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Moving (July-August 1977)

From Film Comment (July-August 1977). After I returned to the U.S. early that year after seven and a half years of living in Europe (Paris and London), my “Paris Journal” and “London Journal” column in Film Comment became “Moving,” a preoccupation that eventually yielded the title of my first book, Moving Places.

Note: the 35 mm screening of JEANNE DIELMAN alluded to here was set up by Manny Farber and Patricia Patterson on the University of California, San Diego campus while they were working on the last of their essays. -– J.R.

How to keep moving in the same way that this column must travel — from La Jolla, to Richard Corliss in Cannes, to Film Comment in New York, to wherever you happen to be reading it? Now that TV Guide generally has to take the place of Pariscope, [London’s] Time Out, the New York newspapers, shall I write about the breathneck beginning of Sirk’s SLEEP, MY LOVE, the parallels with Preminger’s WHIRLPOOL, a wonderful exchange between Don Ameche and Hazel Brooks (”Doesn’t sound like my girl…” “You have a lot of girls. This is one of them”), or scenes that unexpectedly and mysteriously take place in the rain? Better to leave such fine points to the auteurists.

I’m still recovering from my third look at Chantal Akerman’s JEANNE DIELMAN, a new movie which I was finally lucky enough to catch outside a film festival and on a big screen. It’s amazing what a little bit of time on one’s hands and an epic space can do for an epic movie; what initially provoked some resistance — over three hours of concentration on a woman’s life, mainly housework -– now becomes all-absorbing, even monumental. How long will it take before many others get to see it in such conditions, or in any condition at all? Better ask the auteurists about that one, too. Chances are, they’d rather tell you what’s right or wrong with BLACK SUNDAY.

Original soundtrack recording of Bernard Herrmann’s TAXI DRIVER score, side two, track two, bridge of the first chorus: an unidentified muted trumpet (and later, muted trombone) begins to play in a different key from the accompanying strings and piano, which up to then have been caressing Tom Scott’s alto sax theme in a conventionally romantic, jazzy penthouse harmony. A plush, gaudy reverie on Cloud Nine — identified with comparably upholstered glimpses of Cybill Shepherd in the movie — slides almost imperceptibly out of the chordal comfort of Hollywood’s notion of wistful sanity and into a subtly splintered realm of two adjacent frameworks weirdly out of whack, each humming and buzzing away in mutual alienation like a Joan Didion heroine on Seconal. But like all suspension bridges, it leads straight back to safety, the sweet terra firma of a Hollywood platitude -– a repeat of the dreamy alto theme. Even the madness has been illusory.

But what if it’s the spacey bridge that suggests sanity, an escape from the lunacy of the Hollywood wish-fulfillment? Like Elliott Gould singing, whistling and humming fragments of “The Long Goodbye” out of tune and out of synch with an offscreen piano trio, it may only suggest a temporary misalignment of clichés as they’re set in front of a distorting mirror — a glancing, ironic twist to the same old song and dance.

***

“Why walk along a rope and yet squat down every four steps?” Notice the ugly dent that squat down makes in that suspension. This interesting question about poetry (by Saltykov-Shchedrin, cited in a Viktor Shklovsky essay) comes back to me as I marvel at Katharine Hepburn’s happy capacity to make all her bones dance in SYLVIA SCARLET. The latter is playing down the street at a local theater in La Jolla, appropriately known as the Unicorn, which is appropriately located inside an occult bookstore.

If bringing elegance to what is otherwise an inelegant activity (like squatting) can be counted as one of the procedures of poetry, the whole giddy movement of Cukor’s tragic farce as it wildly shifts key signatures from one sequence to the next — from Dickens pathos, Tarkington cuteness, and Twain subterfuge to commedia dell’arte, from dandified drawing-room affectation and genteel, domesticated nineteenth-century fantasy to seedy music hall-suggests one plausible reason why this curious 1936 mélange originally suffered a quick extinction at the box office.

After assigning my art criticism class to write about it, two students complain that they can’t see why I pick such a  naïve piece of tripe. It emerges that they went at seven o’clock, when the audience apparently treated all the strange goings-on — John Collier’s salty dialogue, Hepburn moving (in drag and out) pretty much the way that Jean Cocteau writes, and Cary Grant pursuing a sinister, beefy improvisation on his Cockney background — as ludicrous camp fodder. When I went at eleven, the audience was more sparse and quiet, less intent on making the dream-bubbles burst. As night creatures in the Unicorn’s belly, we were perhaps more prone to accept Edmund Gwenn, a fallen father rolling in the grass at a magical moonlit picnic, crying in his alcoholic

sleep while a Russian beauty tormented him shamelessly for laughs; or Brian Aherne’s bucolic homestead, a gorgeous Disney cottage the size of a musical comedy sound stage.

The same week, I show UN CHIEN ANDALOU twice in a row in my film course: first with a Franck symphony, then with the soundtrack score of PLAYTIME, a film we studied a month ago. Was it the rollicking Muzak, Buñuel, my head, or some secret collaboration between the three that fleetingly suggested a street crowd, gathered around a disembodied hand had some of the quirky, comic ambience of Tati extras? “Using different kinds of music as accompaniment to UN CHIEN ANDALOU,” runs part of my subsequent true-false quiz, “changes the nature of the film profoundly.” Most of the students decide this statement is true.

But if it is, what does that make of filmgoing and film criticism? Did the students in my criticism course and I see different films at the Unicorn? Is UN CHIEN ANDALOU a different film every time you switch cassettes? “Naked Lunch demands Silence from the reader,” writes William Burroughs. “Otherwise he is taking his own pulse. . . .” Pulse readings comprise a good ninety-five percent of the way films are being seen and written about — one reason, perhaps, why most film-reviewing reads like advertising in drag. Textual analysis gives way to market research, and by now few among us are able to distinguish between the two. Those who try are usually labeled formalists, or pedants.

***

January in London: Being especially partial to artworks that put me on the spot — from William Gass’s On Being Blue to Luc Moullet’s LES CONTREBANDIERES to Philip Glass’ Music With Changing Parts to Iris Owens’ After Claude — I discover that Vera Chytilova’s unbearable DAISIES, turning up at a National Film Theatre Czech season, is right up my alley.

A curious split in the audience’s reactions helps to define the irritation more acutely: by and large, the laughter I hear comes from women, not from men. As the two dotty, interchangeable heroines tear through the movie and its countless formal procedures like maniacal children on a murderous rampage — chopping up bananas and several comparably shaped objects in a giggly anti-phallic delirium – I’m already getting edgy. And when they exert their carnage on a banquet table laden with expensive goodies at the end, proceeding beyond comedy into an endlessly protracted nightmare of flesh and food that’s every bit as disturbing as Pasolini’s SALÓ, I realize I’m in the presence of something that I can’t diminish or even control with any amount of rhetoric or film theory.

***

March in L. A.: Seeing Rivette’s NOROÎT for the third time at Filmex, I find it as creepy as ever, but I’m not so sure hat this is because of all the “images of castration” that my psychoanalytically-inclined friends keep alluding to –- by which they mean a lot of female pirates. I’m more tempted to think that Rivette’s effort to expel the “real world” once and for all (apart from the brutal assault of images and direct sound) merely reverts, like a surrealist tactic, to a monstrous form of self-exposure in the mise en scène that is at once omnipresent and invisible, like a poisonous vapor — making NOROÎT into as much a cousin of NOSFERATU as Welles’ OTHELLO. But what I find unnerving and compulsively exciting is described by others as “self-indulgent” – a nice nonanalytical term used to blanket over rejection of all sorts of challenges nowadays, from MIKEY AND NICKY to IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES to RAMEAU’S NEPHEW. I might even be willing to accept that epithet if I understood what it meant.

***

April-May in L.A.: A weekend mainly wasted on trifles that get all the star billing. AUDREY ROSE: a mindless, soporific absurdity about reincarnation that gets reviewed everywhere, thus implying it’s a lot more vital than JEANNE DIELMAN, which no one will squat down and write about. THE LATE SHOW: only intermittently relieved by waiting for moments when Lily Tomlin can outclass her dopey dialogue, and mainly stuck in endless Tales from the Crypt where pleasant memories of Hitchcock, RIO BRAVO, and THE LONG GOODBYE get dehydrated, battered together, balled up, and flattened into puny pancakes, like the inglorious waffle that NICKELODEON made out of John Ford and slapstick.

3 WOMEN: Altman and various critics’ testimony to what can happen to minds which think that modernism can be applied without ever being assimilated, much less confronted. A Forties Hollywood art film with little of Val Lewton’s finesse, apart from those slow Piscean blue dissolves that make it more contemporary, and a dream sequence that can seem possible only to someone who hasn’t even scratched the surface of the French avant-garde in the Twenties, automatically associating all such issues with Bergman. And, for the humanists in the audience, an invitation to not feel tacky and unobservant while feeling superior to the unobservant tackiness of the Shelley Duvall character, echoed in the knowing chuckles that Altman pulls out of me and everyone else.

ANNIE HALL: a marvelous trifle because at least it gives an audience a warm sense of itself, a graceful way of sliding across all the vaudeville turns of the narrative, and the first indication that Woody Allen can sustain a whole film under his own direction. Even if it changes nothing essential, either about him or about ourselves.

Generally speaking, the parties in Hollywood are more fun than the movies because they provide more swagger and drama; more comedy, too, in their paranoid dislocations. Meredith Brody, ]ohn Milius’ story editor, sums up the atmosphere succinctly: “In order to be happy here, you not only have to succeed — it is also necessary for your best friends to fail.” No wonder all four of the movies cited above deal so doggedly with guilt.

There’s plenty of guilt in Godard, too. But when I attend a Sunday afternoon screening at UCLA of ICI ET AILLEURS and COMMENT ÇA VA, two movies he made last year — both untranslated, and attended by what appears to be about a dozen people — I feel, for the first time this weekend, that something concrete is being done about it. But you aren’t likely to find out about this by reading the national critics. Given the hysteria in this country aroused by pro-Palestinian sentiment, you probably won’t get many chances to see ICI ET AILLEURS at all.

So what can I do to help you out of your dilemma? Not much. I can only keep up with seventy percent of the French in ICI ET AILLEURS, and the experience of this short feature and its dazzlingly diverse forms of accumulation — actors, photos, numbers typed on a calculator, multiple TV screens and slides and what the film calls “turning up the sound volume too loud” — leaves me too exhausted to determine whether COMMENT ÇA VA is a dull synthesis of earlier Godard or a try at something else which exceeds my understanding. For all I know, it could be both.

What do I remember about ICI ET AILLEURS? Faces of Palestinian soldiers training in refugee camps, slowly coming into focus, followed by an announcement that “nearly all of these actors are dead.” Different lights flashing on and off around three-dimensional letters spelling out LEARN TO SEE, NOT READ, changing their shadows. Processes of repetition, sound-image juxtapositions and varying durations that suggest Jean-Daniel Pollet’s MEDITERRANÉE (which you won’t get to see either), but spaced out with a rhythmical delicacy that suggests dancing more than walking. Then, “en repensant de cela,” a critique by Anne-Marie Miéville of the mise en scène that Godard has been passing off as something else; the word PALESTINE changing gradually into the word ISRAEL; Kissinger split into “kiss” and “SS” next to a photo of his eagle eye aimed at these divisions. Through everything an overwhelming demonstration that Godard is a much greater showman than Robert Wise.

That’s not much to report, but after one screening, even this minimal selection is a lot more than I’m equipped to deal with. I’d welcome help from any of my colleagues, if they can tear themselves away from the remake of A STAR IS BORN or ISLANDS IN THE STREAM or any of the other saturation-booking specials that consume their columns. If commerce rules that the film has to be in distribution, they could always start with something else. Can anyone with an ounce of sense believe that AUDREY ROSE has to be more interesting and important than LA RÉGION CENTRALE? It might be fun to see someone try to prove such an assertion. The worst that could happen would be getting it wrong, and that happens all the time anyway. At best, it might give everyone a better chance of seeing and understanding something new for a change.

Published on 08 Apr 2013 in Notes, by jrosenbaum

Introduction to Rivette: Texts & Interviews (1977)

This book was published in 1977 by the British Film Institute and has been long out of print, although nearly all its contents has been reprinted on the excellent Jacques Rivette website, “Order of the Exile”. — J.R.

Rather than be considered in isolation, this book should be regarded as part of a general effort to make the work of Jacques Rivette available, in every sense of the term. This is not to imply that the following texts and interviews are being offered as a mere supplement to his films: if the entire body of Rivette’s work can be read as a series of evolving reflections on the cinema, the critical work contained in this volume is indissolubly linked with the critical work represented by his film-making. From this standpoint, it is not enough to say (for instance) that Rivette’s 1957 review of Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt helps to ‘explain’ — indeed, provides a veritable blueprint for — many of the preoccupations of his 1976 film Noroit. One of the assumptions of this collection is that it might be equally valuable to view Noroit as a key towards understanding Rivette’s important text on Lang.

More specifically, this book is primarily designed to accompany a season of films at the National Film Theatre which is itself intended to place Rivette’s work within a critical and reflective context. Both book and season come at a time when most of Rivette’s important work remains materially inaccessible in England and America: only Paris Nous Appartient and Céline et Julie vont en bateau are currently in distribution in the UK (both by Contemporary Films), while nothing after L’Amour fou is available in the US; and an examination of the Bibliography at the end of this volume will show that, apart from a few brief and/or incomplete translations, none of Rivette’s writing has previously appeared in English. It should be stressed that many independent factors are responsible for this overall neglect. Quite apart from the unusual lengths of L’Amour fou, both versions of Out 1 and even Céline et Julie, the successful run of the latter in London last autumn only helped to demonstrate (once again) that a large segment of the film-going public continues to be well ahead of many of the regular film reviewers. There is nothing new about this state of affairs, in England or anywhere else, but it seems worth noting that if Rivette’s most immediately legible and ‘commercial’ film went directly over the heads of some of London’s most influential critics, the chances of gaining their support for works as experimental as Out 1: Spectre or Noroit do not seem very substantial. One also has to consider that unlike any of his former ‘New Wave’ colleagues — Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol and even Rohmer — Rivette has never shown much aptitude or extended interest in ’selling’ his work to a wider public, pursuing any of those elaborate public relations manoeuvres (apart from the occasional interview or festival appearance) that are usually felt to be essential in imposing a director’s name on the public’s consciousness. Rather like Godard but unlike Chabrol, Rohmer and Truffaut, he has regarded all his work since L’Amour fou as exploratory ‘work in progress’, and it is the actual process of this work that interests him more than the ‘product’, marketable or otherwise, that results from it. The art (or craft) of a Chabrol or a Rohmer — or of a Bresson, an Eisenstein, a Tati or a Hitchcock — is to fill in a predestined design, ‘realize’ a prefigured pattern. The interest of Rivette, at least since L’Amour fou, is to combine prefigured elements with relatively unpredictable and uncontrollable ones, and see what occurs. This invariably places the work itself in a state of perpetual suspense (and suspension) where the spectator’s uncertainties are not at all unrelated to the director’s.

There are many interpretations that can be made of the consequences of this approach, and although it is not my ambition here to explore any of these at length — a critical task that certain other texts have assumed in part, some of which are cited as ’suggested criticism’ in the Biofilmography — a few of the implications of Rivette’s methods might be briefly noted. The profound ‘mysteriousness’ of all his films on one level or another, despite their radically different procedures; the declaration, near the end of the first interview in this collection, that ‘the cinema is necessarily fascination and rape, that is how it acts on people; it is something pretty unclear, something one sees shrouded in darkness, where you project the same things as in dreams’; the increasing rejection of any ‘phenomenological world’, apart from the film-viewing situation itself, in Duelle and Noroit — these and related matters raise serious political and philosophical questions that most writing about Rivette has tended to avoid.

While Rivette’s initial formation must undoubtedly be situated to a certain degree within the existential Catholicism and illusionism that lies at the roots of André Bazin’s critical writing — belying a ‘taste and theory’ which, as Annette Michelson has reminded us, is ‘fundamentally antipoetic, resolutely antimodernist (1) — there is little question that Rivette’s development, like Godard’s, has largely proceeded in opposition to various notions associated with Bazin. This can be seen first of all in many of his earliest critical pieces, where the opposition takes various forms. Rivette’s critical discovery of Howard Hawks in 1953 (preceded only by Manny Farber’s in the pages of The Nation) was couched in terms that elicited Bazin’s sharp disapproval (’You can see the danger, which is an aesthetic cult of personality’: ‘La Politique des Auteurs’, Cahiers du cinéma, April 1957); if one places Rivette’s ‘Letter on Rossellini’ alongside Bazin’s subsequent ‘Défense de Rossellini’ (translated in What is Cinema?, Vol II, University of California Press, 1971), the differences in critical method and decorum are so striking that one can scarcely take the former to be the labors of a dutiful disciple; and Rivette’s indefatigable, no less polemical celebrations over these same years of Hitchcock, Preminger, Nicholas Ray and Lang’s last American film clearly didn’t coincide with Bazin’s sympathies. (In the same issue of Cahiers containing Rivette’s review of Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, Bazin labeled the film ‘not worth bothering with’ in the Conseil des Dix.)

Examining ‘The Hand’ at closer range, it should become apparent that the thrust of Rivette’s review is a calculated assault on the notion of the ‘vraisemblable’ (2) which is closely allied to Bazin’s defence of realism, If this difficult but rewarding text seems to bear a dialectical relation to Rivette’s earlier essay on Rossellini — implicitly endorsing Lang’s ‘absolute contempt’ for his characters (which is confirmed by Lang’s own testimony about this film in Lotte Eisner’s recent book on the director) after defending the expression of Rossellini’s love for Ingrid Bergman: and propounding, after an application of Bazin’s ‘neo-realist’ television aesthetic (the virtues of ‘direct cinema’ and an open form), an anti-realist aesthetic based on Lang’s ‘indirect” means of expression and his ‘totally closed world’ — the same contradictions are to be found in Rivette’s first feature, where neo-realist (Bazinian) and expressionist (anti-Bazinian) influences run virtually neck and neck.

On the one hand, there is the pronounced phenomenological side of Paris Nous Appartient, frequently remarked upon by contemporary reviewers: the desire to bear witness to the mood and experience of a particular place and time (’June 1957′ reads the opening title) that continues to give the film, for all its limitations, a rather acute degree of historical pathos. (And despite the post-synchronization, even the soundtrack is eerily prophetic of the urban paranoia of subsequent decades: note the remarks of an American about Nixon, overheard in a cafe towards the end of the film.) The phenomenological aspect is equally present in the film’s respect for durations — not so much a matter of long takes, which the exigencies of the shooting made impractical, as the labyrinthine progress of the heroine in her ‘quest’, up dark stairways and down narrow hallways, and, above all, the extended narrative treatment of the sequence charting her movements throughout a single night and morning, after receiving Gerard’s note threatening suicide. Yet at the same time, the Langian impulse to turn all this experience into a formalist brand of metaphysics — acknowledged in the direct quote of the Tower of Babel sequence from Metropolis — veers the film in quite a different direction which, given all the unforeseen twists, cheated expectations and reversals in the plot, might be construed as being tantamount to a denial of the real. The tension between these antithetical approaches — faith and skepticism, freedom and determinism, paranoia and chaos, “Paris belongs to us’ and ‘Paris belongs to no one’ — is of course the film’s subject, and Rivette’s designation of Paris Nous Appartient as an ‘anti-thesis’ film bears this out.

But if Rivette arrived at this contradiction on a thematic and stylistic level, he was not to realise its formal possibilities and implications until some years later, when he embarked on the adventure of L’Amour fou, an experience that is described in some detail in the first interview of this collection. In between came his protracted struggles with La Religieuse, the most overtly political of all his films, whose experimental aspects (also described in the first interview) are relatively submerged — a film that, for better and for worse, and discounting its musical ambitions, shows the marked influence of some of Otto Preminger’s films in the 50s and early 60s. Certainly the most traditional of Rivette’s films in method and appearance, it remains compelling thanks to its rigorous adherence to Diderot’s protest theme (despite an adaptation which necessarily avoids the question of the novel’s inception — as a practical joke of Diderot’s designed to lure an old friend back to Paris), to Anna Karina’s remarkable performance as Suzanne Simonin, and to Rivette’s resourceful mise en scene — the latter a concern that he was not to take up and explore again, in relative isolation from other formal elements, until ten years later, in Duelle and Noroit.

Turning to the two versions of Out 1 — dealt with in the second interview here, and unquestionably Rivette’s most important accomplishment to date — we arrive at a work whose separate forms (to judge from reports of the longer version) describe yet another formula for the two sides of the Rivettian dialectic. The decision ‘to adopt a perspective that is beyond good or bad’ and film ‘raw’ improvisation by actors who have invented their own characters, in a ‘pseudo-documentary’ manner — reportedly reaching an apogee of sorts in a 45-minute take of a rehearsal by Michel Lonsdale’s theatre group — where fiction gradually proliferates’, presumably leads to a kind of parody-summation of Bazinian notions about realism in the 760-minute version. (’To my mind, Out 1 [like Céline et Julie] is also a kind of comedy,’ Rivette has noted.)

Contesting and contrasting this, in the subsequent editing of the 255-minute Spectre, is a very anti-Bazinian demonstration of ‘how the very principle of montage risks becoming a principle of rejection and suppression — and not merely of elision, but quite literally of subtraction, erasure, or even impediment and “persecution” [of the spectator-voyeur], whereby ‘montage doesn’t mean adding but withdrawing. . . not doing but un-doing: the negative at work.’ In all fairness, it should be noted that in the preceding quotation Rivette is describing not Out 1: Spectre - which wasn’t shot until a year later — but Vera Chytilova’s About Something Else, in a discussion of montage with Jean Narboni and Sylvie Pierre which comprises the final critical text included here. Yet certain comments on editing in this piece (not merely in relation to Chytilova’s film, but also in reference to Godard’s Made in USA and Straub’s Not Reconciled) anticipate so many of his own procedures, particularly in the first and last hours of Spectre, that it is difficult not to read them (at least in part) as a prospectus.

The final text by Rivette included here is a prospectus, written not for publication but for presentation to the Centre National de la Cinématographie as a request for a government advance on the project Les Filles du Feu (subsequently retitled Scenes de la Vie Parallele). It is included here solely for its intrinsic interest: not as a critical piece or manifesto or even, necessarily, as a ‘preview of coming attractions’, (3) but merely as a token acknowledgment of some of Rivette’s current ambitions and interests. Ideally, a collection of this sort should have been longer. A more comprehensive sampling of Rivette’s criticism might include his texts (or remarks, in roundtable discussions) on film criticism, Sommarlek, Les 400 Coups, Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Le Testament d’Orphée, Splendor in the Grass, Proces de Jeanne d’Arc, Monsieur Verdoux, Muriel, Franju’s Judex, and at least part of his writing on Hawks, Hitchcock, Mizoguchi, Preminger and Renoir — to cite only a few examples. It is also worth remarking that, as the most fanatical cinephile of his generation, Rivette is paradoxically the figure who was most instrumental in inaugurating interviews with figures outside the world of film in Cahiers du cinéma: Roland Barthes (1963), Pierre Boulez and Claude Levi-Strauss (1964).

In the course of editing this book, it was decided at an early stage that precedence would be given to (1) interviews and texts that were unavailable in English and (2) those which came closest to defining in some depth the continuity of Rivette’s concerns. For this reason, short shrift has been paid to all three of Rivette’s last features, apart from their inclusion in the Biofilmography and passing references to them here. As a film that has already attracted a relatively wide audience and has been discussed in some detail by Rivette in interviews published in Sight and Sound and Film Comment, Céline et Julie vont en bateau did not seem to warrant the kind of extended treatment accorded here to L’Amour fou and the two versions of Out 1; even if it had, there are no detailed interviews about the film available in French. The same is true, alas, for Duelle and Noroit, at least at the moment — an absence which seems more unfortunate, because both films have already been subject to a great deal of misunderstanding. (4)

Considering the fact that these films represent only the second and third parts of a tetralogy whose eventual completion is still in question — after the disastrous commercial and critical reception of Duelle in France, and prior to the release of Noroit — it would be premature to attempt an extended response to these works in the present collection; the prospectus included here is scarcely more than an acknowledgment of this gap. I can only hazard the personal conviction that, with the passage of time, both films will be recognized as significant extensions of (and advances in) Rivette’s explorations — even if, from the present standpoint, the former seems to hark back to some of the illusionist premises of Rivette’s earliest work, while the latter abandons them with such virulence that it also rejects most of the forms of narrative suspense that Rivette’s cinema has formerly depended upon. Both works, one might add, represent audacious rejections of ‘contemporary relevance’ in terms of their subject matter — refusals which have already provoked certain political questions, alluded to earlier in this introduction, regarding the implication of Rivette’s formalism and the progressive abandonment of interest in ‘lived experience’. Rather than attempt to answer these questions here, I will merely assert that, as a serious, critical investigation into the diverse partis pris of illusionistic narrative, there is a great deal more political import to be found in these films — directly addressing the manner in which spectacle and spectator conspire to produce or deny meanings — than in the collected works of such purely unreflexive illusionist directors as Fassbinder, Herzog, Pakula or Rosi. And a response of Rivette’s in one of his earliest interviews (Télérama, 1 April 1962) may not be entirely irrelevant here: asked whether he believed ‘in a spiritual domain’, he replied, ‘Perhaps, but only through the concrete. If that means being materialist, I think that’s what I am more and more.’

In closing, a few final specifications about the pages that follow. With the exception of the first interview, where a brief and inconsequential preface has been omitted, all the pieces presented here are virtually complete. The interviews precede the texts because it was felt that the former provide a more readily accessible introduction to Rivette’s ideas than the latter (which require much more careful attention), although each section is ordered chronologically. ‘Of all of us at Cahiers, he was the one who was most fiercely determined to become a director.’ ‘Someone like Rivette, who knows the cinema much better than I, shoots little; people don’t speak of him, or hardly ever. . . If he had made ten films, he would have gone a lot further than I.’ These two statements, by Truffaut and Godard respectively, may help explain why Rivette was the first of the Cahiers critics to embark on film-making. They may also serve as a sort of background to the somewhat exacerbated tone of ‘Letter on Rossellini’, which all but concludes with an impatient clarion call announcing Rivette’s imminent debut as a director (which was to come the following year, with Le Coup du Berger). In his Rossellini monograph (Movie Paperbacks, 1970), Jose Luis Guarner states that this piece ‘is still the finest article written on Rossellini’; as an indication of the particular appeal and influence exerted by Voyage to Italy on Godard and Truffaut as well as Rivette, it is certainly the most revealing. But to see this essay in a proper historical perspective, it should be noted that it was written at a time when the readership and reputation of Cahiers du cinéma were extremely marginal; the proliferation of ‘insider’ references clearly indicates that it was essentially addressed to a small group of friends.

This is also partially true of ‘The Hand’, written over two years later — roughly when Le Coup du Berger was released and Rivette was writing the script for Paris Nous Appartient with Jean Gruault. In this case, Rivette was counting on recent memories of Lang’s film in the minds of his readers; and because few contemporary readers are likely to have this reference point, a great deal of the review might appear to be more abstract than it actually is. For the record, then, one does ‘become aware of a brand of make-up’ — the body make-up of the murdered woman — ‘for purposes of plot’. And the plot in question involves the faking of evidence pointing to the guilt of the Dana Andrews character, who is engaged to Joan Fontaine — a stunt contrived by Andrews himself and Fontaine’s father, a newspaper editor, supposedly in order to demonstrate how easily an innocent man might be condemned to death. After Andrews is brought to trial for murder, Fontaine’s father perishes in a car accident which also destroys the photographs proving Andrews’ innocence — a twist of fate eventually circumvented by the discovery of another document exposing the stunt. On the brink of being pardoned, however, Andrews admits to Fontaine that he actually did commit the murder. This ultimately provokes her to permit an investigator who is much enamored of her to phone the governor at the last minute and have him cancel the pardon. The ’scarcely wrinkled hand in the penultimate shot’ referred to by Rivette is the governor’s hand in close-up, resting beside the pardon on his desk which he has just refused to sign. (In fact, one sees both hands, on either side of the pardon — one of them clenched, the other at rest.) And the final shot is a fixed set-up of the impassive Andrews being led away from the camera by guards.

In its original appearance in Cahiers (after the magazine had switched to its larger format), ‘Montage’ is laid out in adjacent vertical columns, with two columns per page; on any two facing pages, the main body of the text occupies the two central columns, while footnotes and/or stills are placed in the outside ones. Unfortunately, it hasn’t been possible to reproduce or approximate this jazzy sort of mise en page here — an effect closer to collage than to montage proper — but an attempt has been made, at least, to keep main text and footnotes within hailing distance of one another, to suggest the original intention. Readers should not be surprised if occasionally they find the footnotes more interesting than the texts they are appended to: as with some of the Sterne-like dashes in ‘Letter on Rossellini’, the gargantuan footnote in ‘The Hand’ and the cabaret performances in Céline et Julie, some of the finer moments in Rivette’s work tend to take the form of spontaneous digressions.

Considering the fact that over eleven years have passed since ‘The Hand’, one can discern several signs of development and refinement in his thinking. If his earlier pieces, in contrast to Godard’s, suggest not so much a passion for paradox as a tolerance for it, his remarks on ‘Montage’ suggest something closer to an absorption and assimilation of contradictions — what Hegel might call a synthesis. Much the same could be said of L’Amour fou, which opened in Paris shortly before Narboni, Pierre and Rivette attended the montage conference in Aix-en-Provence

The basic intention behind the Biofilmography and Bibliography is to offer as much information about Rivette’s career as possible; so an attempt has been made to be inclusive rather than selective. The only exception to this is the ’suggested criticism’ listed after the credits of each film — a very selective choice which is also to some extent arbitrary, because I haven’t read all the possible candidates. A few further references can be found in the Rivette bibliography of James Monaco’s The New Wave, I omitted most reviews that I read of Céline et Julie and Duelle, my own included, because they finally seemed to be beside the point. Some of the others provide a few helpful starts, but it is my general conviction that the best Rivette criticism remains to be written — much as the best of Rivette’s cinema remains to be seen.

The idea and many of the selections of this book were largely inspired by a somewhat similar collection edited and translated by Adriano April — II cinema di Jacques Rivette, prepared for the 10th ‘Festival of New Cinema’ at Pesaro, 12-19 September 1974 - the first book in any language devoted to Rivette. This is the second, and I am deeply indebted to April’s pioneering and judicious work. For other diverse kinds of assistance, advice and encouragement in relation to this project, I owe particular thanks to Charles Cameron Ball, Ian Christie, Richard Combs, Jan Dawson, Amy Gateff, Jenny Gibson, Connie Greenbaum, Eduardo de Gregorio, John Hughes (for quotes from his Rivette interview), Lorenzo Mans, Tom Milne (especially), Jacques Rivette, James Stoller, Stephane Tchalgadjieff, Paul Willemen and David Wilson. J.R. February 1977 NOTES

1. See her Introduction to Noel Burch’s Theory of Film Practice (Seeker & Warburg, 1973, pp. v-xii) and her review of What is Cinema? in Artforum VI. No. 10 (1968). pp. 66-71 — probably the two most valuable expositions of Bazin in English.
2. As is explained in an editorial footnote, Rivette’s use of this term was in part suggested by the French title of Lang’s film, Invraisemblable Vérité - permitting a form of word play that cannot be adequately conveyed in English translation. To understand the drift of Rivette’s argument and its implications, it would be helpful to read ‘reasonable’ (and its variants) as ‘plausible’, ‘probable’ or even ‘believable’ throughout the review; all four meanings are implied in the French.
3. There has already been a shift, for instance, in the order of the films as it is prefigured here: “The Revenger” has become Part III (Noroit), while the ‘musical comedy’ featuring Carolyn Carlsons, dance company is currently planned as the fourth film
4. While Duelle might be described, from a strictly commercial standpoint, as a film ‘aimed’ at a particular kind of audience which no longer exists, the more ambitious and radical procedures of Noroit suggest both an acceptance of the fact of this ‘lost audience’ and a subsequent liberation from this frame of reference - thereby marking a return to the sort of experimentation and ‘pure research’ largely abandoned by Rivette after Spectre.