Entries associated with the tag "Jacques Rivette":

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. —L.P. Hartley

I wanted to tell the story of the last romantic couple. —Jean-Luc Godard

Catherine Breillat's The Last Mistress (now at Landmark's Century Centre) wants to tell the story of the last romantic couple too. Or is it the first romantic couple? Since in terms of literal historical period we're obviously nearer the beginning than the end—the age of capital R "Romanticism" and everything that implies, about prevailing cultural attitudes and standards of human behavior in the post-Napoleonic brave new world of 1830s France. But then why do these dandified lovers, impeccably decked out a la July Monarchy—in plush, exotic fabrics, colorful toques and mantillas, with oriental hookahs on the plein-air carpets, etc—seem so anachronistically like ourselves? Since however meticulous the period reconstructions—gilded rooms, railings and balustrades, statuary—the behavioral signals seem almost intimately familiar: could be us up there, since that's how we'd be responding right now. Which makes you wonder how foreign this country of the past can be ...

Same period,* different film. Jacques Rivette's The Duchess of Langeais, which played in town a couple weeks back, seems as chilly and distant in its neoclassical reserve—Ingres contra Delacroix, the polarities of the era—as Mistress is romantically hung out. As in his earlier Joan the Maid (1993), where late medievals discuss theological dogmas like transubstantiation as if their lives depended on it (which in fact they did), Rivette's characters in Duchess seem driven by assumptions about life, behavior, ideology, etc, that we're not in a position to share. These people aren't us—if you want to "relate," be prepared to fight your way into the mind-set.

So what's to choose between them? Obviously a matter of inclination and taste, since both deliver their own brand of delectables. Whatever her merits as historian, Breillat's micromanaged attraction to the vagaries of human passion invites a complicity that Rivette, more austere and abstract, isn't inclined to give. On the other hand, Duchess fascinates out of sheer obliquity, its terse, alienating distance—everything less predictable since less familiar, a matter of epistemological cunning rather than identification strategies unleashed. Yet despite its raw immediacy, it's the Breillat that arguably wears you down and out. Too much us, not enough them. Where's negative capability when you really need it?

(*Actually it isn't, though every review I've read apparently thinks that Duchess is set in restoration France, in the early 1820s or thereabouts. But as the film's introductory title makes clear—not to mention Balzac's own source novel—the relevant "restoration" is of the Spanish king, Ferdinand VII, not France's Louis XVIII. So Napoleon's empire would still be alive and kicking, if only for a short while more. No wonder everything's so neoclassical—it's exactly as it should be!)

I realize it must sound crazy for people who haven't seen Jacques Rivette's 750-minute  Out 1 (1971) or his 255-minute Out 1: Spectre (1972) to keep reading blog posts about them—even though I keep hearing almost every day from various others who have seen either or both films recently, in Chicago or New York or Vancouver or Berkeley, and are still recovering from the experience. 

What I'd like to focus on here is how these films wind up getting misrepresented due to the circulation of incomplete data. For instance, everyone who's seen any stills from the two films and hasn't seen the films probably concludes that they're both in black and white. They're wrong; the problem is that the only photos available from the films on the Internet and in film magazines are in black and white, undoubtedly because color stills would cost too much money to process. In fact, the beautiful restoration of Spectre that showed at the Gene Siskel Film Center last Saturday, blown up from 16-millimeter to 35, had far more luscious and luminous colors than any other print I've ever seen—finally justifying Rivette's supposedly extravagant claim in a 1975 interview that "you might almost say that I am trying to bring back the old MGM Technicolor! I even think that the colors of Out would please a Natalie Kalmus."

I should add that I've probably seen Spectre a good eight or nine times by now. This is partly because I was living in Paris about two blocks away from a cinema showing it for a week-long run in 1973. I was writing about the film at the time for Sight and Sound, and given my far from perfect French, the only way I could assure myself I was understanding most of the dialogue was by going back repeatedly and taking detailed notes. And of course the fact that the film offers itself as a kind of diabolical puzzle only intensified my burning curiosity about its many mysteries.

All of which leads me to my major point. Thanks to both my prolonged immersion in the film and an interview I did with Rivette during the same period, I can state without hesitation that a major aspect of the film's structure is clarified by the placement of the film's intermission exactly halfway through, e.g., a little over two hours into the film. Up to this point Rivette has been intercutting between four mainly autonomous plots that have only gradually started to link up, involving two separate theater groups and two lonely, solitary, and eccentric individuals played by Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto (decked out in a wig in the accompanying still, supposedly to make herself look like a gangster, with Francoise Fabian to her left). Then, immediately before the intermission, for the first and only time in the film, Leaud and Berto briefly cross paths, at a hippie boutique significantly called L'Angle du Hasard (roughly, "The Angle of Chance"), virtually unaware of each other's existence—at which point all four of the film's plots become magically interlinked.

But this is no longer the scene occurring just before the film's intermission. Similarly, the first sequence after the intermission is no longer an extended sequence of black-and-white stills that either recap the previous plots or anticipate others. Why? Evidently whoever restored the film was unaware this was part of Rivette's plan, and therefore the 35-millimeter reels were arranged so that the intermission now occurs about five or ten minutes later. So every time the film gets shown today, it gets shown incorrectly, because no projectionist wants to stop a reel before the end, and the grand structure of an already very difficult film gets needlessly obfuscated instead of clarified.

By the same token, the beautiful colors of this restoration, even though they obviously fulfill Rivette's intentions, don't really qualify as a "restoration" of anything that audiences were seeing in the mid-1970s. In this case, I'm grateful rather than sorry. But it's still another case of film history being rewritten.      

If I'd had my druthers, I would have seen Jacques Rivette's masterpiece Out 1 for the third time this past weekend, at the Gene Siskel Film Center. It's still one of my all-time favorites, offering far more pleasure, enlightenment, and sheer stimulation over its dozen and a half hours than any dozen routine commercial releases (which would cumulatively last twice as long, and most of which I wouldn't dream of seeing if my job didn't require it). Thanks to work, I had to content myself with about three of the eight episodes, #3, #7, and #8. Still, it was  gratifying to see this much of it with such an appreciative and good-sized audience (about 140) who laughed in all the right places and seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. (The experience was enhanced by a superb job of "soft subtitling" supervised by Sally Shafto, director of the last Big Muddy Film Festival.) 

I realize this is the third post about Rivette in the past couple weeks (see Pat Graham's Celine & Julie: The Typeface and One Sings, the Other Doesn't), but he's the kind of filmmaker who fosters obsessiveness of various kinds. And I'd like to take this opportunity to correct a slight overstatement in my long review of the film in the Reader. Alluding to a slim paperback I once edited, Rivette: Texts and Interviews, published in England 30 years ago and long out of print (a used library copy is currently selling on Amazon for $137.90), I stated that the contents are now available at a new and excellent web site devoted to Rivette. On reflection that's almost but not quite true: still missing is the last major piece of critical and theoretical writing by Rivette, a fascinating 1969 item called "Montage" that he coauthored with two Cahiers du Cinema colleagues, Jean Narboni and Sylvie Pierre.

The piece is especially relevant to Rivette's four-hour Out 1: Spectre, which screens at the Film Center on June 9. But Daniel Stuyck, who helps run the Rivette site, assures me that the text will be added in June as part of the site's periodic expansion. Meanwhile, if you'd like a small taste of this brilliant, somewhat difficult piece, check out a brief extract, about Jean-Marie Straub, in Kinoslang, an invaluable blog by Los Angeles writer Andy Rector (who flew to Chicago for the Out 1 screening).

Sometimes it helps not to know anything . . .

Coming to Celine and Julie Go Boating at the Film Center two weeks ago with "fresh eyes," so to speak (see post and comments for May 15), I wondered what I could possibly find there that hadn't already been analyzed to death—written about, pontificated on, etc. Obviously not a lot, since if someone like yours truly can come up with an idea, then somebody else already has.

So surprise, surprise, from the very first frame: that art nouveau lettering in the titles and credits. Where's it coming from, what's it all about? Nothing I'd read gave even the slightest clue. Lots of literary speculations on antecedents and influences (Henry James, Lewis Carroll, etc). But right up front there's an actual visual motif—it's a MOOOVIE, after all—and nobody's ever bothered to notice, as far as I can check on the Internet. (Though if we're back to rummaging through paper-based archives, musty old libraries of forgotten information, then all bets are off.)

But that art nouveau thing: it saturates the film, or at least the "contemporary" half of it—which is arguably less contemporary than the chamber drama it surrounds, the Jamesian story within a story (30s period in my view, from the deco stylizations, though per Jonathan Rosenbaum, with corroboration from Rivette himself, it actually references 50s Hollywood). It almost seems an homage, if not to Parisian nouveau exactly, then to the Montmartrean belle epoque, which in practice amounts to the same thing: curvilinear fonts and letterings, period streetscapes captured in the verite tracks and pans (including an incredible "ghost" house where the 30s/50s tale unwinds: all that variegated brick, like something out of Raimondo D'Aronco), ornamental graphics in a kid's picture book. Everything is of a piece, inflected by default-styling nouveau. What's odd to me, though, is Rivette's choice of typeface for the intertitles et al: apparently Boecklin standard, a Swiss-German font rather than a specifically French one. You have to wonder why an ostensible period homagist didn't opt for, let's say, Metropolitain, typographic brainchild of axiomatic French nouveau designer Hector Guimard, whose architectural masterwork was—well, of course!—the Paris Metro.

On the other hand, it's possible Rivette didn't consider any of these things—possible but not very likely, since the styling's too consistent to be accidental or haphazard. Or try out this idea (per Jonathan R. again): that the lettering, like C&J's subtitle "Phantom Ladies Over Paris," is essentially an homage to Feuillade—specifically to Les Vampires. Not a bad argument, and it might even have convinced me—if not for the evidence of the serial's own credits! The Gaumont production rubric above the title: it's closer to Benguiat gothic, a deco-style font, than Boecklin standard . . . which, to beat a dead horse, was already a decade out of fashion when Les Vampires was made.

None of which necessarily proves anything—or if it does, then only that, as putative Feuillade homagist, Rivette could be both sloppy and inattentive in his choice of period lettering. Can't have any of that now, can we? But I think there's a better alternative . . .

One final question: does anyone know the fate of the mystery mansion, playfully identified as "7 bis, Rue du Nadir aux Pommes"? Haven't been able to track it down myself, and the address seems mainly a referential jeu d'esprit. Preserved? Restored? Demolished? Or has it simply vanished like a ghost?

Almost 30 years have passed since Jacques Rivette's Celine and Julie Go Boating—which screens Thursday at the Gene Siskel Film Center as part of an ongoing Rivette retrospective—made its Chicago premiere at Facets Multimedia (now Facets Cinematheque) in February '78, a full three and a half years after its initial French release. I still recall the bewilderment and controversy that greeted it, not least in the Reader, which, in one of its more eccentric displays of editorial gamesmanship (or was it just covering its bets?), ran diametrically opposed reviews in the space of a year and half.

First out of the gate and at the bullet end of the argument (zero stars— "worthless" per the everlasting rubric) was Virginia Wright Wexman, film studies prof at UIC (then Circle campus), who spared no pejorative in letting it all hang out ("Rivette Runs Dry," February 17, 1978—not available online, so I'm quoting here directly):

"Jacques Rivette calls Celine & Julie Go Boating a fun picture. But fun for whom? Not the audience. Rivette, one of the most talented of the original New Wave group in France, has degenerated in his recent work from disciplined, relevant statements of genuine humanistic interest to self-indulgent exercises that are intended solely to please himself and the people he works with. The rest of us can join the party only at the cost of being monumentally bored."

And further: "Critic James Monaco has constructed a tortured argument to the effect that Rivette's elongated narratives are necessary to get us into the artificiality of it all. But we don't need over three hours to realize that Rivette is talking about fantasy here. . . . Rivette could provide his audiences with footnotes to his text, as Eliot did for The Wasteland. But Eliot had important things to say, and that makes the struggle to understand his arcane references worth something. . . . Rivette, by contrast, prides himself on his obscurity."

Not to mention: "It shocks me that some critics have praised Celine & Julie as a charming, accessible experience, because the movie assumes so little responsibility for the needs of its audience. . . . If Rivette is really interested in the dynamics of creativity, he should take a moment to consider Freud's idea that art is the product of a sublimated sex drive. Considered as a finished piece of filmmaking, Celine & Julie may have been cheap, but it's a pretty expensive way to beat off."

Eliot, Robbe-Grillet, Freud, all that rarefied heavy artillery—more than enough to scare at least one fledgling enthusiast right out of the theater! Which still begged the question of those conspiratorial "insiders." Were they all just polishing the avant silverware, performing to each other's looking-glass specifications? Or was there really something to get authentically turned on about? And if there was, might not the rest of us—including knuckle draggers like yours truly—reach out and grab a little of that magic too? Which was pretty much how the Film Center's B. Ruby Rich decided to go at it ("Fun With Subversion, August 17, '79—not available online), with an elaborate four-star smooch, plus an alternative selection of high-end critical underwriters:

"Celine and Julie Go Boating is an extraordinary French film that continues to attract a cult audience despite the utter absence of critical support on this side of the Atlantic. . . . [U.S. critics] objected to the film's insistent silliness and broad slapstick style of acting, to the 'indulgent' improvisation by its main actresses, to its running time . . . and to the absence of any payoff in its shaggy-dog ending. These are exactly the qualities I prize, for in combination with the film's central theme and strategy, they make for a work of truly subversive humor. Celine and Julie is funny, entertaining, and the ultimate comment not only on the illusionism of cinema but also on the power of women banded together. . . . Celine and Julie Go Boating effects an unprecedented overthrowing of cinema's function as spectacle (and, in so doing, explodes woman's function within that spectacle). In turn, Celine and Julie become surrogates for the real-life cinematic audience: their laughter and refusal to obey the rules is a model for us to assume more active roles in our cultural life, to cease being passive consumers. . . . I can think of no film in recent years that so lavishly repays a viewer's tolerance of its minor flaws."

Season liberally with Proust, Henry James, Louis Feuillade, Helene Cixous, and voila!: the mind staggers . . . though arguably both reviews have begun to date, albeit for different reasons: Rich's for its "morning of the world" feminism (which probably can't speak to our own jaded times . . . but who knows?), Wexman's for being on what seems to be the losing side of history. Since Celine and Julie's a certified classic, right? But for a close-in look at what goes on in the critical trenches, before the consensus forms and the imprimaturs are officially dispensed, the spectacle of battling ancientes can hardly be improved on—or more calculated to unsettle. Since aren't these things obvious by now? Or is it always back to the future and forward to the past? Hard to believe we're in constant revision, as if "history" could never definitively define. There's always the fresher view . . .

It's interesting to see how some of the most difficult and challenging examples of art cinema have become increasingly popular over the past decade. Back in the 60s and 70s, Robert Bresson was virtually a laughing-stock figure to mainstream critics, and someone whose films characteristically played to almost empty houses. Yet by the time that he died, a retrospective of his work that circled the globe was so successful in drawing crowds that in many venues—including Chicago's Film Center—it had a return engagement. Much the same thing has happened with Andrei Tarkovsky—another uncompromising spiritual filmmaker, and one whose films are even tougher to paraphrase or even explain in any ordinary terms.

I'm just back from a trip to the east coast where I was gratified to find, when I turned up to introduce a screening of Jacques Rivette's 252-minute L'amour fou (1968) in Astoria's Museum of the Moving Image, that the film was playing to a nearly packed house. (Incidentally, this galvanizing love story about the doomed relationship between a theater director and his wife, played by Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Bulle Ogier, has never looked better to me, though I've been a big fan since the early 70s.) Virtually everyone stayed to the end, and there was a lively and enthusiastic discussion afterwards. Better yet, Rivette's other major experimental work, his over 12-hour Out 1 (1971), was screened for the press in Astoria last week, and I'm told that over a couple of dozen members of the press turned up for the event. The public screening scheduled for this weekend was sold out several days ago, and A.O. Scott reports in today's New York Times that a return engagement is already being planned for early March. (I'm told that the only thing preventing a Chicago screening is the hefty cost in this case of having to use laser subtitles—which appear below the screen rather than within the film frame, and have to be carefully coordinated to remain in sync.)