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Remembering Jacques Rivette

Chloe Roddick, programadora

Born in Rouen in 1928, Jacques Rivette belongs to French cinema’s Nouvelle vague (New Wave): a group of young filmmakers who became active in Paris in the 1950s and 60s, and who self-consciously sought to reject existing cinematic modes in favour of a more experimental, radical, and iconoclastic filmmaking style. Inspired by the diaries of Jean Cocteau, Rivette moved to Paris in 1949 to study cinema, though he was ultimately self-taught, much like many other Nouvelle vaguers, who included Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer.

In 1953 he began writing for the then nascent Cahiers du Cinéma papers, which was helmed by André Bazin, and where he garnered renown for his often forceful writing-style and his criticism of established French directors like Henri-Georges Clouzot and Rene Clement. He was the first of the Nouvelle vague group to make a feature film, Paris nous apartient, in 1957, and he went on to make a further 22 feature films during his 50-year career. Below we take a look at five of the most important films to understanding the director’s oeuvre:

1. Paris nous apartient (1961):
Shot on a small budget, and with borrowed equipment, Paris Belongs to Us is, according to critic Jonathan Romney in Sight & Sound “the most severe of the nouvelle vague productions”. Starring Betty Schneider, the story follows a group of actors preparing for a performance of Shakespeare’s Pericles that ultimately never happens, but the film is also, more importantly, a portrait of bohemian, post-war Parisian life in the ‘50s. The film did not receive the critical acclaim of films like Les quatre cents coups/The 400 Blows (Francois Truffaut, 1959) or Le Beau Serge (Claude Chabrol, 1958), both of which went to the Cannes Film Festival that year.

Rivette passed away on January 29t. 2016. He was one of the most important of the French New Wave filmmakers, and its primary theoretician; a director whose influence has remained a powerful impulse on the world cinema stage.