Jacques Rivette: Cinema as Adventure
“The most important filmmaker of the last thirty-five years.”--David Thomson, The New Biographical Dictionary of Cinema (2002)
“Rivette’s movies are movies at their moviest.”--Michael Atkinson, Boston Phoenix
“At once the most cerebral and playful of filmmakers”--Nathan Lee, Village Voice
From May 12 through June 20, the Gene Siskel Film Center presents Jacques Rivette: Cinema as Adventure, a tribute to the great French director celebrated for his lengthy, dazzlingly innovative narratives. The centerpiece of the series is an extremely rare screening of the legendary 12-hour-plus OUT 1, sometimes referred to as the longest film ever made and considered a lost film for over thirty years until its recent restoration. This is not a complete retrospective; nine of Rivette’s twenty-two features (plus one film about him) have been selected by virtue of their importance, rarity, print quality, and availability.
Born in 1928 in Rouen, Rivette was a key member of the group of young critics-turned-filmmakers who formed the nucleus of the French New Wave. After making a handful of short films, he embarked on his first feature PARIS BELONGS TO US in 1957, but production difficulties delayed its release until 1961. Although many of Rivette’s central themes had been set forth in PARIS, it wasn’t until his third film, L’AMOUR FOU (1968), that he leapt into the outer regions of duration, improvisation, and metafiction that would be the matrix of his mature style. Despite the uncompromising and uncommercial qualities of his films, Rivette has managed to keep working--his most recent film DON’T TOUCH THE AX premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in February.
Rivette’s open-ended style contains multitudes: among the many parallels evoked by his films are the mind-bending fictional games of Borges and Lewis Carroll, the nightmarish thrillers of Feuillade and Lang, the performance-centered spontaneity of Renoir and Cassavetes, the paranoid conspiracy-spinning of Kafka and Pynchon, and the utopian exuberance of MGM musicals and 1930s French populist cinema. Although Rivette’s central themes are remarkably consistent throughout his career, his approach has remained fresh and experimental. Like Godard, his only peer among the Nouvelle Vague veterans, Rivette continues to challenge and astonish us, reinventing himself with each new film.
Critic Robin Wood called L’AMOUR FOU “among the least manipulative films I have ever seen.” That description could easily be expanded to Rivette’s films collectively. With their multiple layers and slippery boundaries, they invite us to plunge into a participatory dimension rarely found elsewhere in cinema. Accordingly, Rivette’s critical champions often stress the experiential aspect of his films: David Thomson called CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING “the experience of a lifetime”; Jonathan Rosenbaum said of L’AMOUR FOU, “You emerge from it changed; it’s a life experience as much as a film experience”; and Michael Atkinson compared the effect of OUT 1 on the viewer’s consciousness to “a powerful hallucinogen.” Rivette himself has said, “I like a film to be an adventure: for those who make it and those who see it.”
Special thanks to David Schwartz, Livia Bloom, American Museum of the Moving Image; Delphine Selles, François Leloup-Collet, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, New York; Laurent Maillaud, Diane Eberhardt, Cultural Services of the French Embassy, Chicago; Jonathan Rosenbaum; Sue Jones, British Film Institute; Jonathan Howell, New Yorker Films; Philippe Chevassu, Connaissance du Cinéma; Robert Cargni, International House, Philadelphia; Rebecca Meyers, Harvard Film Archive; Kathy Geritz, Pacific Film Archive; Tom Yoshikami, UW Cinematheque, Madison; James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario; Antonella Bonfanti, Robert Gray, Sally Shafto.
-- Martin Rubin
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Chicago premiere!
Imported archival print!
OUT 1
(aka OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE)
1971, Jacques Rivette, France, 746 min.
With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Michel Lonsdale
“The cinephile’s holy grail. . . a movie equivalent of reading Proust or watching the ‘Ring’ cycle.”--Dennis Lim, The New York Times
“OUT 1 is quite simply the definitive film about 60s counterculture: its global and conspiratorial fantasies and visions, its deliriously euphoric collective utopias, its ultimate descent into solitude, madness, and dissolution.”--Jonathan Rosenbaum, Vancouver International Film Festival
OUT 1 is sometimes referred to as “the longest film ever made”--not quite accurately, but, until Andy Warhol’s 24-hour, once-screened HHHH [FOUR STARS] is exhumed, it’ll do. Filmed in eight 16mm episodes for French TV but rejected for broadcast, OUT 1 received a single screening and then disappeared into the mists of cinephile legend. Its first-ever U.S. screening last November in New York created a sensation, with massive press attention and sold-out shows.
Based loosely on Balzac’s novel History of the Thirteen and built on doublings, connections, and disconnections, the plot follows two rival theater troupes with radically different approaches who are rehearsing two different Aeschylus plays. They are mirrored by two contrasting con artists (Léaud and Berto), each of whom is investigating the possible existence of two different secret societies, leading to a descent into paranoia and a counterculture underground.
Jonathan Rosenbaum compares the form of OUT 1 to that of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, “knotting together strands of conspiracy in the first half, then systematically untying them in the second.” Several critics have noted that the early episodes of OUT 1, with their extended rehearsal scenes, require some patience, but that the film gains considerable momentum thereafter. Note: OUT 1: SPECTRE, Rivette’s 255-min. reworking of the footage for OUT 1, will be screened on June 9. In French with English subtitles. 16mm. (MR)
Saturday, May 26
2:30 pm: Episodes 1 & 2 (191 min.)
Dinner Break
7:00 pm: Episodes 3 & 4 (208 min.)
Sunday, May 27
2:30 pm: Episodes 5 & 6 (183 min.)
Dinner Break
6:45 pm: Episodes 7 & 8 (164 min.)
Special pricing (includes all four parts):
$30 General Admission
$26 Students
$22 Members
A selection of box meals (sandwich, chips, fruit, cookie) from Whole Foods Market will be available at the Film Center at the no-mark-up price of $10. Meal reservations required by May 24; phone 312-846-2600 or inquire at our box-office.
Because of the extraordinary cost of this presentation, no free passes of any kind will be accepted.
Imported print!
L’AMOUR FOU
1968, Jacques Rivette, France, 252 min.
With Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Kalfon
“One of the great French films of the 60s. . . mesmerizing and all-enveloping.”--Jonathan Rosenbaum, Reader
The first of Rivette’s monumental masterpieces, L’AMOUR FOU follows a stage director (Kalfon) and his actress-wife (Ogier in a sensational performance) as they break up--maritally and mentally--while rehearsing a production of Racine’s Andromaque. Moving between cinema and theater, 35mm and 16mm, fiction and documentary, Rivette sets up an endlessly fascinating dialectic that pays off in one of his most extraordinary passages: a days-long primal orgy in which the disintegrating couple act out their madness to the bitter end. In French with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)
Saturday, May 19, 3:00 pm
Thursday, May 24, 6:00 pm
Imported archival print!
CELINE AND JULIE GO BOATING
1974, Jacques Rivette, France, 193 min.
With Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier
“The most radical and delightful narrative film since CITIZEN KANE.”-- David Thomson, Biographical Dictionary of Cinema
Rivette’s most popular film is a dazzling jack-in-the-box of a movie that combines elements of The Arabian Nights, slapstick comedy, Hitchcock, Proust, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, Henry James, Alice in Wonderland, and much more. Berto and Labourier give exuberant performances as two hyper-imaginative young women who meet, mingle personalities, and enter into a mysterious story-within-the-story set in a haunted “house of fiction.” DESPERATELY SEEKING SUSAN and MULHOLLAND DR. are among the films influenced by this seminal work. In French with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)
Saturday, May 12, 3:00 pm
Thursday, May 17, 6:30 pm
JACQUES RIVETTE, THE NIGHT WATCHMAN
(JACQUES RIVETTE, LE VEILLEUR)
1990, Claire Denis, France, 123 min.
“An indispensable introduction to Rivette and his films.”--A.O. Scott, The New York Times.
One major filmmaker pays tribute to another as Denis (BEAU TRAVAIL), an assistant to Rivette early in her career, profiles the director for the French television series Cinéma de notre temps. Serge Daney, noted critic and editor of Cahiers du cinéma, chats with Rivette about his career, the New Wave, the state of cinema, and much else as they wander through the Paris that figures so importantly in his films. In French with English subtitles. Beta SP video. (MR)
Friday, May 18, 7:30 pm
Tuesday, May 22, 6:00 pm
Imported archival print!
PARIS BELONGS TO US
(PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT)
1961, Jacques Rivette, France, 140 min.
With Betty Schneider, Françoise Prévost
“A masterpiece. . . Love lives intertwine and drama leaks out like ignitable propane.”--Michael Atkinson, Boston Phoenix
Rivette’s first feature is part of the initial New Wave explosion of extraordinary debuts that includes BREATHLESS, THE 400 BLOWS, HIROSHIMA MON AMOUR, etc. To a remarkable extent, it stakes out the major concerns that will dominate his work for the next half-century: theater, Paris, conspiracy, creation. The shadows of Feuillade and Lang loom large over this meta-thriller about a provincial girl (Schneider) in Paris who gets mixed up with a production of Shakespeare’s Pericles and a series of sinister events that may have global implications. Cameos by Godard, Chabrol, Demy. In French with English subtitles. 35mm. (MR)
Tuesday, May 15, 6:00 pm
Upcoming films in Jacques Rivette: Cinema as Adventure:
THE GANG OF FOUR
(LA BANDE DES QUATRE)
1989, Jacques Rivette, France, 160 min.
With Bulle Ogier, Laurence Côté
Saturday, June 2, 3:00 pm
LOVE ON THE GROUND
(L’AMOUR PAR TERRE)
1984, Jacques Rivette, France, 126 min.
With Geraldine Chaplin, Jane Birkin
Sunday, June 3, 3:00 pm
Thursday, June 7, 6:00 pm
OUT 1: SPECTRE
1972, Jacques Rivette, France, 255 min.
With Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto
Saturday, June 9, 3:00 pm
UP/DOWN/FRAGILE
(HAUT/BAS/FRAGILE)
1994, Jacques Rivette, France, 169 min.
With Marianne Denicourt, Anna Karina
Sunday, June 10, 3:00 pm
Wednesday, June 13, 6:30 pm
LA BELLE NOISEUSE
1990, Jacques Rivette, France, 240 min.
With Michel Piccoli, Emmanuelle Béart. Jane Birkin
Saturday, June 16, 3:00 pm
Wednesday, June 20, 6:00 pm
June show times subject to change; please check our Gazette or website for confirmation.