Jacques Rivette (review)

Jacques Rivette has received less scholarly attention than many of his contemporaries in the French New Wave, despite his centrality to that movement both as a filmmaker and as a critic and editor for Cahiers du cinéma. In part, this relative neglect is due to the unwieldy running times of his films: many exceed four hours, with one (Out 1) famously surpassing twelve hours. However, within the last decade touring retrospectives and home-video releases have begun to inspire new scholarship, which often approaches Rivette’s films from new perspectives. While scholars once championed Rivette’s poststructuralist critiques of culture or the seductive aspects of his fantasy narratives, more recent work like Mary Wiles’s 2002 dissertation (adapted for a forthcoming volume by the University of Illinois Press) attempt instead to describe the complex narrative properties of his films, explain their significance in film history, and determine how these properties might account for the polarizing reaction to Rivette’s films: why some audiences become enraptured while others leave the cinematheque before the third reel. Published as part of a series on French filmmakers—and in fact the first book-length, English-language study of the director—Jacques Rivette by British scholars Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith should be read as a continuation of this project of reorienting Rivette studies.

Morrey and Smith focus several of their chapters on discrete thematic and narrative elements that distinguish Rivette’s filmmaking, including conspiratorial communities, theatrical rehearsals, literary adaptations, domestic social hierarchies, and childhood games of make-believe. In each chapter Morrey and Smith incorporate theories from the social sciences and humanities—including Roger Caillois’s taxonomy of games and play and Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotopic castle—to develop and revise observations on Rivette by critics and theorists such as Serge Daney and Gilles Deleuze. The most noteworthy of these applications is Smith’s discussion of “re-mapping” in her chapter “Story as Space: Space as Story.” While critics and academics have only touched upon this concept in previous studies of Rivette, Smith elegantly overcomes the difficulties of articulating how this particular mechanism functions in several of his films.

Noting that critics have identified “the rediscovery of Paris” as a salient characteristic of New Wave cinema, Smith argues that this rediscovery manifests itself in the ways Rivette’s subjects anthropomorphize the city as they struggle with their own identities. Here Smith appropriates geographer Doreen Massey’s concept of “mapping,” which posits that the necessary inability to include every detail of a space on a maps permits us to deduce what a society values by noting what it chooses not to include. Smith argues that Rivette’s characters search Paris for the very entities that maps omit—and thus what society seeks to hide. In order to find the answer to various mysteries, characters must “remap” the city by redefining the values and functions of its streets, buildings, and neighborhoods, confronting their own feelings of isolation in the process. A literal example of this is found in Le Pont du Nord, when Marie and Baptiste place a jeu de l’oie board on top of a Paris map in order to reveal which neighborhoods contain hidden danger. But Smith emphasizes that this “re-mapping” is often presented with greater subtlety. For instance, in Out 1 Colin recites Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” while walking through Paris, capriciously imposing the significant events in Carroll’s text onto each Parisian location he passes (55).

In addition to isolating such motifs in Rivette’s films, Morrey and Smith include a discussion of Rivette’s 1950s and 1960s writings for Cahiers du cinéma. They argue that Rivette was an important voice in the development of critical (and later academic) understandings of mise-en-scène. For Rivette, this term meant “finding the most suitable form in which to express one’s subject, recognizing that which is indispensable to the realization of a given scene” (13). The authors...