Jacques Rivette

From Shakespeare to Sartre: Paris nous appartient

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 Rivette’s 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 Rivette’s 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 Rivette’s 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, Gérard Lenz (Giani Esposito), who are rehearsing Shakespeare’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 d’Austerlitz. 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 8 | Jacques Rivette 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 André 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 cinéma 57–58). The “mystery” at the heart of Rivette’s cinema becomes a quality of the world itself when we attribute to him Bazin’s conception of an ontological realism, which was based on the existentialist ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre (Andrew 105–6). 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 film’s 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 Shakespeare’s 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 café, Anne meets her half-brother Pierre (François Maistre), to whom she discloses this strange incident. That evening, Anne accompanies Pierre to a soirée where the mysterious circumstances surrounding the death of Juan, a Spanish musician, are again the subject of speculation. Some guests debate whether Juan’s stabbing was the result of murder or suicide. While milling about, Anne encounters the distracted theater director Gérard Lenz, a drunken, loud-mouthed journalist Philip Kauffman (Daniel Croheim), who is in flight from...