Jacques Rivette (; born 1 March 1928) is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. His best-known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and the cult film Out 1.
He was a member of the French New Wave, a group that included François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, who all began their careers as film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and gained international recognition as film directors in the 1960s (though Rivette perhaps had greater success and recognition as a filmmaker in the 1970s). As a film critic, he expressed his admiration for popular American cinema, especially genre directors such as Robert Aldrich, Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Tashlin. As a film director, he is known for using extended running times and loose narratives to explore the symbiosis and clash between reality and imagination. His films often combine the paranoid and conspiratorial crime stories of films by Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang with the more carefree characters of the films of Jean Renoir and Howard Hawks.
Film critic Raphaël Bassan has said that Rivette is "the only filmmaker of the ex-New Wave—along with Godard—who keeps making truly personal work on the level of film, while his colleagues from the early days have long rejoined the ranks of the qualité française " Francois Truffaut said that the French New Wave happened because of Rivette, and Marc Chevrie has called Rivette "vaguely legendary but largely unknown."
Read more about Jacques Rivette: Early Life and Film Criticism, 1958-1966: Early Film Career, 1968-1981: Middle Film Career, 1984- Present: Later Film Career, Themes and Style