Introduction

Upon the occasion of the public rescreening of Jacques Rivette's film, Suzanne Simonin. La Religieuse de Diderot, ¹ in November 1988, Serge Toubiana cast a look backward to the sound and fury surrounding the De Gaulle government's censuring of Rivette's film in April 1966 on the pretext that it was "de nature...à heurter gravement les consciences d'une très large partie de la population." ² Toubiana's brief account evokes the intense indignation felt by the French intellectual community and, in particular, the stinging ripostes from some of the most prominent filmmakers of the period, beginning with Jean-Luc Godard, who sent a now famous open letter to André Malraux, "Ministre de la Kultur," in which he defined censorship as the "gestapo of the mind" and bluntly accused Malraux, a French icon, of blindness and cowardice (p. 23). The decision of the right-wing Gaullist government, dictated as much by electoral as moral concerns, did not prevent the selection of Rivette's film for the Cannes Film Festival that spring and was reversed after the legislative elections the following year. La Religieuse finally came out in Paris in November 1967. ³ The notoriety that the scandal brought Rivette's film, the least successful--in his opinion--of all his films, turned it, ironically, into his best-known work and greatest financial success.

The status of La Religieuse as a national cause célèbre was not conducive to an appreciation of the film as a work of art when it reached the public. As Jean-Claude Bonnet observes, "l'opinion s'est beaucoup plus passionnée pour l'Affaire elle-même que pour le film" (p. 65). Moreover, Rivette's own attitude toward the film, which he considered, retrospectively, as a perfect example of how not to make a film, ⁴ did little to build critical esteem. The rigorous organization of La Religieuse--its linear structure, internal logic, and air of implacable destiny--is overtly eschewed by Rivette in other films, which tend toward improvisation, indetermination, haphazardness, and incompleteness--in a word, "openness." Rivette does not, however, disown this film, which shares many essential characteristics of other films in his corpus, such as the themes of confinement and conspiracy, ⁵ the labyrinthian configuration of the diegetical universe, the anguished, tormented atmosphere, the obsession with death, and, especially, the persistent interest in the relationship between cinema and theatre that Alain Ménil explores in his article in this film forum. ⁶

Nonetheless, despite numerous studies of Diderot's La Religieuse, relatively little serious critical attention has been paid, up to now, to Rivette's cinematographic "representation," as he likes to call it, of the novel. ⁷ Long perceived as too "classical" (i.e., static) and rather conventional, Rivette's second film has been thoroughly overshadowed not only by the scandalous "affair" of its interdiction, but also by the iconoclastic nature of the rest of his works, which, on the contrary, have attracted broad critical attention. ⁸ It took a decade and a half for critics to begin looking seriously at this work "assez injustement méconnu" (Bonnet, p. 65) as an aesthetic object, beginning with Ira Konigsberg's incisive study, "Cinema of Entrapment: Rivette's La Religieuse (1966)" in 1981, ⁹ and Bonnet's brilliant reevaluation of the film in 1984. Reversing the critical trend, Konigsberg performs a thoroughgoing analysis of Rivette's treatment of space. He analyzes its metaphorical and symbolic dimensions and highlights the stylization of its spatial composition, which actualizes the themes of entrapment and enclosure and ritualizes the action in keeping with the religious thematics. Bonnet, for his part, does not hesitate to consider Rivette's film as a veritible manifesto of the principles of the New Wave in France, emphasizing its originality in comparison to conventional film adaptations; its formal sophistication; the remarkable interpretation of Suzanne Simonin's role by Anna Karina, "une sorte de symbole de la Nouvelle Vague" (p. 71); and, examining an aspect of the film neglected by Konigsberg, its...