Hells Boulevard, for the last time, she looked at
the noisy, smoky Paris, bathed in the red of the lights.
The story resumes five years later aboard a merchant brig off the
Mallorcan coast, where the General, whom Balzac identifies as one of the
Thirteen crew, conspires with his shipmates to recapture the Duchess.
In a moment recalling La belle noiseuse, the hand of an artist is shown
sketching the architectural layout of the nunnery, enabling the Thirteen
crew members to plan their exploit and mobilize what Balzac describes
in the preface to The Thirteen as, ... an occult power against which the
organization of society would be helpless; a power which would push
obstacles aside and defeat the will of others; . . .(16). As seagulls circle,
shrieking violently overhead, Montriveau and his men scale the sheer
precipice and enter the convent, if only to discover that they have arrived
too late, when they find her dead body alone in a candlelit room. There is
no magical reprieve for Balzacs nineteenth-century Duchessas there
had been for the child heroine of Cline et Juliewhose lifeless body
framed in a final tableau testifies to the ossified theatricality associated
with the social and cultural codes of the day. Montriveau departs silently
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with her cadaver, which he throws into the sea to remember her as but
a book read during our childhood, a poem. As he releases the body
into the deep, his gaze turns away from theatrical and ideological staging
of institutions and moves toward the oceans infinitely open horizon, a
space without shape or frontiers that returns us at last to the origins
of cinema (Bazin 107).
| | |
If Ne touchez pas la hache can be considered as a return to adaptation

and the scenarios of possession and abandon associated with it, 36 vues
du Pic Saint-Loup (Around a Small Mountain; 2009), might be viewed as
an unprecedented departure to a new arena: the circus. The film chronicles the journey of a small family circus troupe in and around the Pic
Saint-Loup, one of two distinctive peaks that jut out of the Languedoc
scrublands in southern France. On the eve of the troupes departure
on summer tour, its manager and founder Peter dies unexpectedly, and
so, they call on his daughter Kate (Jane Birkin), who surprisingly agrees
to return after an absence of fifteen years to assist them at the box office. The opening sequence finds Kate broken down on the side of the
road while en route to join her family. She hails a passing sports coupe
seemingly without success, but then the black convertible circles back. A
meticulously dressed Italian, Vittorio (Sergio Castellitto), emerges, like
a modern-day knight who has materialized from the medieval legend
for which the film is named (Mandelbaum).
It seems useful to briefly review the legend that provides the mythic
backcloth of the films story. In it, three noble lords, Loup, Clair, and
Guiral, all in love with the same gentle princess, vie for her hand in marriage. Her father, the lord of the fiefdom of Saint-Martin-de-Londres,
promises his daughter to the one who is most valorous and virtuous in
battle. When the three knights return years later, renowned for their
glorious accomplishments, they discover that the princess has died. The
three retire sorrowfully from the world, each to a nearby summit overlooking her tomb. Every year to celebrate the princesss birthday, each
one lights a fire in honor of her memory. One year, however, only two
fires are lit, the next year, one, and finally, none. Impressed by the hermits devotion, the villagers name each of the summits after themSaint
Loup, Saint Clair, and Saint Guiral.

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Like a knight errant, Vittorio escorts Kate into town and insists on
attending that evenings performance. His interest in her is piqued when
he overhears her sorrowful soliloquy spoken from the side of the circus
ring, where she laments the death of the man she had loved, Antoine.
Through close observation and cautious inquiry, Vittorio comes to understand that she has been traumatized, and so is unable to reenter
the circus ring where her lover was killed before her eyes fifteen years
earlier. He finds a quiet moment and approaches her while she is dyeing
multihued fabrics by a gentle stream; there, she explains to him that
her life is actually in Paris. He responds that he lives his own life on
the move, without vocation, in search of chance encounters and novel
experiences. Vittorios unexpected appearance on Kates deceptively
tranquil terrain evokes unpleasant associations for her; however, Vittorio pursues her and forces the issue, asking her whether she is afraid
to enter the ring, a circular arena that, in this instance, represents the
world. Seated beside him within the cavernous blue tent, she responds
that his intrusive questions have deeply upset her and accuses him of
interfering blindly in matters that have nothing to do with him. Similar
to the sleepwalker Louise in Haut bas fragile who is convalescing
from a coma, Kate finds solace tightrope walking in the shadow of the
Cvennes mountains, tenuously suspended in midair as she crosses
the yawning void between the two most prominent peaks (Frappat,
Cinmas de Recherche). Vittorio continues to circle around Kates
emotional arena, as would an itinerant traveler who threatens to cross
over forbidden boundaries, between the spectral past and the present,
between medieval myth and the modern-day world.
In flight from memories that continue to haunt her, Kate seeks
reassurance in the quotidian, utilitarian world of a Paris boutique,
where her dyed fabrics acquire an exchange value on the commodity marketplace. As opposed to the circularity that characterizes the
performative space of the circus (the ring, the big top, the acrobats
and aerialists dancelike, circular movements both on stage and off),
linear lines define the cloistered space of the city. Perpendicular bars
of a prominent iron gate enclose the fashionable boutique within a
courtyard; white bars of a balustrade line the workspace where Kates
supervisor awaits her; numbered squares of a commercial color chart
allow Kate to appraise her fabrics deep vermillion hue, and she is
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Figure 15. Kate suspended in

space in 36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup.
surprised to discover that it appears different in artificial light than in

the natural daylight beneath the Pic Saint-Loup. Cloth billowing in the
summer breeze at the waters edge does not lend itself to commodification, just as Kate ultimately resists captivity within her former existence.
Encaged behind an iron grille on the Rue de Rivoli, she receives an
unexpected call from Vittorio, who easily springs her, later confiding
his stratagem to the troupe: All the dragons of our life are, perhaps,
those of suffering princesses who seek deliverance.
Vittorio steps quietly into Rivettes role of metteur en scne/ psychoanalyst/ conspirator when he devises a carnivalesque ritual of passage
intended to liberate Kate from the ghosts of her past. He conspires with
Clmence (Julie-Marie Parmentier), Kates young niece, and together
they choreograph a whip routine that restages the once-popular act in
which her lover had perished. Similar to Maries secret blue room in
Histoire de Marie et Julien, the blue circus tent provides Kate with a
phantasmic stage upon which she must reenact her lovers death by proxy
to achieve deliverance. From a perilous position in the center of the
ring, she waits for the whip to crack. Vittorios sentiments undoubtedly
mirror those of Rivette when he reflects on the parameters of his art,
The ring is the most dangerous place in the world ... the place where
everything is possible.

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The thirty-six views to which the French title refers could indicate
the 360-degree movement around the circumference of Kates emotional
life that the film accomplishes, recalling the way in which Max Ophlss
camera literally tracks around its heroine in Lola Monts (1955) as she
reenvisions scenes from her past (Thomson 669). While the ring permits
Lola to restage significant moments from her previous life in spectacular
tableaux vivants, such performances fail to liberate her from the past,
instead imprisoning her within it. Unlike the dizzying centripetal force
that draws Lola downward into an inescapable abyss within the films
final moments, 36 vues circular finale throws all its players centrifugally
outward into the world. As each member of the troupe exits from the
big top like spokes from a wheel, each addresses the profilmic audience, then circling around again with improvised one-liners and even
a salutatory quote from Shakespeares play, Alls well that ends well.
Kate, however, does not emerge from the tent to bid the profilmic
audience adieu. Clmence directs us instead to her red caravan, paying
playful tribute to playwright Raymond Roussels infamous automobile
roulottea spectacularly furnished house on wheels that provided the
reclusive writer with the means to insulate himself from the world, to
travel, almost literally, without traveling at all (Ford 171). While the
caravan seemingly serves Kate in similar fashion, she appears to have
abandoned it at the films end, where it appears tossed to one side like an
empty shoebox. Vittorio finds her under the shade of the big top, where
he announces his departure that coincides with the end of the summers
tour. The films story leisurely circles around to end where it began, as
the two envision an unexpected reunion by the side of another lonely,
winding road. Recasting the translucent dreamscapes of Les filles du
feu, the lens of Irina Lubtchansky (having replaced her father William
Lubtchansky, who died in 2010) pauses on the final, quiet image of a
full moon suspended between two peaks illuminating the landscape
belowthe sanctified space of medieval myth where sadness is appeased
and serenity restored.
| | |
At the cyclical close of 36 vues, we encounter parallel worlds in transit

that come close enough to touch but then move apart (feminine and
masculine; the living and of the dead; myth and the modern-day world).
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Similarly, at the close of the directors career, we can trace within his last
two films, La hache and 36 vues, the two distinctive trends that have
continued to evolve side by side within his work, from the introspective tableau of an aristocratic boudoir to the free-form physicality of
an acrobatic performance; from scripted adaptation to ad hoc invention during a shoot, from the inexorability of the tragic denouement
to the unanticipated comic improvisation of clowns. In La hache, time
is relentlessly present; characters are seemingly unmindful of it, their
lives forever altered in the wake of its progression. In 36 vues, time is
elsewhere; yet characters are transfixed by it, seemingly held spellbound
from within the ulterior dimension of a personal memory or a myth.
In the same way that each film communicates a unique experience
of time and different dimension of theatrical performance, each summons up important moments within Rivettes evolution as a filmmaker.
A journey into the past, of sorts, La hache may evoke for Rivette his
inaugural conversations with Rohmer, who in the early 1950s had initially
pushed the novice director toward Balzac, advising him to read all of the
authors works; it may be regarded as the mature, auteur Rivettes masterful response to the young filmmakers mixed experience of adaptation
in La religieuse (Rivette, in fact, confided to me in a 2009 interview that
he no longer feels constrained by the process of adaptation but enjoys
the difficult challenge it presents); it may express the directors intent
to expand upon his earlier experimental work with The Thirteen, even
as it evokes his other Balzac adaptation, La belle noiseuse, a classic that
remains a culminating moment in his career. 36 vues too recalls earlier
days, recapturing the mystery and ambiguity of Les filles du feu, in which
fantasy and theatrical ritual serve as sources of female empowerment.
Although, admittedly, gender roles in 36 vues are based upon codes of
Christian chivalry and courtly love, they are reshaped in the film to offer a
persuasive alternative to patriarchal constructions of the feminine. Thus,
the medieval French chevalier is transformed into a watchful metteur en
scne who intercedes on behalf of the tormented circus aerialist, placing her in a position to reassert control over her own past and, thereby,
proceed undaunted into the uncertain future.
Rivette now holds a distinctive position in the history of French
filmmaking. Inducted into the famed band of Hitchcocko-Hawksians
who later formed an artistic school, he initially made films that chal
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lenged 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 exceeded those of his New Wave contemporaries in their experimentation with reflexive theatricality, serial form, and duration, pushing beyond the boundaries imposed by conventional narrative. Beyond
inspiring the New Wave movement and continuing to reflect, and reflect
on, its central tenets, Rivettes enduring contribution to the history of
film is unquestionably evident in his sensitive treatment of the histories
and destinies of women. His capacity to offer radical alternatives to
hegemonic constructions of the feminine continues to be articulated
through his engagement with theater and theatrical styles. Some time
ago, Rivette likened the role of the filmmaker, as Marc Chevrie reminds
us, to that of an acrobat on a high wire above the void, which itself is
the very soul of cinema (21). At the close of the sixth decade of Rivettes
career, we watch with anticipation as he strikes a subtle balance between
the political and deeply personal obsession, between myth and fiction,
between theater and cinema, in his films that continue to redefine the
art of cinema around the world.
Notes
1.Walter Benjamin attributes the loss of aura to the increased intervention of technical means in the production and reception of art in the twentieth
century (The Work of Art 22223).
2.See also D. N. Rodowicks excellent analysis of Cline et Julie vont en bateau
in The Difficulty of Difference (chap. 5) in which he explores the films parable
of spectatorship using Freuds analysis of a case of female paranoia.
3.In 1960 Jean Gruault worked with Rivette on a treatment for a film project,
Lan II, which was to focus on the guerrilla warfare of peasants (known as the
choannerie), who had opposed the French Revolution. The treatment for Lan
II by Gruault and Rivette is published in Trois films fantmes de Jacques Rivette:
Phnix, suivi de lan II et Marie et Julien (Paris: Cahiers du cinma, 2002).
4.See Thierry Jousses seminal discussion of the interrelation of theater and
cinema in La religieuse in Thtre de la cruaut; see also Douglas Morrey and
Alison Smiths detailed analysis of La religieuse in their chapter on adaptation
in Jacques Rivette (chap. 7).
5.See also Angela Dalle Vacches close analysis of ric Rohmers adaptation
of Heinrich von Kleists novella, The Marquise of O (1976), in Cinema and
Painting (chap. 3).
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6.Jay Caplan in Framed Narratives: Diderots Genealogy of the Beholder

proposes that the tableaux that constitute Diderots novel require the beholder
to witness the successive trials of Suzanne as part of the much longer trial (or
Passion) that constitutes her narration (49). One of the small but highly significant changes Rivette made in his adaptation of Diderots novel is his addition
of the final suicide scene to complete the Passion story.
7.In Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Hlne Frappat shows how Rivette was
inspired by Balthuss (Balthasar Klossowski) india ink illustrations of Wuthering
Heights (165).
8.For a detailed discussion of the presence of Pirandello in Rivettes work, see
Alison Smiths The Author and the Auteur: Jacques Rivette and Luigi Pirandello
in the Rivette Special Issue of the Australian Journal of French Studies.
9.Jonathan Rosenbaum discusses the festival showing and the films subsequent restoration in detail in Tih-Minh, Out 1: On the Nonreception of Two
French Serials in Movies as Politics. In brief, he notes that forty minutes of
the sound track that had not been located at the time of the showing were subsequently found and restored. Moreover, Rivette reedited the film, altering the
order of certain scenes and deleting a few others; thus, its final running time is
750 minutes instead of 760 minutes (304).
10.When Noli me tangere was restored, Rivette cut a key sequence, which
Rosenbaum describes as a raw piece of psychodrama that featured Jean-Pierre
Laud in the final episode ... alone in his room, in a state of hysteria, oscillating
between despair and (more briefly) exuberance . . . (Tih-Minh, Out 1 31617,
n. 3).
11.Rivette undoubtedly intended the word Aubade to also be understood
as an Obade, to which Balzac refers in The Thirteen, describing it as, a kind
of lodge with a Mother in charge, an old, half gypsy wife who is devoted to
the interests of the tribe boarded and lodged by her (14).
12.See velyne Jardonnets extensive discussion of the uncanny in Rivettes
work, particularly her perceptive analysis of Noli me tangere and Spectre in
Leffet dtranget (Troisime Partie) in Potique de la singularit au cinma:
Une lecture croise de Jacques Rivette et Maurice Pialat.
13.Rivettes use of Tourneur is noted within varied contexts, such as Jonathan
Rosenbaum Gilbert Adair, and Michael Grahams analysis of Norot in Les
Filles du Feu: Rivette x 4, Sight and Sound (Autumn 1975): 23439, Franois
Thomass discussion of direct sound practice in Norot in Les Films parallles,
in Jacques Rivette: La rgle du jeu, ed. Daniela Giuffrida and Sergio Toffeti
(Turin: Centre Culturel Franais de Turin, c. 1991), 16569, Morrey and Smiths
discussion of Play, Theatre, and Performance in Jacques Rivette (chap. 5) and
Rivettes own commentary in Serge Daney and Jean Narbonis Entretien avec
Jacques Rivette, Cahiers du cinma 327 (September 1981): 821.
14.Nathalie Richards role as the petty thief (Ninon) is an homage to that
of Juliet Berto (Frdrique) in Noli me tangere. Her theft of documents from
the desk in Rolands studio recalls the scene in which Frdrique steals corre
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spondence from the chess players writing desk. In a personal interview (2009),
Vronique Manniez pointed out that this writing desk, known in French as
a secrtaire, is indeed, a guardian of secrets. Its reappearance in Haut bas
fragile betrays the secret of Bertos phantom presence in the film, paying tribute
to the actor following her untimely death in 1990.
15.The role was conceived while Rivette was working on the scenario of
Phnix, a film that was to have followed Noli me tangere but was abandoned
because of lack of funds. The film was to have told the tale of a reclusive actress,
a role intended for Jeanne Moreau, who resides in a grand Paris theater. The
film scenario by Suzanne Schiffman, Gregorio, and Rivette is published in Trois
films fantmes de Jacques Rivette: Phnix, suivi de LAn II et Marie et Julien
(Paris: Cahiers du Cinma, 2002).
16.The house is haunted too by memories of Bulle Ogiers daughter Pascale
(Baptiste in Le Pont du Nord), who died several years prior to the filming of La
bande des quatre.
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An Interview with Jacques Rivette*
Caf de la Bastille, Paris, June 1999 (Translated by Yolanda Broad and

Mary Wiles.)
mw: How did you come to make films?
jr: It was Cocteau, le coupable [the guilty one].1 It was while reading
Cocteaus La belle et la bte [his journal written between 19451946 as
he was filming La belle et la bte/Beauty and the Beast; 1946] that I got
into it, 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 [1930]. But, even so, movies were something
of ill repute at the time; it was regarded as an odd line of work. And
now, well, now, its become a program, not just in universities, but even
in lyces, and this is far worse. The films lyce students see, when they
see La rgle du jeu [Renoir; 1939], theyre thinking, Ah, la, la, La rgle
du jeu! the way we thought, Ah, la, la, Brnice! [Racine; 1670] or
Ah, la, la, Le Cid! [Corneille; 1637].
12/7/11 2:17 PM
mw: Were there other points of reference for you from postwar Paris
theater?
jr: Yes, Peter Brook is, perhaps, the most obvious. In any case, in
France, there arent many great playwrights. In the twentieth century,
there are only two.
mw: Who?
jr: Claudel and Gent. And, in any case, Gent is very uneven. And
Beckett isnt French, you know, you cant say Beckett is a French author,
even if he wrote certain plays directly in French. I think that he wrote
Godot first in French [En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot; 1948,
first performed in Paris in 1953], and then he translated it later. Hes
a very great author, but its hard to fit him into the history of French
theater. Hes more Ireland; hes an Irishman from Paris. I only met him
once, by chance, in the 70s. He was impressive, you know, his bearing,
he was so handsome, so tall, so calm.
mw: If you had to describe one of your films as autobiographic, which
one would you choose? And why? All of them?
jr: None of them. Yes. Two of them have some autobiographic aspects.
Its obvious. The first one, Paris nous appartient, and then, Lamour fou,
where everything is transposed. I do remember that one of the reasons
that I used Jean-Pierre Kalfon in Lamour fou was because he didnt
resemble me at all. Everything was different, but there were some moments of ... solicitude, there are always the feelings, the nuances that
come into play, but all the rest is mine. Whenever there are contributions
by the actors, by the co-scenarists, Im 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 Im 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 dont understand how it works. Its
another way of being.
mw: You have mentioned Mizoguchis influence on your work, especially in La religieuse. Were you also influenced by Japanese N theater?
jr: I have seen N performances once or twice here in Paris but, here,
what you can see in France ... or elsewhere ... what is shown everywhere in the West ... is extremely condensed, because if they showed
a real N play (actually, it doesnt last all that long) but still, a N play
does go on, so they condense it down to a half-hour, three-quarters of
an hour, and the plays last many times that long in Tokyo, you know, in
real performances. Yes, Ive seen some, but, in any case, Mizoguchi, he
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isnt anything at all like N, hes a lot closer to Kabuki. He did several
films on Kabuki actors. [R. is referring here to Mizoguchis trilogy on
the theater of the Meiji era, Zangiku Monogatari (The Story of the Last
Chrysanthemum; 1939), Naniwa Onna (The Women of Osaka; 1940),
Geido Ichidai Otoko (The Life of an Actor; 1941)]. There is the film
where a couple attends a N performance, I believe that its Uwasa No
Onna [The Woman of the Rumor; 1954]. All I know of Japanese are
Mizoguchis film titles . . .
mw: In your films, you often use plans prolongs [long takes]. Could
you comment on this?
jr: Ah, yes, continuous shots, because theyre more enjoyable to do,
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 were poorer. There are people
in America, like Cassavetes, he filmed things that way, sometimes . . .
mw: Were you influenced by Cassavetes?
jr: Well, for my generation, Cassavetes is someone we admired a lot
when we saw his films, but you cant 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,
Cassavetess first big success was a film I like a lot, but it isnt the film
I like the best, it was Husbands [1970], which was his first big success
here in Paris with the general public. Faces was never released here in
commercial theaters; we finally saw it at the cinmathque. The only
one that was commercially released was Minnie and Moskowitz [1971].
Im not exactly like Cassavetes, because hes someone who films even
faster than I do.
mw: Could you comment on the relation between women and magic
in Cline et Julie?
jr: It was Juliet [Berto] who wanted to do that bit with the fake
magician. I think that its an idea she came up with, like an enormous
number of the films ideas. It was either Juliet, or it was Dominique
[Labourier] who proposed them as we were talking, chatting, like this.
Its 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. I dont believe I ever laughed as much
as during those sequences, excuse me, during the few weeks when
we were all talking with each other, when we tossed out a lot of ideas,
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ten times more ideas than there are in the film, loads of improbable
ideas, we were saying whatever went through our heads, so the film is
very reasonable, and funny, ah, well, it was thanks to her, so, I think it
was Juliet 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, its easier to believe that a woman
could be a magician than a man. But its purely fictional, you know. Its
easier when its Juliet or Bulle [Ogier] or Graldine [Chaplin], or, well,
you see. They, yes, I can believe that they have magic powers.
mw: Certainly.
jr: Or at least, waves, in any case ... Graldine, shes someone who,
the powers she has, its strange. Its 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 Graldine.
She is someone who, at the very moment that you begin a sentence,
replies, Yes, Ive got it and in fact, she does, she understands everything, shes amazing. Theres no reason to tell her the scene because
shes already understood it. Her mind works at lightning speed. Thats
how we did Norot, 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 . . .
mw: How did you discover the play by Tourneur?
jr: Im not the one who thought of it; it was Eduardo de Gregorio
with whom I was working, with whom I had already worked on Cline
and Duelle. He had seen, I dont 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 wasnt successful, and neither was the film because people arent
interested in seeing women as killers.
mw: I think that was an excellent idea.
jr: Ah, well, theres one person who liked the film a lot, when it was
shown in New York and that was Susan Sontag.
mw: Ah, yes?
jr: Yes, yes, yes. No, I was delighted, I mean, someone intelligent,
thoughtful . . .
mw: Yes, she is a highly respected American critic.
jr: Well, I remember having attended a projection of Norot 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,
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Jacques Rivette
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but suddenly, I realize, Im in London, and I say to myself, Good lord!

Theyre thinking its Ireland!
Ah yes, that was in 76 or 77. Oh, my, did they ever not like it! Tourneur isnt Shakespeare, though. Its hardly ever played . . .
mw: In the United States, either. Even for Americans, the language
is incomprehensible because its archaic . . .
jr: But this language is purposefully medieval, its fifteenth-century
English, essentially, and written at the very beginning of the seventeenth. We had two English-language actresses Graldine and Kika
Markham, whom wed met because she was in Franoiss film, Les deux
anglaises et le continent [Two English Girls; 1971]. Kika was the one
who helped Graldine learn her lines. Its the only time that Graldine
made mistakes, with the quotations from Tourneur. Even Graldine had
difficulty with Tourneurs English, which, in all honesty, is extremely
difficult because its medieval English.
mw: Do you believe that it mixes well with Celtic myth?
jr: Ah, yes, yes. This is entirely from [Jean] Markales book 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
asked me that question 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. And I know all those stories; I know them from Africa.
mw: Does the music of the Cohen-Solal brothers come from African
music?
jr: Youll have to ask them that. No, I dont think so, no. Theyre
still at it; theyve always had a group. I dont remember anymore who
thought of them; maybe it was Bernadette [Lafont] who knew them,
whod met them at a performance. I hardly knew them at the time and
got to know them while filming. They were terrific. Theres a lot in their
music thats related to Tourneurs text. They try to produce music thats
very Celtic, using more or less Irish or Scottish components.
mw: After watching Jean-Luc Godards Prnom: Carmen [1983], I
noticed that the placement of the musicians resembles the way musicians intervene in Merry-Go-Round.
jr: Yes, but, Merry-Go-Round, this was filmed under very difficult
circumstances. I was just recovering from more than a year of illness,
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Maria [Schneider] was in failing health, that is, there were two people in
poor health during filming, and also, there wasnt any money at all, not
at all. It was catastrophic. Sometimes it would be me, sometimes Maria,
who would say, were stopping, were stopping, but then, wed 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 with him [Guns, Robert Kramer; 1980]. It was during the editing
a year later, a year after filming, that two films were essentially made
in order to get their sound in the film and, obviously, to get them in
the image track. It wasnt really much like the musicians in Duelle and
Norot, who were completely integrated into the filming, and you can
see it. In Merry-Go-Round, its montage. While Jean-Luc, he rehearsed
the Beethoven quartet sequence, and he also filmed them 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, I
wouldnt know about that. Youd have to ask him. In Merry-Go-Round,
its an attempt to add a little tension to the film, which heads off in all
directions, with some moments I like a lot.
mw: Why did you feel the need to return to the theater after La
bande des quatre?
jr: 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 like that to work with
each other on some classics; Corneille, Racine, and Marivaux, is what
we were working on. And then at the end of a few months, they wanted
to do a real performance, and thats when we dropped Marivaux, which
was too hard. But we keptand we should have just 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 Brnice [1670], than working on
Racines plays, on Bajazet [1672]. Bajazet is fabulous, I cant speak ill of
Racine, but you grasp it all in the very first reading. Thats 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, hes hard.
mw: You can imagine that for us . . .
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Jacques Rivette
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jr: Its like Latin for us. It isnt French. All of those authors were fluent readers of Latin and Greek, but Corneille couldnt read Greek, and
thats a big difference between them. Racine read Greek, and Corneille
read Latin. And he read so much Latin that its almost Mallarm, its so
dense. Corneilles Brnice, its true that its a hard play, its overloaded,
each verse says three things, and its characters are infinitely rich. Infinitely more things are happening between Titus and Brnice, infinitely
more things are happening in Corneilles play than in Racines, where
nothing happens. Brnice isnt the Corneille play that I like the best
though, even if its got fabulous language. Its fabulous as a poem, but
its like Shakespeare for you. As a matter of fact, I gather its hard to
translate, like Goethe is untranslatable, like Pushkin is untranslatable,
like Dante is untranslatable, well, like all the major poets. I dont know,
but, in any case, it was difficult to stage.
mw: Ive read a few of Corneilles plays but have never seen them
performed on stage.
jr: In France, Im not the only one, once you get hooked on Corneille,
youre lost. Its very deep. Hes an author I find very dense, so full of
history, of thought. Hes a very rich author.
mw: You cite him in your film . . .
jr: Yes, in fact, the theatrical passage I prefer in La bande des quatre
is the passage of Corneille; theres just the one, its the little scene performed by Laurence [Cte] and Nathalie [Richard], which is the final
play by Corneille, its one of his most beautiful ones, Surna [1674],
and its going to end badly, and they know it right from the start. They
are magnificent, both of them, Nathalie and Laurence, Laurence, who
plays the male role, always, of Surna, and Nathalie, Eurydice.2
jr: What is the film, if I may ask you, what is the film that made you
want to do your work?
mw: Paris nous appartient.
jr: Ah, yes. For me, this is a film with a rapport . . .
mw: Yes . . .
jr: Okay. It is very nave. It is a terminally nave film that I filmed
some forty years ago, and its the film of a sixteen-year-old child, but
maybe its navet is where its strength lies.
mw: And I love Haut bas fragile.
jr: Ah, yes, well, me too. Well, thats a more recent film. I really like
it. Its one of the ones I like a lot. Its a film we did in a very short time,
for purely practical reasons, so it is wasnt planned. It is based on the
taxi-dance halls in New York from the 1920s.
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mw: This works so well . . .

jr: Its 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], who Id worked with ever since Lamour par terre, felt the
need for another film, and for it to be very inexpensive, so, I was asked
to do it, and was told, Well, Jacques, were going to shoot another film
very fast and for very little money. I didnt have any ideas, so what
I did was to phone Nathalie [Richard] and then I phoned Marianne
[Denicourt], who had both had secondary roles, Nathalie, in La bande
des quatre, Marianne, in La noiseuse, and then Laurence [Cte], who
came later. Laurence wanted to tell this story, which was her story, so
we worked it in.
mw: Was the films title and its relation to the three girls based on a
notion of music, for instance, high, low, fragile, slow . . .
jr: The title came later. Oh, people were opposed. They were very
opposed to that title. I liked it a lot.
mw: I still havent seen Secret dfense because it hasnt yet been
released in the United States.
jr: Im sorry. And in Paris, it isnt shown a lot. Its really the story of
Electra. Electra is the motor that drives the story, if I dare say so. And,
in fact, I didnt think of Sophocles, I thought of 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 Giraudouxs play, Aegisthus defends himself by saying that he
killed Agamemnon but that he had a good reason to do it! Ah, 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. Giraudouxs Electra
[1937] is not very well known. The part was performed by Rene Devillers, a good actress who we know from the film by Roger Leenhardt,
Les dernires vacances [The Last Vacation; 1948], which was filmed in
1947. Ondine [Giraudoux; 1939] is a good play because the subject is so
strong. One cant really put him on the same plane as Claudel though
... or Gent. Theres 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 lets face it, they are
going to ask for plays, so, okay, he consents and writes them. There is
a very fine one that is never staged, which he wrote for himself, Les
chevaliers de la table ronde [The Knights of the Round Table; 1937]. The
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Jacques Rivette
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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 on dependency and, for Cocteau,
this meant opium.
mw: Would you agree that the difference for the spectator between
film and theater is the presence of the actors body?
jr: But where does the actors body have more presence, in the theater
or in cinema?
mw: Thats the question.
jr: It depends, it depends, but, in the theater, whats most important
is the voice, because the voice is crucial, too.
mw: I agree.
jr: But I think an actors presence is crucial, too. Why are there actors
who have presence, and others who dont? There are very fine actors,
who act well, who are very intelligent . . .
mw: Yes . . .
jr: But finally so what, who cares? Excuse me ... Who caresthey
dont exist because nobodys there, in theater auditoriums, in movie theaters. And then there are others who arent very clever, who do whatever,
and, zoom, there they are.
mw: Some actors are charismatic . . .
jr: If anything is important, its the voice. Thats 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 redone; the sound is redone.
You can see it, and you can hear it, too
mw: Its interesting to me that in Paris nous appartient and Haut
bas fragile, its music and the absent voice that compel the characters
Grard and Ida to continue searching forever.
jr: 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 le
regard [the look]. In cinema, its the look that is crucial; however in the
theater, it plays no part. The actors look is inconsequential in the theater.
However, what is very important in the theater, and also in the cinema,
but less so, and usually, it is the actor who decides, is timing. For me,
this is the quality that gives the actor presence on stage; its a sense of
timing. Theres no other way to say it. Theres no word in French for
it. Tempo means something else. In the cinema, the metteur en scne
is supposed to be more or less responsible for this. But if I use plans
squences [sequence shots], its so that the actors can share in the control
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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, the way the actor moves,
and the body. 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 arent any actors left nowadays who know how to address the
audience in that way. They dont know how to speak anymore. Ah, no,
what has happened in the United States over the last twenty years is
disastrous.
mw: I agree.
jr: Everything is done by management. Just look how many coproducers there are in the credits. Just look at how many coproducers an
American film has. Generally, there are five or six coproducers, three or
four scriptwriters, at least. What are all those producers in the credits
for? Theyre endless. You see five of them, six of them. There are coproducers 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 . . .
mw: Right. Its more of a business than an art.
jr: Yes, thats right, but its 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
arent what they once were.
mw: When I saw Haut bas fragile, I thought of [Vincente] Minnellis
The Band Wagon [1953].
jr: Yes, yes, but its been transposed.
mw: Of course.
jr: In any case, The Band Wagon is a true musical comedy with Fred
Astaire and his sister [Adele Astaire] ... right at the beginning of the
thirties. I think that its the last musical comedy that Fred Astaire was in
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 of Arthur Schwartz, since hes the composer. Ah, no, Im not
familiar with musical comedies, except from recordings. I collect all the
recordings I can find of Broadway musicals.
mw: Ah, yes?
jr: I dont know whether you go see them. Do you live in New York?
mw: No, I live in Florida.
jr: In that case, you dont get to see any more musicals than I do.
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mw: Is there any hope for American cinema?

jr: There are directors like [Robert] Altman and [Alan] Rudolph, I
really like Altman even if his films are uneven, who seem to be the only
ones who have any rapport with the actors, who like them, who shoot
them, who do extended shots of them, which occasionally produces
very long films and even then, Graldine [Chaplin] told me that she
was among those who viewed the rough cut of Nashville [Altman; 1975]
and the rough cut of A Wedding [Altman; 1978] and that there were
extraordinary moments, which were lost.
mw: What do you think of the French cinema now?
jr: Ah, well, theres some of everything. It has its strengths and its
weaknesses, theres some of everything, there are films that are worthless, but ... theres a vitality, a vitality, even if I dont like everything,
but you know, it depends entirely on the gentlemen from Canal + and
on the advances, but more on the gentlemen from Canal + these days.
Doing a film without Canal + is very difficult as soon as it isnt something that can be shot in five weeks in Paris, the way we filmed Haut
bas fragile. You can shoot hundreds of minutes per day using plans
squences [sequence shots] with, lets face it, terrific crews, and unless
you can do that, it doesnt get done, and with terrific actors, too.
mw: 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.
Notes
*All bracketed remarks are my own explanations or translations.
1.Cocteau was responsible for the dialogue of Les dames du Bois de Boulogne
(Bresson; 1945), the film that Rivette saw the day of his arrival in Paris in 1949.
2.Act I from Surna is staged in which Surna, a Parthian general, and Euridyce, daughter of the King of Armenia, declare their tragic love for each other
knowing that each has been promised to another. During their recitation, the
actresses in Constance Dumass class discover that Antoine Lucas has escaped
on his way to prison.
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12/7/11 2:17 PM
Filmography
Aux quatre coins (On Four Corners; 1949)

Principal Actors: Two women and two men, including Francis Bouchet.
16 mm
Silent
Approximately 20 minutes
Le quadrille (1950)
Producer: Jean-Luc Godard
Principal Actors: Liliane Litvin, Anne-Marie Cazalis, Jean-Luc Godard.
16 mm
Silent
Approximately 40 minutes
Le divertissement (1952)
Principal Actors: Olga Waren, Sacha Briquet, Alain Mac Moy.
16 mm
Silent
45 minutes
Le coup du berger (A Fools Mate; 1956)
Production Companies: Claude Chabrol (AJYM), Les Films de la Pliade
(Pierre Braunberger)
Mise-en-scne: Jacques Rivette
Assistant: Jean-Marie Straub
Screenplay: Rivette, Charles Bitsch, Claude Chabrol, Franois Truffaut
Photography: Charles Bitsch
Editing: Denise de Casabianca
Principal Actors: Virginie Vitry (Claire), tienne Loinod (pseudonym
of Jacques Doniol-ValcrozeJean, the husband), Jean-Claude Brialy
(Claude, the lover), Anne Doat (Solange, the sister), Jean-Luc Godard,
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Franois Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Claude Chabrol, Robert Lachenay

(the guests).
Black and white, 35 mm
30 minutes
Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs To Us; 195860)
Production Companies: Franois Truffaut (Les Films du Carrosse), Claude
Chabrol (AJYM)
Screenplay: Rivette, Jean Gruault
Photography: Charles Bitsch
Sound: Christian Hackspill
Music: Philippe Arthuys
Principal Actors: Betty Schneider (Anne Goupil), Giani Esposito (Grard
Lenz), Franoise Prvost (Terry Yordan), Daniel Croheim (Philip
Kauffman), Franois 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
140 minutes
Suzanne Simonin, la religieuse de Denis Diderot (The Nun; 19651966)
Production Company: Georges de Beauregard (Rome-Paris Films)
Screenplay: Rivette, Jean Gruault, adapted from The Nun by Denis Diderot
Photography: Alain Levent
Sound: Guy Villette
Music: Jean-Claude Eloy
Principal Actors: Anna Karina (Suzanne Simonin), Micheline Presle
(Madame de Moni), Francine Berg (soeur sainte Christine), Liselotte
Pulver (Madame de Chelles), Francisco Rabal (Dom Morel), Christiane
Lnier (Madame Simonin), Charles Millot (Monsieur Simonin).
Release: July 26, 1967
Color, 35 mm
135 minutes
Lamour fou (Mad Love; 19671968)
Production Company: Georges de Beauregard (Sogexportfilm), CocinorMarceau
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Filmography
12/7/11 2:17 PM

Screenplay: Rivette, Maril Parolini
Photography: Alain Levent (35 mm), tienne Becker (16 mm)
Sound: Bernard Aubouy (35mm), Jean-Claude Laureux (16 mm)
Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky
Music: Jean-Claude Eloy
Script Supervisor: Lydie Mahias
Principal Actors: Bulle Ogier (Claire), Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Sbastien/
Pyrrhus), Jose Destoop (Marta/Hermione), Michle Moretti (Michle).
Release: January 15, 1969
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.
Out 1: Noli me tangere (Out 1: Touch Me Not; 1970)
Production Company: Sunchild Productions (Stphane Tchalgadjieff)
Screenplay: Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman, inspired by The Thirteen by Honor
de Balzac
Photography: Pierre-William Glenn
Sound: Ren-Jean Bouyer
Principal Actors: Bulle Ogier (Pauline-milie), Juliet Berto (Frdrique),
Michael Lonsdale (Thomas), Jean-Pierre Laud (Colin), Bernadette
Lafont (Sarah), Franoise Fabian (Lucie), Hermine Karagheuz (Marie),
Michle Moretti (Lili), Jean Bouise (Warok), Jacques Doniol-Valcroze
(tienne), Pierre Baillot (Quentin), ric Rohmer (the Balzac scholar),
Alain Libolt (Renaud), Marcel Bozonnet (Nicolas/Arsenal/Papa/Tho),
Christiane Corthay (Rose), Sylvain Corthay (Achille), Michel Delahaye
(an ethnologist), Jean-Franois Stvenin (Marlon), Michel Berto
(Honeymoon), Edwine Moatti (Batrice).
First Public Projection: Le Havre, Maison de la Culture, September 910, 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 of Out 1: Noli me tangere
Filmography
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Sound Mix: Elvire Lerner

Release: March 1974
260 minutes
Cline et Julie vont en bateauPhantom Ladies over Paris (Cline and Julie
Go BoatingPhantom Ladies Over Paris; 19731974)
Production Companies: Les Films du Losange et Renn Productions (Claude
Berri), with six coproducers: Action Films, Les Films Christian Fechner,
Les Films 7, Saga, Simar Production, Vincent Malle productions
Executive Producer: Barbet Schroeder
Screenplay: Rivette, Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, MarieFrance Pisier, Eduardo de Gregorio
The story of the film within the film inspired by The Other House and A
Romance of Certain Old Clothes by Henry James
Photography: Jacques Renard
Sound: Paul Lain
Principal Actors: Juliet Berto (Cline), Dominique Labourier (Julie), Bulle
Ogier (Camille), Marie-France Pisier (Sophie), Barbet Schroeder (Olivier),
Nathalie Asnar (Madlyn), Marie-Thrse Saussure (Poupie), Philippe
Clvenot (Grgoire).
Release: September 20, 1974
Color, 16 mm/ 35 mm
185 minutes
Duelle (Scnes de la vie parallle: 2. Une quarantaine; 19751976)
Duel, released as Twilight (Scenes from a parallel life: 2. The Forty: 1975
1976)
Screenplay: Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Maril Parolini
Photography: William Lubtchansky
Sound: Pierre Gamet
Music: Jean Wiener (direct improvised sound)
Principal Actors: Juliet Berto (Leni), Bulle Ogier (Viva), Jean Babile
(Pierrot), Hermine Karagheuz (Lucie), Nicole Garcia (Jeanne/Elsa), Claire
Nadeau (Sylvia Stern).
Color, 35 mm
120 minutes
154
Filmography
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Norot (Scnes de la vie parallle: 3. Une vengeance; 19751976)

Northwest Wind (Scenes from a parallel life: 3. A Vengeance: 19751976)
Screenplay: Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Maril Parolini, adapted from The
Revengers Tragedy
Sound: Pierre Gamet
Music: Robert and Jean Cohen-Solal, Daniel Ponsard (recorded direct sound)
Principal Actors: Graldine Chaplin (Morag), Bernadette Lafont (Giulia),
Kika Markham (Erika), Humbert Balsan (Jacob), Larrio Ekson (Ludovico),
Anne-Marie Reynaud (Arno), Babette Lamy (Rgina), Danile Rosencranz
(Celia), lisabeth Medveczky (lisa).
Color, 35 mm
130 minutes
Marie et Julien (Scnes de la vie parallle: 1; 1975)
Marie and Julien (Scenes from a parallel life: 1; 1975)
Assistant Director: Claire Denis
Screenplay: Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio, Maril Parolini, Claire Denis
Principal Actors: Leslie Caron, Albert Finney, Brigitte Roun.
Filmed in August 1975, interrupted the third day
Merry-Go-Round (Merry-Go-Round; 19771978)
Screenplay: Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman, Eduardo de Gregorio
Sound: Pierre Gamet, Bernard Chaumeil
Music: Barre Phillips, John Surman
Principal Actors: Maria Schneider (Lo), Joe Dallessandro (Ben), Danile
Ggauff (lisabeth), Franoise Prvost (Rene Novick), Maurice Garrel
(Julius Danvers), Sylvie Meyer (Shirley), Michel Berto (Jrme).
Release: April 6, 1983
Color, 35 mm
155 minutes
Filmography
155
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Le Pont du Nord (Pont du Nord; 19801981)

Executive Producer: Martine Marignac
Associate Producer: Barbet Schroeder (Les Films du Losange/Margaret
Menegoz)
Screenplay: Rivette, Bulle Ogier, Pascale Ogier, Suzanne Schiffman
Sound: Georges Prat
Music: Astor Piazzzolla
Principal Actors: Bulle Ogier (Marie Lafe), Pascale Ogier (Baptiste), Pierre
Clmenti (Julien), Jean-Franois Stvenin (Max).
Release: March 24, 1982
Color, 16 mm/ 35 mm
127 minutes
Lamour par terre (Love on the Ground; 1983)
Production Company: Martine Marignac (La Ccilia, in association with the
Ministry of Culture)
Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Maril Parolini, Suzanne Schiffman
Sound: Pierre Gamet, Bernard Chaumeil
Principal Actors: Graldine Chaplin (Charlotte), Jane Birkin (Emily), Andr
Dussollier (Paul), Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Clment Roquemaure), Facundo
Bo (Silvano), Laszlo Szabo (Virgil), Isabelle Linnartz (Batrice), Sandra
Montaigu (lonore).
Release: October 17, 1984
Color, 35 mm
170 minutes
120 minutes, short version edited by J. Rivette and N. Lubtchansky
Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights; 19841985)
Production Companies: Martine Marignac (La Ccilia with Renn
Productions)
Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Suzanne Schiffman, adapted from part
one of Wuthering Heights by Emily Bront
Photography: Renato Berta
Sound: Alix Comte
156
Filmography
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Music: Pilentze Pee, Trati Na Angelika, Polegnala e Pshenitza, Le mystre

des voix bulgares
Principal Actors: Fabienne Babe (Catherine), Lucas Belvaux (Roch), Olivier
Cruveiller (Guillaume), Olivier Torres (Olivier), Alice de Poncheville
(Isabelle), Sandra Montaigu (Hlne), Philippe Morier-Genoud (Joseph),
Marie Jaoul (Madame Lindon), Louis de Menthon (Monsieur Lindon).
Color, 35 mm
130 minutes
La bande des quatre (Gang of Four; 1988)
Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions)
Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
Photography: Caroline Champetier
Sound: Florian Eidenbenz
Editing: Catherine Quesemand
Principal Actors: Bulle Ogier (Constance Dumas), Benot Rgent (Thomas),
Laurence Cte (Claude), Fejria Deliba (Anna), Bernadette Giraud (Joyce),
Ines dAlmeida [Ines de Medeiros] (Lucia), Nathalie Richard (Ccile).
Release: February 8, 1989
Color, 35 mm
160 minutes
La belle noiseuse (La Belle Noiseuse; 19901991)
Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, loosely adapted from
the novella Le chef doeuvre inconnu by Honor de Balzac
Music: Igor Stravinsky
Principal Actors: Michel Piccoli (Frenhofer), Jane Birkin (Liz), Emmanuelle
Bart (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
Color, 35 mm
240 minutes
Filmography
157
12/7/11 2:17 PM
La belle noiseuse: Divertimento (1991)

Alternate version of La belle noiseuse.
Sound Mix: Bernard Le Roux
120 minutes
Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Maid; 19921994)
1. Les batailles (The Battles) 2. Les prisons (The Prisons)
Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
Music: Guillaume Dufay/ Jordi Savall
Principal Actors: Paris 1455: Tatiana Moukhine (Isabelle Rome).
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: Andr Marcon
(Charles, the dauphin of France), Marcel Bozonnet (Regnault of Chartres),
Jean-Louis Richard (La Trmoille). Poitiers: Bernard Sobel (Pierre de
Versailles), Wilfred Benache (Mathieu Mesnage), Jean-Pierre Becker
(Jean dAulon). Orlans: Bruno Wolkowitch (Gilles de Laval), Lydie
Marsan (Hermine), Pierre Baillot (Jacques Boucher), Vincent Solignac
(Pierre dArc, the brother of Jeanne), Mathias Jung (Jean Pasquerel). The
Environs of Paris: Florence Darel (Jeanne dOrlans), Germain Rousseau
(the confessor of the Dauphin), Franois Chattot (Arthur de Richemont),
Emmanuel de Chauvigny (Gros-Garrau), Didier Agostini (Montmorency),
Nathalie Richard (Catherine de la Rochelle). Beaurevoir: Philippe MorierGenoud (Philippe le Bon), Yann Collette (Jean de Luxembourg), Monique
Mlinand (Jeanne de Luxembourg), dith Scob (Jeanne de Bthune),
Hlne de Fougerolles (Jeanne de Bar). Rouen: Alain Ollivier (Pierre
Cauchon, the bishop of Beauvais), Michel Berto (Guillaume Erard), JeanClaude Frissung (Nicolas Loiseleur), Frdric Witta (Jean Massieu).
Release: February 9, 1994
Color, 35 mm
Les batailles (The Battles): 160 minutes, Les prisons (The Prisons): 175
minutes
Haut bas fragile (Up Down Fragile; 19941995)
158
Filmography
12/7/11 2:17 PM

Screenplay: Rivette, Nathalie Richard, Marianne Denicourt, Laurence Cte,
Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent
Photography: Christophe Pollock
Principal Actors: Nathalie Richard (Ninon), Marianne Denicourt (Louise),
Laurence Cte (Ida), Andr Marcon (Roland), Bruno Todeschini (Lucien),
Anna Karina (Sarah), Wilfred Benache (Alfredo), Stphanie Schwartzbrod
(Lise), Laslo Szabo (the voice of the father), Jacques Rivette (Monsieur
Paul), Enzo Enzo.
Color, 35 mm
170 minutes
Une aventure de Ninon (Lumire et compagnie)
(An Adventure of Ninon: Lumiere & Company, 1995)
Principal Actor: Nathalie Richard.
Release: December 28, 1995
52 seconds
To celebrate the centenary of Auguste and Louis Lumires 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 dfense (Secret Defense; 1997)
Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Emmanuelle Cuau
Sound: ric Vaucher
Principal Actors: Sandrine Bonnaire (Sylvie), Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Walser),
Grgoire Colin (Paul), Laure Marsac (Vronique/Ludivine), Franoise
Fabian (Genevive), Hermine Karagheuz (the nurse), Berndette Giraud
(Marthe).
March 18, 1998
Color, 35 mm
170 minutes
Filmography
159
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Va savoir (Who Knows?; 20002001)

Principal Actors: Jeanne Balibar (Camille), Sergio Castellitto (Ugo), Jacques
Bonnaff (Pierre), Marianne Basler (Sonia), Hlne de Fougerolles (Do),
Bruno Todeschini (Arthur), Catherine Rouvel (Madame Desprez).
Color, 35 mm
150 minutes
Va savoir + (Who Knows?; 20002001)
The original version of Va savoir, Va savoir+ played only seven weeks at a
single cinema in Paris, le cinma du Panthon, to an audience of 1,734
spectators.
220 minutes
Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Story of Marie and Julien; 20022003)
Production Company: Martine Marignac (Pierre Grise Productions),
Cinemaundici, Arte France Cinma, VM Productions
Principal Actors: Emmanuelle Bart (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
Ne touchez pas la hache (Dont Touch the Axe; 2006)
Production Company: Martine Marignac and Maurice Tinchant (Pierre Grise
Productions), Cinemaundici, Arte France Cinma
Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, adapted from La Duchesse
de Langeais by Honor de Balzac
160
Filmography
12/7/11 2:17 PM

Music: Pierre Allio
Principal Actors: Jeanne Balibar (Antoinette de Langeais), Guillaume
Depardieu (Armand de Montriveau), Anne Cantineau (Clara de Srizy),
Marc Barb (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
137 minutes
36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (Around a Small Mountain; 2008)
Production Company: Martine Marignac and Maurice Tinchant (Pierre
Grise Productions), Cinemaundici, France 2 Cinma, Rai Cinma, Alien
Produzioni
Screenplay: Rivette, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Shirel Amitay, Sergio
Castellitto
Photography: Irina Lubtchansky, William Lubtchansky
Sound: Olivier Schwob
Music: Pierre Allio
Principal Actors: Jane Birkin (Kate), Sergio Castellitto (Vittorio), Andr
Marcon (Alexandre), Jacques Bonnaff (Marlo), Julie-Marie Parmentier
(Clmence), Hlne de Vallombreuse (Margot), Tintin Orsoni (Wilfrid),
Vimala Pons (Barbara), Mickal Gaspar (Tom).
Color, 35 mm
84 minutes
Television
Jean Renoir parle de son art (Jean Renoir Discusses His Art; 1957)
Direction: Jean-Marie Coldefy in collaboration with Rivette
Le cinma et la parole (22 minutes), Les progrs de la technique (23
minutes), Le retour au naturel (15 minutes). Interviews with Jean Renoir
by Jean-Marie Coldefy, Janine Bazin, Jacques Rivette.
Filmography
161
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Jean Renoir le patron (1966)

Production Company: ORTF
Mise-en-scne: Jacques Rivette.
Photography: Pierre Mareschal
Sound: Guy Solignac
Editing: Jean Eustache
Principal Actors: Jean Renoir, Michel Simon, Marcel Dalio, Pierre
Braunberger, Catherine Rouvel, Charles Blavette, Pierre Gaut.
Three Programs: La recherche du relatif (94 minutes), La direction
dacteurs (90 minutes), La rgle et lexception (70 minutes)
Theater
La religieuse, Denis Diderot (The Nun; 1963)
Mise-en-Scne: Jacques Rivette
Adaptation: Jean Gruault
Run: From February 6 to March 5, 1963.
Studio des Champs-Elyses, Paris.
Bajazet, Jean Racine, and Tite et Brnice, Pierre Corneille (Bajazet; Titus
and Berenice; 1989)
Production: TGP, Le Chteau de Carte, Capella Films
Mise en scne: Jacques Rivette
Lights: Caroline Champetier
Art Direction: Manu de Chauvigny
Run: From April 18 to May 20, 1989
Thtre Grard-Philipe (TGP), Saint-Denis (Seine Saint-Denis)
| | |
Rivette received the Grand Prix National du Cinma in 1981
162
Filmography
12/7/11 2:17 PM
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170
| Bibliography
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Index
Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations.

adaptations, 4, 2224, 3132, 33, 3435,
40, 6571, 12731. See also individual
films
Aeschylus, 5657, 8990
African ritual, 99101
Aldrich, Robert, 1617, 18
Algerian War, 15
Ali-baba et les quarante voleurs (Ali-Baba
and the Forty Thieves; 1954), 1
Altman, Rick, 81
Altman, Robert, 149
amour fou, Le (Mad Love; 1969), 4, 51;
and Andromaque (Racine), 4, 42, 45,
4647, 49, 52; and autobiographical
elements, 4344; and autodestructive
acts, 4950, 5152; casting, 4546; and
cinematography, 4445; and cinema
verit, 44; and circular narration, 46,
4849, 50, 5253; conspiracy and
investigation in, 4748; and duration,
4142, 43; and experimental theater,
4546; and female voiceover narration, 50; and the flashback, 4647, 50,
5253; and genre elements, 5152;
homage to Breton, 4142; and improvisation, 4546, 49, 5152; and madness, 42, 4849, 5051; and May 1968,
cultural revolution, 41, 4243; mirroring in, 4344, 4950, 52; Pirandellean
allusion in, 42, 4849; and politics,
4243; and portraiture, 51; and power
relations in, 50; and reflexivity, 4253;

relationship with Jean Renoir le patron,
41, 44; and rivalry between women,
4748; Rivette on, 43, 4445, 46, 48;
solar and lunar personas in, 4748; and
sound, uses of, 4748, 50; and surrealist poetics, 5253; and television,
4243, 47, 49, 5152; and the theater
director, 42, 4346, 4849; and the
theater rehearsal, 42, 4547, 49, 5253;
and the theater script, 42, 45, 4749;
and theatrical space, uses of, 42, 4445,
49, 5253; and the troupe, 42, 4447
amour par terre, Le (Love on the
Ground; 1984), 4; Bront allusion,
112; and duration, 112, 114; editing,
114; and labyrinthine architecture,
112; mirroring in, 11213; and occult theatricality, 11213; and parallel
worlds, 11213; and reflexivity, 11314;
Resnais and Robbe-Grillet inspiration,
112; Rivette on, 114, 146; and short
version, 114; and sound, uses of, 113;
and symbolist verse, 11314; and the
theater director, 11112, 113; and the
theater rehearsal, 113; and the theater
script, 11112, 113; theatrical space,
uses of, 113; women and hallucinatory
vision, 11213
amour par terre, Le (Verlaine) (poem),
11314
Andrew, Dudley, 9
Andromaque (Racine), 4, 42, 45, 4647,
49, 52
12/7/11 2:17 PM
anges du pch, Les (Angels of Sin;

1943),28
anne dernire Marienbad, La (Last
Year at Marienbad; 1961), 112, 121
Armel, Aliette, 16
Armes, Roy, 4
Artaud, Antonin, 5657, 6465
Artists and Models (1955), 102
Astaire, Adele and Fred, 148
Attali, Jacques, 20
Aumont, Jacques, 7
Aurenche, Jean, 5
automobile roulotte, 134
Babile, Jean, 72
Baby, Yvonne, 3
Balibar, Jeanne, 91, 93, 128
Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski), 31, 33
Balzac, Honor de, 1920, 3135, 5556,
5859, 87, 12731, 135, 137n11
bande des quatre, La (Gang of Four;
1989), 4, 117; and classic French theater, 116; and color, 11718; and commedia dellarte, 11516, 11819; conspiracy and investigation in, 11819;
and fait divers, 11618; and female
power, 11819; and music, 116, 118;
and occult theatricality, 115, 11719;
and parallel worlds, 11719; and
politics, 11618; and reflexivity, 119;
relationship with La belle noiseuse,
118; Rivette on, 117, 119, 14445; and
sound, uses of, 11718; and television,
116; and theater director, 115, 119;
and the theater rehearsal, 11418,
119; and the theater script, 11516,
119; and theatrical space, uses of,
11415, 11718, 119; and the troupe,
115, 119
Band Wagon, The (1931) (Broadway musical), 148
Band Wagon, The (1953) (film), 148
Barthes, Roland, 2526
Bazin, Andr, 57, 35, 41
Bazin, Janine, 41
Bart, Emmanuelle, 32, 37, 120, 125
beau Serge, Le (Bitter Reunion; 195657,
released 1959), 2
172
Becker, Jacques, 1
Beckett, Samuel, 140
belle captive, La (The Beautiful Prisoner;
1983), 112
belle et la bte, La (Beauty and the Beast;
194546) (journal), Rivette on, 139
belle et la bte, La (Beauty and the Beast;
1946) (film), 12; Rivette on, 139
belle noiseuse, La (La Belle Noiseuse;
1991), 37; art v. commerce, 34, 40;
as Balzac adaptation, 3135; and Le
chef doeuvre inconnu, 3135, 40;
and color, 3638; and Divertimento,
3839, 40; and duration, 3435, 36,
39; and female voiceover, 3233, 39;
and filmmaker as a painter, 3638; and
the flashback, 39; Godard homage in,
3637; and labyrinthine architecture,
36, 3738; and music, 3839; possession and the artist, 40; power relations
in, 36; and reflexivity, 3940; relationship between painting and cinema,
3435, 40; Resnais homage in, 3334;
Rivette on, 35; and the tableau, 31, 34,
3538; theatrical space, uses of, 3536;
and timing as source of female empowerment, 36
belle noiseuse: Divertimento, La (alternate version of La belle noiseuse;
1991), 3839, 40
Bergman, Ingmar, 50, 140
Berto, Juliet, 58, 62, 99, 101, 109, 137
38n14, 141, 142
bia (double), 99100, 1045, 1078
Birkin, Jane, 33, 111, 114, 131, 133
Bonitzer, Pascal, 120
Bonnaire, Sandrine, 76, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89
Bonnaud, Frdric, 38, 91
Bost, Pierre, 5
Boulez, Pierre, 54, 5556, 57, 61
Brecht, Bertolt, 7, 26
Bresson, Robert, 28, 86
Breton, Andr, 4142, 52
Bringing Up Baby (1938), 93
British Marxist film critics, 7
Broadway musicals, 148
Bront, Charlotte, 112
Bront, Emily, 31, 112
Index
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Brook, Peter, 100101, 140

Buuel, Luis, 121
Cahiers du cinma, 1, 2, 5, 26, 41, 43,
54, 87
Canal+, 149
Capra, Frank, 94
Carlson, Carolyn, 71
Caron, Leslie, 63
carosse dor, Le (The Golden Coach;
1952), 34
Cassavetes, John, 47, 141
Cline et Julie vont en bateau-Phantom
Ladies Over Paris (Cline and Julie
Go Boating; 1974), 4, 109; and African
ritual, 99101; Arzner homage in, 104;
and bia (double), 99100, 1045, 1078,
111; and Chytilov influence, 1034;
and cinematography, 99, 105, 110; and
cinema verit, 99; and circular narration, 111; and Cocteau evocation, 107;
and commedia dellarte, 1012, 1089,
111; and dance, 1023, 109; and early
film comedians, 1012; rick Zonkas
homage to, 104; and female friendship,
98, 10710; and female role-playing,
1024, 1079; feminism and reception
of, 98; and games, 10910; and improvisation, 99, 1012, 110; Jean Rouch and
Peter Brook as sources of inspiration,
99102; and Jerry Lewis monologue,
102; and modern primitivism, 100101;
and occult theatricality, 1068; and The
Other House (James), 4, 1057; and
parallel worlds, 99101, 1047, 10911;
Renoir influence, 98; Rivette on, 101,
105; and the silent film era, 9899, 107;
and the tableau, 10911; and theatrical melodrama, 10511; and theatrical
space, uses of, 98, 1025, 1079, 110
11; word play lazzi, 1012, 111
Celtic myth, 6768, 12327, 143
Centre nationale de la cinmatographie
(C.N.C.), 61, 74
Chabrol, Claude, 2, 13, 87
Chaplin, Charlie, 101
Chaplin, Graldine, 62, 66, 68, 111, 114,
142, 143, 149
chef doeuvre inconnu, Le (Balzac),

3132, 33, 34, 40
chevaliers de la table ronde, Les (Cocteau), 7273, 14647
Chevrie, Marc, 136
Choephoroi (Aeschylus), 8990
Chronique dun t (Chronicle of a Summer; 1960), 99
Chytilov, Vera, 1034
cinema verit, 44, 99
circus, 45, 13135
Claudel, Paul, 56, 140, 146
Cocteau, Jean, 6465, 70, 7273, 107,
139, 14647
Cohen-Solal brothers, 64, 67, 71, 14344
Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me)
(Pirandello), 4, 9194, 9697
commedia dellarte, 1012, 11516,
11819
conspiracy and investigation, 8, 10,
1617, 18, 2022, 55, 5859, 7475,
11819
Corneille, Pierre, 116, 117, 119, 139,
14445
coup du berger, Le (A Fools Mate; 1956),
1, 3
Daisies (Sedmikrsky; 1966), 103
dames du Bois de Boulogne, Les (Ladies
of the Park; 1945), 2, 149n1
Dance, Girl, Dance (1940), 104
Daney, Serge, 63
Debord, Guy, 8
Debussy, Claude, 6465, 70, 73
Delahaye, Michel, 26
Denis, Claire, 63, 120, 126
Depardieu, Guillaume, 128
dernires vacances, Les (The Last Vacation; 1948), 146
Deschamps, Hlne, 45
deux anglaises et le continent, Les (Two
English Girls; 1971), 143
Devillers, Rene, 146
Diderot, Denis, 4, 22, 2426, 2930
divertissement, Le (1952), 23
Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques, 3, 59
Double Inconstancy, The (Marivaux),
112, 115
Index
173
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Double Indemnity (1944), 90

Dreyer, Carl, 86
duchesse de Langeais, La, (Balzac), 127
Duelle: Scnes de la vie parallle (Duel:
Scenes from a Parallel Life: 2. 1976),
and Les chevaliers de la table ronde
(Cocteau), 7273, 14647; Cocteau
homage in, 72; and dance, 72; and Les
filles du feu, film cycle 6162; mirroring in, 72; and music, 72; and parallel
worlds, 7273; and relationship with
Norot, 72; solar and lunar personas in,
72; and the theater script, 7273
Dullin, Charles, 12
Duras, Marguerite, 74, 76, 120
El Desdichado (The Disinherited) (Nerval), 61
Electra (Euripedes), 146
Electra (Sophocles), 146
Electre (Giraudoux), 89, 146
Euripedes, 146
Even, Martin, 53
existentialist theater, 1214
Faces (1968), 141
filles du feu, Les (Girls of Fire) film cycle,
4, 6162, 72; Rivette on, 14244. See
also Duelle: Scnes de la vie parallle;
Marie et Julien: Scnes de la vie parallle; Norot: Scnes de la vie parallle
film noir, 1618, 9091
film policier (French detective film),
8586, 8791
flnerie, 1819, 85
Frappat, Hlne, 3, 121, 137n7
French Cancan (1955), 1
Freud, Sigmund, 1112, 136n2
Fulchignoni, Enrico, 101
Garca Lorca, Federico, 13, 15
Gaulle, Charles de, 14
geis, 12326
Gent, Jean, 140, 146
geste interdit (gesture of prohibition),
12526
Giotto, 5354
174
Giraudoux, Jean, 89, 146

Giscard dEstaing, Valery, 62
Godard, Jean-Luc, 2, 21, 79, 14344
Goldoni, Carlo, 94
Green, Miranda, 68
Gregorio, Eduardo de, 6263, 105, 120,
138n15, 142
Gruault, Jean, 2, 23, 136n3
guerre est finie, La (The War is Over;
1966), 14
Guns (1980), 144
Haut bas fragile (Up, Down, Fragile;
1995), 4, 83; and audio dissolves, 81
82; and the backstage musical genre,
8083; conspiracy and investigation in,
7778; dance traditions and disjointed
tone, 8285; and homoerotic female
power, 8283; influence of Henry
Miller, 7980, 82; and labyrinthine architecture, 7778; mirroring in, 7879;
music and feminine identity, 7879,
8283, 8485; New Wave evocation,
79, 85; Renoir homage in, 80; Rivette
on, 14546; and the taxi-dance hall, 4,
7981; Verdi allusion in, 7879
Hawks, Howard, 52, 91, 93
His Girl Friday (1940), 93
Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Story of
Marie and Julien; 2003), 12021, 125;
and Buuel influence, 121; and Celtic
myth, 12327; and cinematography,
120; and circular narration, 127; Edgar
Allan Poe allusion, 124; evocation of
Resnais in, 121, 124; and female power
in, 120, 12427; the geis, magical incantation in, 12326; and the geste interdit
(the gesture of prohibition) in, 12526;
Hitchcock homage in, 123; mirroring in,
12324; and music, 127; and occult theatricality, 12426; and parallel worlds,
12224, 125; and relationship with Marie et Julien, 120; and the revenant (e)
(a spirit who comes back), 12122, 123,
124; and Rivette as patron, 127; solar
and lunar personas in, 122; sound, uses
of, 12021, 124; and time, 127
Index
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Histoire des treize (The Thirteen), 55,

5859
historical epic genre, 8587
Hitchcock, Alfred, 87, 90, 123
Hitchcocko-Hawksians, 87, 135
Hollywood musical genre, 8083
Hungarian Revolution, 13
Hurlevent (Wuthering Heights; 1985),
and Balthus, 31; as Bront adaptation,
3031; and Bulgarian choral music, 31;
and the tableau, 3031
Ishaghpour, Youssef, 8
It Happened One Night (1934), 94
Jacques Rivette: Thtre, amour, cinma
(Deschamps), 45
James, Henry, 4, 1057
Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Maid; 1994),
and cinematography, 8687; and earlier
film versions (Dreyer and Bresson),
86; influence of Charles Pguy, 86; and
music, 86; and personal connection to
Rivette, 86; reworking of the historical
epic genre in, 8587; Rivette cameo in,
86; Rivette on, 146
Jean Renoir le patron (television documentary; 1966), 41, 44, 127
jeune homme et la mort, Le (The Young
Man and Death; 1946), 72
Kabuki theater, 141
Kalfon, Jean-Pierre, 42, 4546, 51, 111,
140
Karina, Anna, 22, 23, 27, 62, 79, 85
Kiss Me Deadly (1955), 1617, 18
Knobelspeiss, Roger, 11618
Labarthe, Andr S., 41, 4344
Labourier, Dominique, 99, 109, 141
Lafont, Bernadette, 60, 66, 68, 143
Lang, Fritz, 10, 67, 69, 71
Laurent, Christine, 120
lazzi, 1012, 111
Laud, Jean-Pierre, 5860, 137n10
Lee, Peggy, 97
Leenhardt, Roger, 146
Lellis, George, 2425

Lemke, Sieglinde, 100101
Lvi-Strauss, Claude, 20
Lewis, Jerry, 102
Living Theatre, The, 45
Lola Monts (1955), 134
Lonsdale, Michael, 56
Lubtchansky, Irina, 134
Lubtchansky, William, 120, 134
Maeterlinck, Maurice, 6769, 7071
mains sales, Les (Dirty Hands; 1948)
(Sartre), 1314
Mandrakore (Mandrake the Magician),
1034
MarcO, 4546
Marie, Michel, 3
Marie et Julien: Scnes de la vie parallle (Marie and Julien: Scenes from a
Parallel Life: 1. 1975), and casting 63;
Les filles du feu, film cycle, 6263, 120;
relationship with Histoire de Marie et
Julien, 63, 120
Marignac, Martine, 146
Marivaux, Pierre Carlet de, 23, 11112,
11516
Markale, Jean, 123, 143
Marker, Chris, 46
Markham, Kika, 143
Marx Brothers, 102
Matisse, Henri, 24, 28
Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 15
May 1968, cultural revolution in France,
4142, 5556, 61
Mlis, Georges, 6
Merry-Go-Round (197778, released
1983), and Les filles du feu, film cycle,
6364; and improvisation, 6364;
reinvention of genres in, 6364; relationship between music and image in,
6364; Rivette on, 14344
Metropolis (1927), 10
Miller, Henry, 7980
Mizoguchi, Kenji, 14041
modern primitivism, 100101
Monaco, James, 4
Monde, Le, 53
Index
175
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Monkey Business (1952), 5152

Moonfleet (1955), 67, 69, 71
Morin, Edgar, 99
Morrey, Douglas, 28, 60, 75, 129, 136n4,
137n13
Narboni, Jean, 63
Nerval, Grard de, 6162
Ne touchez pas la hache (Dont Touch
the Axe; 2007), 128; as Balzac adaptation, 12728, 13031; and La duchesses de Langeais, 127; evocation of
La religieuse, 128; and the flashback,
12829; and music, 128; and possession, 12931; and power relations in,
12930; relationship with Cline et
Julie, 130; Rivette on, 130; and the
tableau, 12731; theatrical space, uses
of, 12731; and timing, 130
New Wave of French cinema, 25, 8, 43,
79, 136
Norot: Scnes de la vie parallle (Northwest Wind: Scenes of a Parallel Life:
3. 1976), 68; and Artaud influence,
6566, 67; Carolyn Carlson and dance
choreography, 71; and Celtic myth
and imagery, 6769; conspiracy and
investigation in, 6566; and evocation
of Langs Moonfleet, 67, 69, 71; and Les
filles du feu, film cycle, 6263, 73; and
the Gesamtkunstwerk, 64; homage to
Cocteau and Debussy in, 6465, 70,
73; and Maeterlinckian symbolism,
7071; mirroring in, 6768; and music, 6364, 67, 69, 71; and the opera
libretto, 70; and parallel worlds, 64,
6768; and pre-Raphaelite figures,
6869; and The Revengers Tragedy
(Tourneur), 4, 65, 137n13; Rivette on,
71, 14243; solar and lunar imagery in,
62, 7071; sound, uses of, 63, 7172;
synopses, 6668 (film), 6970 (opera);
and the theater rehearsal, 6667; and
the theater script, 6566; as Tourneur
adaptation, 6568; as transposition of
impressionist opera, 6465, 6871, 73
No theater, 14041
Nouvelle Vague, 25, 8, 43, 79, 136
176
Office de Radiodiffusion-Tlvision Franaise (O.R.T.F.), 53

Ogier, Bulle: 42, 4546, 51, 59, 62, 74,
105, 109, 111, 115, 138n16, 142
Ogier, Pascale, 73, 76, 138n16
Ondine (Giraudoux), 146
opera, xii; and Haut bas fragile, 7879;
and Norot, 6465, 6671, 73
Oresteia (Aeschylus), 8990
Orphe, (Orpheus; 1950), 107
Other House, The (James), 4, 1057
Out 1: Noli me tangere (Out 1: Touch
Me Not; 1970), 4, 57; and Artaudian
theatricality, 5657, 61; and Balzac,
5556, 5859, 137n11; and Boulez, 54,
5556, 57, 61; conspiracy and investigation in, 55, 5859; and duration,
53, 58, 60; and evocation of Truffauts
Les quatre cent coups, 5859, 60; and
Giotto, 5354; and the Greek chorus,
5657; and guided chance method of
composition/filming, 54, 5556, 6061;
and Histoire des treize (The Thirteen),
55, 5859, 137n11; and May 1968,
cultural revolution, 4142, 5556, 61;
mirroring in/of, 61; Prometheus Bound
(Aeschylus), 4, 56; and reflexivity,
6061; relationship with Spectre, 58
59, 6061; restoration of, 53, 137n9,
137n10; Rivette on, 58, 61; as second
film of Paris trilogy, 74; and serial
form, 5356, 58, 61; and Seven Against
Thebes (Aeschylus), 4, 56; sound, uses
of, 5657, 58; and the theater director,
56; and the theater rehearsal, 5657,
5960; and the theater script, 5657;
and theatrical space, uses of, 5657;
and the troupe/collective, 5657, 5960
Out 1: Spectre (Out 1: Spectre; 1971,
released 1974), 4142, 5859, 6061
Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to
Us; 1961), 2, 4, 17; and Algerian War,
1415; antiquity and contemporaneity
parallel, 8; art v. technology identity
crisis, 2021; and autobiographical elements, 4344, 145; and Balzac, 1920;
and collaboration and personal culpa-
Index
12/7/11 2:17 PM
bility, 1315; conspiracy and investigation in, 8, 10, 1617, 18, 2022; critical
reception of, 45; and eavesdropping,
1112, 1415, 21; and existentialism,
9; as first film of Paris trilogy, 74;
and flnerie (narrator/boulevardier
tradition), 1819; and Freud reference
(female paranoia), 1112; homage to
Aldrich in, 1617, 18; homage to Lang
in, 10; and May 1968 France, 14; and
music, 910, 2122; and mystery, 89,
1113, 1819, 2122; and the nouvelle
vague (New Wave), 34, 8; and Pericles
(Shakespeare), 4, 810, 1516, 17,
2022; and portraiture, 1213, 19; and
reflexivity, 1012; Rivette cameo in,
13; Rivette on, 145; and Sartrean theatricality, 12, 1314; and sound, uses
of, 3, 1012, 20; and the Spanish Civil
War, 1214,15; synopsis, 910; and
The Tempest (Shakespeare), 4, 9, 11,
19; and the theater director, 8, 910,
17, 2021, 4344; and the theater rehearsal, 8, 16; and the theater script,
8, 11, 16, 19, 2122; and the Thtre
National Populaire (T.N.P.), 1516; and
theatrical space, uses of, 8, 16; and the
troupe, 10; Truffauts homage to, 2
Paris trilogy, 74. See also Out 1: Noli me
tangere; Paris nous appartient; Pont du
Nord, Le
Parolini, Maril, 63, 99, 120
passion de Jeanne dArc, La, (1928), 86
Pguy, Charles, 15, 86
Plleas et Mlisande (Debussy), 6465,
6971, 73
Plleas et Mlisande (Maeterlinck),
6769, 7071
Pericles, Prince of Tyr (Shakespeare), 4,
810, 1516, 17, 2022
Persona (1966), 50
Piccoli, Michel, 33, 37
Pirandello, Luigi, 4, 42, 4849, 9192, 93,
98, 137n8
Poe, Edgar Allan, 124
Pont du Nord, Le (1982), 76; cityscape as
labyrinthine schema in, 7577; conspiracy and investigation in, 7475; dance
and movement in, 74, 7677; and

female friendship, 7476; and games,
7577; and Giscardianism, 7475; and
influence on Varda, 76; Marguerite
Duras on, 74, 76; and meaning of title,
74; and music, 7374, 7677; power
relations in, 77; Rivette on, 73, 77; as
third film of Paris trilogy, 74
Prnom: Carmen (1983), 143
procs de Jeanne dArc, Le (The Trial of
Joan of Arc; 1962), 86
Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus), 4, 56
Providence (1977), 3334
quadrille, Le (1950), 2
quarantaine, une (forty day period), 72,
120
quatre cent coups, Les (The Four Hundred Blows; 1959), 2, 5859, 60
quatre coins, Aux (On Four Corners;
1949), 2
Racine, Jean, 4, 42, 45, 47, 116, 119, 139,
14445
Radziwilowicz, Jerzy, 88, 120
rgle du jeu, La (The Rules of the Game;
1939), 98, 139
Renoir, Jean, 1, 41, 4445, 60, 80, 85, 98
Resnais, Alain, 3334, 112, 121
Resurrection (Noli me tangere), The
(Giotto), 5354
revenant (e) (a spirit who comes back),
12122, 123, 124
Revengers Tragedy, The (Tourneur), 4,
65, 137n13
Richard, Nathalie, 77, 83, 115, 117,
137n14, 142, 145, 146
Rivette, Jacques: on Altman, Robert,
149; on American film, 14849; on
autobiographical films, 140; on La
bande des quatre, 14445, 146; on
Beckett, Samuel, 140; on becoming a
filmmaker, 139; on La belle noiseuse,
35, 146; on Broadway musicals, 148; on
Brook, Peter, 140; on Canal+, 149; on
Cassavetes, John, 141; on Celtic myth,
143; on Chaplin, Graldine, 14243; on
Claudel, Paul, 140, 146; on Cocteau,
Index
177
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Jean, 139, 14647; on collaboration

with actors, 14142; on commedia
dellarte 101; on contemporary French
cinema, 149; and conversation with
Jean Rouch, 143; and conversation
with Susan Sontag, 142; on Corneille,
Pierre, 14445; as critical writer, 5, 24;
on dubbing, 147; and early career, 13;
and evolution as filmmaker, 13536;
on film and dance/music, 71; on film
and painting, 24, 40; on film and theater relationship, 7; on film editing,
58, 114; on Gent, Jean, 140, 146; on
Giraudoux, Jean, 14647; on Haut bas
fragile, 14546; on impure nature of
cinema, 30; on influence of Japanese
theater, 14041; Karina on directorial
style of, 22; on Merry-Go-Round, 143
44; on Mizoguchi, Kenji, 14041; on
Norot, 14243; and operatic/theatrical
influences on, 6466; on Paris nous
appartient, 145; on plans prolongs
(long takes), 141; on plans squences
(sequence shots), 14748; on possession and the painter/writer/metteur en
scne, 40; on post-May 1968 France,
6162; on Racine, Jean, 139, 14445;
and realism 7; on le regard (the look),
14748; on relationship between sound
and image, 147; on Roberto Rossellini
and Henri Matisse, 24; on Rudolph,
Alan, 149; on Secret dfense, 14647;
on Shakespeare, 16; on the silent film
era, 148; on theater dcor in films, 34;
on theatrical space 34, 105; on timing,
14748; on Tourneur, Cyril, 14243;
on the voice, 14748; on women and
magic, 14142. See also individual
films
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 112
Rohmer, ric, 3, 135
Romance of Certain Old Clothes, The
(James), 1067
Romney, Jonathan, 128, 130
Rosenbaum, Jonathan, 98, 137nn910,
137n13
Rosolato, Guy, 85
Rossellini, Roberto, 24
178
Rouch, Jean, 41, 60, 99100, 143

Roussel, Raymond, 114, 134
Rudolph, Alan, 149
sang dun pote, Le (The Blood of a Poet;
1930), 72
Sans toit ni loi (Vagabond; 1985), 76
Sartre, Jean Paul, 9, 12, 1314
Scarface (1932), 52
Scnes de la vie parallle (Scenes from
a Parallel Life) film cycle, 6163. See
also Duelle: Scnes de la vie parallle;
Marie et Julien: Scnes de la vie parallle; Norot: Scnes de la vie parallle
Schiffman, Suzanne, 2, 138n15
Schneider, Maria, 63, 14344
Schwartz, Arthur, 148
Screen, 7
screwball comedy genre, 91, 9396
Secret dfense (1998), 88; and Aeschylus
(Choephoroi), 8991; and the Electra
myth, 8586, 8990; and female power,
87; and Giraudoux, 89; Hitchcock
homage in, 9091; and personal connection to Rivette, 87; reworking of
film policier (French detective film),
8586, 9091; Rivette on, 14647; synopsis, 8789; Wilder homage in, 9091
squestrs dAltona, Les (The Condemned of Altona; 1960) (Sartre), 14
servetta, 1089
Seven Against Thebes (Aeschylus), 4, 56
Shakespeare, William, 4, 89, 1516, 134
Shane (1953), 66
Shelton, Marie-Denise, 100
Silverman, Kaja, 85
situationist theater, 12
Smith, Alison, 28, 60, 75, 129, 136n4,
137n8, 137n13
Sontag, Susan, 142
Spanish Civil War, 1214, 15
Stein, Louis, 1213
Strangers on a Train (1951), 90
Straub, Jean-Marie, 3
Stravinsky, Igor, 3839
Studio des Champs-Elyses, 22, 23
Surna (Corneille), 116, 117, 145, 149n2
Suzanne Simonin, la religieuse de Denis
Index
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Diderot (The Nun; 19651966, released 1967), 4, 27; and acting, 2324,
2930; as adaptation, 22, 2325, 3031;
and allusion to painting in, 28, 2930,
137n5; and Barthesian sructuralism,
2526; and censorship, 24; and cinematography, 28; critical and commercial reception of, 24; and Diderotian
aesthetics, 2426, 2931; and evocation of Bresson, 28; and labyrinthine
architecture, 2829, 30; and Matisse,
2425, 28; mirroring in, 30; and music,
29; and prior theater production of,
2324; and La religieuse (Diderot), 4,
22; and sound, uses of, 28; synopsis,
2223; and the tableau, 2527, 3031,
11011, 137n6; and the theater director (Rivette as), 2324, 2728; and the
theater script, 2324; and theatrical
space, uses of, 22, 2628, 29, 30; and
transposition from theatrical to cinematic mise-en-scne, 2324, 2728,
29, 137n4
tableau, 6, 7, 22, 2527, 2932, 3438,
40, 5354, 10911, 114, 126, 12829,
13031, 134, 135, 137n6. See also individual films
Tashlin, Frank, 102
Tempest, The (Shakespeare), 4, 9, 11, 19
Thtre Grard-Philipe, 119
Thtre National Populaire (T.N.P.),
1516
theatricality, 48, 12, 27, 30, 31, 42, 56
57, 65, 98, 99, 105, 107, 11112, 130,
136. See also individual films
total serialism, 5354
Tourneur, Cyril, 4, 65, 137n13, 14243
Tradition of Quality cinema, 5
36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup (Around a
Small Mountain; 2009), 133; allusion
to Raymond Roussel in, 134; and architecture, 13233; and cinematography,
134; and the circus, 13135, conspiracy
and investigation in, 133; and dance,
132; evocation of Max Ophls, 134;
and medieval myth, 13132; and memory, 131, 13233; relationship with Les
filles du feu, 134; theatrical space, uses
of, 133; and the troupe, 131, 13334
Tropic of Capricorn (Miller), 7980
Truffaut, Franois, 2, 3, 5, 5859, 88
Turim, Maureen, 4647
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), 45
Van Gogh (1948), 35
Va savoir (Who Knows? (2001), 4, 93;
and As You Desire Me (film), 9293;
and Capra homage in, 9394; and
Come tu mi vuoi (As You Desire Me)
(Pirandello), 4, 9193; and commedia
dellarte, 9496; and dance, 97, 98;
evocation of Paris nous appartient, 92,
9495, 9798; and female gaze, 95;
and female power, 9596; and Greek
myth, 95; Hawks homage in, 9192, 93;
mirroring in, 95; and music, 97; and
portraiture, 92, 97; power relations in,
9394, 96; and relationship between
theater and cinema, 9798; and relationship with Va savoir +, 91; reworking of screwball comedy, 9192, 9397;
synopsis (play) 92; and the theater
director, 91, 94, 9798; and the theater
script, 9495, 97; and theatrical space,
uses of, 9293, 9698; and the troupe,
92, 97; women as accomplices, 96
Verlaine, Paul, 11314
Vertigo (1958), 90, 123
vie rve des anges, La (The Dream Life
of Angels; 1998), 104
Vilar, Jean, 12, 1516
Vivement Dimanche! (Finally Sunday;
1983), 88
Voyage in Italy (1953), 24
Wagner, Richard, 64
Wilder, Billy, 90
Williams, Alan, 2
Wood, Robin, 104
Zonka, rick, 104
Index
179
12/7/11 2:17 PM
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Mary M. Wiles is a lecturer
in cinema studies at the

University of Canterbury,
Christchurch, New Zealand.
12/7/11 2:17 PM
12/7/11 2:17 PM
Books in the series

Contemporary Film Directors
Nelson Pereira dos Santos
Darlene J. Sadlier
Terrence Malick
Lloyd Michaels
Abbas Kiarostami
Mehrnaz Saeed-Vafa
and Jonathan Rosenbaum
Sally Potter
Catherine Fowler
Joel and Ethan Coen

R. Barton Palmer
Claire Denis
Judith Mayne
Wong Kar-wai
Peter Brunette
Edward Yang
John Anderson
Pedro Almodvar
Marvin DLugo
Chris Marker
Nora Alter
Abel Ferrara
Nicole Brenez, translated
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Jane Campion
Kathleen McHugh
Jim Jarmusch
Juan Surez
Roman Polanski
James Morrison
Manoel de Oliveira
John Randal Johnson
Neil Jordan
Maria Pramaggiore
Paul Schrader
George Kouvaros
Atom Egoyan
Emma Wilson
Albert Maysles
Joe McElhaney
Jerry Lewis
Chris Fujiwara
Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne
Joseph Mai
Michael Haneke
Peter Brunette
Alejandro Gonzlez Irritu
Celestino Deleyto
and Maria del Mar Azcona
Lars von Trier
Linda Badley
Hal Hartley
Mark L. Berrettini
Franois Ozon
Thibaut Schilt
Steven Soderbergh
Aaron Baker
Mike Leigh
Sean OSullivan
D.A. Pennebaker
Keith Beattie
Jacques Rivette
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Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Elizabeth Ezra
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C O N T E M P O R A R Y

Contemporary Film Directors

The Contemporary Film Directors series provides concise,

A list of books in the series appears

Frontispiece: Jacques Rivette

Preface and Acknowledgments | ix

The Apprentice Years: Aux quatre coins, Le quadrille,

From Shakespeare to Sartre: Paris nous appartient 8

From the Literary Text to the Tableau: La religieuse,

A Revolution in Realism, Reflexivity, and

Sounding Out the Operatic: Les filles du feu

Reenvisioning Genres: Haut bas fragile,

An Occult Theatricality: Cline et Julie vont en bateau

Returning, Departing: Ne touchez pas la hache

an interview with jacques rivette | 139

Preface and Acknowledgments

| Preface and Acknowledgments

film throughout his career; the commitment to feminism already in

sent an important part of Rivettes work, I have kept discussion of them

This book has greatly benefited from the contributions of a variety of

| Preface and Acknowledgments

sources, especially from interviews; I have not sought confirmation from

| Preface and Acknowledgments

The Apprentice Years: Aux quatre coins, Le quadrille,

1946), a fortuitous event that he later affirmed marked the beginning of

women, foreshadowing scenes in more recent films such as La bande

The Films of Jacques Rivette

The Films of Jacques Rivette

adaptations. Rivette returns to the theatrical tableau to rediscover a true

Rivette does not seek to theatricalize cinema, transforming it into a lesser

The Films of Jacques Rivette

precipitated the contemporary crisis in representation that film theorist

The Films of Jacques Rivette

Throughout the film, Rivettes camera embraces the incertitude of

The Films of Jacques Rivette

documentation, according to Stein, because most of the records of the

The Films of Jacques Rivette

The Films of Jacques Rivette

Figure 1. Annes audition

The Films of Jacques Rivette

The cold war conspiracy that Philip describes to Anne draws on

(Benjamin, Paris 37). Yet as his observations reenact the rapture of

The Films of Jacques Rivette

Playing his part in the Parisian underworld of criminals and outcasts,

The Films of Jacques Rivette

hearted Mother Superior, Madame de Moni (Micheline Presle), who

The Films of Jacques Rivette

The Films of Jacques Rivette

decision to interview Barthes in 1963, the year that he assumed the

Figure 2. A tableau: Suzanne Simonin

The Films of Jacques Rivette

You have schemes is answered by Suzannes anguished confession, My

The Films of Jacques Rivette

oblivion of those who surround her, serves as an ominous portent. The

Heights; 1985), an adaptation of Emily Bronts novel modeled on the

Rivette returns to the tableau in La belle noiseuse (1991), as does the

The Films of Jacques Rivette

another mysterious visitor, Frenhofer, allows Poussin to enter the studio

intervention of a female narrator at this point signals the shift in focus

The Films of Jacques Rivette