Jacques Rivette

Preface and Acknowledgments

Preface and Acknowledgments Cinema spent its earlier years distinguishing itself from theater: Jacques Rivette’s 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 Hélène Frappat’s seminal work, Jacques Rivette, secret compris (Jacques Rivette, Secrets Understood/ Included; 2001) and Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith’s excellent monograph , Jacques Rivette (2009), have argued for Rivette’s 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 Rivette’s 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 Rivette’s films from the New Wave to the present day. In the first section, I examine the evolution of Rivette’s 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 Rivette’s feature films. In the second section, I show how Rivette’s 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 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 Rivette’s 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 Rivette’s 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 Honoré de Balzac’s nineteenth-century novella, is thus approached as an additional pictorial dimension of the theatricality that defines Rivette’s earlier adaptation of Denis Diderot’s La religieuse. Rivette’s 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 Scènes de la vie parallèle (Scenes from a Parallel Life; 1976) possesses a special significance in nearly all of Rivette’s 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 woman’s 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 Rivette’s 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 Rivette’s first feature film will be revisited and reworked in film after x | Preface and Acknowledgments film throughout his career; the...