Jacques Rivette - 1968-1981: Middle Film Career

1968-1981: Middle Film Career

His next film was L'amour fou (Mad Love) in 1968. Frustrated with the conventions of filmmaking, Rivette wanted to create an improvisational atmosphere in the making of the film. He disposed of a script, shot list or specific direction and instead experimented with scenarios and bringing groups of actors together to create a pure film. The film has several layers, including a theatrical group rehearsing a production of Jean Racine's Andromaque (which would be filmed by a camera crew), a TV documentary crew that filmed the making of the film/ stage production, and a fictional story about the relationship between the stage director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his wife and lead actress (Bulle Ogier). The film ends with an hour long argument between Kalfon and Ogier where they completely destroy their apartment and its contents. Shot in both 35mm and 16mm, the 252-minute film received positive reviews, but was released to the public as a much less praised 2-hour version. The experimentation of this film directly lead to Rivette's next, far more ambitious film.

Invigorated by his new film-making techniques, Rivette invited over forty actors (including Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto, Michael Lonsdale and Bulle Ogier) to each develop an improvised character for a new film without interacting with each other or given a specific plot. He then developed a basic structure for what would become Out 1. In April and May 1971, Rivette shot over 30 hours of 16mm footage as his cast improvised a story involving conspiracy theories and theatrical rehearsals.

Out 1 stars Jean-Pierre Leaud as Colin, a Parisian con-artist who pretends to be a deaf-mute in order to hustle money. He begins to receive strange, anonymous messages which reference Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark and Honoré de Balzac's Histoire des Treize (The Thirteen). Colin becomes obsessed with these messages and begins to believe that a real life utopian secret society, like the one described in Balzac's short story, exists and is contacting him. Thinking the messages contain coded instructions, Colin is led to a boutique. There he meets Frederique (Juliet Berto), a young thief with a habit of stealing mail. Together Colin and Frederique use some stolen letters to track down who they believe to be the secret group Thirteen. This leads them to a house by the sea where two different groups of actors are separately rehearsing for productions of Aeschylus's Prometheus Bound and Aeschylus's Seven Against Thebes.

Out 1 was shown only once in its 12 hour 40 minute original version, at Le Havre in September 1971. It was originally intended to be shown on television in 12 parts, but Rivette was unable to find a distributor for the film, and with help from Suzanne Schiffman spent over a year editing the original down to a 260-minute version called Out 1:Spectre, released in 1974. At its best, the film has received rave reviews and become a cult film, occasionally being shown at film festivals and retrospectives throughout the years.

After abandoning an adaptation of The Phantom of the Opera, Rivette made his most critically regarded film, Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating/Céline and Julie Lose Their Minds). Rivette met with actresses and real life friends Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier to develop two characters that they would like to play, then developed a plot and script with collaborator Eduardo de Gregorio. Unlike his previous two films, Rivette did not utilize improvisation during the filming, stating that the plot was carefully constructed ahead of time. Although the two titular characters do "go boating" in the film, aller en bateau is also French slang meaning "to be caught up in fiction" or "to be taken for a ride". Shot in five weeks during the summer of 1973, the film won the Special Prize of the Jury at the Locarno International Film Festival in 1974 and was an Official Selection at the 1974 New York Film Festival. It was produced by Barbet Schroeder and distributed by Schroeder and Eric Rohmer's company Films du Losange. In 1998, Entertainment Weekly ranked the film 99 in a list of the 100 greatest films ever made and David Thomson called it "the most innovative film since Citizen Kane".

Filled with references to such literature and films as Alice in Wonderland, Jean Cocteau and Marcel Proust, Celine and Julie Go Boating begins when Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian interested in the occult, notices Celine (Juliet Berto), a cabaret magician, drop her scarf and other objects as she frantically walks through the park. Julie retrieves the objects for Celine and they become fast friends, possibly even mystically bound. Together they begin to visit a mysterious "House of Fiction" where exactly the same melodrama (based on two short stories by Henry James) play out every day, accumulating with the murder of a young girl named Madlyn by the bizarre Camille (Bulle Ogier). Eventually Celine and Julie decide to rescue Madlyn and adopt the little girl in modern day Paris. On a boat in the real world, Celine, Julie and Madlyn pass by a boat filled with now frozen characters from the House of Fiction. The film ends full circle (but reversed), with Celine noticing a frantic Julie dropping objects in the park and chases after her.

Rivette then conceived and obtained funding for a series of four films called Scènes de la vie parallèle. With each film revolving around two female characters, Part 1 was to be a love story, Part 2 a fantasy, Part 3 an adventure and Part 4 a musical comedy. Rivette said that his intention for the film series was "to invent a new approach to film acting, where speech, pared down to essential phrases, precise formulae, would play the role of poetic punctuation. Neither a return to silent cinema nor a pantomime, nor choreography: something else, where the movements of the bodies, their counterpoint and inscription in the space of the screen, will be the basis of mise-en-scene." Rivette once again collaborated with Eduardo de Gregorio on the screenplays.

Rivette filmed Parts 2 and 3 of the series in quick succession in 1975. In Duelle (a play on words roughly translated as Twhylight), the Queen of the Night (Juliet Berto) battles the Queen of the Sun (Bulle Ogier) over a magical diamond that will allow the winner to remain on earth, specifically modern day Paris. In Noroît (another word play roughly translated as Nor'west), the pirate Morag (Geraldine Chaplin), seeks revenge against the pirate Giulia (Bernadette Lafont) for killing her brother. Noroît premiered in London in 1976, but was never distributed. Both films received mediocre reviews and caused problems for Rivette with the producer's of the series. Rivette then began filming Part 1 of the series, a love story starring Albert Finney and Leslie Caron. A few days into shooting Rivette suffered a nervous breakdown, and production of the series was abandoned. However Rivette's 2003 film The Story of Marie and Julien was loosely based on what would have been Part 1.

Rivette finished the business deal for the Scènes de la vie parallèle series with the unrelated film Merry-Go-Round. Rivette received word that Maria Schneider wanted to make a film with him and actor Joe Dallesandro, and Rivette accepted. Shot in 1978, but unreleased until 1981, the film is a detective story about a missing sister and a missing inheritance. Like his last two films, it received mediocre reviews.

In 1980 Rivette decided to return to his more improvisational style and remake Out 1. Bulle Ogier, the only original cast member available for the project, and her daughter Pascale Ogier worked with Rivette on the characters as Rivette had done 10 years earlier to develop the film. Along with co-screenwriter Suzanne Schiffman, they made the 30-minute short film Paris s'en va as a kind of sketch for the eventual feature Le Pont du Nord, which was distributed in 1982. Le Pont du Nord, like Celine and Julie Go Boating, stars Bulle and Pascale Ogier as two women who randomly meet and investigate a strange and surreal mystery together involving a strange package and several characters all named Max.