Jacques Rivette 9781526141507

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Jacques Rivette

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French Film Directors

diana holmes and robert ingram  series editors dudley andrew  series consultant Auterism from Assayas to Ozon: five directors  kate ince Jean-Jacques Beineix  phil powrie Luc Besson  susan hayward Bertrand Blier  sue harris Catherine Breillat  douglas keesey Robert Bresson  keith reader Leos Carax  garin dowd and fergus daley Claude Chabrol  guy austin Henri-Georges Clouzot  christopher lloyd Jean Cocteau  james williams Claire Denis  martine beugnet Marguerite Duras  renate günther Georges Franju  kate ince Jean-Luc Godard  douglas morrey Mathieu Kassovitz  will higbee Diane Kurys  carrie tarr Patrice Leconte  lisa downing Louis Malle  hugo frey Georges Méliès  elizabeth ezra François Ozon  andrew asibong Maurice Pialat  marja warehime Jean Renoir  martin o’shaughnessy Alain Resnais  emma wilson Eric Rohmer  derek schilling Coline Serreau  brigitte rollet André Téchiné  bill marshall François Truffaut  diana holmes and robert ingram Agnès Varda  alison smith Jean Vigo  michael temple

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French Film Directors

Jacques Rivette Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith

Manchester University Press manchester

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Copyright © Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith 2009 The right of Douglas Morrey and Alison Smith to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press

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Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for isbn 978 0 7190 7484 4 hardback First published 2009 18  17  16  15  14  13  12  11  10  09   10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

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Contents

list of plates series editors’ foreword acknowledgements Introduction 1 The art of the present and the dialectics of duration: the film criticism of Jacques Rivette

page vii ix xi 1 9

2 In the labyrinth: narrative, conspiracy, community

22

3 Story as space: space as story

51

4 Family secrets

95

5 La règle du jeu: games and play

117

6 Play, theatre and performance

147

7 Adaptation

177

8 Pushing the envelope: bodies, love and jealousy

205

9 Out of time: the unconsoled in Rivette’s late works

235



252

Conclusion

filmography select bibliography index

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255 263 267

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List of plates

1 The entry ritual: the approach (Céline et Julie, 1974) [image courtesy of Les Films du Losange, Renn Productions, Action Films, Les Films Christian Fechner, Les Films 7, Saga, Simar Production, Vincent Malle Productions] page 114 2 The entry ritual: opening the gate (Haut bas fragile, 1995) [image courtesy of Pierre Grise]

114

3 The entry ritual: coming through the wood (L’Amour par terre, 1984) [image courtesy of La Cécilia]

114

4 The entry ritual: at the door (Secret Défense, 1998) [image courtesy of Pierre Grise]

115

5 The entry ritual: crossing the threshold (Haut bas fragile, 1995) [image courtesy of Pierre Grise]

115

6 Ludivine and Walser (Secret Défense, 1998) [image courtesy of Pierre Grise]

115

7 The space of Wuthering Heights (Hurlevent, 1985) [image courtesy of La Cécilia and Renn Productions]

116

8 Escaping Wuthering Heights (Hurlevent, 1985) [image courtesy of La Cécilia and Renn Productions]

116

9 Roch eavesdropping (Hurlevent, 1985) [image courtesy of La Cécilia and Renn Productions]

116

10 Cathy and Roch at the billiard table (Hurlevent, 1985) [image courtesy of La Cécilia and Renn Productions]

116

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Series editors’ foreword

To an anglophone audience, the combination of the words 'French' and 'cinema' evokes a particular kind of film: elegant and wordy, sexy but serious – an image as dependent upon national stereotypes as is that of the crudely commercial Hollywood blockbuster, which is not to say that either image is without foundation. Over the past two decades, this generalised sense of a significant relationship between French identity and film has been explored in scholarly books and articles, and has entered the curriculum at university level and, in Britain, at A-level. The study of film as art-form, and (to a lesser extent) as industry, has become a popular and widespread element of French Studies, and French cinema has acquired an important place within Film Studies. Meanwhile, the growth in multiscreen and 'art-house' cinemas, together with the development of the video industry, has led to the greater availability of foreign-language films to an English-speaking audience. Responding to these developments, this series is designed for students and teachers seeking information and accessible but rigorous critical study of French cinema, and for the ­enthusiastic filmgoer who wants to know more. The adoption of a director-based approach raises questions about auteurism. A series that categorises films not according to period or to genre (for example), but to the person who directed them, runs the risk of espousing a romantic view of film as the product of solitary inspiration. On this model, the critic's role might seem to be that of discovering continuities, revealing a necessarily coherent set of themes and motifs which correspond to the particular genius of the individual. This is not our aim: the auteur perspective on film, itself most clearly articulated in France in the early 1950s, will be inter­rogated in certain volumes of the series, and, throughout, the director will be treated as one highly significant element in a complex process of film production and reception which includes socio-economic and political determinants, the work of a large and highly

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x  series editors’ foreword skilled team of artists and technicians, the mechanisms of production and distri­bution, and the complex and multiply determined responses of ­spectators. The work of some of the directors in the series is already well known outside France, that of others is less so – the aim is both to provide informative and original English-language studies of established figures, and to extend the range of French directors known to anglophone students of cinema. We intend the series to contribute to the promotion of the formal and informal study of French films, and to the pleasure of those who watch them. diana holmes robert ingram

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Acknowledgements

This book was written in collaboration. However, the main author for each chapter was as follows: Douglas Morrey for Chapters 1, 2, 4, 7, 8, 9; Alison Smith for Chapters 3, 5, 6. Certain parts of Chapter 3 have been previously published in ­Symbolism: An International Journal of Critical Aesthetics, Vol. 7, New York, AMS Press. This text is Copyright © 2007 AMS Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Douglas Morrey would like to express his gratitude to the following people for their hospitality and encouragement at various stages of this project: Kehinde Dauda, Alicia Lovejoy, Margaret Ozierski, Oliver Speck. Alison Smith would like to thank the following for their help and ­support: Miguel Guerrero Alonso, Dennis Hartley, Michael Kerpan, ­Federico Schliserman.

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Introduction

Jacques Rivette remains undoubtedly the least well known of all the major figures in French cinema associated with the New Wave of the late 1950s and early 1960s. Although the Nouvelle Vague is constantly exhumed for discussion and dissection, for undergraduate teaching and theatrical re-release, and although the available literature on the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut is enormous and everexpanding, few critics ever seem to have much of substance to say about Jacques Rivette. As Marc Chevrie has commented, the status of Rivette within French cinema might be summarised as ‘vaguement légendaire mais plutôt méconnu’1 (Chevrie 1989: 25). This is demonstrated by the fact that, although retrospectives of Rivette’s films have been held in London, Paris and New York in recent years, the first book-length monograph on Rivette’s work was only published in 2001 (compare with the first book on Godard, published in 1963) and, until now, none has been published in English. This may be partly because Rivette’s early career as a filmmaker – indeed its first two decades – was erratic, experimental and often fell prey to problems of distribution. After a distinguished career as a critic, Rivette filmed his first feature, Paris nous appartient during the summer and autumn of 1958 but, largely due to financial constraints which retarded the editing process, the film was not released in cinemas until December 1961. Rivette didn’t direct another film until 1965, when the New Wave proper was already over, and this adaptation of Diderot’s La Religieuse was dogged by a political scandal that held back its release until 1967. In the late 1960s, Rivette turned to 1 ‘vaguely legendary but largely unknown’

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2  jacques rivette his infamous experiments with narrative duration and improvised performance, and, although these remain some of his strongest and most original films, their running times were designed to dissuade all but the most committed cinephiles: L’Amour fou (1969) was four and a quarter hours long. Out 1: Noli me tangere (1970), which lasts for some twelve hours and forty minutes, was originally designed as a series of episodes for broadcast on television, and has only ever received a handful of theatrical projections in its entirety; the slightly more accessible ‘short’ version, Out 1: Spectre (1974) is still over four hours long. At the time of going to press, neither L’Amour fou nor Out 1 were yet available on DVD. In the 1970s, Rivette directed what may be his best loved and most enduring film, the inexhaustible, irrepressible Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974). Most of the rest of that decade, however, was again given over to financial uncertainty and artistic unpredictability. The darkly mysterious Duelle and Noroît (both 1976) were designed as part of a trilogy, but the third volume, Marie et Julien, was interrupted when Rivette abandoned the set, only to be completed some thirty years later (as Histoire de Marie et Julien, 2003). Merry-Go-Round, filmed in 1977 was not released until 1983 and, for the filming of Le Pont du Nord (1982), Rivette had to invent a claustrophobic character unable to be shut indoors, since he had neither the money nor the authorisation to film interiors. If the foregoing presents Rivette in the traditional role of the accursed artist, condemned to struggle against material poverty and public indifference, the latter half of his career tells a very different story. Since the mid-1980s, Rivette has worked with a regular team of collaborators and succeeded in producing a film every two or three years with remarkable consistency both in style and in quality. Since Le Pont du Nord, all of Rivette’s films have been produced by Martine Marignac. Since L’Amour par terre (1984), all have been co-written with Pascal Bonitzer and, since La Bande des quatre (1989), usually also with Christine Laurent in a well-documented process whereby the script is produced as the shooting progresses, with the accidents and experiences of the filmmaking process incorporated into the story. The director of photography has most often been William Lubtchansky. If the latter half of Rivette’s career is clearly distinguished from the first half, then, in terms of its consistency of personnel, of finance and

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introduction   3 of approach, there are, nonetheless, a handful of themes and tropes that are common across the whole œuvre: the preference, from the very beginning, for female protagonists; the frequent incorporation of theatrical rehearsals; a taste for dark secrets and mysterious, conspiratorial organisations. This book will, accordingly, adopt a thematic organisation, though it will also suggest a rough progression through Rivette’s œuvre, the earlier chapters referring at more length to the early films (Paris nous appartient, Out 1, Céline et Julie etc.) while the later chapters give more space to the 1980s and beyond (L’Amour par terre, La Belle Noiseuse (1991), Secret Défense (1998) and so on). Our book begins with a consideration of Rivette’s work as a film critic. It would be difficult to overestimate the significance of Rivette’s writing to French film criticism, or his stature within the highly influential coterie of Cahiers du cinéma; Rivette’s best articles were crucial in helping to define the notions of mise en scène and the auteur that have become common currency within film studies worldwide. Chapter 1 focuses on the apparently paradoxical nature of much of Rivette’s criticism, a quality perhaps best captured in the seemingly opposed universes of two of Rivette’s favourite directors: the naturalism and generous humanity of Roberto Rossellini, on the one hand, and the clinical gaze and schematic logic of Fritz Lang, on the other. But what Rivette admires in both filmmakers is the simplicity and the rightness of their respective approaches. The politique des auteurs and the theory of mise en scène demand not that a director display a certain style but only that the style employed be appropriate to the material tackled, that the film be allowed to unfold according to its own logic. For Rivette, this question is an unambiguously ethical one, as demonstrated in his infamous critique of the ‘abjection’ of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò (1959). When he turned to directing his own films, Rivette too would seek a form appropriate to his subject matter. For instance, as we see in Chapter 2, the existence of conspiratorial organisations is often suggested only to be denied in Rivette’s narratives (Paris nous appartient, Out 1, Le Pont du Nord …), but frequently the atmosphere of unease generated by the film’s visual and aural register serves to maintain questions and uncertainties in the mind of the spectator, over and above the disavowals provided by dialogue. The investigation of secrets in Rivette’s films is productive of meta-narrative forms: secrets, by inviting enquiry, generate narrative and so these stories

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4  jacques rivette become labyrinthine tales of their own inception and nourishment. At the same time, though, these paranoid conspiracy theories are not only the fabrication of the characters’ minds but also relate to historical and political reality: Paris nous appartient captures a mood of ideological anguish among students and intellectuals following the Soviet suppression of the Hungarian Revolution in 1956; Out 1 documents something of the mood of left-wing, bohemian France after its disappointment at the outcome of the events of 1968; and Le Pont du Nord takes a sombre look at Paris at the end of the Giscard administration, poisoned by scandals and ripe for demolition. If Rivette’s cinema is rarely explicitly political, its social significance perhaps lies in its repeated exploration of the nature of community. By documenting the existence of elective, rather than de facto communities – secret societies, theatre troupes, bands of friends – these films explore the precarious existence of communities, so often under threat from tyrannical leaders or internecine rivalries. If Rivette’s conspiracy theorists are often lost in a labyrinth of their own making, this is not only constituted from the mental and social networks spun by their paranoid imagination but also from the real, physical maze of the city streets. With Paris nous appartient, Rivette formed a crucial part of the French New Wave’s cinematic rediscovery of the streets of Paris, but Rivette’s city was always a rather darker and more sinister place than that of his contemporaries. The search for meaning in these films, the search for answers to long-held secrets, often takes the form of a search for a missing person, the characters inventing and improvising alternative maps of the terrain as they go, seeking to understand the city by imposing a grid upon it, forcing it to tell a story. A city always already has, in addition to its public, official, sanctioned topologies, private, personal spaces that belong to individual narratives. In Rivette’s films, the former are frequently dissolved into the latter. In the latter part of Rivette’s career, the space of the city, as key location, tends to give way to the space of large, old houses. The old house, in Rivette’s films, can be at once a reassuring, memorial (sometimes maternal) presence, and at the same time a menacing one. The history and topology of a large house can be overlaid with, or is metonymical of, the history, structure and hierarchy of a family and so, in Rivette, these houses become sites of disputed narratives. Rivette’s work has frequently updated a tradition of Gothic narrative

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introduction   5 which presents the old house as a masculine, patriarchal structure into which a female outsider, or descendent, ventures. For Rivette’s heroines, the question becomes how to resist enclosure or entrapment within this rigid patriarchal narrative, since inheritance of the house may mean disinheritance of any freedom or power within it, instead causing a perpetuation of the same patterns of guilt and murder (from Céline et Julie to Secret Défense). In these later films, then, the conspiratorial communities are families themselves with secrets at their heart. In Freudian theory, the family’s secret appears as (the infant’s discovery of) sexuality, or as a phylogenetic inheritance of guilt around incest. For Derridean deconstruction, however, the incest taboo appears as a limit point marking the origin of society – an unreachable, impossible point that can never actually be attained without causing the collapse of that society, or of that system of signification. In the same way, Rivette’s family secrets are ever-receding, unattainable mysteries – there is, it seems, always another secret to be learned. Incest is never named as such, but remains as an unaddressed, unthinkable limit structuring these stories. Thus Merry-Go-Round is an almost self-parodic family melodrama that falls apart before its secrets can be determined. Secret Défense is a family tragedy of mistaken identities, assumed guilt and wrong men (in the tradition of Hitchcock, and very knowingly so) but it is a non-linear tragedy, taking in spheres outside the family. Céline et Julie blurs family relations as it blurs all others, the titular characters producing their relationships as a function of their desire while the characters in the old house are condemned forever to repeat the same patterns of patriarchal relationships. A film like Céline et Julie is nothing if not playful and the theme or trope of le jeu2 is central to much of Rivette’s filmmaking. Games and playing, which provide much of the inspiration for key films like Out 1, Céline et Julie and Le Pont du Nord, are at once structured and open, predictable and unpredictable: they are necessarily based on certain fixed rules, yet their outcome must remain uncertain, otherwise there would be no point in playing. The insistence on games and playing means too that Rivette’s films can flip disconcertingly between serious and non-serious registers (for instance, is the conspiracy – in, say, Out 1 – itself only a game?) and lead to a certain amount of unease for the 2 ‘Le jeu’ has multiple meanings in French which cannot be rendered in a single English word: play, a game, acting, gambling, a deck of cards, etc.

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6  jacques rivette spectator. In this way, the films play with the audience too, inviting the spectatorial response to oscillate between rapt immersion and knowing detachment. Rivette’s appeal to the theatre – a constant throughout the fifty years of his filmmaking career – is similarly ambiguous. The theatre in Rivette’s work is at once an open and a closed space. The theatre stage is, in some ways, an artificial, self-contained universe (think of the boxing ring-like stage of L’Amour fou), but in other ways communicates with the outside space of the audience and beyond, in a way that cinema, perhaps, cannot (consider the scenes of théâtre d’appartement in L’Amour par terre or the makeshift stages improvised around the city in Paris nous appartient). The fluidity of these boundaries also accounts for the shifting roles within Rivette’s theatrical fictions (the actors and actresses within Rivette’s universe often seem to adopt and abandon a variety of roles over the course of a film), and for the unfinished nature of most of these theatrical productions: Rivette frequently films rehearsals, but rarely (except in Va savoir (2001)) finished performances, as though all these productions were constantly evolving. Hence too the uncertain role of the theatre (and so, by extension, the film) director: on the one hand, an ambiguous, impotent observer of mutable material; on the other, a tyrannical, paranoid maestro. Theatricality remains an important consideration in Rivette’s occasional forays into literary adaptation and costume drama. Rivette, it turns out, favours source material encumbered with elaborate framing devices and, while his film adaptations dispense with these complex literary structures, they tend to recreate them by other means. Thus the adaptation of La Religieuse discards Diderot’s layered presentation of the narrative, but nonetheless holds the spectator at a distance by its theatricality, its stylised sound and colour design and its rigorous framing, while a further level of critical detachment is provided by the scandalous affaire, and voluminous media commentary that surrounded the film. Hurlevent (1985) truncates and simplifies the story of Wuthering Heights but the film’s use of space recreates the complex series of enclosures and disclosures that characterise Brontë’s narrative, while the novel’s passion and violence are played out with coolness and reserve, lending a degree of self-reflexivity to the film. Rivette’s screen adaptation of the life of Joan of Arc (Jeanne la Pucelle, 1994) rejects the pomp and spectacle of the heritage genre in favour of meticulous historical research, the documentation of

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introduction   7 small acts and long stretches of empty, ordinary time, together with ­eyewitness accounts that serve to frame the person of Joan. But, although this may make Rivette sound like a sober and serious, a difficult and intellectual filmmaker, he has, throughout his career, made sensitive and generous films about intimate personal relationships. Rivette’s films frequently centre on questions of love and jealousy, but such relations are often more complex than the traditional romantic triangle, instead involving four people (L’Amour par terre, La Belle Noiseuse), or six (Va savoir). In addition, the object of jealousy can often turn out to be not so much another person but a work of art, or more precisely the process and experience of art. At the same time, the persistent theatricality of these films suggests that love, and jealousy, are also a matter of performance. This in turn relates to the specular investment we make in jealous passions: seeing the other in the act of betrayal invites a kind of synaesthetic vision whereby looking is already akin to touching. Our Chapter 8 on love and jealousy in Rivette thus also considers the richly sensuous appeal of his films, noting how the work with sound in La Belle Noiseuse gives a sensual appreciation of bodily reality, or how the modernist sound design of L’Amour fou gives an intense, eerie sense of Sébastien and Claire’s mutual mental collapse. For another peculiarity of Rivette’s work is the way that these films, which on one level appear as light, romantic comedies, stray frequently and disconcertingly into the terrain of madness and horror. These latter categories are also relevant to Rivette’s most recent films, Histoire de Marie et Julien and Ne touchez pas la hache (2007). Chapter 9, our final chapter, investigates the depiction of time – and in particular the various senses of lateness – in these films. Upon close interrogation, the narrative chronology of Marie et Julien appears to break down, seemingly turning circles around itself. Time, here, is out of joint, but what Rivette’s appropriation of the ghost story seems to show us is precisely the ways in which time is always, by its very nature, out of step with itself, just as the fundamental operations of cinema imply a certain ghostliness. Thus, both Marie et Julien and Ne touchez pas la hache are revenants from earlier periods in Rivette’s career – the former picking up a project abandoned in 1975, the latter returning to Balzac’s Histoire des treize which provided part of the inspiration for Out 1. These films can also be considered as representations of the unreconciled, or unconsoled – here are a set

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8  jacques rivette of ­characters whose relationships are out of step, out of joint, out of time: Marie haunts the wrong person while Montriveau and the Duchess realise their love at the wrong moment.

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Reference Chevrie, M. (1989), ‘Supplément aux voyages de J.R.’, Cahiers du cinéma, 416, 20–5.

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1 The art of the present and the dialectics of duration: the film criticism of Jacques Rivette It is generally agreed that Jacques Rivette was the single most important and influential of the critics at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s who went on to become the directors of the New Wave. Rivette’s influence can be discerned, not only over the ideas central to the New Wave itself, not only over the future development of the Cahiers (in which Rivette had an editorial role in the 1960s), but over what Marc Cerisuelo calls ‘les idées que chacun porte en soi à la sortie d’une salle de cinéma’1 (Cerisuelo 1998: 11). In other words, Rivette changed the way that we, as spectators, think about cinema, at least in France where the Cahiers critics transformed the face of film criticism, and, given the subsequent dissemination of these ideas with the growth of film studies, doubtless in the rest of the western world as well. Rivette’s influence within the clique of Cahiers critics is demonstrated by the frequently cited confessions of Jean-Luc Godard and Luc Moullet, who held Rivette in such esteem that they would readily adapt their opinion of a film to accord with his (Cerisuelo 1998: 12–13; Mereghetti n.d.: 127). Meanwhile, Hélène Frappat has shown how Rivette transformed the Cahiers of the 1960s, bringing them definitively under the sign of ‘modernity’ by introducing cinema into a dynamic community of the arts: Rivette was responsible for interviews with the theorists Roland Barthes and Claude Lévi-Strauss, as well as the modernist composer Pierre Boulez (Frappat 2001: 110–18). It is significant that, during a round table discussion of the future of French cinema in 1957, André Bazin, co-founder of the Cahiers, invites Rivette to open the discussion on the grounds that he holds the strongest opinions on the subject 1 ‘the ideas that each of us carries in our head as we leave the cinema’

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10  jacques rivette (Bazin et al. 1957: 16). As Paolo Mereghetti remarks, this is a kind of ‘investiture publique’ (public crowning), a declaration to the fellow critics, as well as to the readers, that Rivette is the future of Cahiers du cinéma, and that ‘ses jugements ont une valeur absolue’2 (Mereghetti n.d.: 127). Perhaps the most frequently recurring figure in all discussions of Rivette’s work is that of paradox. His films, for instance, are centred around intricate, carefully plotted intrigues, and yet they display a taste for improvisation and accident that suggests they are made up as they go along. This is often associated with Rivette’s predilection for two very different directors, the focus of two of his most famous critical articles: Fritz Lang, whose films unfold with a cold, implacable logic; and Roberto Rossellini, whose cinema cultivates an openness to reality as it happens, a refusal of scripted action in favour of improvisations dictated by the moment. Already, then, in Rivette’s film criticism, a paradox, or a series of paradoxes, are apparent. As Jacques Aumont suggests, the qualities of a good critic, as exemplified by Rivette, are themselves paradoxical: he or she should have a taste, a discernment that is immediate yet durable, based on a conception of cinema that is stable yet supple, and expressed in a rhetoric that is seductive yet logical (Aumont n.d.: 106). Rivette’s critical style is itself paradoxical. One of the most ubiquitous adjectives used to describe this style is ‘tranchant’, incisive. As Frappat comments, Rivette’s critical gesture essentially consists in decreeing which works count as films, and which do not (Frappat 2001: 74). These judgements are expressed with an ‘apodictic certainty’ that brooks no refusal (Mereghetti n.d.: 121). Anyone who can’t see why Rivette is right is simply blind and understands nothing of cinema. Cerisuelo notes the precision with which Rivette identifies the particular moment, the particular shot in a film that forever disqualifies its director, consigning him to the dustbin of history (for instance in Kapò, to which we will return) (Cerisuelo 1998: 13–14). Accompanying this directness, however, are long, lyrical passages in Rivette’s writing. Many of his sentences – particularly in the articles written for La Gazette du cinéma – are extraordinarily long, multiplying semicolons and developing parentheses and enormous footnotes, suggesting a taste for digression, improvisation and duration that would also characterise his filmmaking (Rosenbaum 2 ‘his judgements have an absolute value’

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the film criticism of jacques rivette   11 1977: 7; Mereghetti n.d.: 125). Hélène Frappat recognises in Rivette’s film criticism the same mixture of ‘violence and reflection’ that he himself identifies in American cinema: at once the violence of brutal judgements and the reflection of patient demonstration. After all, adds Frappat, ‘La véritable violence, c’est la force et l’évidence de la preuve’3 (Frappat 2001: 75–6). Jacques Aumont argues that the cornerstone of Rivette’s critical philosophy is the following trinity: ‘vérité, pauvreté, sainteté’4 (Aumont n.d.: 107). To put it another way, what Rivette perhaps admires most in the cinema is simplicity. In a review of Cocteau’s Testament d’Orphée (1960), he argues that the role of the artist is to ‘reinvent simplicity’ (Rivette 1960: 47). This ‘simplicity’ takes on a number of names in Rivette’s writing, perhaps most famously, in an article on Howard Hawks, the name ‘évidence’, when Rivette declares that ‘L’évidence est la marque du génie de Hawks’5 (Rivette 1953a: 16). Discussing Jean Renoir and François Truffaut, Rivette admires their ‘innocence’ (Rivette 1950a: 2; 1959: 39). In the work of Otto Preminger, this quality is called ‘aisance’ (ease, facility) (Rivette 1958c: 53), but it is also in relation to Preminger – in an article on Angel Face (1953) – that we find Rivette’s ‘éloge de la pauvreté’,6 his respect for a cinema reduced to ‘the essential’ (Rivette 1954b: 42). Poverty is precisely what Rivette sees as missing from French cinema in the 1950s, an industry that has been corrupted by money (in Bazin et al. 1957: 86). This simplicity – an approach to cinema that believes in the world before the camera and seeks to present it in as direct and unadorned a way as possible – is opposed, in Rivette’s writing, to all rhetorical processes employed by films and filmmakers. In his first published article, Rivette established this fundamental dichotomy between what he calls a cinema of synthesis, and a cinema of analysis. In the films of the pioneers (Griffith, Murnau, Stiller), says Rivette, the reality represented had a simplicity and a density which conferred on it a plenitude of meaning. This innocence of early cinema was subsequently lost in the increasing analysis of the image and the act. The cinema has been stifled by an accumulation of rhetorical devices and needs to return to its initial simplicity, to the most basic desire to

3 ‘True violence lies in the strength and obviousness of proof’ 4 ‘truth, poverty, saintliness’ 5 ‘Obviousness is the mark of Hawks’s genius’ 6 ‘praise of poverty’

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12  jacques rivette transcribe the real on film (Rivette in Frappat 2001: 66–8). It is for this reason that Rivette tends to reject those films that self-consciously seek ingenious camera angles and other directorial inventions, preferring the Hitchcock of Under Capricorn (1949) who simply presents information without underlining its importance (Rivette 1950b: 4), or the Rossellini of Viaggio in Italia (1954) who seeks to show rather than to explain (Rivette 1955a: 20). For cinema, as Rivette repeats time and again (1953b: 51; 1954a: 45), is not a language, and any attempt to systematise it as such can only neglect the complexity of the reality that cinema seeks to represent (Rivette in Frappat 2001: 68). Rivette’s preference for a self-effacing directorial style leads to his admiration for the ‘invisible’ rhetoric of Hollywood’s classical continuity system. He praises in Hitchcock a montage so masterful that all trace of the thought behind it has disappeared, subsumed into the simple necessity of the progression between shots (Rivette 1950b: 4). The efficiency that Rivette admires in Hawks’s films similarly lends a sense of necessity to their narrative arcs (Rivette 1953a: 19) (we will return to this question of necessity below). But if Rivette militates for a cinema that is open to the contingencies of the real, he is suspicious of techniques that offer the appearance of improvisation. It is in this way that he prefers the more classical style of Renoir’s American films to the long takes and deep focus of his celebrated French works. In an article in defence of Cinemascope, Rivette takes up position in favour of width rather than depth in the cinema, arguing that widescreen simply enables a more complete presentation of reality whereas the baroque excesses of deep focus cinematography are synonymous with ‘la disproportion, les démesures, la déraison’7 (Rivette 1954a: 48). This position, as commentators have remarked, implies a deliberate opposition to André Bazin’s famous articles in praise of deep focus (Rosenbaum 1977: 2–3). But Rivette’s ultimate aim, which is not so far removed from Bazin’s, is to identify those techniques and those films that are best able to capture the totality of the real (Rivette 1950a: 2). This does not necessarily entail a hostility to montage since, as Rivette argues, in Eisenstein’s work, each shot is conceived as a totality in itself before being placed in a dialectical relation to the totalities constituted by other shots (Rivette 1958a: 20). For Rivette, directors like Renoir and Rossellini are not opposed to montage but rather to découpage, a 7 ‘the outsize, the outlandish, the outrageous’

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the film criticism of jacques rivette   13 perversion of the concept that seeks to fragment the real in the service of narrative, where the original vocation of montage was precisely to facilitate the presentation of the totality of the real (Rivette in Narboni et al. 1969: 28). It is perhaps also this thirst for totality that explains Rivette’s response to his favourite films, such as the ‘adhésion totale immédiate’8 that he feels for Jean Renoir’s The Southerner (1945), and that leads him to discuss and debate at length around the film without ever saying much about it (Rivette 1950a: 2). As Jacques Aumont remarks, a film for Rivette is (or should be) a total experience that ultimately is resistant to analysis and can only be repeatedly affirmed, precisely as an ‘évidence’: ‘Ce qui ne peut s’expliquer peut seulement se sentir’9 (Aumont n.d.: 106). Rivette’s love of simplicity and his respect for the real lie behind his development of the concept of mise en scène. It was Rivette who, more than any other critic, was instrumental in defining this notion that became central to the philosophy of Cahiers du cinéma as well as to the practice of the Nouvelle Vague. Yet the concept is one that tends to escape precise definition: as Aumont remarks, it is ‘un concept flottant et paradoxal’10 (Aumont n.d.: 111) that again is to be felt more than it is to be explained. Mise en scène should be understood, first and foremost, in opposition to the screenplay which, for Rivette, is so unimportant in cinema as to be almost meaningless (Rivette 1950a: 2). The concept of mise en scène seeks to rescue the cinema from any residual sense of obligation it may have to its literary antecedents. For, if Rivette demands that a director have ‘precise ideas’ about cinema (Rivette 1954b: 42; 1955b: 46), these are, most crucially, ideas about camera placement, about framing, about the succession of shots (Rivette 1953c: 59). The art of mise en scène simply involves finding the most suitable form in which to express one’s subject, recognising that which is indispensable to the realisation of a given scene (Rivette 1958c: 53). When successful, this will give the scene a sense of necessity, of rightness, of irrefutable logic, as in the work of Mizoguchi who, for Rivette, always knows exactly where to place the camera to obtain the desired effect (Rivette 1958b: 30). But this sense of necessity does not always go together with a sense of verisimilitude. For instance, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) is, in many ways, a thoroughly unrealistic 8 ‘immediate and complete attachment’ 9 ‘That which cannot be explained can only be felt’ 10 ‘a vague and paradoxical concept’

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14  jacques rivette film (the French title is L’Invraisemblable Vérité, the unlikely truth) but, in Rivette’s analysis, the pure objectivity of Lang’s approach serves a higher purpose than mere realism, lending an implacable logic to this demonstration of Lang’s bleak moral worldview (Rivette 1957: 48). And it is this moral dimension that gives the concept of mise en scène its fullest sense and import. For the approach adopted by a filmmaker should be dictated by her/his material and, if all subjects are equal, then all approaches are not. In other words, certain subjects demand to be filmed in certain ways, and it would be unethical to film them otherwise. Rivette gave his most famous demonstration of this principle in his demolition of Gillo Pontecorvo’s Kapò (1960), a film about the Nazi concentration camps. Rivette argues that Pontecorvo has not given sufficient consideration to the aesthetic questions posed by this difficult subject, opting instead for an obscene ‘realism’ that ultimately renders the spectacle of the camps tolerable for the viewer and thereby implies that they were also tolerable for their victims (Rivette 1961: 54). Rivette singles out for contempt a shot in which the camera tracks in to underline the horror of a woman who has committed suicide by throwing herself against the electrified fence. The point is that the horror of the camps requires no such emphasis, indeed that to emphasise it in this fashion reduces it to the level of any other subject. Serge Daney, who has written of the decisive influence Rivette’s article had on his own vocation as a critic, argues that, in Kapò, the horror of the death camps is merely an idea, whereas, in Alain Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard (1955), it is a reality (Daney 1992: 12–13). Kapò consigns the Holocaust to the past and asks us to feel bad about it, but, as Daney insists with the incisiveness of Rivette himself, ‘Le cinéma étant l’art du présent, ses remords sont sans intérêt’11 (Daney 1992: 11). In Nuit et brouillard, on the other hand, the horror of the camps is still very much present, felt in the physical revulsion of the spectator’s body. As Rivette puts it, ‘on ne s’habitue pas à Nuit et brouillard’12 (Rivette 1961: 54). The lesson of Rivette’s critique of Kapò is that form and content are absolutely inseparable in cinema, and that mise en scène is a moral issue because it ultimately represents ‘le point de vue d’un homme’13 (Rivette 1961: 54). It is here that the theory of mise en scène rejoins 11 ‘The cinema being the art of the present, its remorse is of no interest’ 12 ‘one does not get used to Nuit et brouillard’ 13 ‘the point of view of a human being’

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the film criticism of jacques rivette   15 the other cornerstone of Rivette’s critical doctrine, the politique des auteurs. As Marc Cerisuelo points out, the politique des auteurs is the corollary of mise en scène and vice versa (Cerisuelo 1998: 17), since an author is identified by her or his unique point of view on the world, which can only be expressed in and through mise en scène, while mise en scène is nothing other than the expression of a unique point of view. As Rivette put it in his first critical article: ‘l’univers du créateur n’est que la manifestation, l’efflorescence concrète de son regard et de son mode d’apparaître, – ce regard qui n’est lui-même qu’apparition d’univers’14 (Rivette in Frappat 2001: 67). There is, then, a further paradox here, since the universe to be filmed determines the gaze that will apprehend it, and yet the universe that appears on film is created by that gaze, is its concrete manifestation. Rivette’s conception of mise en scène implies the existence of what Cerisuelo calls an ‘intransitive discourse’ of the film (Cerisuelo 1998: 19–20), as though there were a pre-existing, correct way to film a scene that the director must discover. Rivette confirms this impression when, in Claire Denis’s documentary Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1990), he says the experience of making a film is rather like stumbling across an object buried in the ground and trying to dig it up without damaging it. In a strange way, then, the concepts of mise en scène and the film auteur seem almost to cancel each other out, since a director will have the gift of mise en scène, and will therefore be an auteur, to the extent that he/ she allows the film to dictate its own form; his artistic personality will be confirmed to the extent that it effaces itself before the logic of the film. The paradoxes of Jacques Rivette’s film criticism, like those of his films, are rich and fertile. On the one hand, as we have seen, Rivette has a very strict conception of mise en scène that will condemn certain shots as absolutely unacceptable – as impossible – while praising others as absolutely necessary. Yet at the same time, he recognises that there are no rules to mise en scène, just as there can be no grammar of cinema (since it is not a language). On the contrary, since filmmaking requires an attentiveness to the reality before the camera at this precise moment, its rules cannot be fixed but must be constantly reinvented to accommodate new realities: cinema is an 14 ‘the universe of the creator is but the manifestation, the concrete flowering of his gaze and its mode of appearance, – this gaze which is itself but the apparition of the universe’

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16  jacques rivette art of ‘continual improvisation, perpetual creation’ (Rivette in Frappat 2001: 68). Cinema can only obey the necessities of the moment; it is, says Rivette, ironically borrowing the terminology of grammar, an art of the continuous present (Rivette 1950a: 2). Cinema is also the art of the unexpected and the accidental (Rivette 1954b: 45) and it is this that, despite proclamations that all subjects are equal and the screenplay is irrelevant, leads Rivette to call for a focus on the contemporary in French cinema, a sensitivity to that which is new in French society (in Bazin et al. 1957: 90). By the same token, Rivette admires the uncommon duration of Ingmar Bergman’s shots since, by going beyond the limits required by the dramatic situation, they increase the possibility that the director – and the spectator – will be caught unawares by some unanticipated element of the scene (Rivette 1958d: 46–7). (It is significant that this review should end with the affirmation that the only true critique of a film can be another film, since, throughout, Rivette seems almost to be describing his own cinema to come: the preference for long takes and the ordeal of duration, the physicality of his work with actors, the coherence of the œuvre from one work to the next ... The article was written in June 1958; one month later, Rivette began shooting Paris nous appartient.) Rivette, we have seen, is, on the one hand, a tireless exponent of realism, repeating the need for the cinema to deliver up the real in its entirety. Yet a close reading of Rivette’s criticism reveals that the reality displayed in the cinema is only ever the reality of surfaces, of appearances. The camera, as Rivette points out, films the movements of characters, of actors, it does not film their interiority (Rivette 1950b: 4). Howard Hawks films actions and, in a shot of John Wayne walking towards Montgomery Clift, it is not his thoughts that preoccupy us as spectators but the precise rhythm of his walk (Rivette 1953a: 19). Preminger’s films exist in order to bring together certain people and study the way they interact – this is ultimately their subject (Rivette 1954b: 43). Bresson and Buñuel treat their actors like puppets in their search for a ‘vérité obscure’15 that goes beyond psychological realism (Rivette in Comolli et al. 1964: 42). Bergman films flesh and skin, but ‘Plus la caméra se rapproche, plus l’ambiguïté éclate, plus l’apparence est pure apparence’16 (Rivette 1958d: 46). This logic is taken to its 15 ‘obscure truth’ 16 ‘The closer the camera gets, the more one is struck by the ambiguity, the more the appearance is revealed as pure appearance’

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the film criticism of jacques rivette   17 limit in the work of Georges Franju: in Judex (1963), the subject of the film appears as nothing other than the shifting patterns of black and white across the screen, this evolving apparition in turn revealed as ‘[le] secret à l’origine du cinéma’ (Rivette 1963b: 53). In the cinema, reality is only revealed on screen through an injection of artifice into the situation of the film (Rivette 1950a: 2); the essential can only be obtained through the accidental (Rivette 1954b: 45); the universe of a film is a manifestation of the director’s gaze, a gaze that is solicited and determined by the universe of the real. As will have become clear, the affirmations of Rivette’s film criticism frequently take on an unmistakeably dialectical character. Now the importance of Hegelian dialectics for the film critics of Cahiers du cinéma and the Nouvelle Vague, as well as for post-war French culture and thought more generally, have been duly noted. I wish simply to suggest that, in a culture in which tokenistic lip service is frequently paid to Hegel (in Godard’s criticism, for instance, dialectics is rarely more than a figure de style), Rivette’s writing testifies to a more serious and sustained engagement with Hegelian thought. Rivette’s conception of the dialectic of cinema is perhaps given its most concise formulation in an article on Chaplin’s Monsieur Verdoux (1947), where he defines the goal of cinema as follows: ‘Que le monde réel, tel qu’offert sur l’écran, soit aussi une idée du monde’17 (Rivette 1963a: 42). If one takes the world as starting point, one risks missing the idea and presenting a flat and unquestioning copy of the world that demonstrates no more understanding of it than does a cow fascinated by the trains flashing past its field. If one takes an idea as starting point, however, then the risk is in never attaining the density of the real world, never fleshing out the idea with the weight of reality. The goal, then, is that the idea, by the necessity of its own internal movement, of its dialectic, should, little by little, recreate the world before our eyes, or rather create a different world, ‘plus ambigu d’être à la fois idée incarnée, puis réel transpercé de sens’18 (Rivette 1963a: 43). We can see the profound influence Rivette’s theory has had over a critic like Daney when he distinguishes between Kapò, which never gets beyond the stage of an idea (the horror of the death 17 ‘that the real world, such as it is presented on the screen, become also an idea of the world’ 18 ‘all the more ambiguous for being an incarnated idea, and a real shot through with meaning’

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18  jacques rivette camps) and Nuit et ­brouillard, where this idea is incarnated in a world that provokes a physical response in the spectator. A number of Rivette’s articles are attempts to demonstrate this dialectical movement at work in individual films. In Fritz Lang’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, individual scenes lose their importance in favour of ‘un enchaînement de purs moments’,19 individual characters are reduced to the status of human concepts, everything subordinated to the imperious movement of the central idea. If this idea is initially one about the vanity of human justice – Dana Andrews sets out to criticise the death penalty by proving himself guilty of a crime he didn’t commit – , the final dialectical reversal – in which Andrews is revealed as having really been guilty all along – demonstrates the higher truth that all men are guilty, or, better yet, that the human categories of guilt and innocence are fleeting, unstable appellations that can only be appended to inconsistent appearances (Rivette 1957). Elia Kazan’s Splendor in the Grass (1961) is a film about the work of time and the destruction and transformation of all values that comes with it. This film marks a high point in the cinematic representation of what Rivette calls ‘la dialectique de l’instant et de la durée’20 (Rivette 1962: 36): each moment is perfectly realised and full of meaning; period, place and character are all evoked with painstaking attention to detail, yet each moment only takes on its meaning in relation to all the others, the film thereby forming a universe, a totality, and appearing as an allegory for any and all social or organic processes. Modern European cinema (the cinema of Resnais, Antonioni and Bergman) depicts a world in which an individual’s relation to their society is characterised by doubt and suspicion. But, says Rivette, this doubt only becomes rich and meaningful if it doubts itself, if it seeks to test itself by running up against the certainties of a concrete external reality. But since this reality can always be questioned, doubt is renewed and strengthened, and it is in this way that European cinema approaches the totality of the individual and the social (Rivette in Comolli et al. 1963: 29–30). (And, we might add, it is in precisely this way too that Rivette’s films will seek to depict society, by showing an individual’s constantly renewed, never complete attempts to learn the truth of some conspiracy.) This dialectic is built into the very machinery of cinema in the 19 ‘a sequence of pure moments’ 20 ‘the dialectic of the moment and of duration’

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the film criticism of jacques rivette   19 technique of montage. As mentioned above, Rivette asserts that, in Eisenstein’s work, each shot constitutes a totality. If each shot is a whole sufficient unto itself and with no necessary relation to the preceding or succceeding shots, it is the better to demonstrate the force of the idea that unites these shots in the montage. Eisenstein’s shots are not joined together by the logic of the fictional world but by the logic of the sovereign idea; his montage demonstrates ‘la victoire de l’esprit’21 (Rivette 1958a: 20). Rivette sees a similar process at work in the films of Alain Resnais. Noting that Hiroshima mon amour (1959) is based around a threefold reconstruction – the reconstruction of the city after the bomb, the reconstruction of the heroine’s personality, and the reconstruction of the meaning of the film through montage – Rivette suggests that all of Resnais’s work involves a piecing together of fragments in search of a lost unity. For instance, Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) – Resnais’s documentary on the French Bibliothèque Nationale – can be read as a film about the increasing fragmentation and specialisation of knowledge, inhabited by a desire to reunite these fragments into a universal culture that would hold the secret of humanity (Rivette in Domarchi et al. 1959: 3–4). Of course, if Rivette’s film criticism bears the influence of Hegelian dialectics, it brings with it all the philosophical and ideological problems associated with the method. As the last examples demonstrate, Rivette’s reliance on Hegel implies a transcendental belief in an original unity that can and should be recovered, indeed that must be recovered, since this philosophy also implies a teleological movement towards Absolute Knowledge and the universal culture that comes with it. Even in one of Rivette’s very last interventions in Cahiers du cinéma, in the late 1960s when pure Hegelianism had given way to Marxist dialectical materialism and ideological criticism, this sense of a pre-existing unity remains. In a discussion of montage with Jean Narboni and Sylvie Pierre, Rivette revisits his earlier comments on Eisenstein and Resnais and suggests that montage needs to be understood as the critique of a pre-existing text. In this sense, any refusal of montage would imply a ‘theological’ mentality, an acceptance or passive contemplation of the world-as-it-is, with no attempt to understand it as a historical construct (Narboni et al. 1969: 26–7). But, if a critical edge has been added to Rivette’s thinking on montage here, 21 ‘the victory of the mind/spirit’

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20  jacques rivette the fact remains that he still assumes a text that pre-exists the stage of montage. He even argues, for instance, that a work as radically disjunctive and unassimilable as Godard’s Made in USA (1966) contains an underlying, primary text, even if it has been wilfully destroyed and shattered in the montage (Narboni et al. 1969: 21). At no stage does Rivette seem able to get past this idea of the ‘pre-existing text’ to admit the possibility that the text only comes into being through montage, that it has no existence prior to its assembly at the editing desk. If Rivette’s film criticism determinedly clings on to an aesthetic philosophy that bears some residual transcendentalism, we are entitled to enquire what becomes of this philosophy when Rivette himself turns to filmmaking. For perhaps one of the most intractable paradoxes of Rivette’s work is that the persistent Hegelianism of his criticism is undermined by a filmic universe in which primal unities appear as illusory and therefore unable to be recovered, in which suspected conspiracies are never quite proven to exist with the hero’s quest for knowledge foundering in ignorance, in which the work of art itself has no origin nor any goal, its value lying instead in the unending process of its fabrication. Ultimately one can only wonder whether the long-awaited experience of artistic creation led Rivette to revise some of the most fundamental assumptions underlying his criticism, and whether this conflict lies behind the critical silence that Rivette has maintained since the end of the 1960s.

References Aumont, J. (n.d.), ‘Le passeur’, in Daniela Giuffrida (ed.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Turin, Centre Culturel Français de Turin/Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, 105–13. Bazin, A., Doniol-Valcroze, J., Kast, P, Leenhardt, R., Rivette, J., Rohmer, E. (1957), ‘6 personnages en quête d’auteurs: Débat sur le cinéma français’, Cahiers du cinéma, 71, 16–29, 85–90. Cerisuelo, M. (1998), ‘L’art en avant de l’action? Jacques Rivette critique’, Études cinématographiques, 63, 11–25. Comolli, J.-L., Delahaye, M., Labarthe, A. S., Narboni, J., Rivette, J. (1964), ‘Le journal entre les lignes’, Cahiers du cinéma, 154, 35–42. Comolli, J.-L., Domarchi, J., Fieschi, J.-A., Kast, P., Labarthe, A. S., Ollier, C., Rivette, J., Weyergans, F. (1963), ‘Les malheurs de Muriel’, Cahiers du cinéma, 149, 20–34. Daney, S. (1992), ‘Le travelling de Kapo’, Trafic, 4, 5–19. Domarchi, J., Doniol-Valcroze, J., Godard, J.-L., Kast, P., Rivette, J., Rohmer, E.

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the film criticism of jacques rivette   21 (1959), ‘Hiroshima notre amour’, Cahiers du cinéma, 97, 1–18. Frappat, H. (2001), Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma. Mereghetti, P. (n.d.), ‘Jacques Rivette critique’, in Daniela Giuffrida (ed.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Turin, Centre Culturel Français de Turin/ Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, 121–7. Narboni, J., Pierre, S., Rivette, J. (1969), ‘Montage’, Cahiers du cinéma, 210, 17–34. Rivette, J. (1950a), ‘The Southerner de Jean Renoir’, La Gazette du cinéma, 2, 2. Rivette, J. (1950b), ‘Under Capricorn d’Alfred Hitchcock’, La Gazette du cinéma, 4, 4. Rivette, J. (1953a), ‘Génie de Howard Hawks’, Cahiers du cinéma, 23, 16–23. Rivette, J. (1953b), ‘L’art de la fugue’, Cahiers du cinéma, 26, 49–52. Rivette, J. (1953c), ‘De l’invention’, Cahiers du cinéma, 27, 59–60. Rivette, J. (1954a), ‘L’âge des metteurs en scène’, Cahiers du cinéma, 31, 45–8. Rivette, J. (1954b), ‘L’essentiel’, Cahiers du cinéma, 32, 42–5. Rivette, J. (1955a), ‘Lettre sur Rossellini’, Cahiers du cinéma, 46, 14–24. Rivette, J. (1955b), ‘La recherche de l’absolu’, Cahiers du cinéma, 52, 45–7. Rivette, J. (1957), ‘La main’, Cahiers du cinéma, 76, 48–51. Rivette, J. (1958a), ‘Cinémathèque: Que viva Eisenstein’, Cahiers du cinéma, 79, 20. Rivette, J. (1958b), ‘Mizoguchi vu d’ici’, Cahiers du cinéma, 81, 28–30. Rivette, J. (1958c), ‘Sainte Cécile’, Cahiers du cinéma, 82, 52–4. Rivette, J. (1958d), ‘L’âme au ventre’, Cahiers du cinéma, 84, 45–7. Rivette, J. (1959), ‘Du côté de chez Antoine’, Cahiers du cinéma, 95, 37–9. Rivette, J. (1960), ‘La mort aux trousses’, Cahiers du cinéma, 106, 47–8. Rivette, J. (1961), ‘De l’abjection’, Cahiers du cinéma, 120, 54–5. Rivette, J. (1962), ‘L’art du présent’, Cahiers du cinéma, 132, 35–7. Rivette, J. (1963a), ‘Revoir Verdoux’, Cahiers du cinéma, 143, 42–3. Rivette, J. (1963b), ‘Judex’, Cahiers du cinéma, 149, 53. Rosenbaum, J. (1977), Rivette: Texts and Interviews, London, BFI.

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2 In the labyrinth: narrative, conspiracy, community Narrative and conspiracy: Paris nous appartient and Le Pont du Nord The complex narrative of Paris nous appartient (1961) revolves around a shadowy conspiracy. A young student, Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), is introduced by her brother Pierre (François Maistre) to a group of enigmatic friends including the theatre director Gérard Lenz (Giani Esposito), the American exile Philip Kauffman (Daniel Croheim) and a woman named Terry Yordan (Françoise Prévost), formerly Philip’s lover, who is now seeing Gérard. Another of Terry’s lovers, Juan, has recently died, apparently from suicide, although some of his friends suspect he was murdered. As she becomes more involved with this group of people, taking a role in Gérard’s production of Pericles, Anne is gradually taken in by the conspiracy theories of Philip and Terry. They convince Anne that they are in possession of a terrible secret that is potentially fatal to whomever learns of it; that all is not what it seems; that ‘les vrais maîtres se cachent et gouvernent en secret’;1 that they are facing the greatest conspiracy the world has ever known that will give rise to ‘un joli camp de concentration mondial’2 in which ‘tout sera sacrifié à l’efficacité, à l’État, à la technique’;3 that Juan, having learned of this plot, was driven to kill himself, and that Gérard will be next … Indeed, by the end of the film, Gérard has been found dead with his wrists slashed, and we have witnessed Terry shooting Pierre, convinced that he is part of the conspiracy, working for the suspicious economist De Georges (Jean-Marie Robain). Yet, in the very last 1 ‘the real leaders are hidden and govern in secret’ 2 ‘a nice little global concentration camp’ 3 ‘everything will be sacrificed to efficiency, to the State, to technology’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   23 scene, Terry denies the existence of a conspiracy, telling Anne that the mysterious ‘Organisation’ has only ever existed in Philip’s head. She blames Anne for the tragic outcome of events, implying that her romantic desire to believe in a fantastical plot precipitated the disaster. At the end of Paris nous appartient, at least after a first viewing, the spectator is left in some confusion as to the events of the narrative. Does the conspiracy exist or has it been a mere fabrication all along? The evidence is somewhat contradictory. Certainly Philip appears, as Pierre tells Anne, to be completely paranoid, and he may also be a drunk: in an early scene he is taken to task for his excessive drinking and wild accusations and, when Anne discovers him collapsed in his room, it is tempting to attribute his state to inebriation as much as to the old war wound he mentions. Gérard’s suicide may be explained by his despair at losing creative control of his play and by romantic disappointment following Anne’s rejection, and a scene early in the film informs us that this is not his first suicide attempt. Juan’s involvement with dangerous and powerful figures is belied by the testimony of friends who claim that ‘il avait surtout l’habitude de ne rien faire’,4 spending his days in cafés watching girls go by. Anne’s own eager investigations into the conspiracy may be attributed to her attraction to Gérard and her desire to win him from Terry by convincing him of the latter’s dangerousness. Yet, for all these reassuring explanations, a sense of unease remains at the end of the film. After all, two people are dead: we witness Gérard’s dead body, in a sinister confirmation of Philip’s predictions from the beginning of the film. We also see Terry shoot Pierre, although the status of this action is open to question: the murder takes place in a sudden and disorientating cut to an unidentified space away from the main action, a space where, incongruously, there appears to be snow on the ground. The shot is contained between two closeups of Anne’s horrified face, implying that it may be nothing more than a production of her overactive imagination, although Terry, later, readily confesses to the murder. Furthermore, as a number of critics have suggested, Terry’s final denials of the existence of a conspiracy are a little too categorical to be entirely believed, especially given the endless logic of bluff and double-bluff, affirmation and negation that has characterised the film (Sadoul 1961; Ollier 1981: 57). There remains 4 ‘he was mostly in the habit of doing nothing’

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24  jacques rivette too the imperfectly explained role of the sinister De Georges, present in the theatre that has hijacked Gérard’s play, and present at a party where he hands Anne the telephone so that she may learn of Gérard’s suicide … Ultimately, it appears impossible to decide between two interpretations of Paris nous appartient: that of a global conspiracy directing all the events of the film, or that of a series of essentially unrelated accidents, each with their own prosaic explanation, and it is this hesitation between explanations that makes the film resistant to analysis (Weyergans 1961; Ollier 1981: 61). Paris nous appartient resembles a thriller, then, or a mystery narrative, in its tendency to posit secrets, but unlike a conventional thriller it does not follow a linear development towards the final revelation of the secret. Rather, the film turns restlessly around its secret without ever quite attaining it, without even confirming that there is a secret to be revealed. This is because, as James Monaco has remarked, Rivette’s films are ‘not mysteries, but studies of the phenomenon of mystery’ (Monaco 1976: 311), they constantly interrogate the logic of secrecy itself, asking why we want to know and how the secret maintains our interest. In this way, Rivette produces narratives about narrative, about the process and workings of fiction itself. As we have seen, the conspiracy at the heart of Paris nous appartient revolves around a secret so terrible that no individual can bear its burden alone, and yet to reveal the secret is to condemn oneself to execution. Either way, one is condemned, and in this way, the real secret of Paris nous appartient appears as the infernal logic of secrecy itself. Early in the film, Gérard tells Terry that he suspects her of knowing much more than she lets on, adding, ‘C’est pour ça que tu me plais’.5 When he asks her to tell him her secret, she replies, ‘Non. Comme ça je te garde’.6 If Terry reveals her secret – that secretly there is no secret – she will lose her appeal for Gérard. The relation of the characters to the secret here mirrors that of the spectator to the film narrative: the suspension of knowledge is what maintains the relationship (between Terry and Gérard, between the spectator and the film). The function of the secret, then, is to generate narrative and to disclose it would indeed be fatal since, if it were revealed that the film is built on nothing, then it would collapse, and the characters, who only exist as an effect of the fiction, would cease to be. By making a film that is ultimately about 5 ‘That’s why I like you’ 6 ‘No. That way I can keep you’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   25 itself, about its own process of making meaning, Rivette has created a labyrinth. The labyrinth is formed, not only from the maze of streets, stairwells, corridors and rooms of the city but from the very tendency of the text to fold in on itself. By turning in on itself, the labyrinthine text does not so much describe or circumscribe itself as lose itself, such that it becomes impossible to see around the labyrinth. As Denis Hollier has shown, since it is impossible to grasp the whole of the labyrinth, one can never be sure whether or not one is really in it. A labyrinth is full of passages and doorways, but one can never know for certain whether they lead out of the maze or further into it (Hollier 1993: 114–15). It is this uncertainty as to whether one is in the heart of the maze or at its edge, whether one is inside or outside it, that characterises the labyrinthine narrative of Paris nous appartient, where a line or an action that seems to provide the key to the secret may only serve to increase its unfathomable mystery. ‘Excusez-moi,’ says Philip to Anne after they have wandered around the city for half the night with him urgently unloading his paranoid fantasies, ‘Je vous ai égarée.’7 In making narratives about narratives and films about the process of their own fabrication, Rivette demonstrates his affinity with the experimental textual practice of a number of twentieth-century literary figures. Paris nous appartient may be related to the French literary movement of the Nouveau Roman, roughly contemporary to the New Wave in French cinema (the crossover between the two movements is exemplified by the work of Alain Resnais who collaborated with the authors Marguerite Duras and Alain Robbe-Grillet in Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and L’Année dernière à Marienbad (1961)). Where nineteenth-century realist fiction used detailed descriptions to evoke a reality existing in the world outside the text, the nouveaux romans consistently questioned the status of reality by describing the workings of the text itself, the very movement of description (Robbe-Grillet 1963: 158–61). Paris nous appartient, for instance, could be compared to Robbe-Grillet’s novel Dans le labyrinthe (1959), in which a traumatised soldier gets lost in the streets of an unfamiliar town during a heavy snowstorm, while the reader gets lost in RobbeGrillet’s repetitive, circular narration which accords equal descriptive weight to the experiences of the soldier and to the figures in a painting hanging on the wall of a café. 7 ‘I’m sorry, I’ve misled you’ (In French, égarer has the sense both of ‘to lose’ or ‘misdirect’ and also ‘to mislead’ or ‘deceive’)

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26  jacques rivette Given the presence, in Paris nous appartient, of an incomprehensible and seemingly limitless conspiracy that exerts an obscure but total control over the lives of the film’s characters, a number of commentators have also remarked upon similarities to the writings of Franz Kafka (Baroncelli 1961; Rhode 1966: 109) whose novels depict individuals lost in the labyrinthine bureaucracy of unfathomable organisations. Kafka’s use of space, like Rivette’s, is designed to disconcert the reader: Josef K. in The Trial (1925) finds legal chambers hidden incongruously in tenement blocks, just as Gérard and his companions step oddly from the corridor of an apartment building into the large rehearsal space of a theatre. Kafka’s space, like Rivette’s, is made up of deceptive surfaces and, precisely for this reason, attains vertiginous depths (Blanchot 1981: 145). There is some doubt, in Kafka’s fictions, as to whether his characters are really the victims of a ruthless bureaucratic machine, or whether, on the contrary, they bring about their own demise with their childish stubbornness and belligerent behaviour (Bataille 1957: 116–17; Blanchot 1981: 149–51). In much the same way, Anne’s obstinate pursuit of the conspiracy in Paris nous appartient, against the repeated advice of her brother and other characters, together with her cruel and self-defeating rejection of Gérard, make her partly responsible for her own unhappy fate. Maurice Blanchot has suggested that Kafka necessarily gives rise to a double reading: a literal reading that takes account of a series of absurd and unjustifiable events, and an allegorical reading whereby one tries to make sense of these events, to give them meaning. But an allegorical reading elides that which remains terrifyingly obscure in Kafka’s imagination, while a literal meaning misses the true import of his work. One always reads too much or too little into Kafka, and the two readings can never catch up with one another (Blanchot 1981: 66). Michel Delahaye has described Paris nous appartient in very similar terms, suggesting that the spectator is constantly searching for a latent or secret order that would govern the apparent order of the narrative events but that the relations between these two orders are never adequately resolved (Delahaye 1962: 44). As a critic, Rivette himself once compared Hitchcock’s universe to that of Kafka, suggesting that in the work of both authors, ‘il demeure toujours un secret derrière le secret’8 (Rivette 1956: 41), even if this secret pertains, ultimately, to 8 ‘there always remains a secret behind the secret’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   27 the absence of a secret. ‘Il faut se plier aux faits,’ concluded Rivette, ‘au lieu de vouloir les penser’,9 but it is the inability of the thought process to content itself with this simple acceptance of the facts, it is the inevitable desire to produce more meaning that accounts for the richness of these works. If the narrative of Paris nous appartient, soberly reconstructed after the fact, suggests the reassuring absence of any global conspiracy, implying that the characters are merely drunk or deluded, paranoid or blinded by desire, the form of the film – what Rivette would call its mise en scène – gradually builds in the spectator an unshakeable sense of unease, through an accumulation of minor, seemingly unimportant details that, together, lend a convincing weight to the idea of a mysterious, tentacular organisation secretly directing the events of the narrative. Some of the details are the result of deliberate directorial decisions, others are accidents of the filming process, but all are subtle enough to go unnoticed on an initial viewing. As Jean-François Revel has remarked, there is a banality to the style of Paris nous appartient, a sober classicism to its filming that serves to bring out, through contrast, the mystery of its subject (Revel 1961). The self-effacement of Rivette’s directorial style works – like that the young Rivette admired so much in Howard Hawks – to lend a sense of necessity to the events of the film. Snatches of overheard sound contribute to the growing sense of unease, as in the siren that sounds outside during Anne’s conversation with Aniouta or, during her early morning race to reach the suicidal Gérard, the muttered conversation in a café between an American and a Frenchman discussing Richard Nixon, the American doubting his capacity to lead. The film’s strange, disconcerting atmosphere is further generated by unusual extras and minor characters, such as the distant, perhaps disturbed girl whom De Georges introduces as his ‘ward’ and who listens at the door before entering, hums to herself and plays with her shoes during Anne’s interview with the economist. Or Tania Fedin, another of Anne’s informants, who answers the door tied to a backboard and asks if Anne has been sent by ‘the lamb or the dragon’. Rivette’s use of framing consistently helps to create the claustrophobic sense of entrapment within the film’s labyrinth, from the high angles emphasising the wide-eyed hysteria of Anne’s neighbour, who first alerts 9 ‘we must simply accept the facts, rather than trying to interpret them’

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28  jacques rivette her to the conspiracy, to the shots in Philip’s room in which first he, and later Anne, are trapped in the corner of the room, surrounded by his disturbing series of identical drawings of devouring mouths, the slight low angle lending a menacing quality to their delirious ramblings. Even on the Pont des Arts, as Gérard and Anne discuss Pericles and begin to explore their feelings for one another, Rivette frames the couple against the grill of a fence, imprisoned within the riddle of the city. When Gérard’s farcical rehearsals for the play begin to wear on his nerves and he cries in desperation ‘Il y a quelqu’un qui vous paie pour me rendre cinglé, non?’,10 Rivette’s camera frames the scene from high up in the rafters of the theatre, the malevolent conspiracy of Gérard’s paranoid imagination suddenly incarnated in the concrete reality of a point of view. In Paris nous appartient, then, the meaning of the film, and its power, is generated by the unresolved tension between a narrative that seeks to belie the existence a conspiratorial organisation, and a mise en scène that quietly but persistently seems to confirm its terrifying reality. But is the theme of conspiracy – of such fundamental importance to Rivette’s work – thus simply a kind of game, an intellectual exercise to be worked out over the course of a film, a theorem to be proved without evidence (L’Express called Paris nous appartient ‘un film policier sans flics et sans cadavres’11 (Anon. 1961))? Or does the notion of conspiracy have something to tell us about the political realities of our world? One theorist whose political analysis of contemporary society rejoins conspiracy theories in intriguing ways is Guy Debord. Debord was the author, in 1967, of La Société du Spectacle, in which he argued that the complete domination of merchandise over our lives in modern capitalist societies had led to the creation of a Spectacle in which people were alienated, not only from their labour but from their whole lives, including their thoughts and desires. In 1988, Debord published a new work in which he argued that, far from being challenged in the interim, the Society of the Spectacle had attained an unprecedented degree of power, such that it had become all but impossible even to imagine an alternative political organisation of the world. What Debord calls the ‘integrated spectacular’ is, to some extent, synonymous with the one-way communication of the mass media, in which the ruling class discusses, in a pantomime of 10 ‘Is someone paying you to drive me crazy?’ 11 ‘a crime thriller with no cops and no bodies’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   29 democracy, the decisions that it has already taken (Debord 1992: 19). In this media society, what is important is the instantaneous, but it will be replaced in the very next instant. With this privileging of the instant, of the present moment, the integrated spectacular devalues, or to paraphrase Debord, outlaws history and, in the process, conceals from view the recent history of its own conquest of the world, instead presenting itself as a ‘natural’ expression of human society (Debord 1992: 30). The enormous power of the media has given rise to what Debord calls a ‘faux sans réplique’12 that has infected all fields of knowledge such that ‘truth’ has become, at best, an unverifiable hypothesis, and public opinion, once unable to make itself heard, is now incapable of being formed (Debord 1992: 27). The Society of the Spectacle described by Debord resembles a clandestine organisation, or a conspiracy, since it is characterised by generalised secrecy; indeed this is perhaps its single most important operation (Debord 1992: 26). Secrets are everywhere in this society: from the secrets of cheap and poor-quality fabrication concealed by the lies of advertising, to the increasing number of privately-owned spaces that are off-limits to the general public (Debord 1992: 74–5). But above all, the all-powerful Society of the Spectacle seeks to maintain the secret of its own existence; like the Mafia, its primary objective is in convincing the public that it does not really exist, but is the fanciful creation of a few paranoid minds (Debord 1992: 87–8). In fact, the Mafia, once considered an embarrassing anachronism by the modern state, has become, in Debord’s analysis, the model for all advanced commercial enterprises and for the more or less secret networks of production and distribution formed by these companies. The whole of capitalist society now runs on a logic of bribery, extortion and intimidation, and anyone who seeks to question this society and its privileges is routinely silenced (Debord 1992: 89–95). Criticism of the Spectacle is thus practically impossible since it can only take place outside of this society’s networks of distribution; it can only operate in clandestinity, which leaves it exposed to a violent repression that will remain invisible to the population at large (Debord 1992: 75–6). Justifying itself on the basis of a fabricated consensus, the Society of the Spectacle casts all its enemies as terrorists, ­subsequently employing the figure of the terrorist in 12 an ‘unquestioned falsity’

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30  jacques rivette the continued projection of its own rightness (Debord 1992: 40). Debord’s analysis thus bears more than a passing resemblance to a paranoid conspiracy theory, with any given fact being twisted into evidence in support of his unverifiable hypothesis, as when he argues that the French secret service’s bungled sabotage of Greenpeace’s Rainbow Warrior in 1985 was in fact a deliberate distraction designed to divert attention away from the very real power these services exert over our lives (Debord 1992: 78). And the impetus behind Debord’s book becomes clearer when one reads the dedication to Gérard Lebovici, Debord’s friend and publisher who was assassinated in 1984. Although Lebovici’s murder remains unsolved, he is thought to have been involved with the French criminal underworld. Despite this, however, the press were quick to blame Debord himself for the incident, a typical ploy of the Spectacle whereby Lebovici’s death was turned to the Society’s own advantage as an opportunity to attack its enemies (Hussey 2002: 338–40). Ultimately, then, one cannot accuse Debord of paranoia without confirming his argument since this is precisely what the Spectacle would have us believe in order to undermine his critique. The conception of a conspiratorial state policing its people with a series of hidden strategies may, as Debord admits, have been a ­ridiculous and reactionary notion when it appeared in the literature of the nineteenth century, but that does not mean it must remain so for all time, even if it serves the interests of the ruling power to maintain this argument (Debord 1992: 82). Something of Debord’s bitterly disillusioned view of society may be found in another of Rivette’s conspiracy thrillers, Le Pont du Nord (1982), which arguably stands in relation to Paris nous appartient somewhat as Debord’s Commentaires … of 1988 relate to his original Société du Spectacle of 1967. If the original work offered a disturbing glimpse of a ruthless, inhuman organisation directing our lives, it nonetheless found room for a more hopeful outlook, whether based in political resistance or interpersonal relationships; by the 1980s, the technocratic machine has confirmed its unassailable power and all hope is gone. Le Pont du Nord follows two women, Marie (Bulle Ogier), recently released from prison, and Baptiste (Pascale Ogier), who is simply from ‘ailleurs’ (elsewhere), through the streets of a Paris whose peripheral working-class neighbourhoods are being demolished to make way for huge new housing projects. Baptiste, rather like the characters of Paris nous appartient,

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narrative, conspiracy, community   31 is obsessed with what she sees as ‘une surveillance absolue à chaque seconde’,13 a constant vigilance held over everyone, no matter what they do or where they go. The agents of this surveillance, whom she sees around every corner, Baptiste names ‘Max’: ‘Les Max sont partout: leur regard plane sur tout ce qui bouge’.14 On more than one occasion, we see Baptiste take her knife and cut the eyes from posters on the wall, in defiance of this omniscient gaze. And, in Le Pont du Nord, just as in Paris nous appartient, the mise en scène seems to confirm Baptiste’s paranoid fears, from the sound of helicopters that are heard over the opening credits and periodically throughout the film, to the inserts of statues that appear to be watching the heroines, and sometimes laughing at them, to the final disquieting scene in which a pair of perpendicular lines cross-hatch the camera lens as Baptiste fights a final Max, as though caught in the sights of a sniper’s rifle. The older and wiser Marie is sceptical of Baptiste’s romantic fantasy of a total conspiracy, telling her ‘ça n’existe pas, ça n’existe plus’,15 but, as Alain Bergala points out, this is only because the wild fantasy has become a depressing reality, in the process losing its ambiguous fascination (Bergala 1982: 7). Baptiste steals a briefcase from Marie’s boyfriend in which they find a map of Paris covered with mysterious symbols as well as a bundle of newspaper clippings. In a long, unadorned sequence, the two women read through a series of headlines that serve as a kind of damning catalogue of the political life of France in the 1970s: the de Broglie affair, the Goldman affair, the Empain affair:16 financial scandals, kidnappings, assassinations, unsolved crimes, a shameful litany that effects precisely the kind 13 ‘an absolute surveillance, every second’ 14 ‘Max is everywhere: his gaze falls on everything that moves’ 15 ‘it doesn’t exist, it doesn’t exist anymore’ 16 Jean de Broglie, a French secretary of state, was assassinated in 1976; his financial advisor was indicted for conspiracy to murder. The Baron Édouard-Jean Empain, a wealthy Belgian businessman, was kidnapped and held hostage for 63 days in 1978; investigations into the case revealed his gambling debts and sexual secrets. Pierre Goldman was a left-wing Jewish intellectual who was arrested in connection with an armed robbery in which two people were killed. He was sentenced to life imprisonment in 1974, but later acquitted. Hélène Cixous wrote a book about him which, as its title – Un K incompréhensible (1975) – suggests, casts Goldman as a figure trapped within a Kafkaesque bureaucracy of ‘justice’. Goldman was assassinated in 1979. His killers were never identified but an extreme right-wing organisation claimed responsibility for the act.

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32  jacques rivette of rapprochement between the political classes and organised crime that is central to Debord’s critique of the integrated spectacular. In an interview at the time of Le Pont du Nord, Rivette admitted that this film, like Paris nous appartient and Out 1 (1970), really needs to be labelled with the date of its shooting since it attempts to provide a portrait of Paris at a particular moment in history (Rivette 1981: 12). Paris nous appartient caught the mood of unease among Parisian artists and intellectuals following the brutal repression of the 1956 Budapest student rebellion and during the Algerian War, with all its secrets and disinformation. Out 1, which we will discuss in the second section of this chapter below, represents the last vestiges of the utopian artistic and communitarian projects inspired by May ’68. Le Pont du Nord, meanwhile, appears as a kind of radiography of Paris at the end of the Giscard administration of the 1970s, the ruined buildings and demolition sites testifying both to the destruction wrought by the outgoing regime and to the hope for a brighter future following the elections of 1981. It is significant that Le Pont du Nord ends at La Villette, the camera tracking left in the final shot to frame the abandoned abattoir buildings, since these are in themselves representative of political corruption and incompetence: following the removal of Paris’s central market from Les Halles, the abattoir was displaced to La Villette before it was realised that this location was unsuitable, situated so far from the vegetable market now relocated to Rungis south-west of the city. The new abattoir buildings were demolished before ever being put to use, but the person responsible for this costly blunder, protected by his colleagues in the government, was never identified (Marchand 1993: 301). As if to confirm Debord’s suspicions about the ruling class’s displacement of its own criminal activities on to a terrorist enemy, Marie, in Le Pont du Nord, has just completed a prison sentence for bank robbery, having fallen in with a group of people who convinced her that the banks were the real thieves. The names of her associates that Marie mentions in passing – Werner, Heinrich – serve to evoke Germanic terrorist cells of the 1970s like the Baader-Meinhof gang and to paint the dispiriting picture of a society in which political contestation has been driven into a corner, faced with a sterile alternative between violence or surrender. If Le Pont du Nord met with hostility from a significant number of critics, who saw in it an impotent, defeatist attitude, it is because, as Youssef Ishaghpour remarks, it presents itself as ‘le film

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narrative, conspiracy, community   33 de l’échec de toute une génération’17 (Ishaghpour 1986: 229). But, as Michel Delahaye wrote about Paris nous appartient, to refuse or resist the disquiet that the film inspires in us as spectators would be to mistake its greatness. The disquiet stems not only from the film’s subject but from its ‘perfection’, from its resistance to interpretation, its refusal to give categoric assurance regarding the existence or non-existence of the conspiracy (Delahaye 1962: 45). For all their reluctance to take up position and decide on our behalf, Rivette’s films are characterised, as Eric Rhode remarks, by an ‘unusual lucidity’: ‘This is the world as seen at dawn – mysterious, ante-diluvian and cold’ (Rhode 1966: 116). This peculiar mixture of deliberate obfuscation and striking clarity is due to the fact that, as Rivette himself explains, he is seeking truth through error. In relation to Paris nous appartient, Rivette declared: ‘il est trop simple d’expliquer le monde par une seule idée. Une idée n’existe que grâce à l’idée contraire, il faut une dialectique’18 (Rivette 1961). Thus, in Le Pont du Nord, Baptiste’s blind faith in destiny – ‘De A à Z, tout est écrit,’19 she tells Marie – is tempered by Marie’s more pragmatic outlook. Marie accepts that people cannot necessarily change just because they want to – ‘Si tu es perdue comme une feuille au vent, ce n’est pas parce que tu le décides que tout va changer’20 –, but she nevertheless insists that she is free and responsible for her own actions and must begin by helping herself. And yet Marie’s sensible philosophy itself seems to be undermined by her sudden and summary execution at the end of the film, a brutal reassertion of Baptiste’s inhuman destiny. Just as in Paris nous appartient, where Gérard winds up dead in the same way as Juan, as had been predicted all along, Le Pont du Nord seems to deny the existence of an omniscient conspiracy only to deliver a final dialectical reversal – not dissimilar to the one that Rivette, as a critic, admired in Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (Rivette 1957) – that serves to renew our suspicions. It is for this reason that Luc Moullet wrote: ‘Pour aimer Paris nous appartient, il faut commencer par le voir la troisième fois’21 (Moullet 1965), a statement that might equally 17 ‘the film of an entire generation’s failure’ 18 ‘it is too simple to explain the world with a single idea. An idea only exists thanks to its opposite, there must be a dialectic’ 19 ‘Everything is written, from A to Z’ 20 ‘If you’re lost like a leaf in the wind, everything’s not going to change just because you say so’ 21 ‘In order to love Paris nous appartient, you first have to see it three times’

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34  jacques rivette well be applied to any of Rivette’s films. A first viewing is required to assimilate one interpretation (there is no conspiracy), a second to acknowledge its opposite (there is a conspiracy), and a third to see how both alternatives may be true at once, how the one enables the other. ‘Vous avez raison et moi aussi,’ Anne tells Philip in Paris nous appartient, ‘c’est bien ce qui est compliqué’.22 Hélène Frappat has suggested that this kind of dialectic relates to Rivette’s most fundamental methods of working. In Rivette’s films, writes Frappat, there is a conflict ‘entre un homme qui nie la réalité, et une femme qui ne parvient à la ressaisir que grâce au dialogue’23 (Frappat 2001: 195). Frappat is here describing the plot of L’Amour fou (1969), but the observation is equally valid for a number of other films: in Paris nous appartient, for instance, spurred on by the denials of Pierre and Philip, Anne reconstitutes the ‘reality’ of the conspiracy through her interviews with a series of other characters. But the comment may also apply to Rivette’s collaborative approach to screenwriting in a team that always involves both men and women: Rivette and his actresses (as in Le Pont du Nord) and, since the late 1980s, his regular co-writers Pascal Bonitzer and Christine Laurent. Such an approach prevents the film from being subsumed by the total vision of any one individual, instead requiring ideas to be tested against the reality of other points of view. Rivette’s refusal to provide a complete screenplay in advance, its development according to the vagaries of the production and the inspiration of the performers also works against this notion of a totalisable project. In interviews around Le Pont du Nord, Rivette frequently discussed this method of working, arguing for instance that ‘Quand tout a été mis sur le papier, c’est devenu mort et le tournage ne consiste plus qu’à essayer de ranimer ce cadavre’24 (in Tranchant 1982). Rivette complains about the predictability of the majority of films, saying he prefers films in which one is afraid of what might happen next. He likes the final scene of Le Pont du Nord precisely because it appears ‘perilous’, as though it may collapse at any moment, the camera operator struggling to keep both actors in the frame as they fight their way across the bridge (Rivette 1982: 36). 22 ‘You’re right and so am I, that’s what’s so complicated’ 23 ‘between a man who denies reality, and a woman who can only regain it through dialogue’ 24 ‘When everything is put down on paper it dies, and the filming consists of trying to reanimate the corpse’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   35 It is this openness to the accidents of the shooting process that is also responsible for the sinister shots in which Baptiste is seen through some unidentified viewfinder. The camera, it seems, scratched the film during shooting and, rather than discard the footage, Rivette added symmetrical scratches to the film to create the desired effect. The accident, rather than being rejected from the film, is incorporated within it, it reveals the film to itself (Bergala 1982: 6). This willingness to follow the unpredictable forks of experience, this surrender to the endless tricks and turns of the maze, is precisely what allows Rivette to navigate the labyrinthine logic of representation, and what gives his films, for all their absurd conspiracy theories and paradoxical reversals, an unusually acute apprehension of the exact flavour of contemporary reality. By refusing to look too far ahead, to conceive of the film as it will be, Rivette captures with precision reality as it is. For, as Denis Hollier remarks, ‘Vouloir sortir du labyrinthe, en former le projet, c’est le refermer, s’y enfermer’25 (Hollier 1993: 114).

Secret societies and the origins of community: Out 1 In Out 1: Noli me tangere (1970), released in a short version as Out 1: Spectre in 1974, two marginal characters, Colin (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and Frédérique (Juliet Berto), stumble across the existence of a secret society. This secret society models itself upon the clandestine organisation imagined by Balzac in the preface to his Histoire des treize (1833). In this work, Balzac groups together into a loose trilogy three disparate texts – Ferragus, La Duchesse de Langeais (which would be filmed by Rivette as Ne touchez pas la hache in 2007) and La Fille aux yeux d’or – by means of a preface in which he imagines a secret society of thirteen individuals coming together in imperial Paris in order to facilitate their own advancement. In practice, this preface is rather deceptive since the ‘Thirteen’ are never mentioned as such in any of the three succeeding novels, although the reader may imagine their influence behind various episodes of attempted murder, kidnapping and the transmission of secret messages. In Out 1, Colin is alerted to the existence of the secret society when he receives a mysterious message consisting of a short quotation from Balzac’s preface. For 25 ‘To want to get out of the labyrinth, to make a project out of it, is to close it, to enclose oneself in it’

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36  jacques rivette most of the rest of the film, Colin carries around a copy of Histoire des treize, as though it were a kind of Bible containing all the answers to the film’s mysteries (Bory 1974). In one scene, Colin even interviews an academic Balzac specialist (played by the filmmaker Eric Rohmer) who explains that, although conspiracy may be considered ‘le nœud de l’œuvre balzacienne’,26 paradoxically this theme does not really appear in the Histoire des treize, since Balzac abandoned, in the novels, the idea of the secret society that he had evoked in the preface. The Balzac expert gives historical examples of secret societies that may have influenced Balzac, and mentions that the novelist’s father was a Freemason, but grows sarcastic and impatient when Colin asks about an equivalent association to Balzac’s ‘Thirteen’ that may exist today. The social phenomenon of the secret society was given a kind of intellectual legitimacy in France when it was studied by the Collège de Sociologie, a short-lived scholarly endeavour established by Georges Bataille, Roger Caillois and Michel Leiris in 1937. The Collège de Sociologie was interested in applying the techniques and theories of anthropological and ethnographic research to various aspects of contemporary western society. In particular, the Collège was preoccupied with closed groups: small, primitive populations, heretical sects, fraternities, monastic orders, terrorist organisations and so on (Caillois 1964: 66–7). They argued that, in an era in which society had forgotten and neglected the crucial importance of the sacred in binding together a community, it was in elective communities such as these exclusive and clandestine associations that the sacred bonds of community may be rediscovered. The first and most important distinction between secret societies and other existing communities is that secret societies are communities chosen to exist as such by their members, rather than the simple communities of fact that characterise nations for instance (Hollier 1995: 52–3). In this sense, then, as Caillois observes, secret societies represent a purer form of community than normal societies since community itself is the ultimate value of the secret society, and everything must be sacrificed to the cohesion of the group (Caillois 1964: 72–3). Alongside their theoretical reflections on elective communities, the members of the Collège de Sociologie put their ideas into practice in the form of Georges Bataille’s infamous secret society Acéphale, about which very little is known 26 ‘the crux of Balzac’s œuvre’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   37 for certain, but which is rumoured to have dissolved around the unrealised ambition of sealing the society’s pact with a human sacrifice (Surya 1992: 300–5). The experience of Rivette’s Out 1 may be seen, to some extent, as a continuation of the ideas and ambitions of the Collège de Sociologie. Out 1 itself has an anthropological intention, the film’s extraordinary duration of twelve hours forty minutes having been inspired by Rivette’s viewing of eight hours of rushes for Petit à petit by the ethnographic filmmaker Jean Rouch (Thomas 1991: 14).27 Michel Delahaye, a close colleague of Rivette’s from Cahiers du cinéma, plays an ethnologist in Out 1 who has recently returned from Madagascar after his research funding was cut. Unable to complete his work on the closed community of white Europeans in Madagascar, he considers a project on marginalised communities within France, such as the Bretons or the Basques, and proposes to study the Sorbonne as an example of an initiation rite for French youth. The film’s interest in autonomous communities and alternative social networks is also to be related to its emergence in the wake of the social movements of May ’68 which sought to challenge the traditional hierarchical organisation of French society. But, as Louis Seguin points out, Out 1 appears at a time when the hopes and dreams of ’68 had already faded and the alternative groups set up in the optimism of May had begun to dissolve (Seguin 1974: 18). Discussions over the course of the film reveal that the secret society of Out 1 had indeed been created two years ago, placing its genesis precisely in the spring of ’68, since the film begins with a title card bearing the date 13 April 1970. But, since that time, the members of the group have gone their separate ways, and the association has become dormant, and it is only the urgent investigations of Colin and the inept attempts at blackmail by Frédérique that reawaken the secret society. Aside from the Thirteen, though, and an even more shadowy conspiracy known as the Compagnons du Devoir (another borrowing from Balzac) glimpsed through the character Renaud (Alain Libolt), there are a number of other groups and alternative communities dispersed across Out 1. Most prominent are the experimental theatre troupes led by Thomas (Michael Lonsdale) and Lili (Michèle Moretti), two members of the Thirteen, whose exercises and rehearsals take up much of the screen time of Out 1, particularly 27 Initially edited into a four-hour feature, Petit à petit was eventually distributed in theatres in 1971 with a running time of just 96 minutes.

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38  jacques rivette during its first few hours. These small, intimate collectives appear almost like families and are supported by other examples of alternative domestic arrangements in the film that challenge the hegemony of the traditional heterosexual couple and nuclear family: for instance, the ménage à trois that is briefly entertained by Thomas, Béatrice (Edwine Moatti) and Sarah (Bernadette Lafont), or the household of Émilie (Bulle Ogier) who lives with a female friend and two children whose parentage is never clearly established. Indeed, the heterosexual couple in Out 1 is frequently presented as a site of disappointment and disharmony. The break-up of a former relationship between Thomas and Lili is seen to be responsible for the splitting in two of what was originally a single theatre troupe. Frédérique spends much of the film feigning sexual attraction in order to steal money from men and, when she finally seems to find romance with Renaud, it quickly leads to her death. (Frédérique also mentions, on separate occasions, that she has run away from her parental home and does not want to be found, and that she has a two-year-old daughter who is being looked after by somebody else. Although it is impossible to believe everything Frédérique says, given her con-artist persona, neither of these stories are ever entirely discredited by the rest of the film, and they accord neatly with the pessimistic view of family relations presented elsewhere.) Colin appears deeply uncomfortable when forced to telephone his parents and request a favour (he has previously survived on the meagre income derived from pretending to be a deaf-mute busking with a harmonica), and his courtship of Émilie is equally unhappy, ending before it has really begun, with Colin ultimately returning to his initial isolation in the pantomime of the deaf-mute. In his discussion of elective communities, Georges Bataille expressed his preference for what he called ‘existential’ societies, that is societies that are formed not in order to pursue some external end but simply in order to exist (Hollier 1995: 240). These societies are to be distinguished, then, from political parties or factions organised around a specific agenda (such as the overthrow of a government), but also, arguably, from the heterosexual family, whose goal is its own reproduction. The secret society is organised around a secret which must not be revealed, but this secret ultimately pertains less to the activities of the group than to its members. The first and essentially the only activity of the secret society is to designate its members, and the secret conceals nothing other than their identity. The secret thus

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narrative, conspiracy, community   39 serves to unite the community since the secret is without content other than that of the community itself. The group of thirteen in Out 1 serves as a good demonstration of this principle. Our first intuition of the existence of a secret society in the film comes in the second ‘episode’, in which Lili sits down with her friend Elaine (Karen Puig) and writes out a list of ‘les douze autres’, the twelve other members of the group, thereby repeating the foundational act of the society, an act that must be continually repeated if the association is to maintain a sense of its existence. Similarly, when Frédérique talks to Warok (Jean Bouise), another of the Thirteen, about secret societies, she agrees that the group’s first action would be to draw up a list of its members; meanwhile, Colin’s investigations turn around his burning desire to know whether he himself may be a member of the group. But, aside from these discussions and speculations, the group does not really do anything. As Thomas confides to Sarah at one point: ‘Tu ne sais pas trop pourquoi tu es une treize, et moi non plus, mais ça il faut pas le dire.’28 In a discussion with Étienne (Jacques Doniol-Valcroze) in the sixth episode, Thomas suggests that the group got together in order to give a sense to their lives, but Étienne remarks that ‘on a posé les principes et on en est restés là’.29 As a result, the group’s existence is ‘un peu dans l’air, sans avoir trouvé de point d’impact’.30 François Thomas remarks that the Thirteen have no real power, no real projects, nor even any real enemies outside their own ranks (Thomas 1991: 14). As Jonathan Rosenbaum puts it, ‘the “13” never once assumes a recognizable shape’ (Rosenbaum 1995: 144), and, although much of the spectator’s interpretative activity consists of trying to decide which characters belong to the secret society and which do not, only nine of the thirteen members will be identified for certain by the end of the film (and, of these, two – Pierre and Igor – are never actually seen). The secret society provides a kind of ‘pure’ experience of community so long as it does nothing but circumscribe its membership. But once it takes on a goal and directs its energies outwards, the existence of the community is threatened. As a result, secret societies are necessarily short-lived entities. This was the conclusion of Roger Caillois when he revisited the question in the 1960s. Commenting retrospectively 28 ‘You don’t really know why you’re one of the thirteen, and neither do I, but we’re not supposed to admit that’ 29 ‘we established the principles, but that’s as far as we got’ 30 ‘up in the air, without having had any real impact’

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40  jacques rivette on the Collège de Sociologie’s obsession with sects and fraternities, Caillois suggested that the logic of the secret society, when taken to its extreme, would rejoin that of fascism. He argued that the only way a secret society could avoid the inevitable disappointments of dissolving from within or being brought back into the fold of society and thereby neutralised, would be in imposing the rigour of the group’s internal structure on the whole of society. But the sect thus brought to power would be indistinguishable from a totalitarian state: since the secret society’s very raison d’être is its autonomous existence in opposition to the rest of society, a sect in power and identified with a nation could only pursue its vocation by launching itself aggressively against the rest of the world. The ultimate outcomes of the secret society’s logic, according to Caillois’s disabused post-war assessment, would be war and genocide (Caillois 1964: 96–109). If the totalitarian sect appears as such a monstrous prospect, it is because the sect should never come to power in the first place: for the secret society to take on a publiclyrecognised authority is to betray its most fundamental principle of goallessness (Caillois 1964: 103). The sect in power is a contradiction in terms, but the secret society is already a paradoxical entity by virtue of its own composition. As Caillois remarks, a secret society demands complete obedience of its members, and yet those individuals who are likely to be attracted to such fraternities are the least apt to submit to their regulations, being of a singular temperament that is born to lead rather than to obey (Caillois 1964: 78). The secret society is formed precisely from those individuals that have been secreted from society because of their inability to recognise its conventions or observe its rules (Caillois 1964: 83). In the unlikely event that such a collection of individuals is able to act in concert to gain a degree of power, the risk is that it will simply establish a new dominant social or cultural form, and produce new minorities, thereby necessitating the formation of new sects and secret societies (Caillois 1964: 89). Like the nascent secret society, or like the projectless play of a young child, Out 1 itself is a fragile entity that is constantly threatened by the arrival of a deterministic form. So long as the ‘narrative’ of Out 1 consists of the interminable exercises by the two theatre troupes, Frédérique’s numerous hustles in the streets and cafés around Bastille, Colin’s open-ended courtship of Émilie and the Thirteen’s idle discussions around their group, the film offers a joyful exhibition of acting as play and a kind of pure experience of time, what Gilles

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narrative, conspiracy, community   41 Deleuze called a ‘pure optical situation’ (Deleuze 1985: 29) by virtue of which the cinema allows the spectator to experience the undiluted mystery of the passage of time, decoupled from narrative’s iron rule of cause and effect. As François Thomas comments, Rivette’s multiplications of temps morts in Out 1 – the theatre troupes clearing up at the end of the day, Sarah watering the plants, people sitting around bored in Émilie’s shop and gradually falling asleep – far from causing the spectator’s attention to wander, actually help to focus it on a scene that has all the density and import of real life (Thomas 1991: 12). On the contrary, it is when the narrative begins to solidify into recognisable plots and familiar generic situations that it risks losing its way, as in the rather incongruous sub-plot involving Lili and Émilie in the distribution of false passports that leads them to murder a courrier who comes into Émilie’s shop. In another film, this would be a key scene and pivotal point of the narrative; in the dilated expanse of Out 1 it is a mere distraction from the film’s real interest which lies in the simple physical interaction between the film’s characters who, observed in their evolution over twelve hours, take on the status and gravity of real people. As Jonathan Rosenbaum comments, the rare moments of violence in Out 1 appear almost as accusations of the spectator’s habitual desire for ‘action’ and, as such, seem disturbingly displaced within the otherwise indolent pace of the film, erupting with all the disorientating suddenness of violence in real life (Rosenbaum 1995: 146). The closer the film gets to a decided, finished form, the more it approaches the terrain of conventional cinematic narrative, the more it is in danger of ceasing to exist as the unique experiment in duration and improvisation that gives it its interest. It is this pitfall that accounts for the film’s extraordinary narrative arc. Evolving with incredible slowness, the various narrative threads of Out 1 nonetheless coalesce in a way that seems to promise, after around ten hours of screen time, a resolution to all the film’s mysteries and a neat and satisfying conclusion to the many relationships developed over the course of the narrative. Yet, in the final two hours, the narrative collapses, with threads coming undone and characters dispersing, the spectator left almost as mystified by the events of the film as when it began. Thierry Jousse neatly summarises this movement when he writes ‘Le suspense fait place au suspens’31 (Jousse n.d.: 157): 31 ‘Suspense gives way to suspension’

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42  jacques rivette the suspense, rather than being resolved, is suspended indefinitely, and along with it the narrative itself. In order to demonstrate this, the remainder of this chapter will describe in detail the events of the last two episodes (7 and 8) of Out 1. Given the exceptional length of the film, the analysis of a single sequence would be inadequate to show how meaning accumulates across the work, since it is precisely the experience of the film in its uncommon duration that characterises the spectator’s relation to Out 1. By isolating a number of key scenes from the last three or four hours of the film, we hope to convey a more authentic sense of its unique character. By the seventh episode of Out 1, the narrative of the film seems to be coming together: nine members of the Thirteen have now been identified and the investigations of Colin and Frédérique are forcing the members of the group to meet with increasing urgency to discuss the action they should take. Émilie has retrieved some of the letters stolen by Frédérique and is threatening to send them to the newspapers since they contain details of financial scandals involving Pierre, one of the absent members of the group whom Émilie suspects of causing the disappearance of another member, Igor (who may be the father of Émilie’s children). Sarah arrives as Émilie is preparing to dispatch these letters and tries to stop her. Émilie accuses Sarah of being in love with Pierre and Sarah slaps her, which provokes a falling-out between the two friends and Émilie’s departure to L’Aubade, the house by the sea owned by the group. There she meets Lili, who fled Paris following the incident with the false passports, and they discuss the possibility that Igor may be hiding in a locked room in the house. Back in Paris, Thomas meets Étienne and Lucie (Françoise Fabian) by the Seine and informs them of Émilie’s actions. Étienne and Lucie resolve to use their influence to block the publication of the compromising letters in the papers, but they agree that they must do something about Émilie. As Lucie puts it, ‘il faut absolument la museler’32 because, as Thomas remarks, ‘elle est prête à craquer’.33 This scene is perhaps the closest Out 1 comes to the evocation of an unequivocal conspiracy and, as such, it reproduces some of the techniques used in Paris nous appartient to create tension in the viewer. At the beginning of the scene, the three conspirators are filmed in medium shot but, as they walk together under a bridge, they are framed in a high angle from the 32 ‘It’s imperative that we shut her up’ 33 ‘she’s cracking up’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   43 top of the bridge, as though from the perspective of someone eavesdropping on their conversation. Subsequently the camera cuts to a long shot from the other side of the bridge, the characters in shadow beneath it and the words less audible in the distance, reinforcing the impression of a scene witnessed without authorisation. Several times throughout the scene we hear a sudden loud clanging noise from some unidentified source (probably a barge on the river) that jars our nerves and momentarily covers up the dialogue. Towards the end of the seventh episode, with his theatre troupe now dispersed (following the departure of first Sarah and then Béatrice, who runs away with the ethnologist), Thomas comes to L’Aubade with Achille (Sylvain Corthay) and Rose (Christiane Corthay), feigning a kind of nervous exhaustion in order to keep an eye on Émilie. Meanwhile, Frédérique meets Renaud and, having found someone with an imagination as fertile as her own, seems to fall in love (they refer to each other as the White King and the Red Queen). Renaud confesses to her that he stole Quentin’s lottery winnings, but says the money was for the Compagnons du Devoir, the secret society he belongs to. Frédérique expresses her desire to be initiated into this group. Just as everything seems about to fall into place, however, the narrative of Out 1 begins to break down, the film refusing to reveal its secrets, or refusing to confirm that it has any. Colin comes to Thomas’s abandoned rehearsal space where he finds Sarah and asks her about Émilie (whom Colin still knows by her alias, Pauline). When Sarah replies to Colin, however, her response is backwards. Since the couple are speaking very quietly, the spectator may initially think she has simply misheard. But no, the recorded sound of the film is played backwards in a deliberate effort to frustrate the spectator’s attempt at understanding. This device is used repeatedly throughout this scene, but nowhere else in the film and, for this reason, the spectator is inclined to wonder whether it is simply a mistake, or a fault in the copy she is viewing. The effect of this technique is further to disorientate the spectator and to reinforce the impression that the film holds a secret to which she is being refused access. This powerful sense of deception, almost of betrayal by the film, will be augmented by the eighth and final episode of Out 1. This last episode begins at L’Aubade, where Thomas is continuing his pantomime of depression and complaining of draughts in the house. ‘Lili,

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44  jacques rivette ferme la porte!’,34 he calls, and when Émilie tells him Lili is in bed, he tries, ‘Sarah, ferme la porte!’ Émilie protests that Sarah is not there, but Achille asks, ‘Qu’est-ce qui te prouve que Sarah n’est pas là?’,35 to which Thomas adds: ‘Il se passe des choses dans cette maison … Pierre, ferme la porte!’36 Thomas and friends dissolve into giggles at this point, but Émilie is not laughing and the spectator is left with a sense of disquiet, particularly since the possibility of unseen characters wandering the empty and locked rooms of this large old house has already been evoked more than once. And the possibility seems to be confirmed, first when Émilie finds a scarf belonging to Igor, and later when she enters her bedroom to find Sarah in there. This scene is perhaps the most eerie in the whole of Out 1. The two women, sitting on the bed, are filmed, for the most part, in the mirror on Émilie’s dressing table, Émilie, nervous and paranoid, repeatedly asking Sarah, ‘Pourquoi tu me regardes comme ça?’,37 to which Sarah calmly replies, ‘Je te regarde normalement’.38 Sarah meanwhile advises Émilie to go to sleep, repeating the phrase so many times that it becomes a kind of terrible, hypnotic injunction: ‘Tu devrais te coucher maintenant. Tu devrais te coucher et dormir. Couche-toi.’39 Rivette inserts strips of black leader in between the images here and, at one point, cuts to a shot of the door ajar, as though to suggest a horror just beyond the edge of the visible that is responsible for Émilie’s nervous collapse. The next day, Émilie enters the locked room in L’Aubade and finds nothing but two mirrors placed on opposite walls so that, when she looks in one, she sees herself reflected in the other, to infinity. This is one of the most powerful images of the labyrinth in all of Rivette’s cinema and suggests Émilie’s entrapment within a narrative, within a community, within a consciousness from which she cannot escape. Events in Paris are proving no more auspicious than those on the coast. Frédérique finds a note – presumably from Renaud – inviting her to a rendez-vous where she will discover the secret of the Compagnons du Devoir. Disguised as a boy, hidden behind a mask and armed with a revolver, Frédérique tries to surprise Renaud but is 34 ‘Lili, close the door!’ 35 ‘What makes you so sure Sarah’s not here?’ 36 ‘There are things happening in this house… Pierre, close the door!’ 37 ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’ 38 ‘I’m just looking at you normally’ 39 ‘You should lie down now. Lie down and go to sleep. Lie down.’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   45 shot dead when he doesn’t recognise her. Elsewhere, Warok is deep in conversation with Lucie when Colin arrives and dramatically and categorically declares: ‘Votre histoire des Treize était un pur fantasme d’adolescent.’40 Although admitting that his brush with this ‘fantasy’ brought him into proximity with madness and death, Colin finally insists ‘Je vais très très bien et je vous laisse à vos conversations mondaines’41 before walking out. When we see him again, he has returned to a life of panhandling with his old deaf-mute routine. Out 1 ends at L’Aubade with Thomas, Achille and Rose meditating on the beach. Suddenly, Thomas gets up and begins screaming ‘Non! non! non! Je veux pas, laissez moi!’42 and running away. Since there is no one else on the beach, and Rose and Achille are not doing anything to Thomas, the spectator can only presume that he is talking to the camera, expressing his weariness at being filmed, and his desire for the film to end. This impression is strengthened by the fact that Thomas holds out his arms as though to fend off the camera that is mercilessly following him up the beach, hiding his face in his hands and making shooing gestures. Thomas eventually collapses on the sand, seemingly unconscious. Achille and Rose, panicked, hurry over and loosen his clothing, at which point Thomas begins laughing hysterically. Angered by this joke which has caught them by surprise, Achille and Rose storm off and we see their car leaving in the distance. Thomas is left alone on the beach as his giggles gradually subside and he lies down in the sand with his arms stretched out in a Christ-like pose, the camera only now beginning to back away from him. Out 1 ends, then, with a puerile joke, with hysterical laughter, and with a cruel trick played on Thomas’s friends, and on the spectator. Having shown up the narrative as an impossible labyrinth and the conspiracy as an adolescent fantasy, this final scene implies that the whole film – all twelve and a half hours of it – was one monumental joke. Yet, as Serge Bozon has suggested, the scene actually provides the culmination of the film’s most important theme: that of acting, pretending, playing. Out 1 constantly hovers around an undecidable limit that is the point at which acting becomes reality (Bozon 1997: 42–3). Eduardo Manet has remarked that, in the most impressive scenes of Out 1 – Frédérique’s fight with the biker, Colin’s scenes with Émilie, Émilie on the 40 ‘Your tale of the Thirteen was nothing but an adolescent fantasy’ 41 ‘I’m doing very well indeed and I will leave you to your society gossip’ 42 ‘No, no, no! I don’t want to, leave me alone!’

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46  jacques rivette phone to Igor – ‘Les acteurs … ont oublié qu’ils sont des acteurs’43 (Manet 1974). And it is this indecision between acting and reality that renders the final scene so troubling: have the actors really been taken by surprise and frightened by Thomas/Michael Lonsdale’s sudden performance of panic, or is this just a singularly convincing piece of acting from all concerned? Is Lonsdale himself acting or is his frustration with the cameras genuine? Is this part of the film, or is the film already over? Are we still inside the film, or are we outside it? Were we ever actually in Out? But if much of the last episode of Out 1 implies the breakdown of the narrative, the irredeemable unravelling of the threads so carefully woven over twelve hours, there are nonetheless details in this last episode that serve to relaunch the narrative. In the lengthy discussion between Lucie and Warok, for instance, the Thirteen still seems very much alive. Lucie insists that she is busy trying to organise the group’s activities and seeks to combat Warok’s scepticism: ‘C’est très facile d’être sceptique,’ she says, ‘c’est créer des choses qui est difficile … C’est bien joli d’écrire des bouquins, d’écrire des articles dans les journaux, de discuter dans les bistrots, mais on ne fait rien, rien ne change.’44 Furthermore, the arrival of Colin and his decisive proclamations about the fantastical status of the group do not succeed in dispelling the persistent sense of its reality. For, once Colin has left, Warok tells Lucie that he was sent by Pierre. Pierre, he declares, was unquestionably the author of the secret message Colin received, and the absent member of the group confirmed to Warok his interest in Colin, telling him: ‘J’ai cru pressentir son nom dans la lecture des astres’.45 The conclusion implied by this scene is that Colin has been used, without his knowledge, by Pierre in order to revive the group. Meanwhile, another absent member of the group, Igor, whose ‘disappearance’ had been discussed at various moments throughout the film, surprises everyone by returning at the end of Out 1. Igor telephones Émilie at L’Aubade to inform her he has returned to Paris and Émilie and Lili rush off to meet him. (And yet, since the spectator neither sees Igor nor hears his voice, we are entitled to question the veracity of this 43 ‘The actors have forgotten that they are actors’ 44 ‘It’s easy to be sceptical, but it’s much harder to create something… It’s all very well writing books and articles in the papers, and chatting in cafés, but we’re not doing anything, nothing changes.’ 45 ‘I read his name in the stars’

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narrative, conspiracy, community   47 event. If Émilie’s telephone conversation with Igor is, as mentioned above, one of the most impressive pieces of acting in Out 1, it may be just that: acting, a ruse invented by Émilie to slip away from the trap that Thomas seems to have prepared for her at L’Aubade.) There is one final trick reserved by Out 1, just as the film appears to have reached its ultimate point of disintegration with Thomas’s collapse on the beach. For, after this final scene, the film provides one last shot, a quick cut to Marie (Hermine Karagheuz), one of the members of Lili’s theatre troupe, framed in a low-angle medium close-up against a statue at the Porte Dorée. François Thomas suggests that this final shot is completely gratuitous, as though existing for no other reason than to confuse the spectator further (Thomas 1991: 12). Yet, on reflection, this last glimpse of Marie also serves to rekindle speculation about the Thirteen. For, searching back through the memory of the film, the spectator discovers that it was Marie who gave one of the secret messages to Colin, without explanation, when passing him at the door of a café (although, in a later scene, she would deny all knowledge of this event). It is Marie, in other words, who fuels the narrative of Out 1 in the first place by sparking Colin’s investigation which will lead to the revival of the Thirteen. This final shot thus raises a new set of questions: is Marie one of the Thirteen (a possibility not previously entertained by the spectator)? Is she an agent of Pierre? What was her own interest in exposing the Thirteen? As François Thomas writes, then, ‘au terme du huitième et dernier épisode, le sentiment de quasi-frustration, l’envie d’une relance fictionnelle demeurent’46 (Thomas 1991: 11). The spectator, at the end of Out 1, is reluctant to let go of the film. Rivette, adds Thomas, makes the shortest films in the world: not, obviously, in terms of their objective duration but in terms of the spectator’s desire for them to continue indefinitely (Thomas 1991: 11). The uncommon attachment of the spectator to the film ultimately implies that the real community of Out 1 is the community of the film itself: the community formed, naturally, by the cast and crew in this unique collaborative project, but also the community formed between the film, its characters, and its spectators by virtue of the unusually strong identification built up over the twelve and a half hours of the viewing experience. Martin Even, in a report on the first public screening of Out 1, held in Le 46 ‘at the end of the eighth and final episode, there remains a feeling almost of frustration, a desire for the story to be picked up again’

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48  jacques rivette Havre in October 1971, remarked that, during breaks in the projection, the spectators would speak of the characters as though of people they knew, that the film gradually began to substitute itself for real life (the beach at L’Aubade becoming confused with the beach at Le Havre) such that the end of the film and brutal rejection of the spectator back into reality was felt as a real assault on the psyche (Even 1971). In a film of this length, there is no need to rely on the traditional and rather artificial techniques of cinematic narrative exposition to introduce the characters: rather characters are permitted to evolve organically, in real time, such that certain details of the relationships between them – Émilie’s relations with Igor, for instance, or the history between Thomas and Lili – emerge slowly or accidentally, in a casual remark or in the tenderness of a touch. In this way, as Alain Menil points out, the spectator comes to imagine these characters as belonging to his own past since it is through his attention to their interactions that their most intimate identities have been revealed (Menil 1983: 56). Just as the secret society of the Thirteen is organised around the secret of their inactivity, just as the theatre troupes of Lili and Thomas cohere around the absence of a work, of a play to perform, the community of Out 1 is formed around something that isn’t there: the experience of the film, the film as experience, takes place somewhere between the reality of performers interacting in a specific time and place (Paris, April 1970), and the fantasy of the characters that exists in the non-place and subjective time of the spectator’s imagination. And if acting is at its best when actors forget they are acting, that is, paradoxically, when they are no longer acting, then presumably spectatorship in its purest form is achieved when we forget our position in front of a screen in order to enter fully into the emotional universe of the film. If there is a utopian ambition in Out 1, as Martin Even has suggested, it is not so much the stalled utopia of a directionless group formed in the excitement of 1968, as the non-place of the film experience itself: ‘L’utopie d’une société où chacun pourrait consacrer deux jours à l’aventure d’un film’47 (Even 1974).

47 ‘The utopia of a society in which everyone would be able to devote two days to the adventure of a film’

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References Anon. (1961), ‘Paris nous appartient’, L’Express, 14 December. Baroncelli, J. de (1961), ‘Paris nous appartient’, Le Monde, 21 December. Bataille, G. (1957), La Littérature et le mal, Paris, Gallimard. Bergala, A. (1982), ‘Rivette, Baptiste et Marie’, Cahiers du cinéma, 333, 5–7. Blanchot, M. (1981), De Kafka à Kafka, Paris, Gallimard. Bory, J.-L. (1974), ‘La bande à Rivette’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 25 March. Bozon, S. (1997), ‘Tout ce que les acteurs font 2 fois’, La Lettre du cinéma, 2, 42–5. Caillois, R. (1964), Instincts et société: Essais de sociologie contemporaine, Paris, Éditions Gonthier. Cixous, H. (1975), Un K incompréhensible: Pierre Goldman, Paris, Christian Bourgois. Debord, G. (1992), Commentaires sur la Société du Spectacle, Paris, Gallimard. Delahaye, M. (1962), ‘L’idée maîtresse ou le complot sans maître’, Cahiers du cinéma, 128, 41–5. Deleuze, G. (1985), Cinéma 2: L’image-temps, Paris, Minuit. Even, M. (1971), ‘Out 1: Voyage au-delà du cinéma’, Le Monde, 14 October. Even, M. (1974), ‘Les trois histoires de Out 1’, Le Monde, 28 March. Frappat, H. (2001), Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma. Hollier, D. (1993), La Prise de la Concorde, suivi de Les Dimanches de la vie: Essais sur Georges Bataille, Paris, Gallimard. Hollier, D. (1995), Le Collège de Sociologie, 1937–1939, Paris, Gallimard. Hussey, A. (2002), The Game of War: The Life and Death of Guy Debord, London, Pimlico. Ishaghpour, Y. (1986), Cinéma contemporain: De ce côté du miroir, Paris, Éditions de la Différence. Jousse, T. (n.d.), ‘La communauté inavouée’, in Daniela Giuffrida (ed.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Turin, Centre Culturel Français de Turin/Museo Nazionale del Cinema di Torino, 155–7. Manet, E. (1974), ‘Out 1: Spectre de Jacques Rivette’, Combat, 24 January. Marchand, B. (1993), Paris, histoire d’une ville: XIXe–XXe siècle, Paris, Seuil. Menil, A. (1983), ‘Out one: Spectre de Jacques Rivette’, Cinématographe, 87, 55–6. Monaco, J. (1976), The New Wave: Truffaut, Godard, Chabrol, Rohmer, Rivette, New York, Oxford University Press. Moullet, L. (1965), ‘Paris nous appartient’, Cahiers du cinéma, 161–2, 108. Ollier, C. (1981), Souvenirs écran, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma/Gallimard. Revel, J.-F. (1961), ‘Paris nous appartient’, France-Observateur, 21 December. Rhode, E. (1966), Tower of Babel: Speculations on the Cinema, London, Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Rivette, J. (1956), ‘Faut-il brûler Harry?’, Cahiers du cinéma, 58, 41. Rivette, J. (1957), ‘La main’, Cahiers du cinéma, 76, 48–51. Rivette, J. (1961), ‘Paris nous appartient est un film anti-thèse’, Les Lettres françaises, 20 December. Rivette, J. (1981), Entretien, Cahiers du cinéma, 327, 9–21. Rivette, J. (1982), Interview, Cinématographe, 76, 33–6.

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50  jacques rivette Robbe-Grillet, A. (1963), Pour un nouveau roman, Paris, Gallimard. Rosenbaum, J. (1995), Placing Movies: The Practice of Flm Criticism, Berkeley, University of California Press. Sadoul, G. (1961), ‘Déchirement et complot’, Les Lettres françaises, 27 December. Seguin, L. (1974), ‘Cinq propositions pour Out one: Spectre’, Positif, 162, 17–18. Surya, M. (1992), Georges Bataille, la mort à l’œuvre, Paris, Gallimard. Thirard, P.-L. (1974), ‘L’écriture du dieu (Out 1: Spectre)’, Positif, 160, 58–9. Thomas, F. (1991), ‘Les jeux du solitaire: Out 1’, Positif, 367, 10–16. Tranchant, M.-N. (1982), ‘Rivette, l’artisan inspiré’, Le Figaro, 25 March. Weyergans, F. (1961), ‘Avant les avant-premières’, Cahiers du cinéma, 116, 22–7.

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3 Story as space: space as story

Rien n’aurait eu lieu que le lieu. (Mallarmé)

The above quote was marshalled by Rivette in the course of interviews when Paris nous appartient came out, and it is a fitting introduction to an intense, but paradoxical and playful, relation to place – and to non-place, and to space – which marks his entire film output. The geography of Rivette’s films, carefully programmed and yet labyrinthine, constructed often within the limits of a representative, and divided, space, does indeed dictate the construction of their narratives – or at least, it seems to dictate them, because, as we shall see, the power of the editing and montage process to override, or recreate, geography is one in which the director delights. If it may seem that in Rivette’s narrative world the place forms the story, it is also true that the story forms the place. But, in any case, the two are co-extensive. What, then, constitutes a narrative place? Although in the course of his films Rivette has naturally experimented with many different locations, including even the open space of the countryside of Northern France in Jeanne la Pucelle, there are certain kinds of spaces which seem particularly suited to Rivette’s quest for the hidden narratives which an alert storyteller can extract from the geographical logic of their surroundings. Here we will be concerned in particular with two examples of such spatial narratives, explored and reexplored by Rivette: firstly the city, and more particularly the city of Paris; secondly the bourgeois house in its many different but comparable forms, all of which speak of a certain conception of family organisation and of the hierarchy of human activity. Both city and house become, in a sense, theatres for Rivette’s mobile performances; but these are theatres

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which contain trace narratives of their own, which determine, or at least inflect, the movements of the actors and offer a pre-­determined script to the performance. It is up to actors and camera – and, ­eventually, the magic architecture of the editing room – to pick a way through the determining space in order to extract from it their own satisfactory tale.

To whom does Paris belong? or The city as plot Rivette’s first feature film is, in this regard, programmatic from its opening. Paris is named and claimed, only for the film credits to end with an epigraph which contradicts the claim and even, perhaps, the name: ‘Paris n’appartient à personne’ (Paris belongs to no-one). Paris, then, is No-Man’s-Land? So is it, precisely because it belongs to no one, a space to be appropriated by the as-yet unseen protagonist, whoever it is to whom we will eventually attribute ‘ownership’ of the cameraeye which has recorded the long tracking shot from a train window entering the Gare d’Austerlitz which is the film’s credit sequence? Or is it something more radically inappropriable, which will impose its own form upon the life of this latest arrival, so that, indeed, it will be ‘the place’ alone which ‘takes place’? Is Paris even to be equated with its places and spaces at all?; is it not more accurately a human entity, an agglomeration of relations between a fluctuating population which belongs to ‘personne’ precisely because it is, existentially, ‘tout le monde’? Paris is one of Rivette’s most quintessential settings, present throughout his work, although its fascination is most evident in the films of the early part of his career, culminating in the comprehensive remapping of the city undertaken in Le Pont du Nord in 1981. Bulle Ogier observed at the time when this last film appeared that ‘Paris est un acteur et, chaque décennie, Jacques se propose de l’introduire dans une fiction’1 (Ogier 1982: 16). The title of Paris nous appartient speaks for itself; the city remains a persistent presence through the ramifications of Out 1 (1971), parts of Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), and Duelle (1976). After le Pont du Nord, the city plays a smaller, but still significant, role in Haut bas fragile (1995), and Va savoir (2001), although its 1 ‘Paris is an actor and, every decade, Jacques decides to introduce it into a story.’

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story as space: space as story   53 choreographic power is less evident in these films. It serves, besides, as a background presence, encircling the more bounded spaces where the action takes place, in several films which explore it very little: and indeed the ‘house within the city’, a small labyrinth within a greater one, is itself a classic Rivettian structure, prominent for example in Céline et Julie (1974), L’Amour par terre (1984), Haut bas fragile (1995) and Rivette’s two most recent films, L’Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) and Ne touchez pas la hache (2007). It is a truism that the French New Wave was characterised, among other things, by the (re)discovery of Paris. Armed with the new lightweight cameras and inspired at once by the street cinema of post-war Italy and by the urban labyrinths of the ubiquitous Hollywood noir thrillers, the young team from Cahiers du cinéma and their colleagues eagerly threw themselves into the service of their city, even if their earliest beginnings were often in the provinces – Les Mistons (Truffaut, 1957) in Nîmes, Le Beau Serge (Chabrol, 1958) in the Creuse, etc. This call of the streets was not an entirely unprecedented impulse – an interesting predecessor can be found in the little-known …Sans laisser d’adresse (Jean-Paul Le Chanois, 1951), by a director who to the Young Turks epitomised the static cinéma de qualité – but it is true that the New Wave directors rapidly appropriated Paris and made it a protagonist in their stories from very early on. The title of Paris nous appartient pre-existed the completed film by some three years and indeed features in Les 400 coups (Truffaut, 1959) as the film which Antoine Doinel and his family opt to go to see. It could, perhaps, be read as a triumphant statement of the new mood in French filmmaking, especially before the completed film threw the city back to its own inalienable sovereignty. The early New Wave films (Les 400 coups, À bout de souffle (Godard, 1960)) circulate in Paris with a kind of excited ease, even if the city finally rejects the protagonists. Antoine and René run riot through streets over which the Tour Eiffel presides by virtue of an opening sequence which circles around it as the fairground whirligig ride circles around its axle. Michel Poiccard confidently takes possession of the Champs Elysées and the other streets he drives through, criticising the architecture, flipping women’s skirts, refuelling himself with news at regular intervals. There are, however, more enquiring visions, such as Agnès Varda’s Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961), whose titular protagonist explores a city which seems almost to change form in response to her preoccupied gaze,

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54  jacques rivette but eventually offers her horizons wide enough to draw her from her solipsism. Rivette’s relationship to the city is decidedly of the enquiring kind. It may be argued that the role he offers it is not so much that of protagonist (as Ogier said) as that of co-narrator, guiding camera, characters and audience through the twists of a story in a relationship frequently characterised by tensions and resistance. If Paris – and whatever it hides – belongs to us/does not belong to us, then we (filmmaker, protagonist, spectator …) can make our own way through it, to lay bare its secrets, or submit to its direction and be drawn into its labyrinth. At times one might be tempted to feel that rather than Paris belonging to the characters, they belong to the city, which directs their movements, offers them refuge and threatens them with indefinable danger. And yet, in another sense, Paris – especially the Paris of Rivette’s first film – is its inhabitants: to explore it is necessarily to negotiate not just its unmoving streets and squares but also its ever-fluctuating human identity, and in the process to become part of it. Thus, rather than a more or less blithe exploitation of the city, Rivette’s stories are of explorers who set out to understand it. He is concerned with maps and with mapping of the city rather than just travelling around it: with making sense of its established maps and the illusion they offer of already ‘owning’ the space, and with reconfiguring those maps in order to take possession of a rewritten tale of the city. Both approaches have their dangers and their particular rewards. For a map is already a kind of spatial narrative, with a commanding storyteller behind it, as underlined by Doreen Massey’s introduction to the concept of mapping: maps … are always the product of particular societies and particular groups of people. They reflect specific ways of thinking; each is designed to serve a specific purpose … no map can show everything – to do so it would have to be as big as, indeed absolutely the same as, the world it represents … So things have to be omitted. And that process of selection tells us something about the society which produced the map. (Massey 1995: 26)

To employ a map is to accept some form of imposed purpose: and use of a pre-existing map comes at the price of abdicating one’s own freedom to choose nodal points and significant events. The process of storytelling on the other hand involves a dynamic remapping of the significant space, and Rivette’s Paris films employ his characters and

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story as space: space as story   55 even more dramatically his camera to precisely that end. A chain of contacts scattered in temporary accommodation around the warrens of the city serve as waymarks in Anne’s paranoid Parisian tale in Paris nous appartient, while Colin in Out 1 plans his journey through the streets according to the texts which he recites as he walks, thus imposing random patterns on the dimensions of geographic space and forcing them to produce events for him. The most important of these magic texts, The Hunting of the Snark, is appropriately a tale of exploration, but its superimposition on the streets of Paris reconfigures the city according to a game of chance. In order to extract the city’s potential secrets, maps have to be jettisoned in favour of play. The more openminded the journey of exploration is, the more rewarding and the less treacherous it will prove to be. The indispensable condition for understanding Paris and its potential for narrative in Rivette’s films is to put oneself, as it were, at the city’s disposition. Any overview, be it of a map or of the city itself, offers only a dangerous illusion of mastery, illustrated with exemplary force by Gérard’s triumphant sweeping gaze over the city from the roof of the Théâtre de la Cité in Paris nous appartient, where the high-angle panoramic shot marks the moment at which he is about to lose all power of narration, either of his theatrical production or of his own life. Moving around and within Paris, in pursuit of a self-determined goal, on the other hand offers the opportunity to construct a map, and to actively reorganise the city space in accordance with a self-generated agenda. Rivette’s main characters thus find their narratives through a process of exploration; and the camera apparently allows itself to be led by their movements just as they are led by the clues thrown up by the city. The caveat, ‘apparently’, is very significant: Rivette’s methods of montage are in fact exercises in recreating the characters’ trajectories according to yet another independent series of priorities, unconstrained by such physical inconveniences as practical times of travel. But these reconfigured journeys are themselves dictated by the logic of the footage which has been shot, and might be described as simply another development of the process of exploration: if a shot of a street in a distant arrondissement flows smoothly into a shot of the Arc de Triomphe, then the geography of the film’s motion logically links them. Rivette in the editing room, then, ultimately plots the city which has been revealed by his actors’ movements through it, according to a process of association dictated both by the immediate flow of the

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56  jacques rivette images, and by visual resonances with whatever obscure and complex quest guided the original exploration. Very different cities may result from such constructions: one might compare, for example, the open, bright, sometimes barren setting of Le Pont du Nord with the dark, predominantly underground world of Duelle, both films which apparently obediently follow highly mobile protagonists on a motivated Parisian journey. Rivette’s city quests frequently start from a simple base: a small, precious object of desire – a cassette in Paris nous appartient, a jewel in Duelle, papers in Haut bas fragile, or a manuscript in Va savoir – or an individual whose whereabouts (e.g. the absconded thief in Out 1), or whose activities ( e.g. Julien in Le Pont du Nord), are unknown. But such apparently straightforward lures soon present ramifications which draw searcher and quarry into the infinitely branching networks of the immense, developing whole which is Paris. The search for one person becomes a search for the story which will explain their movements: the search for a story dictates encounters with other, intersecting stories. And so, already in Paris nous appartient, Anne’s pursuit of the cassette becomes a search for traces of the dead man who made it, and this draws her from one end of the city to another in search of individuals themselves in constant motion, and leads her to alarming encounters with vast and all-pervading urban narratives of terror. Soon, Anne – and by extension we – are no longer seeking for the city’s hidden treasure, but for something much more abstract and impossible to grasp: a meta-story which will motivate and explain it. Such a quest is doomed to failure – and yet, although the network of young outsiders that Anne discovers, existing in the cellular gaps of a city which seems almost oblivious to them, probably do not constitute the powerful ‘organisation’ which her tempters Philip and Terry hint at, they too are an alternative organisation of sorts and in seeking them out Anne finds her way into a Parisian narrative which an official account would never register. On the other hand, the visual economy of Paris nous appartient is constructed in order to map even the architectural face of the city according to Anne’s fantasies of a mysterious controlling power. Thus the ominous presence of the monumental buildings, glimpsed from low angles emphasising their status as commanding landmarks, opens several sequences of the film before the camera slides down and away to focus on its unobtrusive protagonist slipping through the anonymous passageways below

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story as space: space as story   57 them. These dominating structures speak of the established power of the official city: potentially overwhelming to those beneath them, their promise, or threat, of mastery proves a trap for the protagonists, as we have already observed. The connection between the ‘plot’ and the city is even more explicit in Out 1. Colin’s half-magical experiments with enigmatic texts, chance encounters and deductions are from the start a quest for something complex and all-pervading: the ‘Société des 13’, elusive presence in a number of Balzacian narratives, is no simple object of desire but a network of connections which subtends Paris . The film itself teases us with hints that the Thirteen may be seeking to remake the city. One of their number is a lawyer, and thus professionally engaged in its ruling; their mysterious âme damnée, Pierre, is supposedly an architect with aspirations to create an urban ideal; while the two theatre projects recall – one particularly explicitly – a civic theatre with urgent implications for the form of the polis. As the mysterious group of friends begin to seek to contact each other, they converge at a series of rendez-vous points in the corners of central Paris, just decentred with regard to the landmarks of civic power: at the bottom of the steps of the Palais de Justice, on a terrace with a view of the Eiffel Tower (probably the old Bibliothèque du Film in the avenue Albert de Mun), under the bridge of the Île des Cygnes; points at once central and marginal. The action of the Thirteen, despite their putative position, is as ineffectual as are Colin’s attempts to prove the group’s existence and make it significant. Both Anne and Colin, apparently aided by a complicit camera, attempt to reveal a network of influence stretching across the city, and in so doing to forge it, or force it, into a story. But such tantalising possibilities of understanding evaporate, lost in the complexity of a city which offers other aspects, other angles, other connections which cannot be accounted for in the desired perfect narrative grid. Rivette’s Paris is not amenable to order, and to seek it is to find oneself unprepared for new and unexpected developments. There is an alternative to such driven enterprises, which is the quest to locate and make use of specific kinds of spaces within the city. These dynamic journeys, contrary to the narratives mentioned above, imply no end to the process of exploration and reformulation: they seek not an ultimate goal but a potentially infinite series of way stations, their only direction sign is their immediate surroundings and their condition of existence is continuous movement. Thus in

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58  jacques rivette Paris nous appartient the theatre group circulates according to the availability of suitable rehearsal spaces, discovering and adopting a number of potential open ‘stages’ hidden between streets and within buildings. The peripatetic rehearsal, despite its precarious existence, maintains its status as a living creative force so long as it remains in motion and in development, constantly reinventing itself in response to new surroundings and changing distribution of resources. When it is drawn into one central dedicated space, and instead of a series of temporary expedients the actors are concentrated towards a precise and identifiable end, the enterprise, and its prime mover, dies – only to be reborn in extremis, outside the city. In the early stages of Out 1, Frédérique and Colin pass from one café to another, cafés being the places where their particular forms of scam can most easily bear fruit; as we can see if we scrutinise the glimpses offered of the streets outside, they visit many different areas of the city, and there seems no need to assume a limit to the variety or the potential of their experience. The Baptiste of Le Pont du Nord begins her assault on the city by moving from one stone lion to another, developing a notional itinerary around the lions of Paris. To film the progress of these journeys, Rivette employs a restlessly mobile camera which yet submits to the magnetic attraction of whatever temporary centre of its narrative universe it has arrived at, circling rapidly around the pivotal object (as in the case of Baptiste’s lions) or moving to and fro within the bounds of the space. From the early 1970s until Le Pont du Nord such magnetised movement is characteristically hand-held, and its jerky nature further emphasises the temporary bond between camera and physical space. Quests such as these offer an exciting possibility of infinite development, but the cost of their perpetual movement is precisely the lack of any satisfactory narrative; as if inevitably, the protagonists are drawn out of their perpetual motion in pursuit of present enjoyment by the promise of a purpose more direct and satisfactory, an object, illusory or not, which when found will bring resolution. The play is meant to be performed, Baptiste to defeat her elusive enemy, ‘les Max’, Colin to discover the truth about the Thirteen and their city – and when these things are achieved, there will be no more need for exploration. The pursuit of a narrative within Paris closes the characters’ minds to all aspects of the city which are not that narrative. The narrative form of many of Rivette’s films contrasts the potential for constant exploratory movement, and thus infinite narration, through protean, mysterious

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story as space: space as story   59 spaces which conceal an ever-circulating or infinitely reproducible object of desire, with the threat of stasis, sometimes, as in Duelle, equated specifically with possession of the most obvious elusive object, sometimes with perception of the hopelessness of the quest for it, but always encountered in the midst of the labyrinth. In the Rivettian remapping of Paris hope depends on dynamic movement, and for that movement to continue, the protagonist’s seeking can never translate into definitive finding. Neither can the free exploration of the city settle into a rigid, hierarchical arrangement of ‘significant’ and ‘insignificant’ places, such as are implied, for example, by Augé’s description of lieux de mémoire (Augé 1992: 71); for this would correspond to a definitive, single narrative, which as we have seen is at most a desired illusion which brings only terror and disappointment. The challenge then is to present a topography of the city which is dynamic, ever-debatable, un-fixed; a way of offering all its elements equally for constant potential relabelling. In Rivette’s most dynamic topographies places draw their significance not from the past (mémoire), but from the present (physical formation, force of attraction to characters and camera) or, in the exceptional case of Le Pont du Nord, from a combination of present, potential future, and a mythical, indefinite past which overlays a present and future Paris with the connotations of a largely imaginary space and time. This is not, however, to say that the city of Rivette’s films becomes a non-lieu in Augé’s sense: the identity of places is frequently concealed or subverted, but their singularity and force of connotation is on the contrary enhanced by their presentness. The arched upper storeys and rooftops of the Haussmannian buildings which form a persistent visual refrain to Paris nous appartient may not be precisely identifiable, but they are unmistakably and iconically Parisian, and their elegant form is as suggestive of the power and stability of the city as their number and repetitiveness is of the warren of forgotten lives they conceal. The stone lions which Baptiste pursues through the city in Le Pont du Nord, although all identifiable, are rarely clearly identified, and there is little to be gained from treating them as a visual puzzle: their evocative power comes rather from their stony feline majesty, protective or threatening. The function of spaces is rarely connected to their named identity, and it is frequently a challenge to identify even quite central places: Frédérique’s peregrinations around the place de la Bastille in Out 1 show only glimpses of the base of the famous

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60  jacques rivette column, the grilles of the Bassin de l’Arsenal and anonymous street furniture. In fact the self-conscious use of landmarks which reinforce the official identity of the city is, as we have already suggested, a warning signal in Rivette’s cinema: their fixity and arrogance offer, as often as not, either delusion or oppression for those characters drawn to them. Rivette’s Paris is thus, ideally, a potentially infinite agglomeration of possible places, the significance of which we do not yet know, any of which may be selected as a temporary or permanent nodal point for a new, unique history. Rivette’s free explorations of the city reveal unexpected connections which spring from the nature of the places he visits, including recognisable monuments of the ‘official’ itinerary. Thus the Lion de Belfort becomes just one – albeit the largest and the most striking – of Baptiste’s sculpted lions, while the golden statue at the Porte Dorée, in Out 1, can figure one of the fabulous Warriors at the Gates of Thebes or a guardian of some archetypal city. When Marie/Hermine Kharagheuz is framed just beside and below this figure, the mingling of text and image, actress and character, the plan of the city and the plot of play and film, becomes indistinguishable; actress and statue are, interchangeably, representations of each other, part of the permanent cityscape and part of the temporary, present telling (or retelling) of a story which here briefly achieves a mythical atemporality. Not only the landmarks and monuments of the city but names themselves can be stripped of their official identity to become pure form: thus, in Out 1, the ‘Place Sainte-Opportune’ is elected by Colin and by Rivette as an incarnation of the power of chance. And so, gracefully but firmly, Rivette’s films abrogate to themselves, through the mediation of their explorer-protagonists, the power to locate suitable points and to confer significance on them. Rivette’s explorations of Paris are typically composed of long, fluid tracking shots which both allow the characters to lead the camera and engage with their movements in varied circling reminiscent of a dance. These give the impression that the process of exploration is character-led, but also that progress is neither simple nor linear, and when the tracking shots are subsequently connected, as we have mentioned, it is the film director alone who claims the privilege of reconnecting the space and constructing the characters’ Paris for them. He imposes, as it were, upon the exploring character the newly-configured city which is the fruit of their exploration. Such reconstructions are by no means constrained by actual geography: Rivette has found in the

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varied requirements of his narratives and the potential of editing a way to liberate himself and the city from the imposed narrative of its own map, and as he told Cahiers du cinéma: Il y a quelque chose que j’adore … c’est faire communiquer des lieux qui, dans la réalité, sont aux deux bouts. Truquer Paris en faisant faire aux personnages des trajets et des sauts complètement aberrants d’un endroit à l’autre. Jouer sur la vraie géographie pour faire de fausses topographies et parfois l’inverse. (Rivette 1981: 11)2

To thus reconstitute the free flow of characters’ movements, however, is also, in a different way, to impose a narrative on the city, and to constrain post facto the apparent free exploration of a city of infinite potential, fixing the characters in the filmmaker’s own grid. In Rivette’s most unusual and most detailed record of Paris, Le Pont du Nord, this process is not only exemplified but also, I would argue, becomes an object of attention. While the early parts of le Pont du Nord are characterised by apparently free movement, tracking potentially infinite itineraries as two characters seek for what they feel they need from the city space, the film develops in a different direction with the introduction of a printed map, albeit one of most unusual form: the board of a jeu de l’oie. At this point it is no longer the features of the city but the map of Paris itself which becomes pure form, reframed and redefined through its approximation to another similar one, which offers a topography of the imagination and its array of half-formed threats and terrors. The jeu de l’oie board charts places which have significance because something WILL happen in them, because they represent the tangible, spatial form of a subjective, psychological and permanent danger. It could be described as the chart of a mythical journey, and its nodal points, imposed by a collective symbology, contain hidden disasters (the significant squares are all dangers) which belong neither to past or future – or to both past and future – since they are repeated unchanging from game to game. The appearance of the jeu de l’oie in Le Pont du Nord offers the most developed example in Rivette’s work of the superimposition of spatial narratives. The abortive quest for an elusive thief at the Gates of Paris, carried out by the cast of Seven Against Thebes in Out 1 and 2 ‘Something which I adore … is making connections between places which, in reality, are poles apart. Inventing Paris by letting characters make completely impossible journeys and jumps from one place to another. Playing with real geography to create false topographies and sometimes vice versa.’

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62  jacques rivette also co-ordinated by means of a real city map, offers a tentative step in this direction, but here the superimposition is ineffective: the thief does not appear at the gates precisely because he has remained in the city, the seekers having selected the wrong narrative thread as a clue to their quest. The game board, however, proves eerily effective in drawing Marie and Baptiste onwards. The effect of its intrusion into the narrative and its ‘interpretation’ of the city space marks a disturbing change in the film’s movement. It imposes, progressively, on a story which was developing freely the constraints of a pre-existent, ineluctable ‘plot’. Until they discover it, Marie and Baptiste are characterised by movement through a city consisting primarily of linking spaces; they come upon significant points in the course of their wanderings, or fix them arbitrarily, and they move great distances (within the first day they practically circle Paris). In the second part the archetypal map takes over, and more and more the two women find themselves stationary, waiting – if not literally imprisoned – in single designated places, ‘generated’ by the coincidence of game board and map. They are entangled in the plot of the game as if in a spider’s web, something to which the rudimentary board bears a superficial resemblance, and of which the fibrous material used to imprison Baptiste is a literal version, on a human scale. The ‘plot’ of the jeu de l’oie belongs neither to the protagonists nor to the city nor to any individual; on the contrary, it carries with it, by implication, the authority of an undateable tradition and perhaps the seal of the collective unconscious. It is worth a slight digression here to explain the significance of this game, which is often described for English readers as an equivalent of Snakes and Ladders. The two have in common the mode of play (counters, squares, dice, a journey from Start to Finish) and universal familiarity to every child within the culture, but the jeu de l’oie contains more complex hazards. It is played on a spiral board which is quite similar in form to the map of Parisian arrondissements, providing an immediate visual link between real and symbolic geography when the two maps are superimposed. The goose-game spiral contains 63 squares, eight of which constitute hazards. Five of the hazards bear names which situate them spatially, as if on the map of an imaginary city, and it is these which Rivette has explicitly retained: the Bridge (squares 6 and 12, an ambiguous feature which acts as ladder or snake depending which end you land on), the Tavern (19), the Well (31), the Maze (42) and the Prison (52).

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story as space: space as story   63 All the hazards which Rivette has retained, except the Bridge, are dangers for a player because they involve not retreat but stasis – you wait on them for variously two or three turns or until another player joins or overtakes you. The jeu de l’oie can easily be seen as a symbolic mapping of life, with its programmed – but avoidable – encounters with confinement, complexity, comfort, death and the depths of ‘the Well’, and indeed a Centre expérimental de recherches de psychologie collective exists (or existed in 2001) in Montpellier, entirely devoted to the philosophical implications of the game (see Fralon 2001). The fascination of the game’s ever-renewable narrative is already, of course, ensured by the way that it converts psychological anxieties into an appropriate physical form: its collective, semi-official incarnation of the dream-work lies behind Marie/Ogier’s description of it as ‘un jeu qui fait très peur’ (a very frightening game). When that evocative imagery meets, and merges with, the solid reality of Parisian space and the potential for real danger which it holds, the fascination, and the fear, are immensely increased, and it is at least arguable that they provide a temptation which may lead protagonists and spectators into fatal error. Further, when Marie and Baptiste abandon their fate in Paris to the game board, they effectively surrender to a pre-determined and inevitable narrative. Both they and the spectator begin to project the unfolding of the plot according to a pre-programmed form, as if they were the latest incarnation of a universal story. What lies within the Parisian spaces is a potential for absolute danger, abstracted from the contingent (hi)stories of the characters and of the city and projected into an uncertain future by the audience’s anticipation. The real historical turbulence of the 1970s in which Marie has been involved, elsewhere, is brought into this mythical space as if to give form to the forces of danger, rather as real places give form to the symbols of the game board. Marie’s terrorist antecedents are the supposed reason why she is being watched and apparently pursued, but the invisible potential for disaster is not merely imputable to these dramas, it is inseparable from, and immanent in, the city/game; the jeu de l’oie imposes on the map of the city its mystery of an everrepeated, indefinable mythical past. That said, it also imposes a collective childishness, drawn from the associations most French audiences would make with a game played on childhood evenings or an abandoned box at the bottom of the toy cupboard. This programmed narrative could also be ludic

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64  jacques rivette and transient, without consequence. After all, the correspondence of Rivette’s physical Paris with the mythical one he draws over it is suspect from the start. When we try to trace the actual topography of the journey in part II, the game-board map proves completely inaccurate, with the single exception of the ‘final’ square, the Pont. One may feel, as a spectator, that this is hardly material – we do not as a rule follow the film with map in hand, and only the most dedicated connoisseur of Paris would notice Rivette’s reconstruction of the city. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the process was important to Rivette himself. The audience, unless they are exceptionally alert and observant, is likely to be misled by Rivette’s reformulation of geography, and submit to the impression that city and board hold overall command of the form of the narrative; but it might perhaps behove us to be wary of Rivette’s determinism. In fact, he has made of Paris what he wished it to be, for his own purposes, and incidentally himself constrained it into the apparently perfectly appropriate game plot – while, at the same time, manipulating the game plot the better to suit the interests of his narrative. Le Pont du Nord opens in the extreme south of the city (the first central point is the place DenfertRochereau in the 14th ), ends in the extreme north and in between circles Paris in an anticlockwise spiral movement (the direction of the jeu de l’oie, incidentally) which runs from Denfert to the rue LedruRollin to an unobtrusive square in the 9th (place Gustave Toudouze), to the pont Bir-Hakeim to the place Monge to the quai de Jemmappes, before attaching itself to the fragile extremities of the old railway. For almost its whole length it favours a marginal Paris, on the edge of the city and, more and more as the film goes on, at the extreme edge of its own existence, in the course of demolition. The only ‘landmark’, the Arc de Triomphe, is as we have seen merely a place of betrayal, quickly abandoned; and when the game board comes to be applied to the map of Paris, the centre is immediately cancelled out, expelled from the putative myth and attributed no narrative potential – while in the geography of the jeu de l’oie proper, the centre is the final square, the goal and the end of the game. With this act, Rivette is not only manipulating Parisian geography to match the needs of his game but manipulating the game plan to match his own preferences, and thus the film asserts a real liberty from any form of externally imposed narrative. But that liberty is asserted outside the diegesis, through the activities of an omnipotent editor (and even this choice was the result

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story as space: space as story   65 of another sort of constraint: it was the need for inexpensive locations that took the film into the urban wastelands of a city in the throes of demolition, creating an atmosphere both profoundly disturbing and paradoxically liberating which epitomises the tensions in our reception of this film). Rivette’s narrative freedom with respect to the jeu de l’oie is not shared by the characters. In the early sequences, while the immediately familiar streets are revealed newly by the particular obsessions of the two characters, film and characters alike discover an exhilaratingly unfamiliar, dynamic city of unknown significance. Of Baptiste’s lions, Duras observes that ‘on ne savait pas qu’il y en avait une armée’ (Rivette 1982: 15);3 neither are we accustomed, necessarily, to the urgent awareness of closure and openness which Marie brings to negotiating the city’s spaces. Rivette’s decisions with regard to his characters not only allow us, but oblige us, to traverse Paris anew, and to interpret it in fresh ways. With the arrival of the jeu de l’oie, however, the film’s reading of the city begins to change. Up to this point, Marie and Baptiste have been undirected wanderers in the maze of Paris, whose personal mapping of the city is still in process. Paris takes form for each of them as they discover those places which have sense to them; as previously mentioned, the emphasis is on movement, and they cover an immense amount of ground. The jeu de l’oie turns them into willing pieces on the board and allows them, up to a point, to programme their travels according to a pre-arranged system: their wanderings acquire sense and structure, but at the same time the film’s dynamic changes. More and more the centre of interest shifts from linking channels to nodal points, from movement to stasis, and the whole of Day Four is spent in one place, literally ‘the end of the line’. Even if the game narrative is programmed only up to a point, since unlike the players of a real jeu de l’oie they can still move freely to the destination of their choice, their freedom of movement progressively decreases. From exploration of streets and squares, their use of linking channels is progressively restricted to one, the abandoned Ceinture railway which once ran from the Bastille through Reuilly to join the Petite Ceinture and eventually reach the canal junction of La Villette. Once on the rails, their destination is inevitable, and that destination is not only the Bridge – as it appears 3 ‘we didn’t know there was an army of them’

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66  jacques rivette on the superimposed map and as the two women believe it to be – but also the unvisited and terrifying ‘Well’ and even the unlocated final danger of the game board, ‘Death’. Thus the revelation (however unreliable or even frivolous it may in fact be) of an underlying ‘game plan’ brings about a fracturing and dissociation in the film. The squares of the game impose themselves on the open city as nodes of concentrated, magnetic intensity, and streets, staircases, railways become means of getting from one to another, before they finally disappear altogether. The rhythm of the film similarly changes from a free-flowing stream of time and movement to an alternation between major significant incidents and briefer accounts of the connections between them, until we reach the long final scene at the canal junction, where the grimmest part of old Paris is in the process of destruction and replacement with something new, powerful and inexplicable. One could say that the defining cinematic principle gradually changes from the tracking shot – continuous, mobile, unselective – to a montage of privileged moments, connected by ever briefer indications of the journeys between them, and in that sense, at the moment when ‘it all connects’, the city becomes ever more ‘disjointed’. The plot of the myth/map needs only certain stations on the journey, where previously any street corner might potentially hold a significant clue to a narrative in the process of formation. René Prédal has commented on Rivette’s aversion to the process of montage: ‘trop de montages … canalisent cet élan vital qu’il faut au contraire préserver, dont il faut favoriser la communication sans jamais l’endiguer’4 (Prédal 1995: 385); on the other hand it is the principal site of his directorial work, as several of his closest collaborators have made clear,5 and we have already seen that his manipula 4 ‘too much montage … canalises this vital movement which on the contrary needs to be preserved, whose communication must be encouraged and never restricted’ 5 For example Juliet Berto, in the pressbook for Céline et Julie: ‘son principal travail de mise en scène se fait chez lui au montage: c’est là où il organise l’action désordonnée de ses marionnettes’ (‘his main directing work was done at home during the editing stage: that’s where he organises the disorderly action of his puppets’) (Berto 1974), or Ogier in the same site: ‘L’acteur organise son rôle à partir d’un schéma: travail d’improvisation jusqu’aux limites du désespoir … C’est à Rivette, ensuite, de mettre en place le puzzle du montage’(‘The actor works out her role according to a schema: an exercise in improvisation to

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story as space: space as story   67 tion of Paris creates false communications, and effectively makes his exploration of the city a montage which hides teasingly behind the appearance of a tracking shot. Prédal’s remark is particularly interesting in that it equates montage with stasis, or at least restriction of movement, a parallel which is made explicit in the construction of Le Pont du Nord. Each point that the women travel to proves a potential threat of entrapment, like the ‘hazard squares’ in the jeu de l’oie; and although the two women seek them out as if they promised understanding, their most urgent preoccupation once arrived is generally to depart as quickly as possible. Nonetheless the movement becomes progressively more joltingly slow. It is deeply ironic that when at last they do stick, it is at the Bridge, the one significant square on the jeu de l’oie board whose name promises movement and continuous passage, and that for Marie (who has set herself a single objective and thus is ‘playing to win’ her reunion with Julien) the stasis is permanent and corresponds precisely to her goal – it is Julien who meets her and shoots her. Thus, as in Duelle, to obtain the object of desire, to conclude the quest, is to meet with death. The ‘Pont du Nord’ sequence, in fact, collapses and compresses the metaphor of the game board, accumulating the symbolic charge of several of its squares at once: the Bridge, the Well, Death and the obliterated centre. The ‘Pont du Nord’ is not, of course, the name of this modest footbridge across the lock, although it’s a good description of it, but of a well-known folk song, in which the titular bridge collapses under the weight of the dancers that have gathered on it; a place of contradictory meanings, a passage which is a temptation to linger, a place of pleasure which becomes a place of death. For Marie, the Pont du Nord represents the final point of stasis, the end of the story, the centre square which had previously been so hopefully obliterated, since ‘Seul le mouvement vaut d’être vécu – et donc montré – tandis que le point final est toujours arrêt de mort’ (Prédal 1995: 389).6 For Baptiste, dancing on the bridge with Max, there is no such certainty. Perhaps after all this ritual motion is a way to negotiate a the edge of despair … It’s then up to Rivette to put the jigsaw of the montage together’). A number of Rivette’s films were released in short and long versions; the director has stated that in these cases the process of re-editing was not a mere shortening but a full reformulation of the story. 6 ‘Movement alone is worth living – and therefore showing – while the end-point is always a death sentence.’

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68  jacques rivette passage into the freedom of the city; perhaps she has simply lost sight of the personal narrative of rebellion which carried her through the streets on her arrival, and accepted the inimical restrictions which she has been rebelling against. The intercalated barred shots, which we cannot but read as gunsights, seem to confirm only too clearly her vulnerability both to confinement and to lurking menace. On the side of optimism, it is as well to recall that in the language of the jeu de l’oie, the square called Death implies not disqualification but going back to start; and that a process of destruction and regeneration has been prominent throughout the film, and incarnated in the body of the Paris which is presented to us. For even though the film’s itinerary eschews lieux de mémoire, nonetheless the Paris of Pont du Nord, more than in any other of Rivette’s films, does appear as the image and trace of the past, visible in its battered topography and crumbling architecture. This is not the monumental, carefully-preserved, recorded past of official history however; rather, the destroyed slums of La Villette, or the deserted ‘Auberge de la Pomme d’Or’, represent the obscure turbulence of the quartiers populaires of Eastern Paris, just as Marie represents a more recent period of rumbling violence. Rivette captures these places at the moment of their cancellation; abandoned and fallen into disrepair, their significance forgotten, the very traces of their existence are about to be obliterated. In the final sequence, Marie’s suppression and implicit replacement by Baptiste perhaps parallels the process of destruction and construction exercised on the city. If we accept the implications of the universal narrative superimposed by the game board on both the map of the city and the tale of the characters, then one may perhaps assume that the replacement of one particular set of buildings by another, as of one particular character by another, will make little difference: the game will be replayed. And yet the fatalistic acceptance of external narrative should not be taken for granted. Meanings are fluid rather than fixed, and the squares of the board change and meld into each other. We end with a dance, which is also a fight, on a bridge which is also a Well into which the unlucky or the overdependent on narrative may fall, in the midst of demolition which is also reconstruction. Rivette suspends judgement, both with regard to the story and with regard to the city; even though, in this particular film the addition of the gunsight shots make of this open ending/beginning a very uneasy promise indeed. But those shots were apparently a matter of chance – they actually repre-

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story as space: space as story   69 sent a malfunction of the camera which Rivette elected to keep. It is as if Rivette elected, in the final moments, to decide the outcome of this hinge moment between past and future on a throw of the dice … if so, then in this film the dice came down for danger, even if it seems to threaten the supposed ‘Max’ as much as his putative pupil. In later films, La Bande des quatre, and even more in Haut bas fragile, the danger will once again be turned aside, dismissed with the victory of the dancers and the discomfiture of all who seek to control the city and the plot. Rivette’s Paris still belongs to no one.

Within these walls : Rivette’s houses Variously large, rambling and mysterious houses are at least as omnipresent in the director’s filmic history as is Paris. Appearing significantly first in Out 1 – where it acts as an explicit alternative to the city – the house recurs as a principal location in Céline et Julie, Merry-Go-Round, La Bande des quatre, L’Amour par terre, Secret Défense, La Belle Noiseuse, Haut bas fragile, L’Histoire de Marie et Julien and Ne touchez pas la hache, thereby establishing itself as the essential setting for the second part of Rivette’s career much as the city, perhaps, characterises the first: Evelyne Jardonnet identifies it as the ‘expression privilégiée’ (favoured expression) of the interaction between Rivette’s characters and the place they are filmed in, eclipsing even Paris in significance (Jardonnet 2006: 235) . The two are not in fact separable, however: the house, a small, relatively confined space defined by its outer shell as a building within a wider landscape, establishes by its position a certain relationship to the city space. It may be drastically separate from it, as in Out 1, Merry-Go-Round, La Bande des quatre, La Belle Noiseuse or Secret Défense where the characters must make a substantial journey in search of the alternative environment it offers. It may be contained organically within it, like Do’s mother’s house in Va savoir or – perhaps most interestingly – the vast, multidimensional labyrinths which make up the private domains of the aristocrats of Ne touchez pas la hache; or it may occupy an ambiguous space, apparently within the city’s confines but substantially separate from it, as in Céline et Julie, L’Amour par terre, Haut bas fragile or Marie et Julien. Consistently, however, the characteristic of the interior of the house is to contrast with the city: once past the threshold wherever it may be,

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70  jacques rivette the new arrival enters an autonomous world, as labyrinthine as the outer one but in which the coordinates which apply to the outer world are no longer valid. Whether they offer refuge, temptation or danger, to enter the house is to withdraw, or be sequestrated, from the polis. At times, the house seems to take over a whole film and swallow up its protagonists, becoming a ‘cosmos’ (as Bachelard would have it) from which the ‘outside’ is debarred, to characters and audience alike. And sometimes, its dynamic will draw protagonist and narrator inwards, towards a notional centre – increasingly in later films, a single, often mysteriously located, room – which promises hidden treasure (Ugo’s lost Goldoni manuscript, in Va savoir) or some even more universal fulfilment: a repeated death in Marie et Julien, an erotic consummation in Ne touchez pas la hache. It will not be surprising to discover that such prospects of closure represent not catharsis but deathtraps for Rivette, spaces of potential obsession which films and characters alike must persistently be impelled to sidestep: a new life can only be found outside the doors, in the city. Only in Marie et Julien does the house itself offer a possible setting for a new beginning. For another contrast between the house and the city is that while the latter allows a certain freedom to those who circulate in it – the city is a space impossible to map comprehensively, and therefore endlessly available for remapping – the house is typically planned and fixed in advance, and is more likely to trap protagonists than to protect them, unless they can find some means of evading its constraints. In fact, Rivette’s films never allow themselves to be entirely swallowed up, although the protagonists may, as we shall see – rather the houses become the site of an alternative fictional world, usually a structured and conventional, not to say rigid, one, which protagonists have to negotiate in order to affirm their own liberty. What is a house when it enters into the realm of fiction? For Gaston Bachelard, the house is the geographical centre of our psyche, the spatial organisation of our first remembered world, and first and foremost a shelter, a place of security, a more complex version of the maternal womb where we can ‘dream in peace’, since ‘quand, dans la nouvelle maison, reviennent les souvenirs des anciennes demeures, nous allons au pays de l’Enfance Immobile, immobile comme l’Immémorial’ (Bachelard 1957: 25).7 The house, any house, 7 ‘when, in the new house, memories of former dwellings recur, we go to the Land of Childhood Immobile, immobile like the Immemorial’

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story as space: space as story   71 contains an implicit map of the past which extends into the present, unproblematically, reassuringly. On the other hand, the house, as Françoise Puaux described it in the opening of an article on the domestic melodramas and ‘Gothic’ chillers produced by the classic Hollywood cinema of the 1940s, provides a map which is anything but sheltering: ‘the home, that powerful motor [embrayeur] of fiction, is in fact nothing less than the setting-up of a whole symbolic system, a whole poetic. From the mansion to the isolated villa, the house, a feminine element and an institution of power, is a menacing figure for whoever attempts to penetrate its secrets’ (Puaux 1995: 34). For Mikhail Bakhtin, the quintessentially Gothic private space of the castle is a unique combination of time and space, a chronotope to use his term, and his description of it can easily be extended to encompass certain elements of the house (an Englishman’s home is, after all, his castle, and as we shall see so may a Frenchman’s be): ‘the traces of centuries and generations are arranged in it in visible form as various parts of its architecture, in furnishings, weapons, the ancestral portrait gallery, the family archives and in the particular human relationships involving dynastic primacy and the transfer of hereditary rights’ (Bakhtin 1981: 246). Bakhtin’s castle, of course, was the space of predilection for romantic Gothic novels, just as Puaux’s description of the house referred to the later, more domesticated Gothic world of Hollywood melodrama; many of Rivette’s narratives do indeed pay homage to this coded world and its mysteries, albeit usually with a wary distance which brings his houses and their narratives into direct contrast with a sceptical and less constrained modernity. Despite their vast difference in emotional resonance, Bachelard and Puaux at first glance agree on two central features: firstly, the house is a feminine element; secondly, and in apparent contradiction with this, it is a spatial representation of power (and here they rejoin Bakhtin). Bachelard, in the midst of his nostalgia, notes that ‘Dans ce théâtre du passé qu’est notre mémoire, le décor maintient les personnages dans leur rôle dominant …’ (Bachelard 1957  : 27)8 and, later, that the childhood home enshrines ‘la chambre, la salle où ont régné les êtres dominants’ (Bachelard 1957  : 32: my italics).9 This hierarchical identification of certain spaces with certain people makes 8 ‘In that theatre of the past which is our memory, the set maintains the characters in their dominant role’ 9 ‘the bedroom, the room where the dominant beings ruled’

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72  jacques rivette of the arrangement of rooms in a house a translation into bricks and mortar of the organisation of the family which occupies it, implicitly a bourgeois and traditional one; and thus the perception of the house as the domain of the feminine is counteracted by its perpetuation of a patriarchal structure, all the more significant, as Nowell-Smith has observed (Nowell-Smith 1977: 115), in that the house is frequently the paternal inheritance, symbol of economic power and token of its transmission. In fact, Bachelard’s feminisation of the house as womb makes of it a space dedicated to the centrality of the (male) child, for whom – and eventually for whom alone – it is a performative space. Other interpretations of the femininity of the house give this phrase a different interpretation, as we shall see. On the other hand, for both Bachelard and Bakhtin (and many others, in various theoretical and poetic formations) the house/castle stands as a solid manifestation of the personal past, enshrined and fixed in the organisation of its rooms and of the objects within them, and in the associations which it reactivates, willy-nilly, in those who pass through it. Rivette’s many houses could be said to encapsulate these ambiguities. They are menacing and sheltering, feminine and paternal, sites of dispute between past and future, order and disturbance, and most of all sites of disputed narratives. Certainly, Rivettian houses are a polyvalent element – their implications and connotations are many and their function may vary from fiction to fiction. Much of this discussion relates directly to work on the domestic space in the context of the family melodrama. In this context, when the house has been described as the domain of the feminine, it is usually in the sense of a stage for playing out dramas associated with female sexuality and power and even a potential site of female power (as Ines Hedges describes the house in Duras’s film Nathalie Granger – a ‘performative space’, where the women can take control and through which they can express their identity (Hedges 1991: 98–100)), rather than the womb-like incarnation of maternal protection for the male child which Bachelard proposes. However, I shall argue that the house in Rivette’s films is in most, although not quite all, cases a male space in dispute. The house is implicitly or explicitly a male property, invested by a ‘master’, and it forms and commands a regressive melodrama which continually re-establishes a hierarchy of inevitable roles. His protagonists, almost always women, enter this space from the outside with the potential to disrupt the story contained

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story as space: space as story   73 within it, but a successful disruption depends in most cases not on re-conquering the space of the house but in leaving it. The penalty for remaining is to find themselves trapped in a space which they cannot perform, but which performs them. This structure, of course, informs much of the literary canon of Gothic melodramatic fiction. The woman who enters the great house as an outsider, uninvolved in the patriarchal process of inheritance and possession, and whose presence reveals some dysfunction in the dynastic order which might potentially disrupt it, but which generally engineers either her own destruction or her successful co-option into a corrected domestic narrative, is a very familiar framework: cf. most obviously Jane Eyre. The resolution of the classic Gothic tale which restores the house to its position as performing space in a masculine world can hardly be expected to be satisfactory for a director like Rivette, with his profound aversion to narrative closure or physical stasis: nonetheless, the solution usually proposed is escape from too constraining a space rather than a dangerous attempt to reappropriate something so vast and weighed down with implications. How then does Rivette map this traditional and potentially repressive space? I would like to look at the way in which Rivette uses this recurring theme with relation to three particular aspects of the rich set of meanings associated with the house. Firstly, there is the way in which the internal arrangement of Rivette’s houses expresses a pre-written hierarchical domestic narrative. This aspect of the architecture of the traditional bourgeois house has been extensively discussed by Richard Etlin (Etlin 1994). Etlin demonstrates how a carefullydesigned pattern of designated spaces for display, for intimacy and for work (assigned to male and female, to master and servant), formed the skeleton, not merely of a web of power relations but of a domestic narrative structure, within which the developing Gothic melodrama could easily insert a further, innermost layer of ‘retreat’ to house the rejected, the hidden and the uncontainable – the madwoman in the attic, the skeleton in the cupboard. In Rivette’s films it does indeed seem that the geography of the rooms imposes itself on the characters, forcing them to accept certain patterns of behaviour and at the same time luring them towards a hidden centre which threatens (or promises) not only immobility but invisibility. Rivette’s houses are furthermore so hermetically self-contained that their isolation acts as a further guarantor for the secretion of whatever lies at the deepest

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74  jacques rivette level. More often than not, the house stands alone as guardian of its secret centre – in an iconically typical case repeated in film after film, isolated among vegetation like the castle of Sleeping Beauty. Secondly, there is the house as the concrete, exterior expression of a power structure in the wider social arena, the sign of wealth and social position. This is the house which also constitutes a form in which wealth and power can be transferred, the legacy which the father hands on to his heirs – or, in less fortunate circumstances, may perhaps be forced to sell to his associates and competitors thus ‘disinheriting’ the family. This figure of ‘my father’s house’ recurs in a number of Rivette’s films – the shadowy father being frequently absent from the screen but rarely from the story, even if his activities have aroused suspicion which put his significance in jeopardy. In these circumstances, the house may become not so much the possession as the representative of the father, standing in for him and affirming his influence. This vision of the house is the central motif of Secret Défense and Merry-Go-Round; in the latter case the errant father has left not one but three houses as vestiges of his existence. In Haut bas fragile it undergoes an interesting diversion, in that, while traces of an absent father haunt Louise’s new life in a hotel in Paris, the house she inherits comes to her laterally and through the female line, and rather than imposing her father’s presence on her it offers her a refuge both from his invasive telephone calls and from the private eye he hires to follow her. The latter is only permitted over the threshold once he no longer represents paternal surveillance. But nonetheless, Louise does not stay in her inheritance, and her final declaration of independence from her father and all he stands for is made in a bare hotel room, devoid of all connection to her family or her past. Thirdly, there is that function of the house which we find in Bachelard: the house as the repository and concrete form of the past and of memory. However the secure, womb-like nostalgia of Bachelard’s vision is rarely appropriate to Rivette’s female outsiders. In fact, when they discover their past preserved in the domestic labyrinths they enter, it is a past imprinted with the power plays described above, in which their investment is already tantamount to entrapment. For the personal past enshrined in these spaces, and still repeatedly present – ‘the land of Childhood Immobile’ – is not immobile in Rivette’s imagination, but active and performative; a narrative and not a state. The concrete fabric and the furniture of the house contains, as it

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story as space: space as story   75 were, directives for actions previously performed among them and for which they were designed – the house is the assurance of the continuance of past histories into the present and future. That the power of such past histories is not dependent on inheritance or even personal investment in the space – or at least not in a simple sense – can be easily seen in the way that the house of Céline et Julie not only draws the protagonists into its performance but presents links with Julie’s childhood memories as compelling as they are ambiguous. Naturally, Rivette brings these various factors into play not to reinforce but to subvert conventional narratives, even when protagonists find themselves unable to evade those narratives. I suggest that there are three principal groups of ‘house films’ in Rivette’s œuvre. Firstly, there are those which employ more or less explicitly the concept of ‘my father’s house’, the house inheritance, in entering which the protagonist must directly confront her own past and the atavistic reflexes it has left in her. Secondly, there are those which take the protagonist or protagonists into a strange house where the dramas replayed seem not to concern her, and she is an outsider but also a possible successor to one of the roles which the drama demands. And thirdly, there are those which offer the house with an unspecified charge of connotations to a number of protagonists, to occupy and adapt as best they may, imposing their own dramas on the old structures according to a different concept of ‘family’ and hierarchy, reorganising the spaces, renegotiating the communications between them. The four films which will be looked at in detail are exemplary of each of these three patterns, although there are as many variations as there are houses in Rivette’s films. There are common factors in all these examples, however. In all cases the protagonists are women, while the house belongs to, or is at least familiarly inhabited by, a man: it is not until Va savoir, in which the house narrative is relatively subordinate, that a male outsider enters a female domestic space. Even if they have direct links with this house, they are never already within it; they arrive from established independent lives, either as investigators (Secret Défense, Céline et Julie), as temporary holders of a subordinate role (Céline et Julie in the narrative-within-a-narrative, L’Amour par terre) or as casual occupiers of the space (La Bande des quatre). And although there are noticeable differences in the nature of the various houses – the ‘domaine’ in Secret Défense is an eighteenth-century mansion with a

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76  jacques rivette full suite of display rooms, the writer’s house in L’Amour par terre is an exercise in outrageously exaggerated twentieth-century kitsch in the manner of an Italian villa, and in La Bande des quatre we have a product of turn-of-the century wealthy suburbia – the approach to them is remarkably comparable in all the films discussed and several others. Set apart from the rest of the world – notably the busy world of Paris from which the protagonists come – the camera follows the protagonist as she initially enters by passing through a screen of greenery: the houses are thus isolated in a fantasy of rurality, even if, as in L’Amour par terre, they may be accessed through a busy city street in full view of the Eiffel Tower. (This, it should be said, is a result of Rivette’s geographical games: the fabulous mansion is certainly not hidden behind a street-door.) In Secret Défense and Céline et Julie especially, entry is effected through a back route into the grounds. This arrival as undercover conqueror, reminiscent of the prince entering Sleeping Beauty’s castle – a cruel version of the story is recounted to the child Madlyn in Céline et Julie –, emphasises not only the self-contained, inward-looking universe represented by the houses but also their timelessness and mythical quality. This houseas-cosmos, the epitome of Bachelard’s idyllic dream, is articulated by Frenhofer in La Belle Noiseuse in terms that could almost have been written by Bachelard. To fully enter this self-contained cosmos, the protagonist must further pass through an open door; and the double crossing of the threshold – first the gate, then the door – is repeated from film to film with almost identical cinematographic strategies. First we see a long shot which frames the protagonist’s approach to the gate along an outside thoroughfare, down which she walks towards the camera, hesitating slightly. As she passes through the gate (or, in Secret Défense, the hole in the wall), the camera remains on the outside, watching the heroine’s back as she enters the domain: it then executes a cut to overtake her and observe her from in front as she emerges from the surrounding greenery into what might be described as an opening space. As she mounts the steps to whatever entrance she has selected, it remains slightly in retreat, watching the approach; and finally (except in Céline et Julie, where the camera is debarred from crossing the threshold until the last episode) another cut takes us inside before her and observes her passage through the door and her first moves in this new territory. The sequence repeated from film to film resembles a cinematographic ritual, signifying a

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story as space: space as story   77 passing from one narrative order to another in a form essential to the Rivettian imagination.

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‘My father’s house’ – Secret Défense (1998) The ‘domain’ of Secret Défense is quite literally ‘my father’s’ for the protagonist, Sylvie (Sandrine Bonnaire). The House is a seventeenthor eighteenth-century mansion/château (complete with tourelles), situated in the Burgundy countryside in a relatively remote position – Sylvie has a long walk along narrow lanes to her illicit entrance point even after she arrives at the rural railway station. It is laid out according to the classic plan (suite of ‘display’ rooms along the front, bedrooms and kitchens above and behind), and its age and grandeur makes it a repository of ‘official’ history, as well as of its own internal story. At one point the camera frames a plaque in pride of place in the kitchen (‘Acquisition du fief de la Colonge de St-Étienne des Tonneaux, le 4 février 1760’) in front of which its new owner, Walser, stands in triumphant mid-shot. Thus the house paradoxically incarnates a history of ownership and misinheritance – what is immortalised is an ‘acquisition’, and Walser too has ‘acquired’ it from the previous owner. For Sylvie, the château de Colonge is the paternal house, which, according to Nowell-Smith’s formulation as described by Christine Gledhill, is the seat of melodrama: The paternal function becomes crucial in establishing both the right of the family to a place in the bourgeois social hierarchy and, through the medium of inheritance, the property relations which underpin this position. The problem for the family is the possible failure of the father to fulfil this function suitably. (Gledhill 1985: 76)

Sylvie’s father’s inheritance however is not only the house but also a capitalist empire more or less explicitly concerned with arms dealing. And not only is he not fulfilling his function suitably, he has vanished, dead in mysterious circumstances, and house and empire have devolved to his partner Walser. For the first hour of the film, although the circumstances of the father’s death are immediately established as the narrative stakes, the house plays no part in the story. Neither Sylvie not her brother apparently has any wish to reinvest their childhood space, and when Sylvie decides to return, her stated intention is to shoot a suspected murderer, thus righting the family wrong,

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78  jacques rivette and then to return to her sparse Parisian flat and her independence, without inheritance . Having gained access by a truly clandestine passage, climbing through a hole in the estate wall – Sylvie’s negotiation of this at night illustrates both her familiarity with the place, and the unauthorised nature of her arrival – and entered what is presumably the front door, conveniently, and surprisingly, open, she confronts Walser in the library. Libraries, private and public, occupy a key place in Rivette’s imaginary geography: in Va savoir the private library is a particularly mysterious, hidden space. Here, however, Walser’s library is a front room, a display room, one of a suite which communicates and the layout of which is emphasised by the film’s deep-focus framing. It is also a workroom, lined with leather-bound volumes; par excellence the father’s space, certainly not a site appropriate for the enacting of the most secret familial dramas. And sure enough, when Sylvie’s plan misfires and she kills not Walser but his secretary Véronique, a complete outsider who has already betrayed an interest in the family drama, Walser’s first concern is to evacuate both young women from this formal, visible part of the house. Sylvie is banished to a back bedroom, while Véronique’s body is disposed of in the grounds – that ambivalent transitional space between gate and door, which constitutes perhaps the most mysterious part of Rivette’s imagined domestic geography, as we shall see. Véronique’s death, apart from putting an end to her detective work, reinforces Walser’s control of the space and the position which he has ‘acquired’, and binds Sylvie firmly to the house and to its owner. Having accomplished, within these walls, a decisive action, she is now the murderess in a new criminal scenario and irrevocably part of the house’s history; and if its display spaces have been the theatre of her downfall, its more retired, private apartments can protect her – at a price. The price will be her relegation to a subordinate status, part-child, part-servant. Rather than inheriting the house, the house has in fact assimilated her. The sharp, confident modern scientist rapidly conforms to the environment of this old-fashioned house and to her new position: she adopts, along with the status, some of the stereotypical mannerisms associated with the mature single woman of Victorian family melodrama, with all the marginalisation, and potential for menace, that this implies. Her encounter with Véronique’s twin sister Ludivine when the latter visits Walser has echoes of Mrs. Danvers confronting

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story as space: space as story   79 the young Mrs. De Winter (and Rebecca is almost certainly one of the principal intertexts to Secret Défense). Although she retains her investigative role, actively seeking out information regarding the past history of her own family, her power of action drastically decreases. In fact, her discovery that the original crime was not her father’s murder (by Walser) but her sister’s suicide as a direct result of their father’s actions, effectively paralyses her with the realisation that eliminating the current master of the space will not negate or avenge the criminal history which it contains. Sylvie thus does not take control of the space she has ‘inherited’; rather she is inherited by it and in the process disinherited of any power which (as the eldest surviving child of the last owner) she might expect to have within it. Entrapped by her own status as murderess, she becomes a powerless narrator: what she learns about the previous crimes committed – and what the audience learns with her – becomes necessarily inactive, as she can reveal no one’s guilt without also revealing her own. The series of crimes whose memory is defended by the social and sometimes by the physical structure of the house – even if the father’s murder, at least, took place elsewhere – acts as assurance of that structure’s survival. The last scene offers a repetition with variations of the drama which marked Sylvie’s arrival in these walls: the role of murderess falls this time to the identical twin sister of the previous victim, while Sylvie becomes the victim. The deed takes place in the house’s main hall, again a formal, visible space which speaks of patriarchal control. Although we do not see its aftermath, it seems certain that spatial rearrangement will follow a similar pattern, and that Ludivine, the twin, who has already allowed herself to be seduced by Walser, will thus be secreted in the house and bound, precisely as Sylvie had previously been bound, to silent acquiescence in the previous murder in the chain, and implicitly to all the rest. She too is thus ‘inherited’, or assimilated, by a cyclical narrative contained within the house which frames her shooting, and drawn irrevocably into its dramas. In Secret Défense the house represents a closed, repetitive, cycle of crime and retribution whose boundaries are not broken in the film: each murder provokes revenge but each revenger in turn prolongs the chain of guilt, perpetuating the status quo within the house, reaffirming its power. Walser himself, despite his apparent mastery, is a mere link in this chain: during the time of the film’s narrative

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80  jacques rivette at least he commits no murder, he merely disposes the evidence in its appropriate place. Trapped by his own unspoken guilt, he can do nothing else. Only one act evoked within the film might perhaps have had truly subversive potential: Elisabeth’s suicide, a ‘crime’ which denounced its predecessor without creating a new killer, held the potential for eliminating the father’s power – since his secret was now revealed and his position unstable – without the need for murder. Walser, as the outsider who accepted a conventional role of avenger in response to that suicide, has thus himself acted merely as a vehicle for the re-establishment of the hierarchy and the Order of the House; inheriting its suite of master rooms and hidden spaces, he too is inherited by it. The end of the film, re-opening another phase of the cycle, is one of the most pessimistic of all Rivette’s films. Not only Sylvie but also Véronique and Ludivine, the pair of outsiders who have stepped inside its walls, are unable to make of this house a performative space – instead, they are performed by it. The father’s houses of Merry-Go-Round also prove dangerous – and eventually fatal – to the daughters, each one holding its charge of confusion, misleading clues, and narrative demands which distract the legatee from independent life. On the other hand, in Haut bas fragile, the co-protagonist Louise receives a much happier legacy. Inherited from an aunt and thus not marked with the suspect paternal seal, this house is in some ways a welcoming space. Although the ritual of arrival follows the sequence described above – this time requiring a lingering camera to exaggerate the extent of the relatively small garden around the house – Louise enters this space armed with her own key, and as she plunges into the greenery we glimpse her father’s envoy (not yet persona grata with Louise herself) in long shot through the closed gate, shut out. Once through the door, she establishes herself in the space freely, actively, affectionately: she looks around, touches the scattered papers and the furniture, and opens the shutters, and the camera pans to follow her as she takes possession of homely – if cluttered – rooms. However, here too the paternal legacy reasserts itself. The con­fident explorations described above are interrupted when the ubiquitous, and mysterious, male protagonist Roland rings the doorbell. His manner of exploring is quite different: following almost the same trajectory as Louise, he touches, he peers, he names and inventories, and generally behaves as one who knows precisely what moves to make and what

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story as space: space as story   81 objects will be found within these walls. Although he is not Louise’s father, and indeed is antagonistic to him, his attitude to this house is one of ownership, and Louise’s movement becomes subordinate to his itinerary, even if a brief mid-shot as they pass from one room to another catches her smiling slightly. As Roland leads Louise into a bedroom and then to an upper room, however, she begins to reassert herself: as Roland continues to point out significant furniture and comment on its condition, Louise responds with actions which take back these objects from him. She plays the ‘romantic piano’, sits happily on the cat-damaged chair, and Roland is impelled to take his leave. When she offers to show him out, however, he turns her down with another affirmation of his prior claim and knowledge: ‘je connais le chemin’ (I know the way). Despite her relative assurance, therefore, possession of a house even for Louise brings with it a risk of dispossession and a reminder of her father’s ambiguous role in her existence. (Roland’s interest in the aunt’s furniture stems from his search for documents incriminating the father.) Despite its relative privacy, she does not make her aunt’s old home into her permanent residence. Nonetheless, when she invites Ninon into it, the flowing dance sequence with which the two girls together express their rejection of all the inconvenient men in their existence represents a confident repossession of at least part of the domestic space as a channel for free and unprogrammed movement. It is however a very selective use of that space, which eschews all rooms, no matter how welcoming, in favour of the liminal, undefined, mobile space of the staircase – neither up nor down, neither formal nor private, nor dedicated to any function except passage from one room to another. Dancing on the staircase could be seen as expressing not only freedom of the house but also freedom from the house and its programmed lifestyle. In the very last sequence of this film the third protagonist, Ida, runs away not only from the putative mother that she has been seeking so long but also from the house in which she has considered renting a room. It can hardly be said that this house is in any way menacing; on the contrary, it is bright and comfortable and, like its owner, warmly welcoming to Ida. To all appearances it would offer no obstacle to an independent and unregulated existence under maternal auspices, but it shares with so many of Rivette’s subtly dangerous houses, before and since, its isolation from the city in its own green island. For Ida the promise of insertion into a ‘family

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82  jacques rivette

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space’ and therefore a ‘family story’ seems suddenly to transmute into a threat. She flees. The unfolding of Haut bas fragile suggests that the house as medium of inheritance has inherent restrictions which are hardly dependent on whether it comes from father or mother or indeed from another source: ‘my father’s house’ remains a potential trap drawing a new generation into the patterns of the past.

‘The House of mystery’ – Céline et Julie (1974) and L’Amour par terre (1984) In Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) and L’Amour par terre (1984), there is no prospect of inheritance and no implication of ownership when the protagonists enter the house. On the contrary, in each case they are requested, or opt, to enter the elected space of someone else’s drama, in which they have no part; in each case they will be co-opted into reproducing the drama, and sooner or later they will seek, independently, to disrupt it by their presence. However, this is not to say that the concept of inheritance is of no importance, and it is worth noting that Secret Défense also contains the story of two sisters who become entangled in another family’s tale; even if in that case they are not the main protagonists, they are never present together within the walls of the fatal house (never able, therefore, to exchange impressions or formulate their understanding of their actions in this place) and they are unable to escape. On the other hand, as we shall see, in Céline et Julie there are hints that the girls’ own past – or at least Julie’s – are in some way linked with the mysterious house, and that it may indeed be Julie’s ‘inheritance’ in a sense more intimate, and even more dangerous, than the paternal legacies discussed above. In both Céline et Julie and L’Amour par terre we are presented with two women who form a double protagonist, and who discover within the house they enter a drama which is more or less explicitly being staged in the rooms which determine and contain it. Once inside, the outsiders are required to play roles in the drama, and in both films the pair succeeds in taking control of the space, breaking the repetitive cycle and leaving the restrictive walls. Also characteristic of these films is a disrupted and disorientating reconstruction of space, not so evident in the ‘inheritance films’. There are subtle spatial disconnections, illogicalities which cause protagonists and audience alike

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story as space: space as story   83 to lose their bearings: the inconsistent appearance of the windows in Céline et Julie apparently cuts all communication between the world as seen from inside and from outside the house, while L’Amour par terre makes much use of deep shadow and misleading montage to conceal the connections between spaces and create the illusion of a labyrinthine interior of potentially infinite extent. There is also a unique and ambiguous role given to the grounds, of which something also remains in Secret Défense. The green space between the outer gate and the inner door is a particularly deceptive area. Although apparently part of the open outer world, its spatial rules are hard to pin down and more dependent on the oneiric or regressive logic which comes from within than on connection with the world without. In Céline et Julie even its existence is uncertain: the windows open from within the house onto a view of sunlit trees, while from the outside, certainly verdant, every door and window is shuttered and bolted. Although treated with more conscious irony in L’Amour par terre, here too it offers a significant and ambivalent space, home to stone gods who prove to be only hollow plaster; and in both films it provides one protagonist with a moment of relaxation and self-assessment, which allows her to draw breath and take stock of her relationship to the fascinating puzzle of the house: Julie having tea with Poupie, Charlotte in her drunken conversation with Cupid’s statue. The house in Céline et Julie – ‘used precisely as it was’, says Rivette; ‘we maybe displaced a chair in relation to a table, but nothing more’ (Rivette 2004) – is a parallel universe, a fantasy world which the protagonists enter by turns, the events in the house being revealed to the ‘outside world’ (that phrase including both the one left outside and the cinema audience) only when the latest visitor reports on what she has seen. We have already mentioned that the camera is unable to cross the threshold, and the passage between inside and outside is thus never filmed until the final, definitive, mutual rescue; and even then, as Jardonnet points out, it is filmed ambiguously. We may, therefore, feel that this house is explicitly imaginary, a family fantasy created in the telling. The story it contains is based on a Henry James novel, The Other House, which concerns a wealthy and eligible man, two rival would-be brides, and a child who must be killed if the father is to marry again; but the film contains significant differences from James’s novel, notably its displacement from a predominantly outdoor setting to an entirely interior one. This basic story, translated

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84  jacques rivette into a series of ominous conversations and enigmatic actions, is in part replayed in the film in each successive telling, creating an effect of repetitive permanence, as if the house and the drama taking place within it are one structure, co-terminous with each other, which can be explored simultaneously. This house is entirely self-contained: the ‘closed self-reflexive space in which characters are inward-looking, unable to act in society’ (Elsaesser, quoted in Gledhill 1985: 75) is taken to its extreme: all the characters’ movements are confined within the walls of the house, while, as has been said, the apparently open window seen in one room does not correspond to any similar opening on the outside. Their dress suggests the heyday of Hollywood melodrama of the late 1940s and early 1950s, contrasting strongly with the 1970s hippie fashions favoured by Céline and Julie; but their lifestyle, domestic arrangements and gestures have connotations more easily associated with the nineteenth century. There are several indications that this house is an imaginary construct which belongs specifically to the past and childhood, and perhaps to the childhood of the protagonists to which its apparent period would indeed assign it. Julie is a character strongly associated with childhood memories, both through dialogue and in the objects which she keeps in her flat. Her stereotypical romance with Grégoire is the site par excellence for Julie’s verbal contact with her past; although the most sustained evocation of it takes place in her absence, when Grégoire, encouraged and abetted by Céline, launches into a deluge of quotes on the subject of ‘le vert paradis des amours enfantines.’10 This storm of words quickly takes on a life of its own, diverging more and more from the sentimental convention which Grégoire embodies on screen, and the false reunion ends with the childhood sweetheart losing control of both his tongue and his trousers. Attempting to re-enter the ‘vert paradis’ is to risk discovering the unexpected hidden there. Grégoire is easily defeated; but the ivy-clad house, which might seem to be an illustration for his nostalgic rural dreams, is not so easy to shake off. One might collate a number of suggestions from the film into evidence that it is to be read as a literal part of Julie’s childhood: Céline, rummaging in Julie’s toy chest, discovers a photograph of it. Later, of course, she quite unexpectedly discovers her childhood 10 ‘the green paradise of childhood loves’. The line is from Charles Baudelaire, ‘Moesta e errabunda’ (from Les Fleurs du mal, 1857), and has entered the language as one of the best-known of French literary quotations.

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story as space: space as story   85 nanny living in its grounds. Given the illusory, ‘enchanted’ nature of much of Céline et Julie – the only film in which the trope of Sleeping Beauty’s castle is explicitly remembered – it may seem as if that space outside the house walls but within its gates, which is ambiguously still part of its alternative world but not irrevocably caught up in the replay of its ‘dusty drama’, has conjured up Poupie and her cottage in response to Julie’s present need, and in accord with the very intensity of her ties with it. Evelyne Jardonnet discusses in considerable detail the disorientating nature of this sequence, spatially ambiguous and detached from the rest of the narration, despite apparent agreements between the old lady’s stories of a little girl in the house, of whose nursemaid Julie was once scared, and the goings-on that we later see there (Jardonnet 2006: 238). And yet Julie in interaction with Céline betrays no hint of recognition either of the address (supplied by Céline) or of the house itself; and it is perhaps worth noting that it is the photograph in the toy chest which supplies the first image of it in the film, an image from which a carefully co-ordinated cut takes us to the front door of the actual building, suggesting that it is the photograph which gives form to the house rather than the other way round. Whether or not we accept this house as literally part of Julie’s past, however, there are clearly important links between its image and the evocative but also restrictive force of childhood memory and formative experience. The house drama certainly speaks strongly to childhood fears, and understanding it may therefore be important, not only for the escape of little Madlyn but for self-understanding and the escape of Julie (and Céline?) herself. Before venturing out on the expedition which will lead her to Poupie, Julie has, in fact, wiped from a blackboard in her flat an occult diagram that she had previously drawn there and substituted a naive drawing of a house, which becomes a plan of the one in the rue du Nadir aux Pommes, with the rooms ‘labelled’. There could be no clearer implication that its design (its physical design, but also that of the drama which is part of it) bears some diagrammatic relation to her understanding of her own world. Thus it would seem that the house and its story are necessary – and perhaps inescapable – to Julie, part of a cultural inheritance if not of a material one. Céline’s anarchic, unformulated storytelling is thus harnessed by Julie after they meet and used to penetrate the stereotyped structures which this house imposes. It belongs to Julie’s past but not to Céline’s; indeed Céline seems to have no past, but it

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86  jacques rivette is perhaps her unbounded capacity for fantasy which ensures that the pair, together, can find ways to break the house walls. A further elaboration of this, along with the fact that the last sequence of the film suggests that the two women are substitutable, would be to read them as literal doubles, two parts of the same mind, one programmed to certain expectations and memories, the other representing desire for unlimited fantasy. Thus it is suggested that both these apparently antagonistic mental tendencies are necessary in order to avoid entrapment in the fatally repetitive drama of the bourgeois family. Neither Céline nor Julie alone can manage to use the house as a performative space. On the contrary, when within it, it takes full control of each of them. They are subjected to its rules, required in turn to play the apparently marginal role of the nanny, repeating lines and actions mechanically and uncritically, evolving according to a set pattern through the rooms of the house, in which the camera never leaves them by themselves. Even though we experience these scenes not as direct cinematic storytelling but as mediated episodes in the course of the women’s subsequent questioning and critical replaying of them, they roll out with the inevitability of a film seen too often; and, as further snatches are revealed, it becomes increasingly possible that the two may be being ‘performed into’ a central and very undesirable part. Control and command of the house comes with their mutual, self-aware, entrance: their awareness being signalled not only by their ability to exchange impressions but by their possession of ‘eyes’ as a talisman. When their exterior, self-conscious selves survive the passage of the walls, the space of the house opens up, revealing hidden rooms unused in the performance of the main drama and open to occupation by the newcomers. In one of these they establish their headquarters in the manner of a greenroom, making the ‘back spaces’ of the house into the back stage of a play which they can at last observe even as they are present within it. (This aspect will be considered in more detail in Chapter 6.) In carrying off the predestined murder victim they succeed both in taking control of the space of the house and in deflecting the inevitable course of the repeated story: not however in order to reinvest these walls, but to carry the child into another ‘green paradise’, through which they can move freely. The apparent equation of escape from the house and escape from all imprisoning narratives, however, should be subject to precaution for at least two reasons. One is the appearance, in the course

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story as space: space as story   87 of the three girls’ idyll on the lake, of the house’s other inhabitants, or figures of them: although they seem as immobile and harmless as waxworks, the implication is nonetheless that escape for Madlyn has made escape possible for them also, and they are now no longer confined. The other is the recollection of another kind of ‘previous narrative’: the acknowledged source text. In Henry James’s novel the little girl is killed not by suffocation but by drowning, after having been taken on a boat on the river. The intertextuality, here, adds a very uncomfortable coda to Rivette’s ending, one that it is not entirely possible to dismiss with the reflection that it is visible only once one has read the book. Does this represent subversion, on Rivette’s part, of a model which might be a constraint but is not? Or a hint that dark stories cannot be evaded simply by climbing through a window? Does the passing of the three figures’ boat suggest a fate averted, or a reminder that they may still be a threat in another version of the story? At any rate, it is with the swift glide of their boat out of frame to the right (the direction of ‘the next page’ in western convention), followed by the inscrutably questioning gaze of a cat in close-up, that the film returns to its starting point, as if not yet concluded. In L’Amour par terre the fantastical and symbolic structure of Céline et Julie has been downgraded. The magic in this mansion is elusive and probably derisory; instead, a sense of inevitability and a link to a collective imaginary is established by a flurry of literary references. The situation however is in many ways comparable to the earlier film. The two protagonists, Anglophone actresses, are invited to a mysterious house occupied by a reclusive author, which is to be the setting for rehearsals and performance of a play which he has written – or rather is writing – for the space. The content of the performance is therefore apparently to be dictated by the physical layout of the house; and it is not long before it becomes clear that it is also the precise replay of a drama which – we are given to understand, but nothing in this film is very certain – actually took place here, of which the original actors, with one exception, are still on the premises. The two men of the house comment on the representation of their past lives, and attempt to draw each of the actresses into recreating offstage the seductions and rivalries which are the subject of the play. These attempts are not entirely unsuccessful, and, as with Céline et Julie, there are hints that resistance to the seduction of the narrative and avoidance of the cyclical trap may be dependent on exploring (and

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88  jacques rivette taking possession of) the back rooms and hidden spaces of the house, which are not to be used for performance of the play and are indeed explicitly abandoned. However, as the narrative develops it transpires that understanding for Charlotte and Emily is actually more likely to come from their interactions with the world outside – not merely the grounds of the house but the city into which they occasionally venture: the mysterious back rooms may simply be a realm of pointless illusion. For the nature of the domestic space is very different. The house is suspect from the start. Everything about it is at once excessive and false. An immense Italianate villa, its ‘spaces of display’ – here explicitly destined for the performance and so for literal display – are decorated with strident patterns and garish acid colours; the living room is actually swathed with a painted curtain which declares its theatrical nature from the start. The pretentious decor at times evokes a mythical and classical past; but it often has more in common with a fairground sweet stall. Its mysteries are all an insubstantial surface, borrowing significance from connotations which they cannot sustain. The house – and indeed the film – is full of signs which act as so many pointers to the richest of symbolic accumulations: the hall floor sports a Roman-style zodiac while an (apparently) stone love god reigns in a small temple in the grounds. The master of the house mourns his lost love Béatrice under the eye of an enigmatic servant called Virgil, between a stairwell painted in violent red and black and flame-coloured ‘marble’ pillars. Behind the locked doors of empty rooms in the apparently vast network of corridors stretching into deserted spaces of the house, mysterious sounds of the sea seem to be heard, but these are, we are told, ‘forbidden’ spaces to which Virgil strictly bars access because ‘c’est là-bas [in the carefully prepared ‘front rooms’] que ça se passe’ (it’s over there that it’s happening) . Even the women engaged in deciphering the mysteries of this house overstuffed with routes into cultural and psychological labyrinths are named Charlotte and Emily. And yet none of all this rings true: the portico is too tall and too white, the marble pillars are too sickly an orange-pink, the glossy surfaces evoke plastic reconstructions, and it is hardly surprising that when a drunken Charlotte leans too heavily against the statue of Eros in his little temple, he proves to be hollow plaster and falls over and breaks immediately, only to be replaced two nights later by an exact replica. The labyrinthine, deeply-shadowed backrooms, which

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story as space: space as story   89 exercise a potent fascination for the women and for the audience, do indeed hide a forbidden room – but alas, this secret space, the room belonging to the lost Béatrice, is nothing but another theatre stage, swathed with dramatic drapes for the planned dénouement of the play. The women explore Béatrice’s possessions like children dressing up in their mother’s clothes, but her evocative phials of cosmetic are reminiscent not so much of the ‘secrets of the muse’s feminine charms’ as of the failed venture into the perfume business recounted to Charlotte by a young woman with a strange resemblance to Béatrice . The apparently intense presence, in another bare back room, of Paul, conjuror, charmer and would-be ‘true clairvoyant’, meditating on his chair like the spider at the centre of his web, may evoke the idea that story, house and all are a kind of extended hallucination of his creation, but in fact he is only able to induce visions without significance. Unlike in Céline et Julie, it is enough to enter the house’s rooms to break their spell, and while Clément and Paul can certainly arrange for their story to repeat itself as one performance (for which the protagonists are paid), they are unable to retain any of the performers for more than one representation. Even if the two women, a little before the dénouement, ‘feel that they have been here for centuries’, their exit is the simplest of departures; while the melodrama which they are called upon to perform is a simple play of sentiments, little more substantial than the inane farce by the same author which they have adapted to the banal spaces of a Paris flat in the early scenes. There is no shadow of murder on Roquemaure’s dramas; and so, like his extraordinary domain, he is soon unmasked as a false mystery. It is almost as if, for Roquemaure, possession of a house charged with its own ominous story is itself a dream, one in which all the members of his household are engaged (they are all furiously writing, or otherwise weaving tales: Paul’s visions projected against shadowy provisional screens might convincingly identify him as the director of a version of the house as film), but one which is cut short by an unexpected – and perhaps even undesired – happy ending. Between Céline et Julie and L’Amour par terre, the compulsive spell of the House and its tales has become much simpler to evade. While Céline and Julie are obliged to invent rituals in order to ensure their freedom from the family and its domestic magic, Emily and Charlotte need only keep their ties with the outside world intact to resist the vacuous temptations of melodrama.

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The House with many rooms – Out 1 (1971), La Bande des quatre (1989) Houses presided over by the figures of absent fathers, or houses invested with melodramatic narratives which draw in the protagonists; in both cases the house to which the protagonists arrive is figured as the domain of an Other – in general, by implication, a commanding male Other. There are instances in Rivette’s work, however, of houses to which the protagonists, collectively, belong, and through which they have distributed their own, independent, complex narratives. The fascination of divided space shared by many stories appears as early as Paris nous appartient, with the rapid, discontinuous presentation of the various stories secreted in the separate rooms of a rundown Parisian hotel. But this space is merely occupied, not shared by its inhabitants: the walls of the rooms, and the rapid cuts executed by the camera, divide them from each other and ensure that their separate stories do not become one narrative. Collective control of the domestic space comes with the possession, by the multiple owners, of a common narrative, and with a willingness to contest the divisive structure of domestic walls. The seaside villa of Out 1 offers one example of such a collectively owned space. Uninhabited, but open to the use of any of the thirteen friends who know of its existence, it has no one master to command its narratives, and no single drama is destined to take place in it. The camera reveals only its more private spaces, its bedrooms and passageways, within which all its occupants have equal rights to the space. That said, among these rooms each occupant is allotted his or her own space and alongside the occupied rooms are others which are locked and inaccessible, allowing the fantasy that a missing person might be secreted within them; and although the house by the sea does offer refuge and a controllable alternative to the confusing threats lurking in the city, it is nonetheless an unwelcoming space, and to an outsider like Émilie it soon appears frankly hostile. After the complicity of the Thirteen has broken down it is gradually abandoned; if it offered any promise of a collective utopia, that proves unforthcoming, and first Émilie and then the members of the group themselves leave it to return to Paris. Like other projects toyed with by the various protagonists in the course of the film, it offers a potential for social reshaping – perhaps in the communitarian post-’68 spirit – which has not come to fruition. Certainly there is no secret hidden in its innermost depths,

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story as space: space as story   91 nor any compulsion exerted by it on its inhabitants, but neither is there any permanence in the ties which bound its occupants to each other and the relationships they have forged. It stands on the shore as a relic of a failed experiment. The house in La Bande des quatre (1989) is the rented living space of a group of drama students, who do not know its history and divide its spaces according to a dialectic of the individual and the communal rather than of display and retreat, without any hierarchy between them. This is not to say however that they are immune to the danger of being ‘performed’ by their domestic living space: this house too hides secrets which demand a little respect, but their free movement and independence allow them to inflect its destiny and take possession of it. Firstly, they have rearranged the ordered family narrative for which this building – a turn-of-the century suburban villa – was designed, and adapted it to a new concept of communal living which is in some sense a substitute family, egalitarian, co-operative and also entirely female. Their use of the space designates the ground floor as communal, the upper rooms as individual, but all the spaces communicate and the occupants move quite freely through each other’s bedrooms as well as the kitchen and living rooms below, creating a continuous, even though cellular space which is occupied and invested, in its totality, by the ‘gang of four’ as a whole. This is in contrast to the other notable Rivettian example of a house reinvested by a group bound by other than family ties. Like the house of La Bande des quatre, that of Out 1 belongs to a heterogeneous group of friends who make up a microsociety, and there is a clear echo of Out 1’s decidedly conspiratorial ‘Thirteen’ in the name of ‘the gang of four’, but the ties that bind the four girls in the later film are less premeditated. Their co-operation is a response to an external mystery which they wish to elucidate, perhaps related to the house but not commanded by it ; while the Thirteen of Out 1 are themselves, apparently, the custodians of a mystery which they may themselves have secreted in the villa which they have made their own. The occupiers of the house in La Bande des quatre, then, have disposed of its conventional space according to their own free-spirited will, and genuinely made of its connecting rooms a performative space for their own liberty. This liberty is indeed under threat as long as the relic of a possibly sinister former narrative remains within

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92  jacques rivette the house, a threat which may remind us of the house traps already discussed; but despite the sensitive Lucia’s evocation of ghosts within the walls, the narrative reasons for this lurking danger lie not in the house and its past but outside. It was another student, Cécile, a purely contingent and temporary occupant of this space, who secreted keys in a fireplace, and it is Cécile’s trail which leads a mysterious male outsider, Thomas, to seek access to the house in search of those keys. Thomas’s insistence on entering the house, and his dark hints that he knows something about it that its inhabitants do not, place him, rather like Roland in Haut bas fragile, in the position of rival owner, or rival narrator of the space; but Thomas represents an outsider in every sense, the purveyor of an intrusive story; just as Cécile, when she returns, seems intrusive and out of place. Rather than adapting its inhabitants to the narrative defined by its space, this house seems sympathetic to their liberating independence; thus the ghostly sounds which guide Lucia to the keys might represent the complicity of the structure itself with the new, convivial incumbents, the liberation not only of the characters but of the space itself from the petrifying presence of secrets. The mysterious key once thrown into the lake, the house is apparently exorcised not only of its whispering ghosts but of all inconvenient constraints; the undisputed possession of the new, egalitarian family of friends, it offers a refuge from danger, even if the latter is not so much destroyed as displaced. Eventually, the ill-defined dangers connected to Cécile’s mysterious connections in a chilly outside world invade a hitherto inviolate interior space, the womb-like theatre which Constance/Bulle Ogier has made her home and her vocation. In fact, since the functions of house and theatre have been interchangeable throughout the film – the girls, sure of their mastery of their own space, have carried out impromptu performances in the living room, while early in the film one of them evokes the rumour that their teacher ‘lives in the theatre’ – the displacement of danger from one to the other may not be so great an adjustment. These sometime refuges which are apparently at the disposition of the characters, as places to collect their thoughts or spaces for the formation and dissolving of alliances, may impose no narratives on their inhabitants but the freedom they offer is always susceptible to invasion; and if La Bande des quatre offers an example of a house distributed as a framework for a utopian space, the denouement of the film offers a reminder that any such idyll is fragile.

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story as space: space as story   93 The most frequent role of the house in Rivette’s films is that of an ambivalent, if not dangerous, space which locks its occupants, permanent or temporary, into pre-ordained roles which threaten to lead them to disaster. The breaking of the narrative chain, the cheating of fatality, involves the ability to leave the house without looking back, often for the more complex and labyrinthine spaces of the city. L’Histoire de Marie et Julien provides an interesting exception as an example of protagonists who (potentially) succeed in cheating the imposed narrative of the domestic space and breaking its imposed cycle without leaving that space, but Julien’s dark, clock-filled den already represents a disruption of the order of a conventional house, one which it is tempting to see as reflecting the spatial priorities of a feline space, as mapped out by its most mobile occupant! And, in any case, the ending of Marie et Julien is still uncertain: the shadows lie heavily around the two protagonists in the final sequences, and it is not entirely impossible that their story too may be embarking on a looping replay. The dramas which human narratives have built are not easily rewritten. And, as we have seen, in the city too lurks the danger of entrapment and death. Liberty, within or outside restrictive walls, depends on a continued determination to forge new, independent narratives, against the directives contained in the spaces themselves. An easy acquiescence in pre-written dramas, pre-prepared maps, pre-ordained roles, always threatens to turn the environment through which Rivette’s characters move into a prison which can close in to crush them. The liberating potential of free movement can transform even the most rigidly hierarchical space: La Bande des quatre offers an example of a much more liberating role for the house as protective shell for a free and equal association, while Haut bas fragile eventually opens to all its protagonists the freedom of a Paris defined by no one but themselves. Rivette’s own filmmaking practice, predicated at once on a fascination with the space in which his camera moves and on the unrestricted ability to refashion that space in the editing room, claims with determination the right to reshape the narratives already written on the world, to remap his characters’ lives.

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References Augé, Marc (1992), Non-lieux: Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité, Paris, Seuil. Bachelard, Gaston (1957), La Poétique de l’espace, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981), The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, trans. by Xaryl Emerson and Michael Holquist, Austin, University of Texas Press. Barber, Stephen (2002), Projected Cities, London, Reaktion Books. Berto, Juliet (1974), ‘The Last Summer in Paris’, in Pressbook for Céline et Julie vont en bateau, unpaginated. Deschamps, Hélène (2001), Jacques Rivette: théâtre, amour, cinéma, Paris, L’Harmattan. Etlin, Richard (1994), Symbolic Space: French Enlightenment Architecture and its Legacy, Chicago, University of Chicago Press. Fralon, José-Alain (2001), ‘La troublante simplicité du jeu de l’oie’, Le Monde, 11 August. Gledhill, Christine (1985), ‘Genre: Melodrama’, in Pam Cook (ed.), The Cinema Book, London, BFI, 73–84. Hedges, Ines (1991), Breaking the Frame: Film Language and the Experience of Limits, Bloomington and Indianapolis, Indiana University Press. Jardonnet, Evelyne (2006), Poétique de la singularité au cinéma: Une lecture croisée de Jacques Rivette et Maurice Pialat, Paris, L’Harmattan. Massey, Doreen (1995), ‘Imagining the World’, in Allen, John and Massey, Doreen (eds.), Geographical Worlds, Oxford, Oxford University Press/Open University 1995, 5–51. Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey (1977), ‘Minnelli and Melodrama’, in Screen, 18, 2 (Summer 1977), 113–18. Ogier, Bulle (1974), ‘Le secret du Dr. Mabuse aux mille yeux’, in Pressbook for Céline et Julie vont en bateau, unpaginated. Ogier, Bulle (1982), ‘La voix des exclus’, interview in Le Monde, 25 March, 16. Prédal, René (1995), ‘Jacques Rivette, ou le temps imaginaire de l’amour fou’, in C.W. Thompson (ed.), L’Autre et le sacré: surréalisme, cinéma, ethnologie, L’Harmattan, 379–94. Puaux, Françoise (1995), ‘Château, maison, villa: le rôle-clé de la demeure’, in Puaux, F. (ed.), Architecture, décor et cinéma, CinémAction, 75, Paris, CorletTélérama, 34–43. Rivette, Jacques (1981), ‘Entretien’ conducted by Serge Daney, Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma, 327, September, 8–21. Rivette, Jacques, (1982), ‘Sur le Pont du Nord un bal y est donné’, conversation with Marguerite Duras, Le Monde, 25 March, 15–16. Rivette, Jacques (2004), interview with Hélène Frappat, included on Céline et Julie vont en bateau, DVD, Paris, Éditions Montparnasse.

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4 Family secrets

In an earlier chapter we looked at films about conspiracies and communities (conspiracies as communities: as Hélène Frappat points out, a conspiracy is a collective fabrication – it doesn’t exist until it is discussed (Frappat 2001: 191)) that are organised around a secret: the community of artists, intellectuals and exiles in Paris nous appartient (1961) gravitating around a secret organisation that may or may not exist; the community of the Thirteen in Out 1 (1970) that exists to protect the secret of its membership, and of its inactivity. The study of secret societies and other such conspiratorial communities may have something to tell us about the nature of community itself, traditionally organised around a sacred centre, an object or figure that provokes both fascination and horror, the site of both strict prohibition and devout veneration (Hollier 1995: 143–4). The secret society, which unites its members in the shared burden of an inviolable secret, operates, as the Collège de Sociologie argued,1 a kind of displacement of the taboos that organised primitive societies. In later films by Rivette, the community depicted is precisely that which is absent from Paris nous appartient and Out 1: the micro-community of the family, and the secret around which the community obsessively turns is something buried deep in the family history. Frappat summarises the narratives of these films as follows: ‘l’enfant grandit dans l’ignorance des fautes qu’il n’a pas commises, et cette ignorance le tuera’2 (Frappat 2001: 42). In Secret Défense (1998), Sylvie Rousseau 1 See Chapter 2. 2 ‘the child grows up ignorant of the crimes he has not committed, and this ignorance will kill him’

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96  jacques rivette (Sandrine Bonnaire) discovers that her father’s death may not have been the accident it appeared to be, and her subsequent investigation sheds new light on the suicide of her sister. In Haut bas fragile (1995), following the death of an aunt, Louise (Marianne Denicourt) comes into possession of documents revealing a scandal in her father’s past. Meanwhile, Ida (Laurence Côte), an adopted child, seeks the identity of her birth parents by tracking down the performer of a song she remembers from her childhood. But family secrets already provide the intrigue in some of Rivette’s 1970s films. In Merry-Go-Round (1978, released 1983), Léo (Maria Schneider) learns that her father’s death in a plane crash may have been faked, whilst in Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), the eponymous heroines (Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier) seek to rescue a young child from the family that is plotting her slow death.

A wild goose chase: locating the family secret It is difficult to speak of family secrets without evoking the spectre of Sigmund Freud, whose psychoanalytic theories suggested that sexuality was the dark secret at the heart of the family, a secret whose discovery is always traumatic for the infant. Noting the frequency with which his patients displayed a traumatic relation to sexuality, Freud initially theorised that the child’s discovery of sex took the form of an aggressive seduction on the part of an adult, at an age when the child was unable to understand or consciously assimilate the event (Laplanche and Pontalis 1985: 23–4). Freud later revised his theory to suggest that the traumatic event was in fact the child’s witnessing of the parents’ coitus, the so-called ‘primal scene’ (Laplanche and Pontalis 1985: 40–1). Unable to determine whether these scenes were fact or fiction, reality or fantasy, Freud ultimately resorted to a phylogenetic explanation, arguing that the guilt and trauma associated with sexuality were to be explained by an event occurring at the origins of humanity that had become the subject of a kind of genetic inheritance (Laplanche and Pontalis 1985: 46–7). In Totem and Taboo, for instance, Freud remarks upon the universality of the prohibition of incest in human societies and suggests that there would be no laws forbidding incest if there were not a strong instinctual urge to commit it in the first place (Freud 1955: 123–4). Freud posits the existence of a primitive

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family secrets   97 horde in which a band of brothers, fuelled by their incestuous desire for their mother, united to murder their powerful father. This crime provoked guilt in the brothers, however, and so they established the law of the totem as a displacement of the father’s power, imposing on themselves the same restrictions (including the incest taboo) that were imposed by the father (Freud 1955: 141–3). It is thus this crime and the prohibitions that follow it that Freud sees as being at the origin of society: this is the fundamental drama of human desire that is subsequently rehearsed in every family in the form of the Oedipus complex, in which the male child must resolve his desire for his mother and rivalry for his father in order to enter into the Symbolic Order of adult society. In a text that interrogates the notion of a catastrophic origin to society, that is of a dramatic rupture separating ‘nature’ from ‘culture’, Jacques Derrida argues that the prohibition of incest – that is generally considered an essential component of society – is inseparable from a whole nexus of concepts that would include language, classification, hierarchisation, in short what Derrida calls différance (a term encompassing the two meanings of the French verb différer: to differ and to defer) (Derrida 1967: 190). Différance is that which makes possible language and representation, but also which permits a social organisation based on deferral and delay (hence for instance the accumulation of agricultural reserves) since it enables the very opposition between presence and absence through the making present of presence, its supplementation or re-presentation; its making present, in other words, for a representational consciousness (Derrida 1967: 206). In Derrida’s analysis, then, society, language and the prohibition of incest are all born at the same time with a system of supplementarity and substitution that generates the very notion of an origin as a function of the relay of sense across a system of signification (Derrida 1967: 376). But this origin, or fundamental signified, that is promised as the ultimate goal to which the chain of signification leads, can never be reached since it is always possible to substitute new signifiers for this eternally receding signified. And the incest prohibition is caught up in this same logic: incest is the limit-point of the system, the fundamental signified around which the entire system is oriented, but which cannot be attained without causing the collapse of the system (Derrida 1967: 376). Derrida argues that, from the point of view of this system, incest is properly ­impossible: before

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98  jacques rivette the installation of society – in the state of pure plenitude fantasised as existing prior to it – there could be no incest since incest was not prohibited and hence could not be conceived or recognised as incest; following the installation of society, there can be no incest since it is prohibited (Derrida 1967: 372). It is the prohibition of incest that creates incest as a possibility, but a possibility that is precisely impossible: if society is born with this prohibition, then, this transition is not a gradual passage but a point, a pure limit, that is crossed as soon as it is reached (Derrida 1967: 377). In this sense, the origin is unlocatable, and society is always already under way: it is in the nature of the system of signification, of supplementarity, to pose the origin of society as at once a brutal rupture and a gradual progression, both instantaneous and interminable (Derrida 1967: 360). If incest is the secret around which communities are organised, then, it is in the form of an unattainable point. Within the community, incestuous desire is always already displaced on to other objects, and incest can only exist in reality at the expense of the community. Appropriately, from this point of view, the family secrets in Rivette’s films prove just as unreachable as the conspiracies in Paris nous appartient and Out 1. In the same way that we are never sure of having got to the bottom of the organisations in these films – of their reality, of their components, of their reach – we are never entirely satisfied that we have exhausted the secrets of Rivette’s family films. The secret, towards which the whole narrative tends, is often revealed quickly and discreetly, in a line that goes partly unnoticed, and the spectator has the impression that there is always another secret that has been left undisclosed. Moreover, although incest never provides the content of the secret as such, these stories of an adult’s abuse of power and its lasting consequences for a child tend to evoke the disturbing possibility of incest as an unspeakable point on the ever-receding horizon of the family’s conscience. In Merry-Go-Round, Léo and Ben (Joe Dallesandro) meet at Charles de Gaulle airport where they have both been summoned by Elisabeth (Danièle Gégauff), Léo’s sister and Ben’s lover. But Elisabeth is not present at the rendez-vous and sends Léo and Ben on a wild-goose chase around the suburbs of Paris. No sooner have they found Elisabeth than she is kidnapped, but not before informing Léo that their father faked his own death in a plane crash after stealing four million dollars. As the narrative develops, this intrigue becomes absurdly

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family secrets   99 complicated: Léo’s father, David, is apparently in league with Shirley (Sylvie Meyer), Ben’s sister, and has lured Léo to Paris because she has the key to a safe-deposit box that will enable him to recuperate his money. David organises the fake kidnapping of Elisabeth, who is also working with him, in order to blackmail Léo into giving him the key. But when the final handover is arranged, on a golf course, Elisabeth is murdered. Léo confronts David (Maurice Garrel), who appears to be her father but ‘avec un autre visage’.3 David protests that he is not her father, that the latter really did die in the plane crash, but Léo shoots him anyway. Meanwhile, Shirley finds Ben and tells him: ‘We’re free! It’s worked just as I planned. We’re rich!’ before kissing him on the lips in a manner not befitting a sister. At the end of Merry-Go-Round, the spectator is left with more questions than answers: was Léo’s father really alive or dead? Is Shirley really Ben’s sister? Who is working with whom? And what is going to happen now? As with many of Rivette’s other films, Merry-Go-Round appears to borrow from the crime thriller, but escapes the linear development of this genre since it dispenses with the traditional exposition (Seguret 1983) and deliberately fudges its dénouement: Maître Novick (Françoise Prévost), the lawyer who had seemed to help Léo but was actually another of David’s conspirators, and perhaps the instigator of the plot, is unable to savour her triumphant explanation as Léo (and perhaps the spectator) is no longer listening (Thomas 1983: 58). By deliberately hindering this linear development, the form of the film, as Yann Lardeau remarks ‘tend à tourner sur elle-même, comme à vide, comme si elle n’arrivait pas à trouver son port, à produire son objet, ou cachant qu’elle n’en avait pas, était devenue à elle-même son propre objet’4 (Lardeau 1983: 51). Merry-Go-Round turns around itself (hence the title) just as the characters describe orbits around Paris without ever entering the city. It is as though the impossible secret at the heart of the film gives it a kind of centrifugal force such that all attempts to penetrate the mystery simply lead us further away from it. As Rivette stated quite categorically, ‘Le centre, ça n’existe pas’5 (in Gasperi 1983). Or, as Ben remarks at one point, ‘the four 3 ‘with another face’ 4 ‘tends to turn around itself, uselessly, as though unable to find its destination, unable to produce its object or as though, concealing the fact that it doesn’t have an object, it became its own object’ 5 ‘The centre doesn’t exist’

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100  jacques rivette million dollars is about the only thing that’s not fake in this whole story’. By turning about itself, Merry-Go-Round literally becomes a film about itself: the only things that are true in this experience are a sum of money (the budget) and the situation with which the film begins: the arrival of a young woman (Schneider) and a young man (Dallessandro) at an international airport, invited by (an absent) third party and who spend the rest of the film trying to decipher their role, their relation to each other and the missing links that may lend some coherence to this story (Lardeau 1983: 54).

Imagine the worst: the proliferating family tragedy of Secret Défense In Secret Défense, Sylvie Rousseau is informed by her brother Paul (Grégoire Colin) that their father, who died when he fell from a train five years ago, may in fact have been pushed by his business partner, Walser (Jerzy Radziwilowicz), who is now in charge of Pax Industries, a successful arms manufacturer. Sylvie attempts to murder Walser in revenge, but accidentally kills Véronique (Laure Marsac), his secretary and lover. Sylvie eventually learns that Walser killed her father, with her mother’s consent, after he discovered that M. Rousseau had ‘sold’ his other daughter, Elisabeth, to a client in order to secure a contract, an event that provoked Elisabeth’s suicide. Meanwhile, Ludivine, Véronique’s twin sister, becomes involved with Walser and, learning of Véronique’s death, tries to kill Walser, only to shoot Sylvie by mistake. Secret Défense, in other words, is a tragedy and, as Sandrine Bonnaire suggests, the film must operate in the register of tragedy if the spectator is to suspend her disbelief in the face of such an improbable sequence of events (Bonnaire 1998a). The film is in fact loosely based around the myth of Electra, who urged her brother Orestes to avenge the murder of their father Agamemnon by killing their mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus. More generally, the narrative of Secret Défense is in the spirit of tragedy in which, as Hélène Frappat puts it, ‘le héros se laisse ensevelir pour payer le prix d’une faute qu’il n’a pas commise, pour expier un secret dont la révélation même est impuissante à le délivrer’6 (Frappat 2001: 43). As is 6 ‘the hero allows himself to be buried in order to pay the price for a crime he did not commit, to atone for a secret whose revelation is unable to set him free’

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family secrets   101 well known, Freud used models from Greek tragedy, with its theme of inherited guilt and its serial repetition of the same familial structures, in his conception of the private drama of sexuality within the family, and he appealed to the myth of Electra in his rather unsatisfactory attempt to describe a female equivalent to the Oedipus complex. But we can perhaps find a more recent model for the structures of Secret Défense in the cinema of Alfred Hitchcock, whose influence was frequently noted by reviewers of the film. Recurring tropes in Hitchcock’s films are the figure of the double and the theme of the transferral of guilt, which were first systematically uncovered by the critics at Cahiers du cinéma in the 1950s, including Rivette in his review of I Confess (Rivette 1953: 50). Hitchcock’s cinema is full of characters assuming another’s guilt or being wrongly accused of a crime they did not commit. In the same way, the narrative of Secret Défense is based around a series of crimes in which the murderer or the victim takes the place of someone else: Walser killed Sylvie’s father, in the words of her mother, ‘pour que je ne le fasse pas, moi’.7 In return, Sylvie undertakes to kill Walser in order to prevent her brother from doing so, saying ‘Il faudrait que je le fasse à ta place’.8 But Sylvie accidentally kills Véronique in place of Walser and, when Ludivine comes to take her own revenge, she targets Walser, believing him guilty, but shoots Sylvie instead, as it were wrongly killing the right person. The disconcerting doubling that allows Véronique to return as Ludivine is a further nod to Hitchcock, an obvious reference to Vertigo (1958) in which the apparently dead Madeleine is seemingly reincarnated as the identical-yet-different Judy (Kim Novak). Like Hitchcock, Rivette reinforces this theme of the double through his use of shadow. In the magnificent shot in which Ludivine first appears in Walser’s office, a harsh light casts a full shadow of Ludivine’s body on the wall between her and Walser as a violent reminder of her absent sister, her ponytail clearly outlined in the shadow’s profile as though to underline her youthfulness and accuse the parallel between Walser’s predatory sexuality and Rousseau’s betrayal of his teenage daughter; to this end, Walser, half concealed in the shadows on the left edge of the frame is himself doubled by the half-shaded face of a Roman portrait hanging on the wall between the characters. Certainly these Hitchcockian themes imply an inheritance of 7 ‘so that I wouldn’t have to do it’ 8 ‘I’ll have to do it for you’

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102  jacques rivette guilt, as in Greek tragedy or Freudian theory, but this inheritance, in Secret Défense, is not necessarily linear. Instead, it moves sideways or jumps unpredictably, not contained within the Rousseau family but spreading outwards from its edges. Walser, after all, is not part of the family, even if he plays the role of a father figure to Sylvie and Paul, and Véronique and Ludivine are even more distanced from the Rousseau clan, their own family arbitrarily connected up to the Rousseau tragedy. The father’s crime itself is not kept within the family but occurs precisely as a result of his placing a higher value on something outside the family. ‘Imagine le pire,’ Sylvie’s mother tells her, ‘tu auras raison.’9 Sylvie immediately thinks of incest, but she is wrong: the truth is worse than the worst, the sexual exploitation of his family for his own social and commercial gain. This crime of the father (selling his daughter in order to secure a contract) is described by Frappat as ‘displaced incest’ (Frappat 2001: 47) and displacement is precisely the key to the whole film. It is, as Émile Breton suggests, ‘un film de déplacements’10 (Breton 1998). This is true not just in terms of the substitutes and surrogates who populate the narrative but also in the film’s insistence on objects and substances that flow and communicate: the liquids that Sylvie pours from one container to another in the laboratory where she works, the innumerable telephone calls, the sound of televisions that permeate the walls of Sylvie’s building (de Baecque 1998: 71). Most especially, though, displacement is assured in this film by the interminable images of transportation: shots filmed through the windscreen of Walser’s car and Sylvie’s endless train journeys. The scene in which Sylvie shoots Véronique while trying to kill Walser is the culmination of one long movement that begins in Paris when Sylvie leaves her brother’s bedside in the hospital where he is staying after falling off his motorcycle. We watch Sylvie ride in the metro, return to her office to collect her gun, go home and pack, arrive at the Gare de Lyon, buy a ticket and some sunglasses and board the TGV for Dijon. We watch as she tries on her sunglasses and buys vodka in the restaurant car; we see her change trains in Dijon and arrive finally, at the tiny station of Chagny where she walks, in darkness, to the large country house occupied by Walser and enters the library where she aims her gun, only to be foiled by Véronique. This whole long sequence, lasting nearly half an hour, was naturally 9 ‘Imagine the worst and you’ll be right’ 10 ‘a film of displacements’

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family secrets   103 singled out by impatient critics who saw it as unnecessarily slowing the development of the narrative, one journalist wittily calling it a ‘“tunnel” à la gloire de la SNCF’11 (Durand 1998). But, on reflection, this lengthy sequence – which is perhaps the most compelling in the whole of Secret Défense – proves to be essential to the film’s meaning. Rivette cast Sandrine Bonnaire as a killer in Secret Défense on the strength of her performance in Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie (1995), but Bonnaire only agreed to the role on condition that the character’s sense of guilt be fully explored (Bonnaire 1998b). It is in this scene, above all, that Rivette is able to evoke this guilt, not as a kind of abstract structure that Sylvie inherits from her father and is powerless to avoid but as an idea and an emotion that is born of her volition and has its own duration, indeed that exists in and as duration. In this sequence, Rivette shows us the birth of an idea during Sylvie’s pensive metro journey, as she crosses restlessly from one side of the carriage to the other before getting off the train and changing platforms in order to go back the same way. Subsequently we witness the growth of this idea in the train to Dijon as Sylvie nervously tries on her sunglasses, swallows her vodka and snaps at fellow passengers, as she takes her pulse and smokes keenly on a cigarette, the tension settling in her shoulders. By the time she arrives in Chagny, Sylvie’s idea has taken on a life of its own and become unstoppable as she strides purposefully through the night towards Walser’s house. As Rivette’s co-screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer has commented, ‘Dans Secret Défense, la durée même crée la substance et la beauté du film. Ce “rien” cache une charge émotionnelle très puissante’12 (Cuau and Bonitzer 1998). As Bonitzer remarks, this attention to duration further demonstrates Rivette’s indebtedness to Hitchcock, since the director of Vertigo also worked with duration as a function of suspense, spectators developing a heightened sense of the passage of time in their anxious expectation of what they knew was going to happen. (Vertigo also emphasised journeys and transport, especially Scottie’s (James Stewart) endless circuits in his car during his investigation of Madeleine.) At the same time, since Sylvie’s journey through space is also – for her and for the spectator – a journey through time, it highlights the fact that her return to Chagny is also a return to her childhood and will re-open 11 ‘a tunnel in honour of the SNCF’ 12 ‘In Secret Défense, duration creates the substance and the beauty of the film. This “void” conceals a very powerful emotional charge’

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104  jacques rivette the wound of her sister’s suicide. In addition, since Sylvie’s father was murdered by being pushed from a train, and since her mother will reveal the secret of Elisabeth’s suicide during another train journey, the conception and development of Sylvie’s own murderous intentions during a series of train rides lends a neat symmetry to the film. Various critics have suggested that Secret Défense is structured around figures of recurrence, of the return of the same, that, in much the same way as other films by Rivette, it forms a kind of loop, what Claire Vassé calls ‘une ronde de la mort’, a sort of merry-go-round of death (Vassé 1998: 34). While this is clearly true to some extent, given the theme of doubling that we have already discussed, I would suggest that the constant emphasis on the forward motion of trains and cars gives Secret Défense more of a linear impetus than many of Rivette’s films. Hélène Frappat, discussing the shot in which Sylvie nervously gulps vodka standing up in the restaurant car of the TGV while the green band of the French countryside hurtles past the window, argues that it represents Sylvie’s immobility within the current of life, the stasis implied by her entrapment within the tragic unfolding of her family’s internal logic (Frappat 2001: 43). I would offer a slightly different interpretation of this image, based on the very real sense of vertigo, the literal dizziness that it inspires in the spectator. Does this image not imply, rather than Sylvie’s immobility, precisely her sudden awareness that she is caught up in a process, the ongoing process of genealogy that she is powerless to stop? Does not Secret Défense give us a glimpse of a process – the process of desire – that passes through all the figures and characters of the film but is indifferent to the repetitive structures that would try to impose a sense upon it? For, if on the one hand desire is constantly reinvesting the same structures, on the other it flees along an endless chain of objects, each one just as imperative, and just as disposable, as the last. Does not Secret Défense, despite the obsessive rehearsal of the same scenarios and the serial logic of its revenge plots, demonstrate the ease with which one body can replace another in what Claire Vassé calls ‘ce trafic des corps’13 (Vassé 1998: 34)? This is precisely the conception of desire presented by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in L’Anti-Œdipe. Desire, they insist, is a process, and a process of production. By conceiving of desire in 13 ‘this traffic in bodies’

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family secrets   105 terms of acquisition, rather than production, psychoanalysis comes to consider desire in terms of lack, the lack of an object that is external to it, as in the Oedipus complex where the child’s unsatisfied desire for his mother construes his desire thereafter as a futile chase across a series of desultory objects, each an unsatisfactory substitute seeking to replace the primordially lost object. Deleuze and Guattari argue instead that ‘Le désir ne manque de rien, il ne manque pas de son objet. C’est plutôt le sujet qui manque au désir, ou le désir qui manque de sujet fixe’14 (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 34). By organising desire around lack, psychoanalysis channels desire into the fear of lacking, of missing out; this is ultimately the sense of the psychoanalytic figure of castration (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 35–6, 71). But this organisation of lack is also the fundamental operation of capitalism: Deleuze and Guattari argue that capitalism works to produce lack within structures and circuits of consumption, to absorb overabundant resources in order to motivate further production and the continued circulation and generation of capital (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 280). Capitalism operates at once by unleashing the free flow of desire and capital (of desire as capital) in its paroxysmic frenzy of production and consumption, and at the same time by binding or reining in this flow through the functions of banks, the culture of saving and so on (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 306–7). Capitalism thus imposes internal limits to its own growth and power, but these limits are constantly displaced (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 293). In this sense, psychoanalysis belongs fully to the capitalist era since it discovers the enormously productive forces of desire and the unconscious, and immediately imposes a limit on this desire, a structure on this unconscious in the form of the Oedipus complex which is a domestication of ‘une matière et une forme généalogiques qui lui échappe de toutes parts’15 (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 20). For Deleuze and Guattari, the family drama described by Freud is inseparable from the wider structures and conflicts of capitalist society, not because the family is a ‘microcosm’ of society but because it is bordered on all sides by a society that ­necessarily 14 ‘Desire does not lack anything; it does not lack its object. It is, rather, the subject that is missing in desire, or desire that lacks a fixed subject’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 26) 15 ‘a genealogical form and content that are in every way intractable’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 13)

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106  jacques rivette permeates those borders (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 115–16). Indeed, the Oedipus complex itself can be read as the application of social images and social types on to the family (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 313–16). From this point of view, we should remember that the family secrets in Rivette’s films are not contained within the family but on the contrary demonstrate the family’s intersection with a wider society, with the world of business, commerce, capital. The crimes in these films are not committed in the family but draw the family outside itself, bringing it into contact with the circulation of desire at large in the world, with forces that impact back on the family and alter it irreversibly. In Secret Défense, Sylvie’s father destroys his family in his desire for a contract, his libidinal investment of capital taking precedence over his feelings for his daughter. A similar logic is at work in Merry-Go-Round, where David is willing to sacrifice his family for four million dollars, or in Haut bas fragile, where the absent father’s secret turns out to be one of embezzlement of funds and the subsequent suicide of the patsy who shouldered the blame.

Twice upon a time: rewriting family history with Céline and Julie According to Deleuze and Guattari, the psychoanalytic conception of desire, lacking its object, is only capable of producing fantasy and hallucination, that is of producing phantasmic substitutes for the forever-absent real object. Deleuze and Guattari insist, on the other hand, that desire produces the real: ‘Si le désir produit, il produit du réel. Si le désir est producteur, il ne peut l’être qu’en réalité, et de réalité’16 (Deleuze and Guattari 1972/73: 34). Perhaps one of the finest cinematic illustrations of this belief in the productive power of desire is to be found in another of Rivette’s films that deals with a family secret, Céline et Julie vont en bateau. The plot of this film is, notoriously, almost impossible to summarise, precisely because of the undecidability between the status of ‘reality’ or ‘fantasy’ that one is to attribute to its images. In brief, then: Céline and Julie, two young women who may be friends, lovers, sisters or cousins, enjoy a life of games, storytelling and magic tricks. One day, Céline tells Julie about 16 ‘If desire produces, its product is real. If desire is productive, it can be productive only in the real world and can produce only reality’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 26)

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family secrets   107 an old house that, in the words of Julie Levinson, she has ‘remembered or dreamed or made up’ (Levinson 1991: 241). Céline and Julie take it in turns to go to this house and act as maids. In the house live a widower, Olivier (Barbet Schroeder), and his daughter Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar), together with Camille (Bulle Ogier), the sister of Olivier’s late wife, and another woman, Sophie (Marie-France Pisier), both of whom are competing to become Olivier’s new wife. Céline and Julie eventually discover that, since Olivier’s wife decreed that he should never remarry so long as Madlyn was alive, the two women are trying to murder the child in order to fulfil their wish. Céline and Julie thus decide to rescue Madlyn from the sinister and murderous world of adult heterosexuality. This synopsis, however, does nothing to convey the giddy sense of slippage between different planes or dimensions of reality and fantasy that give the film its unique character. Consider, for instance, the relationship between Céline and Julie. The pair seem to meet when Julie sees Céline drop her scarf in a park and follows her in order to return it. But, in the subsequent pursuit through Montmartre, it soon becomes clear that this chase is a game, and a game that these women may have played before, since they both seem to know the ‘rules’ (and besides, the opening title card states that ‘Le plus souvent, ça commençait comme ça’17). Julie deliberately follows at a distance, never really trying to catch Céline, and tries to make herself invisible whenever Céline turns round to look. Céline, of course, is well aware that she is being followed and, at one point, brushes past Julie and stares her directly in the eye, an act that makes this whole pursuit seem less like a game and more like a seduction (Levinson notes the ‘erotic dimension’ to this scene and its camerawork (Levinson 1991: 239)). Julia Lesage, who seeks to recuperate Céline et Julie as a lesbian film, insists that the two heroines are sleeping together (Lesage 1993: 122) and we might note that they address each other as ‘tu’ for the first time after Céline spends the night in Julie’s bed, which, in classical French cinema, is traditionally a discreet way of implying sexual intimacy between characters. Céline also disguises herself as Julie in order to meet and rapidly despatch her childhood boyfriend Grégoire (Philippe Clévenot), the heterosexual couple proving a troublesome obstacle to the development of a same-sex relationship, as in many 17 ‘Most of the time, it started like that’

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108  jacques rivette queer narratives. Furthermore, Céline tells her friends she has met a red-haired woman (like Julie) from America, saying ‘Elle veut me faire son Pygmalion’.18 Later, Julie will introduce herself to Céline’s friends as ‘une lointaine cousine d’Amérique’.19 Yet, on another occasion, Céline refers to Julie as her sister. There is even a possibility that Céline may be a pure invention of Julie’s since she appears in the park (and loses her scarf) after we have seen Julie perform a spell from her book of magic. A little later, she performs another one and returns home to find Céline sitting on the landing outside her door. Alternatively, the whole narrative could be a dream of Céline’s, who wakes in the park at the end of the film to see Julie hurrying past and dropping her magic book. The nature of Céline and Julie’s relationship is, then, indeterminable, but what is important is that they produce that relationship, they produce each other, as a function of their desire. Julie is a creation of Céline’s dreaming imagination and Céline is a magic trick conjured out of thin air by Julie. They invent themselves as lesbians by flirting in the street and, if they decide they want to be sisters, they have only to pronounce the word in order to make this wish a reality. The world of Céline and Julie is one of games, stories, creations and magic tricks. In Julie’s apartment, Céline tells of her recent trip to Africa and how the emperor of the pygmies gave her a tiger skin, provoking the jealousy of Zouba la Géante. She performs magic tricks in a nightclub but Julie, herself a specialist in invocations and magic potions, has no difficulty taking her place when Céline is busy in the old house. The house and its occupants are, in turn, inscribed within the uncertain logic of Céline and Julie’s world. The house first appears as simply another of Céline’s stories, the pair seeming to make it up as they go along. ‘Elles étaient comment, ces deux femmes, blondes, brunes …?’ asks Julie, to which Céline replies, ‘C’est ça, blonde, brune.’20 And indeed, there will be one blonde and one brunette in the house. Julie goes to the house, enters, and is later ejected again, dizzy and forgetful, but she finds a sweet in her mouth which, when sucked, brings back images from within the house, first in short, disordered fragments, then gradually, after several visits to the house, in longer, 18 ‘She wants to make me her Pygmalion’ 19 ‘a distant cousin from America’ 20 ‘What were they like, these women, blonde, brunette? – That’s right, blonde, brunette.’

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family secrets   109 linear sequences. This peculiar means of access to the activity within the house raises a number of other possible interpretations. Some critics have suggested that these magic sweets are like psychedelic drugs giving access to the hallucinatory ‘trip’ inside the house (Bory 1974; Brown 1998: 31). Meanwhile, the position of Céline and Julie as they ‘watch’ the scenes in the house – framed in two-shot facing the camera – seems to cast them as film spectators, an impression heightened by the disconnected sequence of the initial images that have to be edited together into a coherent story (Delmas 1974: 19; Levinson 1991: 242). The fragmented nature of these images has encouraged other critics to see in them ‘the irruption of an unconscious memory’ (Rodowick 1991: 101) and indeed, it seems possible that the house may somehow belong to Julie’s past. While Julie is out, Céline discovers a black-and-white photograph of the house in a trunk in her apartment. Meanwhile, while looking for a back door into the house, Julie comes across a long-lost nanny who serves her tea and reminisces about Julie’s childhood and family. The nanny tells Julie that, after she left, all the inhabitants of the house departed, never to return, and she adds, ‘Tu te souviens de l’infirmière? Tu en avais peur!’21 All of this implies that the scenes in the house may belong to Julie’s childhood, and that she may even be the child cared for by the nurse that she herself now ‘plays’ in the fantasy reproduction (although, as Wood points out (1981: 10), the child more closely resembles Céline). In the film, Julie’s mother is absent and she talks of receiving postcards from far-flung locations like Java and Beirut. If it were possible to apply traditional psychology to the characters of the film, we might suggest that this romantic imagination conceals Julie’s denial of her mother’s death (although, inside the house, Camille also talks at length about her travels around the world). Ultimately, then, just as in Freud, it is impossible to decide whether this is a real memory or a fantasy, but what is certain is that the scenes of the house have the structure of images produced by the unconscious. At one point, as Céline and Julie finish their sweets and emerge reluctantly from the obscure fiction of the house, the last shot of the sequence – in which Olivier attempts to seduce the nurse Angèle – is repeated one last time, rather in the way an image from a dream will flash on to the conscious mind as the dreamer is coming up from sleep. It is the insistent repetition of 21 ‘Do you remember the nurse? You were so scared of her!’

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110  jacques rivette the images and events inside the house that gives them the status of a fantasy or an unconscious memory (Rodowick 1991: 101). Several images return obsessively throughout the course of the film: Camille coming slowly downstairs dressed in her late sister’s dress; Camille arranging flowers with the nurse; Sophie offering sweets to Madlyn in her closed fists, saying ‘Tu pourrais perdre, mais tu gagnes toujours’;22 Camille at a sink with the nurse, washing blood from her hand; Sophie coming downstairs with a doll in her hand and fainting at the sight of something in the dining room. After seeing these images a couple of times, Céline protests that ‘ils font les mêmes gestes qu’hier’,23 and Julie proposes that perhaps ‘ils se font une journée perpétuelle’.24 Indeed, within the diegetic world of the house itself, the same events are being played out over again. Camille dresses in her late sister’s clothes, noting that ‘Les mêmes modes reviennent tous les vingt ans. Je pourrai donc les porter sans rien y changer’25 (this line is borrowed from the Henry James story ‘The Romance of Certain Old Clothes’ that served as partial inspiration for this section of Céline et Julie). Camille hopes, in this way, to win the confidence of Madlyn but, thinking she has seen the ghost of her mother, the child hides under her pillow and Camille, surprised, breaks a wine glass in her hand. ‘Elle me déteste,’ she laments, ‘Je n’arriverai jamais à me faire aimer d’elle. Tout se répète comme il y a dix ou quinze ans.’26 She goes on to complain of how she has always lived in the shadow of her sister: ‘Elle voulait m’anéantir, m’étouffer, me faire disparaître’.27 Now history has come full circle and it is her sister’s daughter that Camille wants to get rid of, whom she wants to smother, for it is surely Camille’s bloody hand print that Angèle discovers on Madlyn’s bedclothes in another scene (the same red hand print that appears, as if by magic, on the shoulder of Céline and Julie when they have been inside the house). Sophie is also aware of the patterns being repeated within this house, since she declares ‘Je ne veux pas que Madlyn souffre ce que j’ai souffert

22 ‘You could lose, but you always win’ 23 ‘they’re doing the same things they did yesterday’ 24 ‘they’re living the same day over and over again’ 25 ‘The same fashions come back every twenty years. I’ll be able to wear them as they are.’ 26 ‘She hates me. I’ll never manage to make her love me. Everything is happening again like it did ten or fifteen years ago.’ 27 ‘She wanted to destroy me, to smother me, to get rid of me’

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family secrets   111 quand j’avais son âge’.28 Ironically, though, Sophie seeks to protect Madlyn by removing her from life altogether: the sweets she gives to the child are injected with a drug to make her sleep, Olivier mistaking his daughter’s abnormal somnolence for a hereditary condition. Céline and Julie decide to rescue Madlyn from the oppressive atmosphere of this house where she has no future. As they say, ‘Il était une fois, il était deux fois, il était que cette fois ça se passera pas comme les autres fois’.29 On their last visit to the house, Céline and Julie enter together and gleefully mock the adults who, with the deathly pallor of ghosts or statues (at the sink, Camille even bleeds blue blood), sleepwalk through their eternally prescribed roles. Eventually they sneak out of the window with Madlyn and wake in Julie’s apartment to find the child in the bathtub happily asking ‘À quoi on joue maintenant?’30 In other words, Céline and Julie rescue Madlyn from an adult sexuality that seeks to destroy her. The drama played out in the old house may not be, strictly speaking, an Oedipal conflict, but it has the same consequence, namely the negation of the child and the erasure of the child’s desire. The successful negotiation of the Oedipus complex permits the child’s entry into the Symbolic Order of adult sexuality, but only at the expense of the polymorphous perversity, the productive force of the child’s unformed desire. Adult sexuality effectively eliminates the child’s desire from the equation by projecting its own desire into the space occupied by the child. Céline and Julie, with their playful and unfixed approach to reality, rescue the creative potential of the child’s desire from the adult figures who seek to annihilate it in order to satisfy the exclusivity of their own desire. The joyful message of Céline et Julie is that the Oedipal structure of sexual identity is not a pattern programmed into humanity at some distant point of origin and destined forever to be repeated with the same mixture of guilt, fear and compromise. On the contrary, Oedipus is a specific historico-cultural binding of desire that in no way excludes the continued creative potential of desire. As David Rodowick puts it, Oedipus ‘is a historically defined regulatory apparatus whose efforts to bolster the subject within the reigning norms of self-identity and hierarchies of power issue from the attempt to construct order out of the disorderly force of the drives’ (Rodowick 1991: 96). To criticise or 28 ‘I don’t want Madlyn to suffer the way I suffered when I was her age’ 29 ‘Once upon a time, twice upon a time, this time won’t be like the other times’ 30 ‘What shall we play now?’

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112  jacques rivette to deconstruct this psychic apparatus is ‘to articulate the potentially utopian function of phantasy’ (Rodowick 1991: 96). Perhaps the most important observation to make about Céline et Julie vont en bateau – Royal S. Brown makes this simple but often overlooked point (Brown 1998: 31) – is that it is the world of Céline and Julie, with all its ambiguous relationships, endless games and miraculous synchronicities that appears to us, as spectators, as the real world, whereas the world within the house, with precisely defined familial relationships, and a clear, decipherable plot, a reconstructable order of events, appears as an absurd and stuffy fiction. Julia Lesage points out the refreshing freedom of Céline and Julie’s gestures and interactions, compared to the uptight mannerisms of the women in the house (Lesage 1993: 123). It is no surprise that the inhabitants of the house begin to resemble zombies in the final scenes since they have in fact been a kind of living dead from the very beginning, ‘embalmed in their roles’ (Levinson 1991: 244). Céline et Julie, then, as Robin Wood has argued, constitutes a powerful critique of a patriarchal social structure in which a woman’s identity is defined by her attachment to a man, as is the case for Camille and Sophie in their desperate struggles to ‘catch’ the supremely eligible Olivier. Céline and Julie, meanwhile, are constantly creating and re-creating their own identities in a playful relation that deliberately refuses a concept of ‘maturity’ defined by male heterosexuality (Wood 1981: 8–9). Céline et Julie vont en bateau is undoubtedly, as Wood insists, ‘one of the most radical and positive feminist statements the cinema has yet achieved’ (Wood 1981: 2), but it achieves this status precisely through the lightness with which it wears its feminist credentials and the mischievous joy with which it takes apart the heterosexual ideal, making it, in the words of Youssef Ishaghpour, ‘le film le plus drôle que le féminisme ait produit, grâce à un homme’31 (Ishaghpour 1986: 222).

References Bonnaire, S. (1998a), ‘A la frontière du naturalisme et du théâtre’, Le Monde, 19 March. Bonnaire, S. (1998b), ‘Je préfère l’émotion aux éclairages flatteurs’, Télérama, 21 March. 31 ‘the funniest film ever produced by feminism, thanks to a man’

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family secrets   113 Bory, J.-L. (1974), ‘Céline et Julie vont en bateau’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 30 September. Breton, E. (1998), ‘L’art du déplacement’, L’Humanité, 18 March. Brown, R. S. (1998), ‘Lost and found: Céline and Julie go boating’, Cineaste, 23, 3, 30–1. Cuau, E. and Bonitzer, P. (1998), ‘Nous étions dans un état d’alerte permanent’, Libération, 18 March. de Baecque, A. (1998), ‘Un système vide’, Cahiers du cinéma, 522, 70–1. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1972/73), Capitalisme et schizophrénie: L’AntiŒdipe, Paris, Minuit. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (1984), Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, London, Athlone Press. Delmas, J. (1974), ‘Céline et Julie vont en bateau’, Jeune cinéma, 80, 18–20. Derrida, J. (1967), De la grammatologie, Paris, Minuit. Durand, J.-M. (1998), ‘Secret Défense’, Le Progrès, 18 March. Frappat, H. (2001), Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma. Freud, S. (1955), Totem and taboo in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 13, trans. and ed. by James Strachey, London, Hogarth Press. Gasperi, A. (1983), ‘Rivette, l’inconnu du 4e rang’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 11 April. Hollier, D. (1995), Le Collège de Sociologie, 1937–1939, Paris, Gallimard. Ishaghpour, Y. (1986), Cinéma contemporain: De ce côté du miroir, Paris, Éditions de la Différence. Laplanche, J. and Pontalis, J.-B. (1985), Fantasme originaire, fantasme des origines, origines du fantasme, Paris, Hachette. Lardeau, Y. (1983), ‘Une partie de colin-maillard’, Cahiers du cinéma, 346, 51–4. Lesage, J. (1993), ‘Céline et Julie vont en bateau: Fantasme subversif’, CinémAction, 67, 121–7. Levinson, J. (1991), ‘Céline and Julie go story telling’, The French Review, 65, 2, 236–46. Rivette, J. (1953), ‘L’art de la fugue’, Cahiers du cinéma, 26, 49–52. Rodowick, D. N. (1991), The Difficulty of Difference: Psychoanalysis, Sexual Difference and Film Theory, New York, Routledge. Seguret, O. (1983), ‘Tu me fais tourner, Rivette …’, Libération, 22 April. Thomas, F. (1983), ‘Merry-Go-Round: Le beau manège’, Positif, 267, 58–9. Vassé, C. (1998), ‘Secret Défense: Petits trafics avec les morts’, Positif, 446, 34–5. Wood, R. (1981), ‘Narrative pleasure: Two films of Jacques Rivette’, Film Quarterly, 35, 1, 2–12.

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114

1  The entry ritual: the approach (Céline et Julie, 1974)

2  The entry ritual: opening the gate (Haut bas fragile, 1995)

3  The entry ritual: coming through the wood (L’Amour par terre, 1984)

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115

4  The entry ritual: at the door (Secret Défense, 1998)

5  The entry ritual: crossing the threshold (Haut bas fragile, 1995)

6  Ludivine and Walser (Secret Défense, 1998)

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116

7  The space of Wuthering Heights (Hurlevent, 1985)

8  Escaping Wuthering Heights (Hurlevent, 1985)

9  Roch eavesdropping (Hurlevent, 1985)

10  Cathy and Roch at the billiard table (Hurlevent, 1985)

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5 La règle du jeu: games and play

‘To begin with, the single idea was that of jeu in all the senses of the word: actors’ performance, the interplay of the characters, but also play in the sense that children play and in the sense in which one talks about the free play of parts of a machine’1 (Rivette 1963). Thus Jacques Rivette described his approach to the filming of his monumental manifesto of the early 1970s, Out 1, adding that his choice of play as guiding principle was in reaction to his previous film, L’Amour fou, and its ‘false authenticity’ (côté faussement vécu). But if Out 1 is a key ‘play-text’ in Rivette’s work, it is not the first of his films to give a privileged position to one or other of the senses of jeu – a polyvalent word which, apart from most of the functions of the English ‘play’, also includes ‘game’ in its organised, regulated form and the theatrical activity of ‘acting’. Indeed his first venture into filmmaking, the short Le Coup du berger (1956), is principally notable for the way that it structures its story (a stock comic plot with a long lineage which Stanley Donen was to re-use four years later in The Grass is Greener, a film which incidentally seems in its turn to have inspired Rivette for the finale of Va savoir2 ) around a game of chess, with the various actions of its protagonists ‘translated’ into the abstract form of recognised 1 ‘Au départ, la seule idée était celle du jeu dans tous les sens du mot: jeu d’acteurs, jeu des personnages entre eux, aussi bien le jeu au sens où les enfants jouent et aussi jeu comme on dit qu’il y a du jeu entre les parties d’un assemblage’ 2 For the lineage of the story of the mink coat and the lost left-luggage ticket, see http://www.snopes.com/love/betrayal/minkcoat.asp. The article traces the story, often attributed to Roald Dahl in 1959, back to Gregory Ratoff’s 1939 film Day-Time Wife, but omits to mention Rivette’s short version. Hitchcock, as well as Donen, was to re-use it in 1960.

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118  jacques rivette tactical moves. From his beginnings, then, Rivette’s cinematic representation of life is presented as a jeu, but the rigid, predictable laws of chess which here frame Claire’s adventure as a kind of behaviourist exemplum are a long way from the connotations which govern Out 1 – free play, children’s play, interplay, contexts in which jeu can be used to liberate the film from the demands of pre-planned narrative or professed mimesis (‘le côté faussement vécu’). In Rivette’s cinema from Le Coup du berger onwards, ‘play’ and ‘games’are among other things a vehicle for this tension in his narratives between the wish for structure, sense and context – even, if necessary, arbitrarily imposed – and a contradictory wish to avoid commitment to any such imposition but to remain open to experiment, chance and unpredictability. In order to explore Rivette’s use of these tensions, it is probably first necessary to try to pin down, a little, the protean concept of jeu and the potential it offers for re-thinking both narrative and the very process of filmmaking – the relationship between camera and actors, camera and location, camera and audience. One of the most sustained and systematic theoretical analyses of the notion of jeu was that carried out by Roger Caillois and published as Les Jeux et les hommes in 1958, two years after the appearance of Le Coup du berger (an extended edition was published in 1967). Caillois himself took as his starting point Johan Huizinga’s 1938 study Homo ludens. Caillois and Huizinga, between them, set out a number of characteristics of the limits and nature of the domain of the jeu which provide a useful framework for understanding both its creative potential and its philosophical difficulties. The first principle of jeu, Caillois suggests, is separation: the ludic and the extra-ludic worlds do not communicate – or, if they do, they lead to a dangerous corruption of the very principle of play (Caillois 1967: 37–8). Sometimes the separation is directly spatial, for example the carefully delineated ground of a football field or the stage of a theatre, but often it is a loosely-defined change of mentality; the switch between make-believe and reality which children can exercise with the simple announcement ‘We’re not playing now’. Huizinga said of this hermetic game world: ‘It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise and other means’ (Huizinga 1938 in Ryan 2001: 178), a sentence with obvious Rivettian resonance. According to Caillois, it is a necessary characteristic of jeu that it

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la règle du jeu: games and play   119 should have no practical consequences in the non-ludic world, within which it must be a completely unproductive activity (Caillois 1967: 24). That demand leads to a certain amount of theoretical gymnastics even within the categories he sets out for himself – professional footballers, for example, are no longer playing, while gambling can claim to be play because it does not produce wealth but only redistributes it, a solution which avoids the question of whether any individual gambler can be said to be playing. But Caillois is seeking definitions where there may, in fact, be only lines of tension. The porous border between play and non-play has always been a fertile locus of narrative, and it is one which Rivette explores both within his films – notably in Le Pont du Nord (1982), one of the most exemplary formulations of the problems of jeu – and in his filmic practice itself. The other vital line of tension which Caillois locates in his definition of the domain of play is that between predictability and unpredictability, a contradiction which is present, inherently and in both its aspects, in the very construction of the concept. On the one hand, Caillois points out, there is no game if the outcome is known in advance (Caillois 1967: 39); on the other, a fundamental characteristic of many, if not all, ‘game worlds’ is their submission to a series of known, relatively simple rules which the players have accepted in advance and which restrict the range of possible causes and consequences much more drastically than could be imagined in a ‘non-ludic’ world – with a consequent provisional predictability (Caillois 1967: 13–14). Although he finds himself obliged to make an exception for ‘games of make-believe’ – that is to say, the construction of fictions, a category which obviously takes on enormous importance as soon as these concepts are applied to literature and film – it cannot be denied that the vital part of the domain of jeu contained in the English word game does immediately suggest a framework of rules. In fact, Caillois’s definitions and categorisations are themselves an attempt to tease out rules for a game with the concept of ‘game’ – his first requirement, separation and non-productivity (along with the relatively uncontentious further requirement that play should be an activity freely engaged in), presenting itself as an Ur-rule which all games, even the most unregulated, must obey. Beyond these general definitions, Caillois attempts a classification of types of games along two axes. The simpler of these is an expression of those very contrasting tendencies which a few pages before he has

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120  jacques rivette assigned, together, universal value: regulation, restriction and predictability versus uncertainty and, indeed, impunity – since actions in a game world cannot have permanent consequences in reality, the range of permissible actions is greatly extended, and while the rules of the game may be immutable, the laws of the outside world, judicial and even physical, can be freely poked and twisted and ­temporarily ignored. Caillois proposes a terminology which recognises two extremes: ‘ludus’ for highly regulated, formal games, predicated on ‘a taste for gratuitous difficulty’; ‘paedia’ (from children’s play) for unregulated, experimental free play whose major characteristic is to dispense with the restrictions of reality in the name of the ‘primal power of joyous improvisation’ (Caillois 1967: 75). Alongside this dichotomy, he also divides ‘games’ into four types based on the basic principle which activates them: games of competition (agôn) where the outcome depends on the players’ skill; games of chance (alea) where on the contrary the players renounce all influence over the outcome; games of make-believe (mimicry); and games of pure physical euphoria (ilinx). That the types are often – indeed usually – found in combination is made clear; and similarly that the combination of competition and chance provides a particularly significant model, where the two aspects together assure the contradictory fundamental requirements of inescapable rules and uncertain outcome (Caillois 1967: 50ff.). Caillois’s model, although it has been justifiably criticised for its rigidity and for some of the more dubious conclusions of the ‘sociology of games’ which he subsequently draws from it (see, for example, Motte 1995: 6–9), is an invaluable tool for any discussion of the presence and significance of play and games as a narrative principle, and we will have frequent recourse to his vocabulary in untangling Rivette’s use of them. But his field of study is, in fact, relatively restricted in comparison with the semantic field of jeu. Returning to Rivette’s summary of the inspiration of Out 1, quoted above, we see that ‘play in the sense of children’s play’ is only one, relatively minor, aspect of the matter; and games, as such, are not even mentioned. Perhaps more important, and surely with even more fundamental significance for Rivette’s narrative projects, are the two notions of interplay between the characters and free play ‘in the sense in which one talks of the free play of parts of a machine’. With these two references we turn to a notion of jeu defined in both cases as interaction between elements of a greater whole, where a certain

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la règle du jeu: games and play   121 space left for adaptation of the action of one to the action of the other is allowed to decide – in the case of the machine, we might say to regulate – the progress of the whole agglomeration. Leaving aside, for the moment, the more narrowly ludic aspects of separate worlds and the social function of human play, which is the central issue for the sociologists Huizinga and Caillois, we see here a concept of jeu as a dynamic creative force; one which might, up to a point – in the case of Out 1, did in fact and to a very considerable degree – substitute for the organising hand of the director and scriptwriter in deciding the progress of the plot. In describing such creative free play, a valuable reference would seem to be Jacques Derrida’s 1967 description of the jeu as formative principle of a metaphorical structure. The concept of structure, to begin with, assumes a centre: Ce centre avait pour fonction non seulement d’orienter et d’équilibrer, d’organiser la structure … mais de faire surtout que le principe d’organisation de la structure limite ce que nous pourrons appeler le jeu de la structure. Sans doute le centre d’une structure, en orientant et en organisant la cohérence du système, permet-il le jeu des éléments à l’intérieur de la forme totale … Pourtant le centre ferme aussi le jeu qu’il ouvre et rend possible. En tant que centre, il est le point où la substitution des contenus, des éléments, des termes, n’est plus possible … Le concept de structure centrée est en effet le concept d’un jeu fondé, constitué depuis une immobilité fondatrice et une certitude rassurante, elle-même soustraite au jeu. Depuis cette certitude, l’angoisse peut être maîtrisée, qui naît toujours d’une certaine manière d’être impliquée dans le jeu, d’être pris au jeu, d’être comme être d’entrée de jeu dans le jeu. (Derrida 1967: 409–10)3 3 ‘The function of this center was not only to orient, balance, and organize the structure … but above all to make sure that the organizing principle of the structure would limit what we might call the play of the structure. By orienting and organizing the coherence of the system, the center of a structure permits the play of its elements inside the total form … Nevertheless, the center also closes off the play which it opens up and makes possible. As center, it is the point at which the substitution of contents, elements or terms is no longer possible … The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of a play based on a fundamental ground, a play constituted on the basis of a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which itself is beyond the reach of play. And on the basis of this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were at stake in the game from the outset’ (Derrida 1978: 278–9).

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122  jacques rivette But when the assumption of a central, stable, organising principle is called into question, the jeu inherits fundamental formative significance. At most in this case, the centre may be replaced by a void, itself a construct of the dynamic interplay of elements around it, any of which may at different times appear to allude to it but which in no way depend upon it to form a whole. ‘Le centre n’avait pas de lieu fixe mais une fonction, une sorte de non-lieu dans lequel se jouaient à l’infini des substitutions de signes’4 (Derrida 1967: 411) – according to Derrida’s spatial metaphor which is itself peculiarly appropriate to Rivette’s preoccupations. Instead of the stable centre, in this construct, there remains the desire for it, dealt with by a continual reorganisation of the marginal elements among themselves in such a way as to continually create and recreate different, transitory organisations with everchanging imaginary centres (‘ce champ est en effet celui d’un jeu, c’est-à-dire de substitutions infinies dans la clôture d’un ensemble fini’5 (Derrida 1967: 423)). A truer, and less regressive, conception, according to Derrida, would dispense with all tendency to create centres, however temporary, and ‘affirm the jeu’, in its dynamism, for itself, a step which, he acknowledges, is extremely hard to take. Such patterns, and such contradictions, are profoundly relevant to Rivette’s practice and to the dynamics of his narratives, which frequently function as illustrations of the continually frustrated and continually resurgent desire to find/to destroy narrative coherence. However, as Rivette’s actors play off each other, and his plots continually restructure the clues that the audience – and the characters – think they can read as pointing to some narrative centre, we are still aware of the more childish, frivolous connotations of jeu, and the contrast between seriousness and non-seriousness which is another line of tension in the definition of play6 becomes a source of unease and, indeed, embarrassment. Rivette’s twists and turns may leave a sophisticated spectator uncertain, at risk of mistaking the worlds of play and non-play and, by responding too eagerly to the dark and ­terrifying hints laid in the plot, of finding themselves exposed as 4 ‘the center had no natural site, […] it was not a fixed locus but a function, a sort of nonlocus in which an infinite number of sign-substitutions came into play’ (Derrida 1978: 280). 5 ‘This field is in effect that of play, that is to say, a field of infinite substitutions only because it is finite’ (Derrida 1978: 289). 6 See Warren Motte, 1995, 17–20.

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la règle du jeu: games and play   123 r­ idiculous, like an adult overengrossed in children’s make-believe. In this sense it can be said that Rivette’s films contain play not only within themselves – in the relations between elements of the plot, between characters and between actors in the production – but also between film and audience. We are left in continual uncertainty over what, precisely, our role should be in relation to the stories unfolding before us. In this context Marie-Laure Ryan’s two fundamental relations which a text may seek to establish with an audience, and their corresponding tensions, are relevant. Exploring the potentialities of virtual literature, Ryan contrasts immersion, the characteristic of the nineteenth-century realistic novel, which draws the reader fully into the fictional world ruling out any sense of separation which might allow space for play, with interactivity, the domain of the active reader (and the ‘writerly’ text), establishing – potentially – a ludic relationship in which the world of the text becomes a separate play space which the reader can manipulate at his or her will, creating hints and ideas of meaning with, on the whole, imaginative freedom and emotional impunity. Ryan’s contention is that, despite semiotic dogma about the nature of the text which would establish interactivity as the only valid descriptor of the activity of reading, a reader seeks immersion, finds considerable satisfaction in texts that seem to provide it, and on the contrary often remains frustrated by the detached ‘empowerment’ that comes from active resolution of purely textual puzzles … unless, that is, something in those puzzles, whether it be the apparent content of the text or the process of its production, is fascinating enough to temporarily blur the boundary between play space and reality: in other words, to become, even for brief instants of connection, immersing. A true game, as most game theorists, Caillois, Huizinga and Motte included, would agree, depends on this same requirement. Adults playing with children may keep a certain detachment, but real players are always, for as long as they are playing, immersed in the game. Ryan’s formulation, and especially the hint of uncertainty which attaches to it – as if neither immersion nor interactivity can be an adequate response, both carry with them a guilty sense of missing something – is extremely useful to describe the uneasiness of the spectator before a Rivettian plot: offered a set of puzzling narrative clues with ambiguous or very incomplete connections, we, along with the principal characters, are torn between a sophisticated caution which encourages taking a step backwards, keeping the elements separate

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124  jacques rivette and appreciating them for the elegantly selected direction signs they are, and an eager wish to plunge into this narrative, assemble the pieces of the puzzle and believe in our own assemblage and its significance, at least in the complex world of the film’s characters’ lives and, perhaps, even in our own. Rivette’s running times can only encourage the latter tendency: when we follow the unravelling of a fictional world over three, four – or in the case of Out 1, twelve – hours, the temptations of immersion become ever more acute, as do the chances of the audience’s decoding activity converging with that of the characters. But the more we become engrossed, despite ourselves, despite the codes which should warn us how arbitrary, constructed, and indeed derivative Rivette’s game of fiction is, the higher the risk of confusion. For almost all his career, Rivette rarely resolves the question at the heart of the audience’s uneasiness – was it a game, was it ‘for real’? Was there a plot or not? Was there a narrative centre, or did I make it up? Is anyone dead, or have they all gone home? (Even this apparently naive question need not have an obvious answer: consider, again, Le Pont du Nord with its explicit, if shadowy, contemporary references.) Only in two of the films of his old age, Haut bas fragile and Va savoir, has the matter been resolved definitively in favour of the ludic. In Haut bas fragile, the most musical of Rivette’s films – joué, played, therefore, in yet another sense – the most sinister of games ends with a dance where the characters circle and replace each other in what seems like a visual expression of Derrida’s endless ‘free play’: the last scene of Va savoir offers an explosive, drunken, decompression where every over-charged signifier is liberated at once: nothing that has gone before has really mattered in comparison with what will come after, the continuing process of creation (the theatre troupe will survive to put on the new Goldoni) and appreciation of the creation (Do will come to the play, and in the meantime, everyone will eat the cake.) Marc Chevrie (1989, 1991) claims that Out 1 marks the entry of jeu into Rivette’s cinema, despite ‘small incidents’ in La Religieuse and L’Amour fou, while ‘À partir d’Out 1, l’idée de jeu s’étend à tous les niveaux du film … Le monde est un jeu de rôles et le film un jeu de l’oie’7 (Chevrie 1991: 133) – with exceptions nonetheless, notably for the two Parallel Films, Duelle and Noroît, and for Hurlevent. Chevrie’s definition of the ludic seems strongly predicated on non-seriousness 7 ‘From Out 1 onwards, the idea of the game reaches into all levels of the film. The world is a role-play and the film a jeu de l’oie’

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la règle du jeu: games and play   125 and provisionality, notably a certain provisionality in the narration (‘Les seules règles sont celles du jeu que les personnages se jouent à eux-mêmes … La règle principale, … c’est de jouer le jeu. Le jeu de la fiction’8 (Chevrie 1989: 22)). In fact the graceful, highly regulated, implicitly repeated agonistic dance of Duelle has many of the characteristics of a game, a championship of which, of course, we are shown only one match; and Chevrie’s description applies to it as much as to others even if the narrative detachment is less, if destinies seem fixed and death final. Noroît, violent in its action and definitive in its end, nonetheless plays out in so artificial and improbable a form that the audience can only read it as a jeu théâtral, in which context it will be discussed in Chapter 6. On the other hand Claire’s progression, or regression, in L’Amour fou, expresses itself through a series of activities which are ludic at least through their gratuitousness and ritual repetition, as well as through certain aspects of mimicry. Her withdrawal from the performance of Andromaque, and confinement in a space quite as separate where she systematically destroys whatever elementary rules of the function of objects remain, could be described as a progression from ludus to paedia within a universe entirely governed by the jeu, while the actual fate of the couple is played out in the space between theatre and flat. The weekend of gleeful and fantastical destruction which constitutes the euphoric climax of the couple’s fusion but which takes no account of consequences and, indeed, has none, since it is followed almost immediately by their separation, seems the final confirmation that one of the stakes of L’Amour fou is the possibility – or impossibility – of maintaining the vital imaginative life of a separate game world through the banal succession of real days. In Out 1, however, all the connotations of jeu, without exception, do seem to come together for the first time. In its original conception, the film had scarcely any preconceived limits; the narrative thread was of the thinnest, and largely imported by the different actors, some (Michel Lonsdale, Michèle Moretti) to continue work already begun in other contexts. Some came with a character prepared, some (Jean-Pierre Léaud, at least, the most neurotic and unrelaxed of actors) wanted to arrive ‘vierge’ (virgin) and accept the workings of chance and inter­actions on his character. On this fragile and disjointed base the various actors were assigned episodes in which they would 8 ‘The only rules are those of the game which the characters are playing for themselves … The principal rule … is to play the game. The game of the story’

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126  jacques rivette encounter each other – on the basis of the previous day’s shooting, the subsequent story would develop. It was, in fact, entirely dependent on the interplay not only of the characters but of the actors, and the ­imaginative exercise required might reasonably be compared to exercises in improvisation, or indeed some kinds of imaginative games. The actors, however, did not necessarily find this open-ended activity easy or ‘playful’ in a relaxing sense. Bulle Ogier, for example, in the interview given to Sergio Toffetti recalled that ‘cela m’intéressait moyennement. J’étais déjà un peu lassée par l’improvisation’9 (Ogier 1991: 91). The stakes, in terms of complete concentration on the actions of the other portions of the whole, and immersion of the actors in the process of creation, were very great: the project must have become for its initiators a very serious game indeed. Out 1, even in its twelve-hour version, is a fragmentary experience for a spectator, an interlacing of strands which, for the majority of the film, remain essentially impermeable to each other. The moments when the strands truly meet – that is, when the different actors encounter each other – constituted the only pre-planned aspect of the film. But, of course, these are not the only contacts programmed between the various, fragmentary, stories: it is the montage too which brings different sequences together, and the montage is insistent: for example the ten-minute sequence in episode 3 where Colin’s calculations on his blackboard are cross-cut four times with a fairly minor scam being carried out by Frédérique. Although these two characters never encounter each other on screen throughout the film, this interlacing cannot but persuade the audience that some connection between them exists, which can only be guessed at since no evidence becomes available. The audience is forced into this exercise in the long version of the film quite as much as in the short one, but Rivette, in an interview with Yvonne Baby in Le Monde, drew attention to its relatively greater importance in the short version – which was, of course, the only one likely to have anything like a general audience. ‘Nous avons essayé que [Spectre] ne soit pas un“digest” de la version longue, mais un autre film ayant sa logique propre : plus proche du puzzle ou des mots croisés que l’autre, jouant moins sur l’affectivité, plus sur les rimes et les oppositions, les ruptures et les raccords, les césures et les censures’10 (Rivette 1971). To the extent that this 9 ‘this only moderately interested me. I was already a bit tired of improvisation’ 10 ‘We tried to make sure that [Spectre] was not a “digest” of the longer version but

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la règle du jeu: games and play   127 ­characteristic is genuinely accentuated in the shorter version, it would seem that, in the passage from one to the other, the protagonists of the jeu have changed somewhat, and with that change comes another, in the relationship between the players. The twelve-hour version constitutes, more than any other of Rivette’s films, a ‘documentary of its own production’, retaining – although manipulating – at least the vast majority of the various actors’ contributions. A sense of exploration and uncertainty, however illusory, does get through to the audience: the centre of interest is on the process of production, the ‘interplay’ of the actors and the characters, the ‘free play’ of possible developing narrative ideas in which any slight adjustment of one will have repercussions on all the others. The audience is offered the position of spectator to a game in progress, witness to the pleasure taken by the players in their own creation. Actors and characters remain essentially separate: in part because the characters remain for a long time mysterious and hard to define while the actors were very recognisable faces of particular interest for anyone following the most exciting cinematic developments of the period, in part because the time devoted to rehearsals – much greater than in the short version – forces the fact of theatre, and theatrical exercises, to the forefront of the audience’s attention. In short, the audience remains a spectator, but in the course of twelve hours a very engaged spectator, immersed in the process of making sense of the growing complexities but at a second degree; on the other hand the sense seems to be a function of the interplay of characters, created by them gradually and undetermined to the end. In Spectre on the other hand the game becomes one between film text and spectator, where the latter is called upon to actively decode hints and piece fragments together into a coherent whole, after the manner of ‘the jigsaw puzzle or the crossword’. The making of meaning is left up to the audience during the course of the screening, and a textual model for the enterprise is offered in Colin/Léaud. On the other hand the model of the crossword puzzle or the jigsaw is very different from that of an improvisation game; where the latter is free, if not of rules at least in its development, the former implies not merely a set of rules but a solution and an overriding authorial mind which has decided it. The solver of a puzzle is trying not merely to get ‘something that a different film with its own logic: closer to a jigsaw or a crossword puzzle than was the other, working less on emotion, more on matches and contrasts, breaks and concordances, caesurae and censorship’

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128  jacques rivette works’ but to ‘get it right’, and the game is no longer an equal one. If there is no answer, the solver is more likely to feel cheated than complicitous. Noli me tangere presents actors and, to a considerable extent, the camera playing with each other in the sense that one plays with playmates: Spectre plays with the audience, but in the sense that one plays with a toy, or a cat with a mouse. Authorial control and superiority is established and constant. That said this distinction too is not a rigid one: the audience can take a certain puzzle solver’s pleasure in Noli me tangere (although its inadequacy as a reading will become clear quite quickly), and the awareness of ludic improvisation is certainly not absent from Spectre, especially if one sees the shorter film first. But it is important, as much within the films as in their relationship to the audience. There are spectres haunting Noli me tangere, precisely those of shadowy ‘master players’, someone – or some group – who holds the solution to a precise, calculable enigma. Characters insistently confront each other with the suspicion that the interlocutor is playing with them, or at least trying to draw them into a game where the relations will no longer be equal: ‘Tu joues sur les mots’ (You’re playing with words), ‘Je ne veux pas jouer à ce jeu-là’ (I don’t want to play that game), ‘Tu pourrais pas jouer à un autre jeu?’ (Couldn’t you play a different game?) (Pauline to Thomas, to which he responds with apparent innocence and paranoid menace, ‘Je joue avec ce que je trouve’ (I play with what I find)). When Lili’s troupe, looking for Renaud at the various gates of Paris, deflect questions with the excuse of a game (‘Je cherche cet homme’, ‘Pourquoi?’, ‘Par jeu’ (I’m looking for this man?, Why?, As a game)), they are once again coupling jeu with a sense of power, superior knowledge which excludes the other. If Rivette’s interview with Nouvelle Critique suggested that the film was to be made under the sign of ‘play’ in its light-hearted, ludic and unregulated sense, the connotations of jeu for the characters are much more menacing, related not so much to the creation of a narrative as to the suspected presence of an unknown one in which they may be trapped. Colin, of course, with his various number games and word games aimed at the solution of the puzzle, epitomises this concept of the game as a directed activity whose goal is not creation but discovery. In both versions of the film he has the same function, to stand in for the audience–puzzle solver gathering together the fragments around him and reorganising them into a coherent narrative pattern which, by

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la règle du jeu: games and play   129 definition, must have been put in place by another agency before him. Colin’s games are all directed at unearthing a source and a solution, in other words a centre outside and above the game he is playing. But of course he has already, prior to amassing his clues and recombining them, decided for himself what answer he hopes to get from them: by the time we meet Colin he’s no longer looking for ‘a narrative’, he’s looking for ‘l’histoire des treize’ – and in the process of looking for it, incidentally fragmenting and recombining other ready-made narratives, including Balzac’s and The Hunting of the Snark. If he has hit upon a game worth playing, he is going the wrong way about it; fitting together a jigsaw puzzle with no guarantee – this at least is made abundantly clear – that the pieces will make the picture he’s searching for. Colin’s approach – into which he draws the audience – is a perfect example of ‘paranoid criticism’ as defined by Dalí, ‘l’objectivation critique et systématique des associations et interprétations délirantes’11 (Nadeau 1948: 148–9), a process which depends, precisely, on awareness that the elements of the outside world are variable and transitory in their meanings – that all the elements of the puzzle, in fact, are continually en jeu. Il s’agit de spéculer ardemment sur cette propriété du devenir ininterrompu de tout objet sur lequel s’exerce l’activité paranoïaque, autrement dit l’activité ultra-confusionnelle qui prend sa source dans l’idée obsédante. Ce devenir ininterrompu permet au paranoïaque qui en est témoin de tenir les images mêmes du monde extérieur pour instables et pour transitoires, sinon pour suspectes et il est, chose troublante, en son pouvoir de faire contrôler aux autres la réalité de son impression … Nous nous trouvons ici en présence d’une nouvelle affirmation … de la toute-puissance du désir. (Dalí, in Nadeau 1948: 149n)12

Colin’s game – and the audience’s even more – comes up against several paradoxes. The first is that, if he is playing the right kind of game (if a solution, a narrative, a centre exists), the paranoid approach 11 ‘the critical and systematic objectivisation of crazy associations and interpre­ tations’ 12 ‘One must eagerly bank on the property of uninterrupted becoming possessed by every object subjected to paranoid activity, in other words the activity of extreme confusion which stems from an obsessive idea. This uninterrupted becoming allows the paranoid who observes it to consider even the images of the outside world as unstable and transitory if not suspect, and, alarmingly, it is in his power to have others bear out the reality of his impression. Here we find ourselves in the presence of a new affirmation … the omnipotence of desire’

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130  jacques rivette will be of little use as a strategy. On the other hand, if there is no solution, it brings considerable benefit – assuming, that is, that one counts on the side of benefit the pleasure involved in the playing – but only on the condition that the original fiction, that justifies the game in the first place, is retained. It is this that Colin suspects, two thirds of the way through the film: ‘Une plaisanterie? Si c’était ainsi, tout l’univers magique et mystérieux dans lequel j’avance se ternirait dans un seul instant, et cela est impossible’;13 and at last accepts – his approach was ‘idéologiquement faux’ (ideologically false) because he had asked the Sphinx ‘une question … mal posée’ (a poorly-formed question). The activity of decoding is thereby brought to a close, as far as Colin is concerned; but after his departure Warok’s cryptic remarks to Lucie ‘C’est un disciple de Pierre … Ce jeune homme l’intéressait infiniment’14 ensures that the audience are not freed from their perplexity so easily, nor from the temptation to continue to play Rivette’s game. We are lured once more into hoping that the mystery may have a solution: a unique one, even, since while Colin’s investigations lead only to the nebulous formation of the Thirteen, whose very composition is uncertain, this conversation points, once again, to the absent – and completely non-functional be it said – éminence grise of the putative group, Pierre. In fact, what we see of the relationships between the Thirteen emphasises that this conspiracy is most probably a game, established gratuitously, and with little or no impact on the ‘real world’ of its initiators who have all gone their separate ways. Colin’s game is then in effect a game about another game, and the game-of-thirteen may indeed no longer be being played, until the thirteen players are recombined as a direct result of its inexplicable intrusion into the real world through the action of non-players, who for different reasons have made of it something monolithic and significant: Colin has adopted it as a factor in a private game of his own, Pauline/Émilie, probably encouraged by the contagion of Colin, believes it may be responsible for a ‘real’ disaster in her own ‘real’ life, while Frédérique encounters it by chance in the course of her own private games which are always disrupted when those she tries to play with – in the cat-andmouse sense, although with engaging amateurishness – turn out to 13 ‘A joke? If that was so, the whole magical and mysterious universe which I am moving through would fade in an instant, and that is impossible’ 14 ‘He’s a follower of Pierre. This young man interested him [i.e. Pierre] immensely’

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la règle du jeu: games and play   131 be playing games themselves. Even the original nature of the ‘game of thirteen’ is hard to fathom, and the players themselves seem not quite certain of it; as they recombine, suspicion grows that perhaps not everyone was playing by the same rules. In any case the result of the reactivation of this diffuse attempt to create something is to disrupt the new projects – creative projects, play with creative projects – of everyone concerned. When Thomas calls on Sarah to help him with his production of Prometheus, the production fragments: Sarah, once so in tune with Thomas, cannot adapt to the new ‘rules of action’ he has established with his troupe. Sarah’s writing is interrupted by her new association with Thomas. Pauline’s putative magazine fades before her growing suspicion of her husband’s associates, and so forth. These various creative activities are in different ways under the sign of jeu: although in one sense – which will be discussed in a separate chapter – the word covers the activity of theatre in all its forms, there is a difference between Lili’s gratuitous exercises (‘On prépare pas. Il n’y a pas de but’15) and Thomas’s experimental combinations which are free experiments with language and with the significance of Prometheus, rejecting the ‘rules’ of the text, but which are at least notionally aimed at performance. Elsewhere, Warok seems to have left the Thirteen in order to devote himself to solitary games of chess (or completely shadowy business transactions), while Lucie’s legal work – although invisible to the film – has little ludic about it, and little which is apparently creative, either. Creativity and play, creativity as play, was of course the principle which Rivette was importing into his own manner of working with this film, but the film reveals it as a very fragile endeavour. The experiment, though, also marked his first collaboration with Juliet Berto who was to be such a strong presence in the subsequent, and even more strongly ludic, Céline et Julie. Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) represents the triumph of paedia over ludus, and jouer over le jeu; not that this triumph is achieved without effort. In the last scene, Céline and Julie, having successfully extracted little Madlyn from the labyrinth of le jeu, are at least temporarily too exhausted to envisage any further ‘playing’, despite Madlyn’s eager pleas. Berto described the atmosphere in which the film was conceived as ‘dans l’esprit d’une école maternelle, qui ferait son spectacle de fin d’année pour les grands’ (Berto 1973: unpaginated).16 15 ‘We’re not preparing anything. There is no aim’ 16 ‘in the spirit of a kindergarten doing an end-of-year show for the grown-ups’

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132  jacques rivette It’s a spectacle which exalts the universe of the kindergarten, representing it as a subversive force and as a state of grace which adults need to achieve – the opposite of the frequent representation of play as preparation for adulthood. The signs of childhood are omnipresent throughout the film: it represents the past for the two heroines, or at least for Julie, who has a flat, a responsible job and a number of precise memories all located in another place, even though the arrival of Céline corresponds with the reappearance of a number of characters from her past; but it also represents a desire towards which they tend, not by turning backwards but by (re?)connecting with a ‘childlike’ freedom in dealing with objects, spaces and even words. Relics of the past are re-used as essential tools in a process of rejecting the overcodified adult world, in a series of ludic rituals such as Céline’s balletic humiliation of Guilou, the very incarnation of a mummified and romanticised unattainable past, or Julie’s careful suspension of her dolls under the blackboard on which a complex puzzle diagram has been replaced by a naive, infantile drawing of a house. It is tempting to see such scenes as anti-initiation rituals, marking a passage from an adult to a children’s world which should however not be seen as a passage backwards: the relics themselves, both Guilou and the dolls, are rejected and destroyed in the course of this rite of passage. The ‘advance’ into childhood is recounted, or performed, in the parallel universe where Céline and Julie must rescue the child Madlyn from a narrative so pre-programmed that not even a word may vary in its daily repetition. What unfolds inside the mysterious house is not so much a game – in which repetition would assume variation – as a scripted play (there is surely an irony in the extreme codification that this word implies in English when in singular noun form – as if through its two senses it covered the two extreme limits of freedom and codification contained in jeu). Madlyn’s escape becomes dependent on Céline and Julie succeeding in introducing ‘play’ – freedom of action, interaction (they can only succeed in freeing the child when they are both present), but also children’s games – into the unyielding framework of the play, the ‘performance’. As nursemaid, the role which they fulfil in turn, they are explicitly required to act as mediator between the world of children and of adults in the hierarchic space of the bourgeois house. The script of this role requires that the two worlds be kept separate, and the child’s life be subordinated to the requirements of the adults:

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la règle du jeu: games and play   133 in their final incursion into the house, their successful abduction of Madlyn is achieved through mixing the two, and subordinating the adults’ dance to an explosion of irreverent childish high spirits. Alongside this, of course, the pair’s relation to the ‘house text’ is itself ludic, and so, up to a point, is the spectator’s. The nature of this game, for the audience, is certainly comparable to a jigsaw puzzle – offered fragments of a story, a little fuller with each incursion into the house, we are invited to piece them together and produce a coherent picture, fixing the tantalising, surrealistic glimpses into a rational narrative framework, and incidentally elucidating the mystery. Apparently, we participate in this game along with, and guided by, Céline and Julie, who discuss the progress of their ‘investigations’ and so put into words the questions and conclusions which the audience themselves may be coming to. However, we are completely dependent on the pair, who narrate their respective experiences in the house to each other in retrospect with the aid of the mysterious sweet which provokes both the visions and their recall, to mediate our entrance into the world of the puzzle. Thus one can also read the incidents in the house as a story in the process of telling, invented by its two narrators by a process of elaboration from loose ends left by the previous instalment. This, of course, is another form of game, a creative one which generates rather than discovering text – but it is one from which the audience is necessarily excluded in the last resort. The best that an audience hoping for space for creative play with a text will ever find is a certain number of loose ends left even after the film is over. With regard to the story of the house, this is not something Rivette supplies: while the film may allow the audience the pleasure of the jigsaw puzzle, the creative game of narrative is a tantalising illusion. However, the last sequence, with its hint that the whole construction is provisional and could be repeated or rewritten, perhaps opens possibilities for a spectator too to join in a game of text generation. With regard to the house text, besides, it is not irrelevant that it is itself a game with a pre-existing text, a Henry James novella which is not only ‘discovered’ in snatches as characters and audience organise the pieces but also played with, adapted. Names and relationships change, an extra part is created to let the girls into the picture (as a child reader might insert themselves into an adventure story), and that part once created alters the possibilities available for a dénouement before, finally, the ending is joyously thrown into confusion by a complete explosion of all the

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134  jacques rivette limits of the fiction. Céline and Julie, in fact, might be said to achieve with James’s story that ideal combination of immersion and interactivity which Ryan postulates as the as-yet-unachieved ideal of the virtual text; an ideal which, as we suggested briefly above, is perhaps to be sought in a particular manner of reading, associated particularly with childhood and play, independently of the nature of the text. That manner of reading produces, among other things, a protest against the dictatorship of the author over the reader, an issue that has always preoccupied Rivette. The very making of Céline et Julie, like Out 1, involved an attempt to dissolve the authority of the director in the pleasure of collective creativity with the actors; and again the experience brought its quotient of stress as well as enjoyment, especially as the shoot proceeded. It is not easy for adults to insert themselves into the universe of children’s play, nor was it possible for Rivette to abandon his authority entirely. As with all his films, the free flow of the shoot was given form in the editing room, where Rivette officiated alone, or in consultation only with Nicole Lubtchansky. ‘Son principal travail de mise en scène se fait chez lui au montage’, recorded Berto, ‘c’est là où il organise l’action désordonnée de ses marionnettes’17 (Berto 1973). The metaphor is surely significant: for all his ideal of improvisation and group creation, in the end the actress sees herself as a toy or a prop, manipulated by the director–masterplayer. Chevrie (1989, 1991) has claimed that between Céline et Julie and Le Pont du Nord, where the game reappears as the guiding figure in the plot, Rivette’s films became darker and the jeu loses its importance. However, the great confrontation of Duelle has several characteristics of a game on a cosmic scale: the players are designated and incarnate roles; they confront each other in competition (this is the first time that Rivette sets up an open rivalry, Caillois’s agôn as the fundamental stake of the plot); this competition is allocated a specific time if not a specific space; the confrontation has no permanent effect for its players (even though they believe that it may have one); and we understand that it is repeated with variations at regular intervals. The importance of the theme is emphasised by Viva/Ogier’s menacing declaration when cornered by Lucie/Hermine Karagheuz in a darkened gambling den – or salle de jeu: 17 ‘His main directing work was done at home during the editing stage: that’s where he organises the disorderly action of his puppets’

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la règle du jeu: games and play   135 lucie: Vous jouez souvent? viva: Beaucoup

lucie: À quoi?

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viva: Tout le temps, très fort, à tout. Chemin de fer, roulette, baccarat … Cache-cache aussi parfois.18

Viva’s declared penchant for gambling games is intriguing given Caillois’s emphasis on the connection between agôn and alea, and the apparent scheming of the two characters in this most agonistic of films to leave nothing to chance – except, presumably, who the people will be who cross their paths in the course of their contest and who find themselves drawn into the fray. (And yet, the singularly significant names of these secondary, human characters – Silvia Stern, Lucie, Pierre – suggest that they too are predestined to take part in this drama of light and a lost jewel.) For if the two protagonists may indeed be playing, all the other characters are being played with in the most extreme sense. Their role is that of pawns on a chessboard which will be used only once; they are not willing participants and for them the game may end in a death which seems real. Although Lucie is told by Viva that she has been selected to participate (‘Vous étiez désignée … pour jouer le bouc émissaire’19) the performance of the Duel in the confines of time and space suggests that it can only involve those people and places available within this radius in this limited period, and therefore that an element of chance reigns in the designation of the ‘pieces’. For those pieces, Caillois’s definition of the limitations of jeu does not apply; the Duel therefore both fits the definition (for Viva and Leni) and does not fit it (for everyone else involved), even though all are immersed in it in different ways. That paradox informs individual images and sequences, such as the apparently light seduction scene played out between Viva and Pierre, or even, in the very first sequence before the filles du feu appear, Lucie’s introduction balancing on a large globe: at once a child’s game of skill and an image charged with symbolism. It underlies the principal narrative thread of the film, the 18 lucie: Do you often play? viva: Very much so. lucie: What do you play? viva: I play everything, very hard, all the time. Chemin de fer, roulette, baccarat … sometimes also hide-and-seek. 19 ‘You were singled out to play the scapegoat’

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136  jacques rivette jewel which is passed from one pawn player to another: if all players were equal, it might be the furet of the children’s game which the designated seeker must locate; but this game belongs to the seekers and the jewel brings death on contact with the skin. The fact that it is passed principally between actual or potential lovers makes the ‘game’ another degree less playful and more painful. Duelle’s game of hide-and-seek, on the other hand, takes place not merely between characters – very often in deadly earnest – but between characters, camera and audience through the medium of the light. Light is the truly fundamental element in Duelle. It is quite frequent for a character to move through patches of deep shadow where their whereabouts is only detectable through the swing of the camera to follow what we assume to be their movement; or, alternatively, for a silhouette, whose features are invisible, to betray its identity by a tiny, indirect clue which comes briefly into play: a voice, a movement, a reflection from some characteristic ornament. At the very moment at which Viva announces that she ‘also plays hide-and-seek’, she slips into the shadows of the room, and the camera continues to slowly circle with her until she eventually disappears completely, only her voice providing the clue to where she may have gone. Eventually we are made privy to some stated rules for this game between characters, camera and audience. Viva, we are told, ‘loses all power as soon as she is no longer surrounded with light’; Leni, on the other hand, ‘loses all power at the moment when the light blinds her’. That revelation gives narrative force to the entirely cinematic dependence on light to create image and meaning: at the moment when Leni is revealed, or when Viva is hidden, they are helpless. It has to be admitted, though, that the film is not quite scrupulous about obeying its own rules; while a Leni on whom all windows are thrown open does appear overexposed and defeated, the Viva who circles Lucie in the shadows of the salle de jeu and eventually withdraws triumphantly into them hardly seems powerless. In practice, the characters faced with the camera seem most concerned to hide, or to reveal themselves only in brief glimpses, as in the seduction scene where Viva, this time certainly bathed in light, appears for a long time only intermittently as the camera swings between her and Pierre. In this game of evasion and discovery the audience is, unusually, drawn into an active role perforce, since we are obliged to a certain effort of recognition if we are to identify the shadowy figures who pass before us, while the use

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la règle du jeu: games and play   137 of off-screen space (or even at times, the ambiguity of a character who may or may not have left the screen space under cover of shadows) extends the diegetic world in which the game takes place and blurs the boundaries between the characters’ space and the audience’s. A further dimension to the game of hide-and-seek is provided by the musicians, cited by critics and participants alike as a guiding force and central theme of the film (e.g. de Gregorio, in Frappat 2001: 152; Gamet 1991: 72; Thomas 1991: 167). According to a principle established at the project stage of the four ‘films parallèles’, all music had to be live and the musicians were therefore present on the set, and yet they rarely take part in the action. In Duelle particularly we hear piano music in places, such as the lobby of Lucie’s small hotel, where there is no narrative place for a pianist. The musician is therefore hidden from the audience by the camera; the source of the music is secret and indeed mysterious, even if at this early stage we may not distinguish it from conventional non-diegetic accompaniment. In the central nightclub scene, the pianist whose discreet off-screen presence has haunted the film plays his part in the general game of hide-and seek which draws in all the protagonists and the audience alike. Weaving between mirrored columns, disappearing behind dancing couples, and passing constantly from light to shadow, in this scene all the actors in the strange cosmic theatre of Duelle seek and evade each other, and the camera also takes part in this discreet movement, occasionally cutting to close-ups as it ‘finds’ one or another of the circling players. In the background, throughout, the accompanist – relegated to the side of the screen even when the camera momentarily concentrates on the dance floor band – is constantly obscured by dancers, pillars or shadows: hardly an active participant in the game, but perhaps nonetheless an essential one, not least for the audience. Since the narrative stakes of Duelle involve the drawing of apparently ‘innocent’ characters into a cosmic game which may be fatal to them, this procedure of involvement of those outside, or ambiguously in and outside, the narrative space, inevitably has an effect both disturbing and exciting: we are participants, ready or not. It should be said, all the same, that the serious menace which undoubtedly haunts Duelle, one of Rivette’s darkest films in the literal and the figurative sense, does not have the narrative all its own way. Rivette’s approach to this first ‘scène de la vie parallèle’ involves an extraordinary mix of genres and influences, and the play of one

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138  jacques rivette against the other is an effective means of casting doubt on the right of any to gain hegemony over the narrative. Thus references to the arcana of Celtic myth, drawn from the writings of Jean Markale which interested Rivette at the time, coexist with costumes and conventions from a sophisticated interwar urban thriller, and the name of the vanished ‘Lord Christie’ cannot but recall Agatha. The protagonist on the other hand is an entirely contemporary young woman, negotiating an improbably anachronistic, and therefore timeless, or fantastical, Paris, concocted from various codes given in advance and half-known to the audience. The unquestionable pleasure of Duelle comes partly from the recognition of this collage effect, its mixture of incompatible fantasy worlds to create a very particular private universe. We accept, as it were, the persona of Lucie, the temporary dangers of that persona and the exhilarating freedom of imagination which comes from engaging with a world unconstrained by outside reality. Duelle, like a video game, is all story, in which suspension of disbelief can completely recreate the world. Frappat has argued (Frappat 2001: 212–17) that the magical games indulged in by the double protagonists of Céline et Julie, Noroît, or Duelle are a sign of a refusal of maturity. The inability to grow up would, in this argument, be a condition of magic and mystery, but also a trap in which the child-goddess can only repeat the same confrontation with her self/other or alternatively face mutual destruction. Certainly the Marie of Marie et Julien, a creature of this period reviewed – and, perhaps, corrected – thirty years on, experiences a rebirth to new life and humanity when she accepts the importance of an adult relationship, self-consciously contrasted with the destructive, and narcissistic, partnership she formed with the mysterious Simon. To activate that rebirth, besides, Marie has specifically to refuse the ‘game’, with its rules that she claims not fully to know, which has structured her existence as a revenante. At the moment when she makes the forbidden gesture which annuls all trace of the play – at least in the mind of her fellow player – she discovers that it cancels nothing at all. At the end of her ‘quarantaine’ – the same period, drawn from Markale and Celtic legend, which was available to the goddesses of Duelle, but Marie’s strategy is quite different – the world proves not to be a place of play for her, she is not banished from it, and she is unable to banish herself. The ‘open ending’ of Marie et Julien is thus qualitatively different from the implicit repetition of Céline et

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la règle du jeu: games and play   139 Julie or of Duelle – where Lucie holds up the bloodstone in the last shot to reject the goddesses who have not won their return to the earth, but not to destroy them. Rather than a new round of the same game, Marie’s future promises some sort of development and discovery, but in a sober, unmagical and perhaps even rather drab everyday world. When Marie and Julien face each other for the last (or is it the first?) time in Julien’s living room, the cat Nevermore, which had climbed into Julien’s lap as he settled down to sleep, jumps off his knees and slips out of the frame for the last time. Even the sound of his bell fades from the soundtrack. And the Parallel World with which Rivette once played goes with him. ‘Les chats et les femmes ont quelque chose en commun: leurs yeux sont les portes de l’invisible, les portes d’un Autre Monde qui ne déçoit jamais car il est le seul dont la réalité ne soit pas soumise aux turbulences de la perversité humaine.’20 (Markale 1989: 40). In 2003, Rivette’s filles du feu are no longer Markale’s. Already in 1981 the prospective games were changing, and the magical fascination of myth becoming a deadly trap. But before rejecting any hope of a playful world, Rivette turns in another direction: to the Derridean image of jeu libre, life as dance. When Rivette returned to filmmaking, after a long hiatus, in 1981, it was with a film which takes the trope of the game as its organising principle, and gradually draws its free-floating characters into the prescribed trackways of a dangerous tradition. At the start of Le Pont du Nord , the two women who arrive in Paris are unrestricted in their movements: indeed their freedom is their distinguishing mark, since Baptiste has neither past attachments nor a precise mission, while Marie is just released from prison and left to her own devices in the city. Both circulate around Paris, interpreting as they choose the objects which they find there, accepting or rejecting them as they will, and following whatever street appeals to them. However, from the start this freedom is to some extent a source of anxiety: although Marie celebrates both her liberty of movement and her free choice of action, she has a definite purpose to her wanderings: reunion with her lover Julien and a new start in a new place. Baptiste on the other hand rejects the very concept of freedom, preferring to attribute all happenings to ‘destiny’, and her quest through the city for watching eyes and 20 ‘Cats and women have something in common: their eyes are the portals of the invisible, doors to an Otherworld which never disappoints because its reality alone is not subject to the turbulence of human perversity’

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140  jacques rivette ambiguously vigilant lions is something which she explains by reference to a sinister outside agency. Her quest for an organising centre is perhaps hinted at by her penchant for circling movements: around Max on his motorbike – so much more impressive and powerful than her scooter – or the haughtily menacing Lion of Belfort. Both women, although for separate reasons, seem to welcome the discovery, among some papers acquired from Julien, of a map of Paris overlaid with a jeu de l’oie board. For Marie this offers an enigmatic clue to Julien’s movements, so that to follow it has an immediate purpose; but it is also she that is familiar with the game, and eagerly explains it to Baptiste. The pleasurable childhood shudder which can be read in her description of this ‘jeu qui fait très peur’ transmits both to Baptiste and to the spectators (who are probably assumed to have experienced it) the fascination of its mysterious narrative framework. The function and significance of the jeu de l’oie, and its eerie similarity to the map of Rivette’s beloved city/labyrinth, have been amply discussed in Chapter 3. It is a childhood game, a light-hearted pastime, but also a mythic structure fraught with connotations, hence Marie’s fear. The interest of its appearance in Le Pont du Nord for a consideration of Rivette’s concept of play lies in the way that its appearance progressively restricts Marie and Baptiste’s freedom to interact with the city and indeed to circulate within both space and frame. The transformation , although gradual, is fundamental: the Derridean, dance-like, conception of ‘jeu libre’ as perpetual mobility and constantly varied interaction, is sidelined by the increasing force of a strictly regulated narrative frame, in which however horizontal movement across space may be replaced with a vertical dimension of depth as the places designated by the game plan as significant become increasingly charged with mysterious meaning and implicit danger. The ‘hazard-squares’, those potential traps which Marie and Baptiste seek, almost simultaneously, to find and to escape from, are designated by a pre-existing game/myth as spots where something may happen. (The dance-game of exchanges depends upon continuous movement. In Duelle the real dangers for all its players are to be found in moments of stasis and arranged meetings: every agreed place and time is an appointment with death. Again and again in subsequent films, freedom, life and playfulness will be incarnated in a climactic dance in which all the narrative stakes, and all possible dramas, dissolve. The jeu libre is imperilled by events). What it is that

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la règle du jeu: games and play   141 may happen there is, without doubt, uncertain – and all the more menacing for its uncertainty. The jeu de l’oie of Le Pont du Nord is still defined by ‘le déroulement jamais identique de la partie’ (Chevrie 1991: 137).21 But, in the end, the threat is always the same, and it is always mortal. Programmed confrontations are always, in nuce, duels to the death. The paradoxical desire of all storytellers, and of all audiences, to provoke and to avoid such agonistic finality was already a vital motor of Noroît and Duelle. With the last sequence of Le Pont du Nord, however, Rivette begins to experiment with an alternative to the inevitable ending of the narrative game either by fight (Noroît and Duelle) or flight (L’Amour fou, Out 1) – or its inevitable projection into a similarly patterned rematch (Céline et Julie). Baptiste and Max, the adversaries par excellence, are in fact for the first time left, in the last sequence, circling each other in dance-like motion. Admittedly their dance is still only a few steps from a fight, and across the frame rigid gridlines obscure our view of them and imply an overriding exterior threat (perhaps from the filmmaker himself, holder of the camera on which these lines appear, and holder also of the power of life and death over the evanescent world on screen); but their confident motion may nonetheless suggest that the jeu régulé may be subverted profitably by the jeu libre. The fatalistic acceptance of external narrative cannot be taken for granted.There is still danger in Le Pont du Nord. But in Rivette’s films of the 1980s and 1990s, with the exception of Secret Défense, the danger will once again be turned aside, dismissed in Haut bas fragile with the victory of the dancers and the discomfiture of all who seek to control the city and the plot and exploit the dangerous fascination of ludus. Haut bas fragile is another film which promises to make of an organised game a central factor in an ominous plot. The apparently naive Louise, rediscovering Paris after a long period of (literal) unconsciousness, is baited with hints of mystery into entering the cellar of Alfredo’s bar, where she is initiated into the rules of a game of alea and agon where the stakes are life and death. The chance of a deal of cards designates a Killer and a Victim from among the players, after which the game becomes a test of skill as one tries to evade the other. This bears some comparison with the universal Great Game which pervades the entire world of Elio Petri’s futuristic thriller La Decima 21 ‘the never-identical unfolding of each match’

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142  jacques rivette Vittima (The Tenth Victim, 1965), a film of which we can assume Rivette was aware, given his omnivorous cinematic culture; and it raises to a perfect schematic principle the pattern, described above, of the game as a series of programmed encountters with death. But the pattern is evoked only to be set aside: Rivette no longer has time for it. When Louise, designated Killer, is led onto the roof of the building to perform the execution, Rivette’s low-angle framing of the top of the building, with its safety grille and its various aerials silhouetted against the open sky, even resembles Petri’s introductory shot which introduces Killer and Victim at the climax of a pursuit, filmed from below on the railed walkways of a housing estate; while Wilfred Benaïche, who plays the sinister Alfredo, is an older, quieter version of the excitable Jacques Herlin, who reads the rules of the game in Petri’s film. But Alfredo’s game/conspiracy is no worldwide social phenomenon: it is a mere mystification, which dissolves around Louise as she looks down into the courtyard below the building, and the camera follows her gaze in a tight, unstable circle before drawing back to observe her as she falls to the ground. When, after the sound of a shot, the camera turns, once again adopting Louise’s tentative glance, it is to reveal not the strange young ‘victim’, but Lucien, the private eye whose shadowing of her is already a game of quite another sort. He is startled but intact; he is also alone, the other players having vanished from the roof. The gun fires twice more towards the ground as Louise recovers, but it is firing blanks, as Lucien observes. Nothing more is heard of this ‘game’, its sinister elaboration having only one function in the plot: to rid Louise of her vertigo and permit her to develop with even more assurance her complicities and intrigues with the other characters. These too are ludic but in a much less regulated sense; in fact, the most obvious metaphor for the playful relationships in Haut bas fragile is that of the dance, and dancing is a regular feature of the film, both on and off the nightclub floor. In a number of spontaneous transitions from daily movement to dance, the main characters advance towards each other and retreat, circle around each other, offer themselves to each other and then retract, in a formalised testing of their relationships. Dance is a process of gradual harmonisation which leads to the (more or less provisional) establishment of complicity between the dancers, a complicity which will then extend forward in the narrative rather as – as Wiles (2000) points out – the manner of movement

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la règle du jeu: games and play   143 adopted in dancing continues to manifest itself as the protagonists – or at least the girls – go about their daily business. The ritualised and provisional nature of the dance both make it into a ludic activity, as does the pleasure which its participants visibly take in their creative movement and in the teasing dialogues which accompany it. It is, however, play of a very peculiar kind, neither subscribing to any pre-ordained rules – movements develop out of the movements of the partner, with at least apparent spontaneity, and even the music, non-diegetic in many cases, may seem to be called up by the movement rather than the reverse – nor anarchically child-like: neither ludus nor paedia. In fact, if anything, the constant circling movement of the dance, and its function as a vehicle for changing roles and relationships, make it a visual incarnation of that sense of jeu which is interaction, room for manoeuvre, and even substitutions of meanings (during the dances, the meaning which each partner holds for the other slides and shifts into new forms), the Derridean jeu demonstrated. The tempting mysterious narratives invented by Roland and Alfredo dissolve into this shifting dance, their centres are eliminated without bringing about the closure of the film, and they are last seen circling around the dance floor, gracefully anachronistic, harmless figures relegated to the background. Va savoir (2001), although presenting itself formally and narratively as one of Rivette’s more straightforward films, also partakes of this game of shifting signifiers. On the surface it presents a relatively ‘serious’ interplay of relationships, presented through a number of scenes of confrontation between individual characters and involving a fairly naturalistic portrayal of jealousies and regrets. The ambiguity of play hovers only on the edge of the drama, contained within the separate frame of the Pirandello text with its open definition of identity, or threading through the central couples in the person of the enigmatic gambler/joker Arthur. In fact, however, the film is indulging in a very subtle game with the conventions of genre, a game which is explosively revealed in the exuberant final scene. Throughout Va savoir Rivette lays a trail of narrative tropes drawn from the unlikely sources of fantasy and romance, swashbuckler and fairy tale. The return of the beloved from a foreign land, a maiden confined in a dungeon, the mysterious jewel stolen by a ruse and won back by another, and finally, of course, the duel to the death, are all the stock-in-trade of romance (even the concealment of the treasure in a

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144  jacques rivette cake has precedents in fairy story), and all are slipped, casually and as if accidentally, into the framework of a modern romantic comedy to which they, subtly, import a sense of mythic significance which is regularly loosened in a light twist which relieves them of all importance. Camille escapes from the box room in which she has been locked with ridiculous ease, and her imprisonment only makes her a few moments late for her performance. Ugo’s subverted duelling rules ensure that the ultimate game of agôn is reduced to a bar-room competition over who can retain his teetering dignity longest as both men slip gradually into ridiculous euphoria. Rather than a matter of life and death, the duel ends with the antagonists helplessly wriggling in the womb-like structure of the safety net, while, below, all the mysterious over-charged threads are unwound in an energetic burst of laughter and, once again, a dance. The absent objects of desire, recovered and presented to those who sought them, are promptly returned: their magical importance is, instead, projected forward into action. The Goldoni manuscript will become a production, the ring will become the resource which allows the theatre troupe to survive – and, of course, to produce the Goldoni; the stalling pressure of past obsessions is released in a reconciliatory dance, and everyone will eat the cake. The various hints of predictable, centred narrative which have crossed this film, then, are used as props in a game and finally revealed, not as completely without significance but as stages in an ongoing process where meaning is never a stable property which can be located once and for all in a given object. Once again, centres and significance shift. In Rivette’s most recent films, however, the sense of ludic exhilaration is almost absent, replaced by an overpowering melancholy and an uncomfortable tension. In Marie et Julien, the metaphor of life as a game is re-adopted in Marie’s hesitant search for ‘the rules’ governing her most unusual situation, but it is a terrifying game in which she has no sense of her bearings, and which she aspires only to leave. In Julien’s dealings with Madame X he changes rules and stakes on a whim, exercising an arbitrary power which suggests complete indifference to ‘fair play’. This scenario after all dated back to the difficult period of the late 1970s, the period in which the playfulness of Céline et Julie was increasingly in crisis. The latest film to date, Ne touchez pas la hache, is another project with a long genesis, but its translation into film form is a pure product of the twenty-first-century Rivette; but it

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la règle du jeu: games and play   145 contains hardly a hint of play, or only tense and bitter games of cat and mouse. Even the band of Parisian amateur pirates whose expedition to kidnap the cloistered maiden might seem to partake of the nature of a boys’ game of make-believe finds that its play turns old and bitter. Montriveau’s crew are, in fact, none other than that very ‘société des treize’ who once so obsessed Colin/Léaud in the Paris of 1971, but their plan of assault has something of the Famous Five about it. And yet it ends abruptly, in the shock of an encounter with death: not death as part of the game – there is no struggle – but as the exterior reality par excellence, that which makes all exploits vain. Unable to absorb this reality, they can only, literally, drown it, dropping it out of the frame before vanishing from it themselves. ‘Il est des choses qui ne doivent être abordées que dans la crainte et le tremblement; la mort en est une, sans doute; et comment au moment de filmer une chose aussi mystérieuse, ne pas se sentir un imposteur’22 (Rivette 1961: 54). And yet it would probably still be risky to claim that Rivette has turned away from the playful: his output has always oscillated between ludic exchange and its freely transposable game worlds and more stable, consequential narration. Both intersect, however, in his continual interest in the most constant and elaborate of all conceptions of jeu, that is the parallel, representative world of theatre. Theatre, performance, experimental action and repetitive text, become a constant, infinitely rich and variable image of Rivette’s outlook on creation, on cinema, and on the process of life which, as Artaud so famously said, is theatre’s double. Between play and the play, Rivette’s theatre seeks to explore areas accessible only in the ‘sacred space’ of the performance, and to establish a laboratory, presented on screen, where the work of creation of the cinema can be prepared. It is to this that we now turn.

22 ‘There are certain things which must only be approached in fear and trembling; death is one of these, without a doubt; and at the moment of filming something so mysterious, how can one not feel like an impostor?’

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References Berto, Juliet (1973), ‘The Last Summer in Paris’, in Pressbook for Céline et Julie vont en bateau, unpaginated. Caillois, Roger (1967), Des Jeux et des hommes, Paris, Gallimard Folio. Chevrie, Marc (1989), ‘Supplément aux voyages de J.R.’, Cahiers du cinéma, 416, April, 20–5. Chevrie, Marc (1991), ‘Les aventures de la fiction’, in Sergio Toffetti (ed.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Torino, Museo nazionale del Cinema di Torino/Centre Culturel Français de Turin, 133–7. Derrida, Jacques (1967), L’Écriture et la différence, Paris, Éditions du Seuil. Derrida, Jacques (1978), Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul. Frappat, Hélène ( 2001 ), Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma. Gamet, Pierre (1991), ‘L’image du son’, interview with François Thomas, in Sergio Toffetti (ed.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Torino, Museo ­nazionale del Cinema di Torino/Centre Culturel Français de Turin, 71–8. Markale, Jean (1989), Brocéliande et l’énigme du Graal, Paris, Éditions ­Pygmalion. Motte, Warren (1995), Playtexts: Ludics in Contemporary Literature, Lincoln/ London: University of Nebraska Press. Nadeau, Maurice (1948), Histoire du surréalisme, Paris, Points Seuil. Ogier, Bulle (1991), ‘North By Northwest’, interview avec Sergio Toffetti, in Sergio Toffetti (ed.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Torino, Museo nazionale del Cinema di Torino/Centre Culturel Français de Turin, 91–3. Rivette, Jacques (1961), ‘De l’abjection’, Cahiers du cinéma, 120, 54 Rivette, Jacques (1963), interview with Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-André Fieschi, Eduardo de Gregorio, Nouvelle Critique, 63, April. Rivette, Jacques (1971), interview with Yvonne Baby, Le Monde, 14 October. Ryan, Marie-Laure (2001), Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Inter­ activity in Electronic Media, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press. Thomas, François (1991), ‘Les Films Parallèles: Musique et son directs’, in Sergio Toffetti (ed.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Torino: Museo nazionale del Cinema di Torino/Centre Culturel Français de Turin, 165–70. Wiles, Mary (2000), ‘Re-staging the feminine in Jacques Rivette’s ‘Haut bas fragile’, Studies in French Cinema, 1, 2, 98–107.

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6 Play, theatre and performance

At the elaborate summit of the concept of jeu, ‘playing’, ‘play’, it seems inevitable that we will find ourselves dealing with the theatre: the theatre which, hardly by chance, has been a controversial partner and rival of cinema since the newer art began. A source of material for adaptation and even more importantly of personnel – both actors and directors –, it was also a convenient model for a performance art struggling for its own identity, especially in the first years of sound film, and, for many theorists, the anti-cinema par excellence. ‘Pas d’épousailles du théâtre et du cinématographe’, wrote Robert Bresson in his journal of the 1950s, ‘sans extermination des deux’1 (Bresson 1975: 21); but Bresson’s theatre is a pasteboard affair, an easy scapegoat for a frozen, actorly style of cinema, and in the same 1950s André Bazin was able to see in a very different conception of theatre a new beginning for film art. ‘Plus le cinéma se proposera d’être fidèle au texte, et à ses exigences théâtrales, plus nécessairement il devra approfondir son propre langage’,2 he wrote in 1951 (Bazin 1981: 171). Bazin’s approach, which emphasises the inconvenience of the theatrical form when brought into contact with the cinematic, proposes that, by confronting and indeed foregrounding that inconvenience, cinema is forced to reflect both on its responsibilities as a performance art which constructs the reality which it reveals to its audience, and on the specificity of its interpretation of 1 ‘[There can be] No marriage of theatre and cinematograph without exterminating both’ 2 ‘The more the cinema seeks to be faithful to the text and its theatrical requirements, the more necessary it will be for it to explore its own language more deeply’

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148  jacques rivette such ­fundamental factors in performance as ‘actor’ and ‘audience’, or indeed ‘space’ and ‘time’. Within the ambit of the emerging Nouvelle Vague there was thus a precedent for considering the presence of theatre in cinema as neither an unproblematic, inevitable merger nor a deadening compromise, but rather as a vivifying dialogue of differences. Such a dialogue implies that renegotiation of the implications of performance be a characteristic of both parties to the interaction, and it is not by chance that Bazin’s article considers a potential rethinking of theatre, as well as of cinema, to be one of the benefits of bringing the two together. In the actual practice of Nouvelle Vague directors (notably Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard), the theatre which makes its presence felt is an active art form which is already a laboratory for experiment into definitions of scenic space and real space, group creativity and development of text, the raison d’être of ‘performance’ and ‘spectacle’ and their implications for participants. Especially in Rivette’s work theatre, generally experimental theatre, is a constant and insistent presence, a persistent reminder, and metaphor, of the process of performance, at once reflecting on Rivette’s cinematic practice and providing a means of developing it through never-ending questioning and correction – with the dangers of exhaustion and discouragement which this may bring. Everyone who has worked on Rivette has had to begin with the observation that, as Gilles Deleuze, a great admirer, puts it: ‘À travers toute son œuvre, Rivette élabore une formule où s’affrontent cinéma, théâtre, et théâtralité propre au cinéma’3 (Deleuze 1985: 112). In all his films there is a sense of theatricality, of lives being lived through constant role-play and performance of actions which, carefully staged in space, self-consciously acquire a meaning more concentrated than the casual gestures of everyday life; and in several, even if theatre in its strict sense is not present, other modes of performance, such as conjuring shows, variety singers, social dance, organised games or religious and secular rituals take on an important role. ­‘Theatricality’, unlike ‘theatre’, refers to action but not to the place of action: ‘theatre’ must take place within boundaries, but ‘theatricality’ creates its own  space. Rivette, then, establishes fluid spatial boundaries between performance and life and blurs the distinction of theatre and not-theatre: 3 ‘Throughout his work, Rivette has been developing a formula in which cinema, theatre, and the theatricality which belongs to cinema are brought face to face’

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play, theatre and performance   149 the whole, of course, within the specific context of cinema which frames all that he presents as a canned past performance radically spatially separate from its eventual audience. It is impossible to separate Rivette’s films into those which ‘deal with theatre’ and those which do not, even if the structure to which we conventionally give that name (with its actors, stage spaces, dedicated texts) is more visible in some films than others. A rough division of the work could, however, be offered, presenting, on the one hand, those films in which characters are involved explicitly with theatre as a major part of the narrative process (Paris nous appartient, L’Amour fou, Out 1 (both versions), L’Amour par terre, La Bande des quatre, Va savoir); on the other, those in which theatre and organised performance do not form part of a narrative which is, at least formally, conceived as unfolding in an unbounded ‘real’ world (Le Coup du berger, La Religieuse, Hurlevent, La Belle Noiseuse, Jeanne la Pucelle, Secret Défense, L’Histoire de Marie et Julien, Ne touchez pas la hache); and, between the two hands as it were, an ambiguous third group (it will be observed that a case might be made for including several of the previously mentioned films within it), in which the whole filmic space becomes a theatre and the action entirely performance, ‘un monde de pur artifice’ in which every word and gesture is reflective, and even if the action moves freely through very real places, nothing is ‘natural’. This is characteristic of the films of the later 1970s and very early 1980s (Céline et Julie, Noroît, Duelle, Le Pont du Nord or Merry-Go-Round, to which Haut bas fragile (1995) might be added): but it might equally well be said of Out 1 or L’Amour par terre if they did not, at the same time, include explicit theatre, of La Religieuse which was a theatrical production before it became a film, or of Marie et Julien which has its origins in the 1970s. In Noroît there is an explicit theatrical referent which is even, at one point, reframed as a performance within the film, but it would make little sense to speak of the characters as ‘involved with theatre as part of the narrative’ in what is the closest of all Rivette’s films to a piece of performance art. Céline et Julie on the other hand contains a clearly delineated space where something like a performance takes place, but its nature is far from certain, while all the characters’ interactions, outside that space, are playful, self-conscious constructions. What follows will concentrate principally on films in the first and third groups – most especially L’Amour fou, Céline et Julie, Out 1, Va

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150  jacques rivette savoir and Noroît – and on the way in which Rivette investigates interaction between ‘theatre’ and ‘not-theatre’ – that is between performance, backstage and an outside world almost always perceived as theatrical – in order to reconfigure the various positions which those involved in a performance event may occupy: actor, director, critic and audience. These positions, crucial to theatre, are also of course highly relevant to cinema, and their nature and the relationships between them deeply concern Rivette in his filmic practice. It is for this reason that this chapter will give particular consideration to the role of the director, a source of tension both within Rivette’s films and in his perception of his own role as a creator and, undoubtedly, an auteur. In September 1968, just after the completion of L’Amour fou, Rivette gave a long interview to Cahiers du cinéma in which he claimed that: ‘tous les films sont sur le théâtre. Il n’y a pas d’autre sujet … Si on prend un sujet qui traite du théâtre de près ou de loin, on est dans la vérité du cinéma, on est porté’4 (Rivette 1968a: 15). In 1982, while he was preparing L’Amour par terre, he referred to theatre as ‘le refoulé du cinéma’5 (Rivette 1982) and in 1996 as ‘la scène primitive de l’inconscient du cinéma’6 (Rivette 1996: 62), both of which formulations establish it not just as a permanent but often unspoken presence – as Fabienne Caratini has observed (Caratini 1999: 214) – but also as a formative one for cinematic practice. Theatre, literally, represents the performance in formation, the stage at which nothing is yet fixed, and it is in the image of the theatre, its disposition of spaces and roles, that cinema – ‘unconsciously’ perhaps – has learned to conceive of itself as an art of performance and spectatorship. This is true even when it subverts that disposition, parading its difference from theatre with a camera which invades the performance space and – notionally – carries the virtual spectator into the midst of the action. One of Rivette’s most intriguing achievements in L’Amour fou is to demonstrate how that freedom with which the camera moves among the actors, far from breaking down the boundary between onstage and offstage space, in fact seals it hermetically, fixing the filmed performance in its own tight, closed world. Rivette’s ‘theatre films’ may be 4 ‘All films are about theatre. There is no other subject … If you choose a subject which deals closely or distantly with theatre, you’re within the truth of cinema and borne up [by it]’ 5 ‘that which cinema represses’ 6 ‘the primal scene of cinema’s unconscious’

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play, theatre and performance   151 seen as attempts to explore and genuinely subvert this (inescapable) founding geography of cinema, and its concomitant distribution of roles to all persons present, in the process opening the separate, ritual world of performance to a dynamic and uncertain interaction with what is outside it. However, as we shall see, the enterprise comes up against the inevitable limits and contradictions of the fixity of cinema, something which Rivette, in practice, seems unwilling, or even unable, to renounce. His brief excursions into theatre direction were not particularly successful, and he observed in his interview with the NRF that he found the lack of directorial control over a theatrical performance a disturbing factor: ‘Ils [les acteurs] peuvent faire ce qu’ils veulent sur scène … Ça bouge tout le temps’7 (Rivette 1996: 63). In practice, Rivette’s championing of flux and process and dynamic development is always a tightly controlled illusion of which he remains the artificer. But we will return to this. In L’Amour fou, the space is at first glance clearly defined and hierarchised. Performance, theatre, the rehearsals for Andromaque, take place on a white square of ‘stage’ which, when filmed from high angle, is reminiscent of a boxing ring, and brightly lit. It is surrounded by a shadowy area of seating, offstage but within the walls of the theatre building, where the actors regain their everyday personas. Outside that space, outside the walls, lie the intermediate areas of the city (streets, cafés and the dispersed homes of the troupe) where certain brief scenes take place, and, somewhere in the city, there is the film’s alternative centre, Claire and Sébastien’s flat, a walled-in cell where the intimate drama of the couple takes place. Between the flat and the theatre there is no apparent physical continuity ; indeed the flat sometimes seems devoid of all connection with the outside world. At least, that is, devoid of all visual connection, because through the soundtrack Rivette can break down walls and barriers: we hear the sounds of the street that we cannot see, and Bulle Ogier’s voice records what is taking place there although we do not look through the window. At times a daring montage of sound can transcend all barriers and bring the theatre into the rooms of the flat to enter into verbal exchange with Claire. There seems to be an understanding in L’Amour fou – unlike in some other films where the act of performance may take possession of any space offered to it – that the action and narrative of Andromaque 7 ‘They can do what they like on stage … It moves all the time’

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152  jacques rivette belongs completely within its open, bounded square of light which is itself contained within the hall of the theatre building. Outside that space the play is only words, although words have their own evocative power to disturb the lives they invade. The sequences shot in the rehearsal space comprise two kinds of film image, the 35mm footage belonging to Rivette’s film camera and the shots taken by the TV crew for their documentary. It is through the contrast between these two series of images that Rivette is able to emphasise the indefinite borders of his apparently organised theatrical geography, while at the same time observing how the procedures of the camera crew – with their mobile point-of-view and ability to immerse themselves in the dramatic action – effectively reconfirm and close the borders of the stage space. The 35mm camera films the room in which the performance takes place in wide sweeps and tracking shots, which pass without hindrance across the stage and into the ‘backstage’ ranks of seats, frequently framing both spaces within the same shot and thus emphasising the extent to which the division between theatre and not-theatre is either illusory, or in effect shaded out. The ‘stage’ becomes a frame within the frame – rectangular, defined, but permeable to the frequent comings and goings of director, actors and camera crew, who enter and exit the world of the performance of Andromaque each time they step across its boundary. Since it is an open space, in the centre of the room, conversation of course takes no account of its confines, and it is only when they enclose themselves in the formal language of Racine’s text that the actors temporarily construct themselves a separate linguistic world. (Text, and the sound of language, can thus be used to establish boundaries just as it can be used to abolish them ; the paradoxical role of sound spaces is one to which we will return). Even the place where the room itself ends is indefinite, the walls and doors are in shadow and people who enter and leave seem to pass through a vague and open space, which contrasts with Rivette’s presentation of the flat in the same film, where the solidity and sometimes the invasiveness of walls are emphasised. This disposition ensures that Andromaque, the play, rather than an autonomous narrative contained in its distinct and ritual world, remains a part of the flux of human interactions which are taking place in and around its space, not only the constant discussion between director, actors and stage crew, which relate to it directly

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play, theatre and performance   153 since they determine its form, but also the marginal meetings and partings which link the performance to the personal dramas outside the theatre. This recalls Youssef Ishaghpour’s definition of the characteristic of the cinematic actor as opposed to their theatrical counterpart: ‘en tant qu’être physique, c’est un objet, un élément de l’image parmi d’autres’8 (Ishaghpour 1986: 222). This description of the individual actor could here be applied to the performance itself, organically linked to the activity in the rest of the room which is, in its turn, prolonged without noticeable hiatus outside those invisible walls, in the streets and homes to and from which people move. It is thus impossible to tell with certainty where the ‘performance’ ends and ‘ordinary life’ begins; through the manipulation of sound editing Rivette can even bring the tones of the Racinian verse spoken onstage directly into connection with Claire, isolated in her flat. Rivette’s 35mm camera, however, while it moves easily around the length, breadth and height of the room, keeps a distance from the performance space, rarely intruding itself into these interactions. In fact it remains self-consciously detached, in a position comparable to that of a theatrical spectator, albeit a mobile one – present as a watcher but debarred from involvement. The TV camera, on the other hand, circulates among and between the actors as they rehearse, focusing closely on their faces and highlighting another, contrasting definition which has been offered to differentiate the cinematic from the theatrical actor: ‘le démaquillage, le gros plan qui dénude les visages’9 (Bonitzer 1995: 36). It profits as much as possible from the cinema’s capacity for involvement, for that presence among the actors which so fascinated Patrice Chéreau, and which draws the filmic spectator into the performance space. In doing so, however, it shuts the offstage space out of the frame, restricting itself entirely to the ‘inner’ world of the white rectangle. The filmic frame, unlike the edge of the stage, establishes a truly impervious border between ‘performance’ and ‘non-performance’; although, notionally, sound from the offstage space could still cross the line, this is not permitted. Thus the TV camera isolates Andromaque, or rather the developing Andromaque, from its context. The penalty for that breakdown of the spatial separation between performer and audience on which cinema has staked so much is to 8 ‘as a physical being, he is an object, an element of the image like any other’ 9 ‘removal of make-up, close-ups which reveal the face’

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154  jacques rivette eliminate entirely all that is NOT performance. Far from being ‘un élément de l’image parmi d’autres’, the stage becomes the only available world, and the performance becomes all; while the cinematic audience is offered at best an illusion of participation, at the cost of the loss of any sense of what it is that they are participating in, or of any remaining reminders of their own space. When the television camera turns its attention to the context of the production – which it does, since what the team is creating is a documentary, not a record of the performance – it does so through tight framing of individuals, notably the director Sébastien and the lead actress Marta, as talking heads separated from all surrounding space, speaking, illusorily, as individuals to the individual in the cinema, or eventually perhaps in their TV-furnished living room. That tightly-insulated dialogue is as impervious to outside interruption as is the stage-bound, active, ‘involved’, mobile camera. L’Amour fou provides an exemplary diagram of the spatial dimension of a paradox which exercises Rivette throughout his work: how is it possible to break down the division between performance and audience which exists in both theatre and cinema and which denies the possibility of dynamic interaction and change and condemns the ‘work’ to a deadly finitude, while at the same time allowing the audience to retain their autonomy and understanding? The problem, as it presents itself to both media, has been expressed with exemplary elegance by Jean-Loup Rivière  who eventually chooses to define ‘theatre’ precisely as the potential to resolve it: Si le théâtre c’est là où je pourrais être et l’image là d’où je suis exclu, dans les deux cas c’est là où je ne suis pas. On appelera alors théâtre tout dispositif qui transgresse sa structure exclusive pour me faire place.10 (Rivière 1995: 45)

This attempt to redefine  the sense of ‘theatre’, to make it symbolic of an ideally interactive performance space and to use this ideal to reflect on the exclusive nature of cinema, is fundamental to Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974). The ‘performance’ which Céline and Julie regularly witness – and perforce participate in – in the rooms of the old house is certainly not explicitly either a theatrical performance 10 ‘If the theatre is the place where I could be and the image the place which I am excluded from, in both cases it is the place where I am not. So we will use theatre to mean any arrangement which transgresses its exclusionary structure to make a space for me’

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play, theatre and performance   155 or a film, even if its characters and topoi allow telling comparisons with both boulevard theatre and classic Hollywood. If anything, their trips to the house seem like dream excursions into the narratives of memory, ‘primal scenes’ in a literal sense. Nonetheless the contrasted geographies of performance space, and the liberating recourse to a conception of ‘theatre’ as a world of open boundaries where the performance leaks out from its own space to accept interaction with all the outside world in some unlimited ‘offstage’, can be traced clearly here too. The old house in Céline et Julie is, to begin with, a hermetically sealed space which contains its own completely autonomous narrative. It is a performance space with no offstage, its windows closed and shuttered and impervious to Julie’s pocket-knife on the one occasion when she attempts to break in (this despite the fact that, to those inside, windows can appear to be open, just as windows in a set may open onto painted illusory scenery). Once inside, whichever girl is present becomes not audience, nor actress precisely, but absorbed participant in the drama, completely involved in her role as the nursemaid Angèle, circulating in the rooms of the house and interacting with its inhabitants according to ‘the script’; she becomes her part, and is only able to consider events with critical detachment, or indeed perhaps to see them at all, on condition of being separated from them not only in space but in time. (The episodes appear to the protagonists, and to us, as flashbacks, recalled with the aid of the madeleinesweet after they have got out of the house, intriguingly proposing the possibility that while we are participants in our lives, we perceive ourselves as actors in our memories.) Thus she is completely unable to inflect them, to affect the performance in any way. Such absolute involvement is comparable to the cinematic model of audience space – as illustrated by the TV images in L’Amour fou: the outsider is entirely absorbed in the performance, given an illusion of co-presence and indeed involvement, but unable to act on this world in any way because her presence there implies a renunciation of her own ‘outside’ identity along with any other offstage context. The only activity which she can exercise on the performance is that of critical commentary after the event, in a separate space and time which is the only place left for ‘offstage’, a place from which there is no road through to the performance. Through the critical commentary, though, the separated, disempowered audience can become aware of

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156  jacques rivette the desire, indeed the need, to act on the performance, of its ‘deadly’ nature in its current form (‘deadly’ because it will inevitably end in a murder, but also because like Peter Brook’s ‘deadly theatre’, or the Nouvelle Vague’s construction of academic cinema, it has lost all capacity for innovation). In order to achieve this, they need to effect a change from the cinematic model of spectatorship to the theatrical, with its ability to perceive at the same time both onstage and offstage space and to observe some sort of relationship between the two. Eventually, they need to reach that dynamic interaction which the 35mm footage of L’Amour fou can illustrate, but not entirely exemplify. To do so is to become aware of themselves first as an audience, participating together in a shared event, rather than as isolated individuals communing in solitude with the projected images. The process of sharing develops gradually over the various occasions in which they cross the threshold: the first two visits to which we are party are individual experiences from the original expedition to the subsequent replay; the third time, Céline enters the house but shares her sweet with Julie who then appears as Angèle in the ‘projection’. Subsequently, the girls are able to effect a mutual recall session without a further visit; in this episode, Rivette’s montage creates an Angèle who changes from Céline to Julie to Céline, sometimes in mid-sentence, although always with pronounced changes of angle such that the contrasting faces and identities are not emphasised. But it is when they find a way to physically enter the house of performance together, each aware of the other and thus able to detach herself from her own experience through exchange with the other, that the girls are at last able to pass freely not only between spaces but between activities, using what they have seen as spectators to inflect their performance as actresses and their participation as actresses to change the dénouement, thus taking on the role of ‘director’ of the whole. At this point, the film engages in an explicit celebration of theatre as a liberating interpenetration of worlds: the girls select a bedroom not apparently needed for the performance as their ‘greenroom’, where they change, run through their lines and share their pre-curtain stage fright. The soundtrack, once again, is employed to redefine the space: we hear the traditional ‘trois coups’ of French theatre11 as the light rises 11 Traditionally, the start of a play in France is signalled by someone backstage striking the floor with a staff in a rapid series of blows followed by three louder, separate ones to demand silence from the audience.

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play, theatre and performance   157 gradually, and at the end of the ‘act’ there is even applause to be heard from an improbable and always invisible audience. It is by reconstructing a cinematic space as a theatrical one that the hypnotised spectators become active, joyful performers: the theatre is a space of freedom. In addition, the subsidiary performances in the offstage world which is Paris, which also make up Céline et Julie, establish any place the girls may happen to be as a potential stage space and any situation as an opportunity to exercise their talents as actresses and choreographer/directors – thereby ensuring that the fluid boundaries of improvised performance are set up as a norm outside the rigid and outdated (but nonetheless obsessive) ‘primal scene’ of the house. In Céline et Julie the world of pure artifice is also a world of almost perfect freedom. The two actresses, or the two characters, put themselves on display, for each other or for their bemused contemporaries, through carefree co-opting of objects, gestures, quotations, ideas. On condition that they are self-aware, their interaction with the world offers no constraints, no prior meanings which must be respected, no texts and no myths except their own. They act out a joyful celebration of the rich and varied present, anarchic and infinitely renewable. The same cannot be said of all the films of the late 1970s, however. Even if Rivette’s knowing subversion of popular genres keeps us at an appropriately sceptical theatrical distance from the events which unfold, many of the films of the ‘third group’ lead the performers to enact their own deaths; and even if these enactions signal their unreality, death is par excellence a ‘real’ meaning, a signified which cannot be dismissed or controlled – except, perhaps, precisely by ritual enactment. (The theatrical freedom of Céline et Julie actually depends on averting the representation of death, in the house but also elsewhere, as when Julie reinterprets the ominous Tarot card her colleague has drawn from her reading.) In Noroît, Duelle, Merry-Go-Round, Le Pont du Nord, and even Out 1, the sense of a possibly dangerous significance to the performance, however playful it may seem, remains as a dark backdrop to Rivette’s frequently exuberant and celebratory action. However, in this context it is worth recalling, at the start, Hélène Frappat’s interesting comments on tragedy (Frappat 2001: 43): Vouloir arrêter le passage du temps, vouloir se faire ‘une journée perpétuelle’: telle est la tragédie, et c’est le contraire de l’Éternel Retour, cette figure nietzschéenne de la reprise. Le sujet choisit un acte dont

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il peut supporter, dont il peut désirer qu’il revienne indéfiniment. Le sujet décide: il est actif, donc puissant. Au contraire, dans la tragédie, le héros se laisse ensevelir …12

Frappat continues by linking the nature of tragedy to a sense of guilt and expiation, which demands an eternal and inescapable repetition of disaster. My interest in this quotation here however lies in the proposed opposition between fruitless repetitions of pre-determined catastrophes (the house play of Céline et Julie or the cyclical plot of Secret Défense) and a repetition which is also revivifying, an ‘Éternel Retour’. That Nietzschean reference is also frequently cited by those concerned with theatre as ritual enactment. I would like to argue that where the enactments of death can be read as ritual performances, the sense of ‘burial’ in the repetition is averted, and – again through conscious theatricality, although in a different form – freedom can once again be asserted. Perhaps the most radical example of this procedure is the longinvisible Noroît (1976), which is also a unique instance in the history of Rivette’s relation to theatre. Alone among his films, Noroît presents itself in its entirety as an adaptation of a piece of theatre: the lurid Jacobean drama The Revenger’s Tragedy. Certainly it is not so much an adaptation as an appropriation of the text, but Rivette establishes the play as a very formal structuring frame, inserting title screens which periodically announce the acts and scenes about to be represented. These conventional divisions serve not only to remind us of the original’s existence but also to signify theatre in a more essential sense – specifically a form of European post-Renaissance theatre which enclosed even the most violently transgressive action in a tight traditional pattern. The Revenger’s Tragedy however is already a peculiar play which, as Karin Coddon has pointed out, puts the well-known five-act structure distinctly out of joint: ‘Though two full acts follow the Duke’s murder, their narrative purpose is radically superfluous’ (Coddon 1994: 85). Rivette’s treatment of it almost entirely removes it from this context, mingling relics and fragments of the Jacobean text with characters and tropes (and lines) from popular adventure 12 ‘Wanting to stop the passage of time, wanting a “perpetual day”: that is tragedy, and it’s the opposite of the Eternal Return, Nietzsche’s image of repetition. The subject chooses an action which he can bear, can even desire to have recur indefinitely. The subject decides: the subject is active, and therefore powerful. On the contrary, in tragedy, the hero lets himself be buried …’

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play, theatre and performance   159 cinema – the pirate drama, specifically Fritz Lang’s Moonfleet (1955), but also the western and specifically, mischievously, Shane (1953) – and moulding all this material into an experimental dance drama which belongs in form and function to quite another concept of theatre: neo-ritualistic performance as practised by several exponents of twentieth-century experiment. The text of the first sequence is full of potent connotations. The protagonist, Morag (Geraldine Chaplin) is crouching on a twilit beach over the body of a young man, to whom she proclaims (over the unedited sound of the sea, which eventually decided Rivette to provide subtitles): Shane/mon frère/je t’ai cherché/je t’ai trouvé/dans la mer/sur les rochers/dispersé/déchiqueté./Avec mon souffle,/avec mes mains,/je t’ai rassemblé./Voilà/ton corps/comme avant.13

The reference to the reconstructed body – not present in the play, which indeed harps insistently on decomposition and disappearance – connects the Jacobean revenge tragedy to the myths of Isis and Orpheus; and since the former has direct links to the sun and the moon, the reference becomes a recognisable archetype which will lend the force of its connotations – however vaguely known by the audience – to the confrontation between the two actresses/rivals, Chaplin/Morag and Laffont/Giulia, who will become associated with moon and sun respectively. Christopher Innes has noted that among the favoured sources for ‘the ritualistic’ in the experimental theatre were ‘the Dionysian rituals of ancient Greece’ (Innes 1993: 3). Rivette allusively employs them here; in addition one might feel that his omnipresent secret societies are also being brought into the ambit of the drama to come, since the Isis myth relates to Freemasonry, and such sidelong references to real organisations which exist on the margins of (most) spectators’ knowledge of the world are not rare in Rivette’s work . The evocative power of the mythic idea, the atmospheric setting, Chaplin’s intensely physical, dancer’s movements and her mysteriously bound wrists which suggest a suicide attempt, combine to launch Noroît in a climate not only of mystery but of menace, which is 13 ‘Shane/my brother/ I sought you/I found you/in the sea/on the rocks/ dispersed/broken./With my breath/with my hands/I have put you together./ Here is/your body/as it was before’

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160  jacques rivette further enhanced when Morag switches to the enigmatically ominous English text of the Revenger. Here – as he had already attempted in Out 1, and in a rather different way would do in Va savoir – Rivette makes use of language as sound, exploiting the foreignness of his text (or, in Out 1, its distortion in order to divorce sound and sense) in ways which were also typical of certain currents of the avant-garde. The English text has a meaning – and is subtitled for French audiences – but it is obscure and allusive, and most of all separate from all other exchanges, doubly theatrical and potentially magical. What should be noted for the moment, however, is that the very different theatrical practices which Rivette is drawing upon (‘primitive’ ritual, Jacobean tragedy, and modern post-symbolist and post-Artaudian experiment) are all intensely serious in purpose, proposing to evoke rarely experienced feelings of awe, terror, desire or even repulsion rather than playfulness in the audience. Indeed their success depends on their power of conviction that what transpires onstage is significant. What precisely its significance is may be uncertain, especially in experimental reformulations of myth, but to offer the component parts to the audience as entirely inconsequential sounds and gestures would be to produce only parodic grand-guignol. And this is clearly not Rivette’s intention. While he is prepared to completely deconstruct the ‘false myths’ of bourgeois melodrama – theatrical or cinematic – in Céline et Julie (and, indeed, later in L’Amour par terre, where even the great Hitchcock comes under teasing scrutiny), the raw power and violence of his theatrical material – textual, referential and gestural – in Noroît cannot be dismissed or destroyed, however much it may be tested by its combination with other, more light-hearted or more trivial, codes, most particularly those of cinema. From cinema – but before cinema from popular literature – comes the image of the pirates’ lair which transposes the Revenger’s corrupt court (the ‘accursed palace’ (The Revenger’s Tragedy, I, i, 30), a recognisable, if distorted, figure of real power) into a fantasy familiar to all children’s games. In the sequence which introduces them, we see the pirates unloading heavy cases of booty at a midnight cove, swinging athletically from ‘rigging’ as they stow their loot in the castle, posing with hand on cutlass hilt and one foot triumphantly on a table where a lavish feast is spread; in fact, performing instantly recognisable pirate gestures which may induce in the audience a pleasantly relaxed, reckless, swashbuckling mood, in contrast with the darkness of the

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play, theatre and performance   161 introduction. The ‘pirate’ is essentially the ‘figure of the pirate’, a combination of costume, gesture and object relations whose physical movement alone contains a mass of narrative meaning. The state of being a pirate is a kind of dance, and the dancers can be transposed freely so long as they make the right steps; whether men or women take the lead roles, whether the hideaway is maintained and quality of life assured by kidnapped maidens or toy boys, is of little account to what matters about pirateness. One might however think that it was the very concentration of signifiers with which Rivette began which generated the secondary term ‘pirate’ – the elemental setting of the Breton shoreline, the ‘ritual’ broken body, and the Jacobean association de malfaiteurs combining to lead with a kind of inevitability to this end; and even before the Revenger enters the castle some brutal, and at times quite inexplicable, despatching may warn us that the reassuring boundaries of the swashbuckler (especially the cinematic swashbuckler) will not apply. Not that these deaths, like the many others which punctuate Noroît – which in the true tradition of Jacobean tragedy has disposed of all its characters by the end – are anything but representations and mimes of death; but, at times, they reach a ritual, theatrical seriousness. In fact, paradoxically, it is the non-illusionistic, theatrical presentation of death which gives it a significant reality in Noroît. When the film evokes cinema, on the other hand, it is to offer the audience a defusion of tension, a space for doubt and distance through the possibility of a playful image. Thus the swashbuckling references, thus the all-toofamiliar words with which Morag calls to her inexplicably resurrected brother in the castle. However, if narrative tropes and cinematic quotes can be used as a playful reminder of the conventional nature of everything which takes place on screen, the resources of cinematic language can be co-opted in their turn and drawn into the performance. Thus the exceptionally long fluid takes which circle the protagonists as they continually circle each other, and take their rhythm from that of the actors, by way of the camera’s capacity for motion become a part of the dance which is the whole film, even though the meticulously maintained distance ensures that there is never full fusion of the camera/spectator and the action. The camera, like the live musicians who provide occasional accompaniment, is ambiguously part and yet not part of the performance, included in the pattern of movement and yet not involved

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162  jacques rivette in the narrative, a condition of simultaneous presence and absence which is characteristic of theatre – especially ritual and experimental theatre, both of which blur the distinction between audience and performance space – but extremely rare in cinema. As a more dramatic exploitation of cinematic language we might cite the change in film stock in the final nocturnal ‘masked ball’, which inserts sequences which almost seem to be shot in infrared to follow the actions of Giulia (the sun), for a while, and grainy, documentary black-and-white images of Morag (the moon). While the insertion of these images in a very dark sequence, where figures and faces are hard for the spectator to make out, might tempt us to read them as subjective shots, the night vision of the powerful protagonists themselves, Rivette deliberately belies this since the ‘vision’ corresponds to the one being seen. (Unless, of course, we are to use this as evidence that Morag and Giulia are mirror-doubles.) Thus the film stock becomes an element not of identification but of staging. The transposition of this performance from theatre to cinema has made available to Rivette not so much an increase in illusionary realism as a wider vocabulary of signs; the camera and its movements, the film stock, the superimpositions and insertions of film when edited are elements available to the director/choreographer just as are costumes, dance steps, death’s heads or suddenly struck matches. In Noroît perhaps more than any other of Rivette’s films, cinema becomes theatre, with all its constituent parts set out to work together before the audience in the name of the mise-en-scène.14 Even the light-hearted codes of cinema’s adventure genres are reunited by that mise-en-scène with something more universal, or archetypal, which might underlie them and suggest dark and dangerous referents. But Rivette is still able to refuse to frame either himself or his audience in a recurrent, inevitable narrative, most of all one which ends in death. Just as, earlier in the film, the pirates/dancers have woven, then broken with laughter, an illusion of gruesome violence in a staging-within-the-staging of part of the Revenger’s text (but the staging is also a recreation of a deed which has already been – barely – shown to us in shadows, and the actors will immediately repeat the 14 N.B. that I am here using mise-en-scène in the restricted sense in which Bordwell and Thompson use it (2001, chapter 6). To the Cahiers critics the term was more generally applicable to all the elements of film language, without necessarily implying the degree of theatricality suggested here.

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play, theatre and performance   163 gestures of murder in their own frame story), so in the final shot, as Morag and Giulia sink to the ground after ritually stabbing each other in the belly, they are also – ambiguously, but inescapably – doubled up with mutual laughter, like children at the end of a long and exhilarating game. Even if they do not get up and walk off the screen/ stage as the image gives place to the credits – as thirty years later Ugo and Pierre will do after a comparably theatrical showdown at the end of Va savoir – Rivette in extremis frees his audience and his actors from the confines of ritual re-enaction; around a performance there is always another, open world to which the performers belong, and if there is no guarantee that it may not hold equal violence, neither is it condemned to mirror the actions which it stages for itself. In the end, once again, it is theatre, with its simultaneous presence/ absence of ‘actor’ and ‘character’ in a space which can be both on- and offstage, which offers us a liberation and an open ending. Even if all the screen space of Noroît becomes subsumed into a performance space, the actors by virtue of their double identity still contain, within themselves, a boundary through which they can pass to escape the fixity of a completed performance, and, in so doing, to reaffirm free agency through the particular definition of theatre as performance in process rather than performance as product. L’Amour fou is about rehearsals and not the actual performance, and therefore we are still at a stage, temporally speaking, where the passage between stage and auditorium remains open and where auditorium and backstage are indistinguishable, and even the inner boundary which distinguishes actors from acted is still not quite established. The happy dénouement of Céline et Julie hinges on the conversion of finished product into aleatory, experimental process, with the concomitant thinning of the rigid boundaries between ‘on’ and ‘off’ which this implies. Rivette regularly turns to the genesis of performance in order to deconstruct the more ‘classic’ stage/audience structure associated with theatre at its culmination, and of course with cinema: in Paris nous appartient, L’Amour fou, Out 1, and La Bande des quatre, the productions in rehearsal throughout the films are never completed – in Out 1 and La Bande des quatre there seems to be no intention that they shall ever be so, even if in the latter the performers do eventually reach the stage of acquiring costumes, while in Paris nous appartient a potential production is abandoned (in fact, the prospect of it drives its director to suicide) in favour of continuing

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164  jacques rivette the cycle of rehearsals. There are only two cases in Rivette’s work where the theatre is represented on or after its first night: L’Amour par terre, where the single production is merely the last in the series of rehearsals and developments which make up the performance event, and Va savoir, where a troupe is presenting Pirandello’s Come tu mi vuoi for a short run, and the filming of several successive performances illustrates – up to a point, at least – the difficulty of locating a point where theatre is ‘completed’. We will return to this, and the specific issues it presents in terms of performance structure, later. This theatre-as-process with its porous boundaries naturally leaves individuals the potential freedom to exchange their roles in relation to the production, and not only in terms of actors inhabited, or not, by their character. Bystanders may become an audience, an audience may become actors and actors an audience, actors who are not onstage comprise a critical, sometimes directive, audience for those who are, technical helpers may become performers (as when Gérard’s stage manager enters the performance space with a sheet of cardboard during rehearsals of Pericles and, like the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, becomes at once performer and prop), actors or directors may withdraw from the production without completely severing their links to it and strangers may enter its ambit from the outside world. In Paris nous appartient, the protagonist Anne arrives at a rehearsal as a bystander, accompanying a friend who is expected to take part, only to find herself promoted to actress to cover for an absentee, then offered a starring role, then demoted once again to critical audience of a piece progressively changing out of all recognition. In La Bande des quatre the only performances which take place – or which seem ever to be going to take place – are duos for the benefit of an acting class, where each and every student may pass within the space of a few minutes from actor, to audience, to critical commentator and temporary ‘director’, and the roles offered by the play itself are redistributed with each new presentation and fragmented into scenes which ensure that the actress is never for a second subsumed by her character. Although the students occasionally find this procedure frustrating, indeed discouraging, its liberating potential becomes clear when they transport it to their own, too-devouring concerns. The mock trial staged by the Band of Four in the house adopts the easy exchange of roles and the disengaged irony that their classes have taught them, and enables them to make sense

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play, theatre and performance   165 of what may be a real drama by abstracting it. As Hélène Frappat has observed (Frappat 2001: 26), the theatre stylises experience, and the theatre contained in a film stylises a complex fiction – but it is not the simplified result which counts for the audience here so much as the process of distilling it and the effect that has on the actors. The ultimate expression of this fluidity is the short-circuit which sees actors and audience become one and the same, a group simultaneously performing and being the sole observer of its own performance. The theatre of Out 1 is a theatre of group exercises which occasionally incorporates the ‘role’ of audience into the very performance, creating a frame within the frame of the ‘stage’ space in order to watch and react to a performer contained within their circle. In such circumstances any separate audience space is absorbed and potentially abolished: anyone entering the same space as this action will, despite themselves, become an observed performer as well as an observing audience, obliged to calculate his or her position in relation both to actors and to action (as casual intruders on rehearsals always discover, if indeed they are tolerated at all) and the conditions are established for a potential conflation of stage and offstage space in a performance which extends indefinitely across ‘real’ space; such as arguably structures Out 1 (Frédérique, Pauline/Émilie and especially Colin figuring the co-opted outsiders acting despite themselves, and at the same time re-forming, the drama of the ex-Thirteen) and becomes evident in Noroît and Duelle. Thus these theatre troupes conflate actors, audience and all other persons present during the performance event into a general notion of self-aware participants in a process of creation, reflecting in this again the preoccupations of the experimental theatre in the mid-twentieth century. The New York-based Richard Schechner, a pioneer of ritualistic experiment during precisely these early years of the 1970s, as well as an influential theorist of theatre particularly concerned with redefining the audience, thus described his aim to create ‘open’ sections in his productions: ‘truly open [unprepared] moments when all the people in the room, acting either individually, in small groups, or in concert move the action forward. This “action” is not known beforehand, and may have nothing to do with the dramatic action of the play’ (Innes 1993: 176). The concomitant risk for experimental theatre was to merely replace one exclusionary structure with another with regard to the potential audience, since

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166  jacques rivette many of these performances seem intended for initiates only and unprepared intruders may be more readily resented than incorporated. The issue proved a reef on which much of the most interesting experimentation with participatory audiences eventually ran aground, with even the uncompromising Jerzy Grotowski turning with time from ‘theatre’ to ‘therapy’ or ‘exercise’ groups where the rethought relationship with the audience is resolved by the elimination of the audience! Applying such theories to film is an even trickier proposition. Rivette himself has famously compared the film project in the course of its preparation to the ‘secret societies’ which fascinate him: a potentially revealing comparison in that the eventual audience for a film, unimaginably large in comparison with a theatre audience, is completely excluded from the process of ‘secret’ preparation. As we shall see, Rivette’s fascination with the freedom offered by performance in process has a decidedly contradictory relationship with aspects of his actual practice. And when, in Va savoir, he finally shows a performance encountering a general audience in a public space, he has surprisingly little to say about the relationship between stage and auditorium, preferring to film within the stage space to which he offers entry, even outside the bounds of the actual play, only to a select group of principal characters. Nonetheless cinema may be peculiarly capable of providing illustration, by dint of its freedom of movement, of that extension of the performance outwards into the spaces of the city and the world to which reference was made above. If the existence of defined ‘acting’ and ‘audience’spaces proves not to be particularly fruitful to Rivette’s representation of performance, it might be suggested that it is not the stage but the auditorium that he conceives as an unnaturally restricted and hermetically separate space. A performance space which offers fluid roles to those evolving within it may easily be extended to involvement in the wider context in which the productions lie, and the outside world is also part of the theatre, whether or not the performance itself is seen as investing the entire world. Thus Anne in Paris nous appartient, as well as passing from audience member to actress, decides to seek out a lost cassette containing the music of the play and thereby acquires a role of liaison (for the spectator) between the production and the wider networks of a mysteriously conspiratorial Paris, in which in turn the play she is rehearsing has an uncertain – and apparently imperilled – place. In Out 1 the outsider Colin,

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play, theatre and performance   167 self-appointed investigator of another conspiratorial mystery which spreads its notional web across the city, enters Thomas’s performance space to which the clues he has accumulated elsewhere have directed him, and – apart from inflecting the performance by dint of his own presence – asks questions, within that space, concerning the director’s life in the outer world which directly change the subsequent development of the theatre project: while Frédérique uses the whole space of Paris as a backdrop for both seeking and acting, so that we can never be entirely certain whether her character dies for real or for fake. Rivette’s performance spaces have boundaries so open that the whole outside world becomes potentially connected to the theatre space, and any passer-by may, in a variant of the ‘butterfly wing’ effect, pass in and out of its ambit and play a role in its development. Even if this cannot quite break down the ultimate, unbridgeable divide which exists between the auditorium and the screen, the manifest random ordinariness of the streets of Paris in which Out 1’s performers circulate perhaps establishes it as a space an audience may recognise as its own, while the extraordinary circumstances of a twelve-hour cinema session make any screening of a full-length Out 1 a ‘happening’ in which the cinema audience is, if not part of the performance, at least part of a living event. This structure extends even to the troupe of Va savoir. It is established from the outset in Va savoir that the stage space is continuous and inseparable with the offstage. The first minute of the film, in fact, takes place in a non-space: a temporary, bounded – and mobile – magic circle of performance is created by a single spotlight which an unidentifable figure apparently draws with it as it moves this way and that through featureless darkness. The only space is the actor’s space (it is impossible yet even to tell that the actor is an actress), even the frame of the film is not locatable, so that the directive voices which we hear and to which figure and light apparently respond may issue from on- or off-screen; may even, notionally, be part of our own space, especially if shown in a cinema with the capacity for sourced and directed sound. Even when the director’s voice calls for light and a geography – with a concomitant division into stage and auditorium – becomes visible, shadows are still dominant, and the most definite boundary is still the immaterial one created by the spotlight. The transition – certainly effected via a cut – from stage to the backstage corridors follows Camille’s movement and marks

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168  jacques rivette no great visual difference for the audience; the balance of light and shadow, the dominant colour – or lack of colour – and the rhythm of movement is the same, the edge of the space still hard to define. The continuity is further emphasised when the passing of another intermediate door is marked by another cut across which camera and character continue together in fluid movement. The device of using dominant movement to cover cuts allows Rivette to extend this unbounded space further, from the dark theatre corridors and staircases to the narrow night-time street outside, then to the very similar corridors and staircases of Camille’s and Ugo’s hotel – in which they talk critically about the appearance of the theatre they have just left, thereby evoking that space as an imaginary superposition on this one. Thus the stage extends outwards into the city. The same is not, however, unambiguously true of the performance. In this first sequence the play is still elsewhere – a rather alarming prospective elsewhere – and even if everyone is engaged in its preparation neither their actions nor their words will much affect, or be affected by, what transpires onstage. If anything, Camille as she passes across this open but confined and directed space speaks of her fear of matters outside the theatre crossing its boundaries: the offstage, and so far off-screen, existence of Paris holds a threat of interference which may destroy the fragile security she has created around herself as performer. And indeed, it soon becomes clear that the changeable nature of theatre, as an art always in the process of making, is no less important in Va savoir for the incidental fact that the story unfolds after the première. The individuals who encounter the actors in their extra-theatrical lives do directly affect that still-dynamic creation which is the play – to which they sooner or later become a temporary audience –, and even in this film’s fairly conventional theatrical geography, theatre can still ‘transgress its exclusionary structure to make a space’ for individuals who may seem completely exterior to the performance space. However, the transgression takes place at the boundaries: in Va savoir there is still a time and space which belongs to the performance alone. Even if we are made privy to the presence of certain extraneous characters in the auditorium as Come tu mi vuoi is played, the actors are not; and the performance in Va savoir retains its own immaterial but staunch separateness through the near-uniqueness of its language. It is only in the above-mentioned first sequence that Italian is used

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play, theatre and performance   169 for everyday purposes, and we might use this as a further indication of the potential fluidity of all boundaries in these first moments. Camille, catching herself using Italian, stops herself with irritation: her haste to revert to French perhaps underlines how important it is to her, now she is in Paris, to keep stage and surroundings separate. Subsequently the language becomes the unmistakable property of theatre, thus rejoining a number of other examples in Rivette’s work of the employment of foreign language to demarcate a virtual space for the performance of theatre, or of magic, from the English of Noroît to Marie’s magical Gaelic charm in Marie et Julien. Thus Rivette uses theatre within cinema, and cinema as a context for his presentation of theatre, as a means to question the rigid separation of ‘fiction’ and ‘reality’, ‘performers’ and ‘spectators’ which makes up much of performance art, and to raise issues of participative creativity and the role of the spectacle in a wider context. In this context – and especially given the critical position of Cahiers in the 1960s and its consequences for the context of his own creativity, one would expect him to have particular concern to redefine the role of director in this fluid creative structure. So to what extent does Rivette include the director (the auteur in cinema and, partly as a result of cinematic debates, increasingly in the new theatre of the 1960s) in the ebb and flow of participants in performance? It is no surprise to find that directors figure prominently in many of these films, and that their role is a site of tension: at once central to the definition of the ‘theatre project’, and uncertain, fallible, and ultimately dispensable to its realisation. All Rivette’s directors are an integral part of the flux of roles which define performance projects – they are also actors and, of course, frequently critical audiences, while others in the group may adopt directive functions at times. Nonetheless Gérard in Paris nous appartient, Sébastien in L’Amour fou, Thomas and Lily in Out 1, Constance in La Bande des quatre, Clément in L’Amour par terre or Ugo in Va savoir are clearly figures set apart, nodal points in the constant exchanges, ever-present and very frequently central in the frame during performance projects; and it is inevitable that we read them as to some extent surrogates for the filmmaker and his concerns. It is notable however that in the ambiguous theatrical films of the late 1970s, the role of director is absorbed into the exchanges of the play, and in fact becomes one of the stakes of the action. Morag and Giulia, in Noroît, vie for control of the revenge

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170  jacques rivette plot, of the quest for treasure and of the dance. One might read the game/quest of Marie and Baptiste in Le Pont du Nord as an attempt to evade the control of a sinisterly invisible director (Baptiste’s ‘Max’) or to relinquish directorial responsibility to something impersonal and pre-established, ‘destiny’ or the throw of a dice in a game of goose … In any event it seems in these films that the position of director is perilous, always contested and bearing the risk of elimination. The effectiveness of Rivette’s visible directors as creative agents is both emphasised and undermined by their presentation. Their creative efficiency is established, often, by the conversations held about them when they are off-screen, or alternatively by the implied authority of a central place in the frame; that is, by constructions put in place by some external agency, be it within or outside the narrative. Constance first ‘appears’ as a voice, taking control of the actions of the two student actresses who occupy both the stage and the screen: from the moment when we hear her offstage comments, the camera withdraws slowly from the stage space and from Anna – with whom we have entered the theatre in the first three minutes of the film –, to take up Constance’s position in the auditorium before cutting to a reaction shot of her in the centre of the frame: she is thus offered control of the point of view and of all that takes place in ‘her’ room. Ugo is similarly introduced as a voice commanding not only what happens on his stage but the film itself in its opening moments; his call for light which demarcates the visible space indeed offers him a quasi-divine authority. On the other hand their own actions frequently betray uncertainty, if not outright lack of authority. In Paris nous appartient the first view we have of directorial activities highlights Gérard’s harassed inability to get his actors to come to rehearsals or even to say where the troupe will be tomorrow. But Gérard is presented as a man with real creative vision who is able to convince the audience more easily than he can impose on his fellows, with the exception of the lovestruck Anne who to some extent guides our reactions. Rivette’s view of the director–artist is still romantic; and if Gérard is manipulative, his fate is also tragic. The eight years which separate Paris nous appartient from L’Amour fou have frayed Rivette’s faith in the existential value of the director and his lone artistic vision endangered by the philistine forces of pragmatic economics. Sébastien describes to the TV ­interviewers his ideal of non-authoritative direction, but in

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play, theatre and performance   171 practice he employs all means at his disposal to impose his personal charisma on his disparate troupe, even as the fiercely private drama he is living with his partner detaches him more and more from the collective responsibility he has undertaken. The introductions to Lili and Thomas, in Out 1, epitomise this contradiction between authority attributed and uncertainty experienced. Lili establishes herself as a director by her words and gestures, but her direction is as fragile as it is consensual: she is constantly questioned, reinforces her judgements with gestures of affection, leaves the group to its own devices while she makes a swift exit; and she is constantly decentred by the camera, hidden behind other characters or framed at the side of the screen. In later sequences she will indeed temporarily cede her position as director, or have it usurped by other members of the troupe. Thomas is first seen in an insistent circling approach shot which places him firmly at the centre of both frame and camera movement, while he executes a ‘mirror exercise’ which seems to present his partner as his subjugated puppet. When he breaks off and the camera cuts away from him it frames another couple turning towards the place where we believe him to be, as if he is still a magnet in this room – but then it backs away, and circles in again on other faces, hands, bodies, and, as the group movement fragments into a strange animalistic medley, the previously commanding figure is lost in the apparently anarchic interaction and indeed temporarily displaced by a red-painted tailor’s dummy. Even though the camera periodically re-establishes his central position by other circling shots, his ‘disappearance’ reflects clearly the admission he will later make that he sometimes fears ‘going too far’, losing control of his rehearsals. The action becomes instinctual, disturbing, apparently dictated by the sole presence of the actors’ bodies, and, as Frappat says (Frappat 2001: 36), when ‘la violence qu’on croyait “dehors” … déferle sur la scène’, ‘le metteur en scène – manipulateur, chef de troupe ou de bande – est dépossédé de sa place’.15 And Thomas, Lili, Clément, Constance and Ugo will all betray paralysing uncertainty not only about their economic circumstances but about the artistic foundations of the projects they have undertaken. ‘Ce qui [les] perd, c’est plutôt la force souterraine du découragement mélancolique, 15 ‘the violence thought to be “outside” … explodes on the stage’, ‘the director – the manipulator, the leader of the company or of the gang – is dispossessed of his power’

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172  jacques rivette les obstacles intérieurs qui font qu’il[s] n’y croient plus’16 (Frappat 2001:  49). On the other hand the films chronicle mercilessly the games of seduction by which these directors, principally but not solely the men (Gérard, Sébastien, Thomas, Clément Roquemaure), compensate for their lack of authority by a dialectic of presence and absence, dependence and detachment, calculated to fascinate their entourage and most especially their lead actresses. Constance in La Bande des quatre employs similar methods, selectively offering and withholding both approval and personal information in order to create desire for both in her students. We are left in no doubt about the emptiness of such games. ‘Il vous fait le coup de l’indispensabilité’, a jaded member of the troupe observes to Anne of Gérard, ‘et ensuite il vous traite comme un objet’17. But if Gérard’s approaches to Anne sometimes seem too blatantly mocking to be bearable, Rivette teases the audience with different aspects of this character whose creative difficulties seem a haunting symptom of the hostility – perhaps the concerted hostility – of the city. We may see through his flirting, but we are never certain how seriously to take his vision of Pericles – physically unconvincing, but with moments of poetic grace – or his air of vulnerable anxiety. In later films the directors’ charm is given less indulgent treatment. Sébastien behaves in public like a ‘Don Juan merdique’18 while in private being deeply emotionally dependent; Thomas leads his troupe into one risky experiment after another before concluding the film, his association with them and with the audience, by a feigned collapse which marks his refusal of all responsibility and creativity. The attempt by Lili’s partner Quentin to ‘direct’ an exercise flounders into comic disaster as his motive is revealed to be not so much creation as a ruse to impose his personality in the face of a young intruder. Charlotte and Emily mercilessly mock Clément’s wiles – so long as the other is the target of them – and their double gaze is offered to the audience as a safeguard against the moments where the camera seems willing to frame him as Mr. Rochester. This ironic uncertainty reflects Rivette’s ambiguity about his own role. On the one hand he undoubtedly has an ideal of ­collective 16 ‘Their downfall is more the undertow of melancholy and discouragement, the inner obstacles which make them lose faith’ 17 ‘He gives you the indispensable bit and then he treats you like an object’ 18 ‘a shitty Don Juan’

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play, theatre and performance   173 creativity which he articulated to Yvonne Baby at the time of the making of L’Amour fou:

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moins on intervient et plus ce qu’on voit semble être une projection spontanée de ce qu’on a de plus caché. C’est alors que l’on a l’impression de ‘s’apprendre’, c’est comme si on se regardait dans un miroir qui joue vraiment son rôle.19 (Rivette 1968b)

Almost identical sentiments are put into the mouth of Sébastien, debating with the TV director over the nature of his role and fearing the ‘trop dirigé, trop manipulé’.20 Rivette is often cited as exemplary for the freedom which he allows to actors’ creativity. ‘Ce merveilleux sentiment d’être un acteur-auteur, créateur de son propre personnage. C’est passionnant pour un comédien’ was Bulle Ogier’s observation on this aspect of the work at the time of La Bande des quatre (Ogier 1989) – but she immediately added: ‘même si, bien sûr, ensuite Rivette manipule tout au montage’.21 Throughout Rivette’s career actors and actresses involved in his projects have echoed that impression in describing their ambiguous experience: sometimes startled, often delighted to discover on viewing the film what Rivette has made of their performance, they nonetheless evoke with insistent regularity the contrast between an impression of improvisation and a result which somehow does not correspond to what the process had seemed to be about. In fact, observation of Rivette’s comments on the subject indicates that the champion of collective creation has always been unwilling to relinquish a central, even hierarchical authority which he has observed that cinema offers him more unambiguously than theatre. He attributed his lack of success in the actual space of the theatre to this very factor: lors de la représentation, ils [les acteurs] sont livrés à eux-mêmes. Ils peuvent faire ce qu’ils veulent sur scène. On travaille avant, et ce moment peut être très intéressant, surtout si on a du temps, mais on est impuissant, on n’a aucun contrôle sur le résultat final. Ça bouge tout le temps … Au cinéma, même si on est plus ou moins content 19 ‘the less you intervene the more what you see seems like a spontaneous projection of your most hidden self. That’s when you have the impression of ‘learning about yourself’, it’s like looking in a mirror which is really doing its job’ 20 ‘over-directed, over-manipulated’ 21 ‘The wonderful sense of being an actor-author, creating your own character. It’s fascinating for an actor’ ‘even if, of course, afterwards Rivette manipulates it all in the editing room’

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174  jacques rivette

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du tournage, il y a toujours le moment du montage, où le metteur en scène est maître de son choix.22 (Rivette 1996: 63)

‘The editing stage’ opposed to the process of theatrical creation ‘which moves all the time’ … Naturally, the operation of montage is also a process, and sometimes a very long one: the editing of L’Amour par terre lasted four months. But it is a process of which the work is hidden. Unlike Godard, Rivette has never experimented with prolonged sequences of obtrusive montage which force the audience to reflect on his choices as they watch the film; indeed his characteristic style involves very long takes in which figures are given the leisure to move in relation to each other and to develop their relationships, and cuts within sequences are typically camouflaged by continuous movement or direction of gaze, creating a sense of natural, unmediated flow. But that sense is illusory. We have already seen (Chapter 3) that Rivette enjoys the reconstructive power of the montage which is not seen. But in his representations of the work of the director, this final stage of creative omnipotence is, precisely, edited out: indeed, arguably, hidden with particular skill under the constant preoccupation with apparently spontaneous movement, flow and change. It is that which is never available to the creators of theatrical projects whom Rivette presents on-screen. It is perhaps significant that, while Rivette has carried his cinematic projects through to fruition, assuming both responsibility and authority (that said his filmography includes a number of unfinished projects, and several of his shoots involved recorded disappearances, sometimes temporary, but in some cases terminal) the theatre directors of his films, without exception, buckle under the weight of their contradictions or are otherwise set aside as a condition of the survival of their projects. Gérard, dispossessed of all creative control, which he arguably never had in the first place, is reduced to a passive, impotent spectator in the auditorium of an increasingly ‘deadly’ establishment production, and it is only his suicide – definitive elimination, therefore –, which paradoxically allows his original, dynamic project to continue. Sébastien, as later 22 ‘During the performance, they [the actors] are left to themselves. They can do what they like onstage. You work beforehand, and that moment can be very interesting, especially if you have some time, but you’re powerless, you have no control over the final result. It moves all the time … In the cinema, even if you’re more or less happy with the shoot, there’s always the editing stage, where the director is master of his own decisions’

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play, theatre and performance   175 Constance in Bande des quatre, will withdraw into the marginal spaces of ‘the outside world’ in the web of which their work was inevitably caught, leaving the groups who surrounded them to continue the work without them, while Thomas’s melodramatic collapse absolves him from further responsibility for his production while ensuring that he still retains some degree of seductive control over those around him. It is perhaps L’Amour par terre which offers the most radical derision of the demiurgic role of the director – Roquemaure, writer and director of the play of his own life, is taken by surprise on the night of the production when his preparations are hijacked and deflected by a new dénouement prepared (and directed) by the team who have apparently been gracefully supporting him. Caught in the trap which Rivette describes as lying in wait for the theatre director (‘You work beforehand, and that moment can be very interesting, especially if you have some time, but you’re powerless, you have no control over the final result. It moves all the time’), the director’s role does indeed prove to be interchangeable with that of actor or audience, his commanding central space to be open for others’ occupation (it’s worth noting that Roquemaure’s entrance is a rapid slide in the opposite direction, from spectator to playwright to director). However, the sequence of Rivette’s ineffective, failed or eliminated directors seems to come to a – temporary – end with a more hopeful figure. Ugo in Va savoir, despite the fact that his authority over his own production is uncertain and his games of seduction as potentially derisory as his predecessors’, retains his director’s role at the end of the film, with a new text in his hands and the continuity of his theatrical project assured, and what’s more with the credit of a perfectly executed false finish which has absolved him from staging catastrophe, and which is the result of his own imagination and stage management – even if it may, temporarily, have cost him a little dignity and self-control. Perhaps this reflects a less tormented relationship on Rivette’s part to that ‘scène primaire’ which is the hierarchy of theatrical space and roles; and Ugo is probably the most truly collegiate of Rivette’s fictional directors. However it’s worth noting that the play he is directing is by Pirandello, an author obsessed with the paradoxes of authorial authority – and also an abiding presence in Rivette’s œuvre and his thinking about theatre.

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References Bazin, André (1981), Qu’est-ce que le cinéma?, Paris, Éditions du Cerf. Bonitzer, Pascal (1995), ‘La parole, l’action, le corps, l’image’, in Les Cahiers de la Comédie Française, no. 15, Spring 1995, 33–40. Bordwell, David and Thompson, Kristin (2001), Film Art: An Introduction, 6th edition, New York, McGraw Hill. Bresson, Robert (1975), Notes sur le cinématographe, Paris, Gallimard Folio. Caratini, Fabienne (1999), ‘Le fantôme du théâtre dans le cinéma de Jacques Rivette’, CinémAction 93, Le théâtre à l’écran, 214–19. Coddon, Karin S. (1994), ‘“For Show or Useless Property”: Necrophilia and The Revenger’s Tragedy’, ELH 61, 71–88. Deleuze, Gilles (1985), L’Image-temps, Paris, Minuit. Frappat, Hélène (2001), Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma. Innes, Christopher (1993), Avant-Garde Theatre 1892–1992, London/New York, Routledge. Ishaghpour, Youssef (1986), Cinéma contemporain, Paris, Éditions de la différence. Ogier, Bulle (1989), ‘Les clés de la Bande des Quatre’, interview in Le Quotidien de Paris, 9 February 1989. Rivette, Jacques (1968a), ‘Le temps déborde’, interview conducted by Jacques Aumont, Jean-Louis Comolli, Jean Narboni, Sylvie Pierre, Cahiers du cinéma, 204, September, 6–21. Rivette, Jacques (1968b), ‘Entretien’ conducted by Yvonne Baby, Le Monde, 2 October. Rivette, Jacques (1981), ‘Entretien’ conducted by Serge Daney, Jean Narboni, Cahiers du cinéma, 327, September, 8–21. Rivette, Jacques (1982), interview with Jacques Fieschi, L’Annuel du théâtre I, 1981–82, l’Aire théâtrale – les fédérés, Paris. Rivette, Jacques (1996), ‘Jacques Rivette: Autour du cinéma’, interview with Aliette Armel, NRF, 520, May, 60–9. Rivière, Jean-Loup (1995), ‘L’acteur et moi’ in Les Cahiers de la Comédie Fran­­ çaise, no. 15, printemps 1995, 41–5. Tourneur, Cyril (1974), The Revenger’s Tragedy (ed. Brian Gibbons), London, Benn.

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7 Adaptation

The majority of Rivette’s films are completely original creations, the narratives and characters developed in collaboration with his co-screenwriters and his performers, in some cases improvised during the filmmaking process itself. In this context, Rivette’s occasional use of well-known literary texts or historical episodes to form the basis of his films appears all the more surprising, particularly as the sources chosen bring with them some unusually cumbersome cultural baggage. Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Denis Diderot (1966) is an apparently straightforward adaptation of Diderot’s classic eighteenth-century novel that is a staple of French literature courses, but whose anti-clericalism was still powerful enough to provoke a scandal on the occasion of Rivette’s film treatment. Hurlevent (1985) adapts Emily Brontë’s much-loved Wuthering Heights, a novel that has been appropriated by the surrealists, defended by Georges Bataille and Albert Camus, and interpreted by generations of feminist scholars, as well as giving rise to famous film versions by William Wyler and Luis Buñuel. Jeanne la Pucelle (1994) is an account of the life of Joan of Arc, a figure in French history whose political and religious significance has been fought over for hundreds of years, as well as being the subject of numerous literary and film treatments. This chapter will consider how Rivette seeks to adapt these well-known sources in a manner that both respects the integrity of the original and results in a film bearing Rivette’s authorial stamp. In particular, we will see how the very difficulty of approaching these canonical subjects is inscribed within the film language itself through a variety of devices that serve

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178  jacques rivette to frame the narrative and characters on display.1

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Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Denis Diderot Diderot’s La Religieuse, written in 1760 but first published in 1796, has its origins in a kind of practical joke. Seeking to entice his friend, the marquis de Croismare, back to Paris from his country residence in Normandy, Diderot decided to exploit his charitable nature by inventing a tale about a young nun, sister Suzanne, who had run away from her convent following brutal mistreatment at the hands of her sisters and mother superior, and was requesting shelter and financial assistance from the marquis. Initially this ploy took the form of letters, supposedly written by one Mme Madin, with whom Suzanne had been lodging, sent to Croismare. But Diderot was so taken with his character that he produced a novel-length first-person account of her experience of convent life. This was eventually published with the correspondence between Croismare and Mme Madin forming the novel’s preface. As Jay Caplan points out, Diderot’s presentational strategy thus places La Religieuse somewhere between a first-person and a third-person text, problematising the status and identity of the text itself, but also of the author and reader (Caplan 1985: 48). The reader is placed at an uncertain distance from the figure of Suzanne: on the one hand, her subjective account of her horrifying ordeal provokes pity and empathy from the reader; but on the other hand, when aware of the narrative’s role within Diderot’s elaborate practical joke, the reader may observe a greater distance from Suzanne’s story and find a grim humour in its artful manipulation of the marquis. As Caplan comments, ‘one does not know whether this story calls for laughter or for tears’ (Caplan 1985: 49). This uncertainty affects the character of Suzanne herself since, without vocation for the life of a nun, her only desire is to escape from the convent, and yet, in order to maintain the sympathy of the marquis, Diderot is careful to ensure that his heroine remains a pious and deeply religious figure throughout her tale. As Caplan puts it, the novel ‘both releases the body and regulates it, gives rein to passion and sublimates it’ (59). 1 Clearly, Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) is also a costume drama based on a classic literary text (Balzac’s La Duchesse de Langeais). However, we have chosen to focus on this most recent film in our final chapter devoted to Rivette’s ‘late work’.

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adaptation   179 This framing anecdote about the marquis de Croismare that serves to hold Suzanne’s story at a distance from the reader is absent from Rivette’s film adaptation. It is true that Suzanne Simonin contains an unusual amount of prefatory material before the film proper begins: it opens with a disclaimer pointing out that the film is ‘freely adapted’ from Diderot and has no pretension to be an ‘accurate’ representation of convent life; a voice-over and a series of eighteenth-century portraits and engravings then introduce Diderot and describe the conditions in convents in the eighteenth century where rich families would often rid themselves of their daughters in exchange for a generous sum paid to the convent. We are told that Diderot’s characters were based on real historical figures and read quotations from Bossuet and Bourdaloue on the dangers of cloistering young girls against their will. All this material serves to legitimate the narrative of La Religieuse following the scandal which, as we shall see below, the film had generated prior to its release (Chauderlot 2001: 90). Yet there is no mention of the marquis de Croismare or the practical joke behind Diderot’s novel. Rivette’s film appears as a direct presentation of Suzanne’s ordeal, rather than a retrospective confession of her experiences to a third party and, as a result, suggests Bruno Ribes, it is impossible to maintain the critical distance with regard to the film that Diderot achieves in the novel (Ribes 1966: 696–7). However, as a number of astute critics have pointed out, several details of Rivette’s filmmaking practice in La Religieuse work to re-install a certain distance between the spectator and the horrors of Suzanne’s story. Firstly, the film has a deliberately theatrical presentation. Over the final title cards of the prefatory material, we hear the chattering voices of a theatre audience which are silenced by the traditional three knocks upon the stage that signal the beginning of a performance. After the credits, the film opens on what appears to be a theatre audience, with a couple of heavily made-up society ladies whispering and giggling behind their fans. The camera pans right to the ‘stage’ which turns out to be an altar, separated from the audience by a prison-like lattice, on which Suzanne (Anna Karina) is to proclaim her vows. When she protests that she is there against her will and implores the pity of the spectators, a curtain is drawn across the scene and the impassive audience gets up to leave. Rivette first directed La Religieuse for the stage before bringing it to the screen and, if the original theatre critics saw the play as being closer to a film

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180  jacques rivette (Déon 1963: 12), then the film retains a notably theatrical aesthetic. Thierry Jousse points to the frontal playing of the majority of scenes, the lack of depth to shots, the lateral entry of figures into the frame, the use of doors and curtains and the paucity of close-ups, all of which serves to keep the spectator at a distance from the performance on screen (Jousse 1988: 24). This distance is further maintained by the use of sound and music. La Religieuse features a dissonant, modernist score by JeanClaude Eloy that is based on arrhythmic percussion reminiscent of Edgar Varèse or Karlheinz Stockhausen (Singerman 2000: 144) and which prevents the spectator from entering whole-heartedly into the film’s eighteenth-century setting. Alan Singerman has shown how there is a slippage in La Religieuse from mimetic to semiotic sound: the noises on the soundtrack initially appear to have an unproblematic diegetic motivation, yet in their development across the film take on more connotative or symbolic functions (Singerman 2000: 145). For instance, the insistent tolling of bells obviously belongs to the diegetic space of the convent, yet the sound also carries an ominous foreboding of death, while the bells’ strident shattering of the silence signals the shattering of Suzanne’s illusions and the breaking of her will (146–8). Similarly the sounds of children playing or anvils being struck outside underline Suzanne’s frustration through a tantalising appeal to a world that is close yet inaccessible (Bonnet 1984: 73). Inside the convent, the sound of wind howling through the corridors stresses Suzanne’s bleak and isolated condition while most troubling of all is perhaps the unattributable sound of running water that begins to invite questions about Suzanne’s sanity and turns La Religieuse into a kind of horror film (Bonnet 1984: 73; Ménil 2001: 105). The film’s colour scheme has a similar symbolic value, with the overall bluegrey palette provided by the convent walls and the nuns’ garments interrupted occasionally by patches of red to indicate the extremity of Suzanne’s suffering – as in the red stain on the floor of her cell – and to suggest the presence of male authority – the archbishop’s robes (Chauderlot 2001: 95). Elsewhere pink and yellow indicate a more feminine presence, as in the yellow walls of Suzanne’s mother’s house or the flowers in the garden at Sainte-Eutrope (Branch 1985: 68; Chauderlot 2001: 95). All of these techniques, then, serve to maintain the spectator at a distance from what otherwise appears a realistic depiction of

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adaptation   181 eighteenth-century life, inviting us to question the status of what we see on screen. In this, La Religieuse bears some similarity to the work of Robert Bresson, whose broadly realistic films were rendered similarly alien through stiff or artificial performance, stylised sound design and strict control of framing. A number of contemporary critics drew comparisons between Rivette and Bresson, calling attention to the ‘austerity’ and ‘Jansenist rigour’ of Rivette’s mise-en-scène (Cervoni 1966; Frodon 1966: 44). Jacques Aumont notes that Suzanne’s imprisonment is signified by the tight framing of La Religieuse which makes it difficult to imagine an off-screen space (Aumont 1967: 64). Jean Rochereau compares Suzanne’s despairing suicide at the end of the film to that of the eponymous heroine of Bresson’s Mouchette (1967) (Rochereau 1967). If the most obvious point of comparison to Bresson is his own film set in a convent, Les Anges du péché (1943), La Religieuse also recalls his ‘prison cycle’ (Reader 2000: 43–70) – Un condamné à mort s’est échappé (1956), Pickpocket (1959), Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962) – in its determined narrowing of focus and its stress on the will to resist captivity. La Religieuse most resembles Bresson, though, in its distance and its stillness. As Ira Königsberg points out, most shots are in the medium- to long-shot range and there is minimal camera movement, with the figures themselves moving relatively little within the frame, all of which allows us ‘to feel the solid weight of the real physical world, the still reality of the convent walls’ (Königsberg 1981: 124). This reinscription of a series of framing or distancing devices within what appears to be a more direct presentation of Suzanne’s story gives Rivette’s film a somewhat paradoxical nature that has left critics in difficulty when describing the work. Already, discussing the stage play, Michel Déon complained of its rather monotonous unfolding, yet also noted that the monotony was broken by Suzanne’s emotional crises, and further that the play appeared to be constructed around a series of singular tableaux (Déon 1963: 12). For Thierry Jousse, the film is at once classical and modern (Jousse 1988: 24). Marc Buffat notes both an unusual physicality or corporeality to the film, particularly in the depiction of the violence inflicted on Suzanne, and at the same time a sense that bodies are hidden or effaced beneath the voluminous costumes, pious gestures and discreet camerawork of the film (Buffat 2001: 68). The framing in medium shot keeps us at once close to and distant from the charac-

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182  jacques rivette ters, ‘estrang[ing] the characters from their own physical totality while it locks convent life into a complete isolation from the rest of the world’ (Chauderlot 2001: 92). In other words, Rivette’s film maintains the ambiguity that Jay Caplan identified in Diderot’s novel with respect to the simultaneous approach to and withdrawal from bodies, the containment and release of passions. And, just as in the novel, this ambiguity also pertains to the point of view adopted in the film. Whereas, in Diderot’s text, Suzanne’s first-person narration gives the reader access to her interior world, it would be tempting to conclude that the cinema can only communicate Suzanne’s thoughts and feelings to the extent that they are externalised in actions or words. Yet, as Königsberg points out, the techniques that we have been describing above, in particular the rigorous framing and the stylised sound design, serve to create for the spectator the very experience of entrapment that Suzanne suffers (Königsberg 1981: 120). As Chauderlot puts it, ‘the objective data, what the camera offers in terms of circumscribed spaces, is strictly equivalent to the subjective universe represented by what the heroine sees’ (Chauderlot 2001: 97). At the same time, though, the spectator’s perspective remains outside Suzanne and may even be compared, as Jean-Claude Bonnet suggests, to the position of Croismare, observing the young nun from a distance with a kind of impotent and guilty fascination (Bonnet 1984: 68). This strict limiting of vision in La Religieuse is perhaps symbolised in a series of blindfolds that appear throughout the film, from the hood that Suzanne is obliged to wear when going to an audience with her confessor, through a game of blind man’s buff in the convent garden, to the mask worn by Suzanne at the end of the film after finally escaping from the convent into another kind of captivity as a high-society prostitute. It would seem, then, that Rivette’s film retains much of the troubling ambiguity of Diderot’s Religieuse and, from this perspective, the scandalous affaire that surrounded the film’s release becomes all the more intriguing. As Kevin Jackson has suggested, since Rivette’s motivations in directing La Religieuse seem to have been largely formal – the challenge of adapting Diderot from the page to the stage and subsequently to the screen, the problems of creating a specifically cinematic sense of entrapment through framing and sound – it appears all the more surprising that such an apparently innocent academic exercise should have given rise to what, at the time, was

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adaptation   183 ‘the greatest popular scandal of French cultural life’ (Jackson 2002: 151). The ‘affaire de la Religieuse’ is too complex to describe in detail here (for a comprehensive account, see Favret-Saada 1993), but we will sketch out the broad stages of its development. After receiving complaints while the film was still in production, the minister of information Alain Peyrefitte issued a warning that La Religieuse was likely to be banned (Anon 1965; Théolleyre 1966). Subsequently his successor Yvon Bourges banned La Religieuse from exhibition against the advice of the supposedly independent censoring body, the Commission de Contrôle. The result was an outcry in the cinema profession and in the mainstream media. Probably the most commonly recurring word in discussions of the ban was ‘arbitraire’ (arbitrary): commentators were shocked by the apparently unmotivated attack on Rivette’s film. After all, Diderot’s Religieuse was being taught on the baccalauréat and had never been indexed by the Vatican (Anon 1966). Rumours grew of an unlikely church conspiracy to lead a protest campaign against the film (Favret-Saada 1993: 64), while critics accused Gaullist ministers of seeking to garner Catholic votes prior to the presidential elections of December 1965 (Favret-Saada 1993: 67). Overall, though, the banning of La Religieuse was seen as an inappropriate and heavy-handed intervention by a government that was out of touch with the tastes and opinions of the French population. In a scathing open letter to the Minister of Culture André Malraux, Jean-Luc Godard accused him of being blind and cowardly, ‘faible, vieux et fatigué’ (weak, old and tired) (Godard 1966). As JeanClaude Bonnet suggests, the ‘affaire de la Religieuse’ was just one of the incidents of ‘cultural authoritarianism’ that would eventually lead to the revolts of May ’68 (Bonnet 1984: 64). In 1967, Bourges’s decision was overturned and, in 1975, a Conseil d’État decreed that his refusal to grant a visa to La Religieuse had in fact been unlawful (Favret-Saada 1993:66–7). Ultimately, then, if Diderot’s novel is framed by the anecdotal story of the marquis of Croismare, Rivette’s film version of La Religieuse, when it was finally released in 1967, was framed by the affaire that it had generated. Given the extensive debate around the film that took place in the media, no spectator could realistically come to the film knowing nothing about it, and indeed many would doubtless have viewed the film having recently read or re-read Diderot (one of the unexpected side effects of the scandal

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184  jacques rivette was increased sales of the novel (Sadoul 1966)). The result of all this discussion around the film was that it became much more difficult to approach the film itself: as Jean-Louis Bory pointed out, in all the column inches devoted to the affaire, any sustained discussion of Rivette’s film was notable by its absence (even though journalists had frequently had access to private screenings) (Bory 1966). Nevertheless the ‘affaire de la Religieuse’ centres around issues that are at the heart of Diderot’s own framing device, and of the very concept of the novelistic preface. As Caplan points out, by distancing us from the fiction, prefaces serve to remind us that ‘it’s only a story’, warding off the threat of some indistinct middle ground between fiction and reality by seeking to address us as ‘mature’ readers (Caplan 1985: 46). But this maturity is notably gendered since, as Caplan goes on to argue, the capacity for detachment (from representations and from emotion) to which such fictional strategies appeal is socially determined as ‘masculine’ (47). Similarly, one of the common complaints among defenders of Rivette’s film was that spectators were being treated like children (Lachize 1966; Carcassonne 1966; Touchais 1966): it was assumed that French filmgoers were unable to make their own decisions regarding the artistic merit or moral worth of a film, or to take the requisite critical distance vis-à-vis a filmic representation. Notwithstanding M. Bourges’s decision to override their judgement, the Commission de Contrôle’s original advice was for the film to be distributed domestically but forbidden to viewers under the age of eighteen, and furthermore banned from export to former French colonies in Africa, the Middle East and South-East Asia. As Favret-Saada wryly comments: ‘les colonisés, même après avoir conquis leur indépendance sont, pour l’éternité, des mineurs de 18 ans’2 (Favret-Saada 1993: 77n. 15). What the ‘affaire de la Religieuse’ perhaps demonstrated most forcefully was that the cinema itself, in the eyes of the ruling authorities, still had the status of a child among the arts, not yet having reached the dignity or maturity of a specific art form because of its dubious association with a ‘popular’ audience (Decamps 1966: 6). Ironically, then, while Rivette’s carefully controlled mise-en-scène in La Religieuse aimed to illustrate a grown-up idea of cinema, an independent art form free from the shadow of its literary and theatrical antecedents, 2 ‘the colonials, even after they have won their independence, are forever con­­­ sidered as minors under the age of 18’

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adaptation   185 the incongruous scandal that grew up around the film served only to demonstrate that the cinema was still, and may forever be consigned to what Jean-Luc Godard calls ‘l’enfance de l’art’.3

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Hurlevent Like Diderot’s La Religieuse, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights is a framed narrative. The novel is initially presented from the point of view of Lockwood, the wealthy tenant of Thrushcross Grange, but most of the story is recounted by the housekeeper Nelly. Within her narration, however, there are other points of view, such as Catherine’s diary, or the letter by Isabella Linton. As J. Hillis Miller points out, this imbrication of different narrators gives the reader the sense of entering ever deeper into some kind of secret, the novel becoming a sort of ‘penetralium’ (Miller 1982: 46). Even outside the narrative itself, the novel is framed by the various paratextual devices that lead the reader into the novel proper, such as Brontë’s adoption of the pseudonym Ellis Bell, or the preface by her sister Charlotte, under the name Currer Bell, which, imitating the style and imagery of the novel itself, appears as a kind of threshold to the fiction, the ‘inside outside’ (Miller 1982: 47). As Stevie Davies writes, ‘The narrative structure of Wuthering Heights has been aptly compared with a nest of Russian dolls or Chinese boxes, a series of disclosures which are also ambivalently enclosures, insides with the status of outsides’ (Davies 1994: 69). This ambiguous motif is repeated in the narrative importance of the two houses, Wuthering Heights and Thrushcross Grange, where ‘the sanctum is also a prison’ (79). For Davies, this anxiety over the status of inside and outside in Wuthering Heights ‘records and structures a dread about the self’, suggesting ultimately that ‘the core interior of a person may be empty or haunted’ (79). At first glance, this framing and this ambiguity appear to be absent from Jacques Rivette’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights. Hurlevent transposes the action of Brontë’s novel to the south of France in 1931 and condenses the novel, cutting the whole of the second part and eliminating the figure of Lockwood. Rivette’s film ends with Cathy’s 3 This epithet recurs across much of Godard’s late work, including several times in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98). It is also the title of a short film made for UNICEF, co-directed by Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville.

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186  jacques rivette death and it is Heathcliff (here renamed Roch) who sees Cathy’s ghost at the window of Wuthering Heights in the film’s final scene, whereas the novel opens with this vision for Lockwood. Some critics have been disappointed by this narrowing of focus: for instance, Claude Cobast argues that the restricting of point of view and the condensing of narrative prevents Hurlevent from attaining the complexity of Brontë’s depiction of character interaction (Cobast 1985). But, on closer inspection, it appears that the novel’s ambiguous play with the notions of inside and outside is in fact taken up in Rivette’s ingenious use of space in Hurlevent. In both the houses in the film, but particularly the farmhouse at Wuthering Heights, Rivette foregrounds doors and windows, frequently filming through these apertures, and across right angles within the building to increase the sense of a labyrinthine set of spaces within spaces. For instance, in an early scene in the film, Guillaume (the novel’s Hindley, played by Olivier Cruveiller) comes into Cathy (Fabienne Babe)’s room to find her with Roch (Lucas Belvaux). As Guillaume manhandles Roch from the room, we cut to a reverse shot of them emerging from the door, and the camera pans right as it follows the pair past a portrait of their late father (Earnshaw) on the wall, and out another door on the right-hand edge of the frame. But the camera continues to a window, where it frames Guillaume and Roch passing along a balcony to the left. A woman’s head appears at the window in the edge of the frame, watching. Another pan right watches Roch go down some steps into the courtyard, before a cut to a reverse angle shows that it is Nelly (Sandra Montaigu) watching from the window. We pan right again, following Guillaume, to watch Joseph (Pierre Morier-Genoud) lock Roch into a shed in the background. As Guillaume stands, satisfied, the camera pans around right to find Catherine watching him. Angry, she runs out and shuts herself in another room. The point is that all the characters who inhabit Wuthering Heights, including the dead father, are involved in this short scene contained in two or three shots. The house may be a complicated and intricate space, but there is nowhere to hide, no privacy; for all its rooms within rooms, nooks and crannies, the house seems continually to propel the characters into one another’s space. It is because Rivette has created Wuthering Heights as such a claustrophobic and labyrinthine space that the moors, when they appear in the film, carry the same powerful charge of freedom and respiration that they do in the novel. In a subsequent scene to the

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adaptation   187 one just described, Cathy looks out of her window, then leaves her room. We cut to an exterior view of the house and tilt down to see Cathy emerging from under an archway at the bottom of the stairs. The camera pans left, following Cathy as she sneaks along the wall and around the corner of the house, then through another arch, and out a gate to a building in the background. We cut to a closer angle as Cathy releases Roch then, as they find one gate locked, they run across the courtyard in long shot and duck into a low shed. A reverse angle shows them emerging from a window at the back of the shed, then escaping down the steps of a ruined barn, as Rivette’s camera pans left to frame them in a high angle arriving at the bottom of the stairs. This high, wide shot is maintained as the couple flee on to the moor before a series of long shots capture Roch and Cathy as small figures in the distance, the open space of the moor contrasting starkly with the complex enclosures of the farmhouse. To soundtrack the scenes on the moor, Rivette uses the piercing choral music of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, one of the first major successes of the nascent world music scene. Although initially incongruous in the setting of 1930s rural France, on reflection this music seems particularly appropriate to the ambiguities of Wuthering Heights. As Kim Burton points out, this Bulgarian singing is often inappropriately described as ‘open-throated’ in the West, when in fact ‘the throat in this style of singing is extremely constricted and the sound is forced out, which accounts for its focus and its strength’ (Burton 1999: 36). Similarly, in Wuthering Heights, it is the confinement of the characters in the claustrophobic houses that accounts for the violent outpouring of passion when they are released on to the moors, even if this new freedom becomes just another constraint (Heathcliff and Cathy are bound to each other). The peculiar vocal style of the Voix Bulgares was preserved in Bulgaria after it had disappeared from Europe for reasons of geographical and political isolation (Broughton 1999: 39) and the strangeness of the sound serves to underline the sense, in Hurlevent, of a world apart, cut off from the rest of civilisation. The framing devices and the multiple narrators in Wuthering Heights make it difficult to locate a centre or to find a ‘secret truth’ to the novel. As Miller puts it: ‘No hidden identifiable ordering principle which will account for everything stands at the head of the chain or at the back of the back’ (Miller 1982: 51). It is this, of course, that accounts for the continued possibility of interpretation of Wuthering

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188  jacques rivette Heights and maintains its interest for generations of readers. Perhaps the most common interpretation of the novel is as a kind of paroxysmic depiction of romantic passion, of the desire to annihilate the self in the other that brings love into troubling proximity with death, proving death to be the truth of love and vice versa (Bataille 1957: 12) (In this sense, Hurlevent shares a common theme with Rivette’s L’Amour fou (1969).) Yet the narrative of Wuthering Heights, which proceeds through a series of substitutions and jealousies (another common theme in Rivette, as we shall see in our Chapter 8 on ‘Bodies, love and jealousy’), suggests that this pinnacle of passion can never really be attained, and certainly not sustained. As critics have pointed out, we never really see, in the novel, the origin of Heathcliff and Cathy’s passion, a moment when they ‘were joined in a union which was prior to sexual differentiation’ because, as Miller remarks, ‘This division has always already occurred as soon as there is consciousness and the possibility of retrospective storytelling’ (Miller 1982: 61). This is then the sense of the novel’s endlessly self-contained structure: there is no way back to a point of origin. And, as Leo Bersani points out, the longing for undifferentiation can only ever play itself out in the forms of differentiation, leading to structures of repetition as the characters’ passion becomes caught up in familial ties, the same mistakes and cruelties recurring from generation to generation. As Bersani puts it, ‘Wuthering Heights documents a frenetic attempt to create family ties – or, to put it another way, to tie the self up in an unbreakable family circle’ (Bersani 1984: 202). What becomes of these themes in Hurlevent where, as we have seen, the crucial second-generation repetitions of the novel’s second half are omitted? Certainly the passion of Wuthering Heights, what Rivette calls ‘la folie du livre’ (the book’s madness) (Rivette 1985: 93), is faithfully transcribed in Hurlevent. There is more sex and violence here than in most of Rivette’s notoriously bashful movies (and, in Jacques Rivette, le veilleur, he talks of his discomfort at filming these scenes). Sometimes this violent passion is symbolised, for instance, in the thunder storms that break over the moor, in the fireworks that spark as Roch plots his revenge against Olivier (the novel’s Edgar Linton, played by Olivier Torres), or in the animal imagery of the dialogue: Nelly calls the bickering Guillaume and Cathy ‘chiens enragés’ (rabid dogs), while Roch tells Isabelle (Alice de Poncheville), ‘Je vais t’écorcher comme un lapin.’4 4 ‘I’ll skin you like a rabbit’

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adaptation   189 When Roch sneaks up on Cathy and Isabelle as they are talking about him, Cathy says ‘Tiens, quand on parle du loup …’ and never has the phrase seemed more appropriate.5 Aside from this symbolic violence, however, the film contains faithful and rather shocking translations of scenes such as the one in which Cathy fights with Nelly and scratches Olivier’s face when he tries to intervene, or when a drunken Guillaume threatens to push a knife down Nelly’s throat. Amid all this violent passion, however, there is a peculiar reserve about Hurlevent, a kind of distance to the film’s presentation of all these episodes. Louis Marcorelles remarked upon ‘le dépouillement, l’aridité’ (the asceticism, the aridity) of the film (Marcorelles 1985). Jean Roy noted its ‘clinical’ almost ‘icy’ gaze (Roy 1985). Louis Skorecki too found the film ‘étrangement glacé’ (strangely frozen) (Skorecki 1985), while Jeanine Baron was struck by the peculiar combination of violence and slowness (Baron 1985). Despite the heightened sentiments on display, there are few, if any, emotive close-ups in Hurlevent, which is filmed mainly in continuous medium or long shots with, as we have seen, complex arrangements of figures moving in and out of the frame. Rivette’s camera has a tendency to pan slowly around scenes, as though prowling expectantly around the characters, and frequently this constant reframing will reveal, or remind us of the presence of another character witnessing the scene and whose gaze adds another level of interpretation. For instance, after Cathy’s fight with Nelly and the wound inflicted on Olivier, the camera frames the young lovers as Cathy prevents Olivier’s departure with self-pitying sobs. It is only at the end of the scene, when the camera pans left, that we realise Nelly has never left the room, but has been nursing her own wounds and looking on in disgust. A good example of Rivette’s dispassionate, clinical gaze comes in one of the novel’s most important scenes, where Cathy tells Nelly about Linton’s marriage proposal, unaware that Heathcliff is listening. Heathcliff flees after hearing of Cathy’s decision to accept the proposal and thus misses the confession of her true feelings for him, including one of the novel’s most famous lines: ‘I am Heathcliff’ (Brontë 2003 [1847]: 82). It is instructive to compare this scene in Hurlevent with the one in William Wyler’s Hollywood adaptation of Wuthering Heights (1939). There, the director uses pointed cutaways and dramatic bursts 5 This would be idiomatically translated as ‘Speak of the devil’, but literally means ‘Speak of the wolf …’

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190  jacques rivette of lightning to show the impact of Cathy (Merle Oberon)’s words on Heathcliff (Laurence Olivier), and Cathy’s famous line is delivered in a huge emotive close-up followed by an overexposed shot in a flash of lightning, marking this scene as the emotional climax to the film. Rivette’s approach could hardly be more different. Once again, he makes clever use of the space of the farmhouse: Catherine comes to talk to Nelly in the kitchen, while Roch is hidden behind a wall on a staircase that leads outside into the yard. Once the presence of all three has been established, the camera pulls back left to frame only the two women and only tracks back to include Roch in the frame once again just before he flees down the stairs. As Nelly seems to have heard this movement, we cut to a medium shot of her listening, the top of Cathy’s head just visible in her lap. Another cut frames Cathy more closely as she begins to talk about Roch, but, at the moment of the crucial line – ‘Nelly, je suis Roch’ – Rivette cuts back to the previous image. Perhaps the most important line in all of Wuthering Heights is all but lost in Hurlevent by a cut that occurs as it is pronounced, shifting the attention away from Cathy and back on to the distracted Nelly. If this distant, cold camerawork serves to defuse some of the passion in Hurlevent, then the effect is aided by the performance style of the actors. A number of critics pointed out a strange sort of secondarity, a kind of reflective distance in the performance of these elemental passions. As Michel Pérez put it, Rivette’s actors are not so much playing Wuthering Heights as playing at Wuthering Heights (Pérez 1985). Patrick Grainville remarked that the young performers seemed to be ‘calculant trop leurs déplacements et leurs froncements de sourcils’6 (Grainville 1985). But Rivette is generally recognised as such a gifted director of actors that we are obliged to consider that this self-consciousness, this awkwardness to the performance may well have been deliberate. For, after all, this secondarity to the characters’ behaviour is already present in the novel. The characters are presented as – or present themselves as – existing in the heat of an uncontrollable passion, and yet the manifestations of this passion are often carefully calculated in advance. Nelly remarks upon Cathy’s ability to ‘plan the turning of her fits of passion to account, beforehand’ (Brontë 2003 [1847]: 117). Similarly, Heathcliff’s revenge, although born of passion, takes the form of a long-planned and slowly-released hatred: he waits 6 ‘too calculating in their movements and their frowns’

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adaptation   191 three years before putting his plan into action, and then allows it to play out over generations. A good example of this petulance in Hurlevent can be found in a scene that has no direct equivalent in the novel but takes place in the billiard room at Wuthering Heights shortly after Cathy has returned from her first stay at the Lintons’. Roch, with dirty face and dirty hands, is sleeping in a chair in the corner of the room, but opens his eyes the moment Cathy comes in. Cathy enters and walks straight over to a mirror, turning around and casting a glance over her shoulder to admire herself, and doing a little twirl before turning to see Roch in mock surprise: ‘Tiens, t’es là?’ (Oh, there you are!). She comes over to him and stands with the billiard table between them, then, as he continues to sulk, she slides forward so that her torso leans across the table. Roch sinks further into his chair away from her. Catherine begins to play distractedly with the billiard balls and asks Roch what he is thinking about. ‘Un singe,’ he replies, ‘Une sale grenouille hypocrite dans une robe de poupée!’7 They stand on opposite sides of the table and roll the billiard balls angrily back and forth to each other until Cathy sits on the edge of the table and lies across it in a pool of light from the window, her skirt riding up around her thighs as she crosses her legs. She looks up at Roch who pretends not to notice. The camera pans right past the end of the table and moves closer to the couple as Cathy reminisces about how, as children, they needed chairs to climb up on the table. ‘C’est toujours moi qui gagnais,’ she remembers, to which Roch replies, ‘C’est toujours toi qui inventais les règles!’8 As Cathy announces that the Lintons have been invited to celebrate Bastille Day, Roch slams the balls across the table and storms out. The camera pulls discreetly back to frame his departure, then the image fades to black. It is true that everything about this scene seems contrived and awkward, from Cathy’s self-conscious look in the mirror, to the distance between the couple symbolically measured out by the billiard table, from Cathy’s transparent attempt at seduction to Roch’s sulky response. But ultimately this comes across as an accurate depiction of precisely the same childish cantankerousness that Brontë describes so wryly in her novel. If Rivette’s actors appear to be playing at Wuthering Heights, it is only because they are playing young people playing at emotion. 7 ‘A monkey’, ‘A dirty, hypocritical toad all dressed up like a doll’ 8 ‘I would always win’, ‘You would always invent the rules!’

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192  jacques rivette Louis Skorecki suggests that, although Hurlevent ostensibly takes place in 1931, it actually takes place in the summer of 1985, ‘dans un fracas délicat de dentelles trouvées dans un grenier’9 (Skorecki 1985). Marc Chevrie too notes that Rivette seems to be filming, not an original series of events invented as they are lived by the characters but rather ‘une matière préexistante reproductible à l’infini’10 (Chevrie 1985: 5). Chevrie compares the secondarity of Hurlevent to other directors like Bresson, but particularly Jean Renoir, arguing that the use of a self-consciously theatrical performance style within a scrupulously realistic décor is reminiscent of Renoir’s adaptation of Madame Bovary (1933) (Chevrie 1985: 6). In interview, Rivette suggested that ‘Le principe de l’adaptation, c’est celui de l’éternel retour’11 (Rivette 1985: 94), borrowing the Nietzschean concept of eternal return to explain how a story from eighteenth-century Yorkshire can be transposed to nineteenth-century Mexico by Luis Buñuel, and then to twentieth-century France in Hurlevent. And, in a sense, this updating of Brontë’s narrative to the more modern setting dispenses with the need to adapt the second half of the novel. For the same drama of the search for the oblivion of undifferentiation across the forms of differentiated identity, which Bersani finds in the generational structure of Wuthering Heights (and which is a reasonable interpretation of Nietzsche’s eternal return), is also played out across the world and across the ages. One of the more surprising outcomes of Rivette’s adaptation of Wuthering Heights is the unexpected affinities it suggests between Brontë the English Romantic and the French realist tradition. For instance, Guillaume’s terrifying descent into alcoholism in Hurlevent would not be out of place in Zola, while the view of poverty and generational cruelty in rural France is not unlike Bernanos. But if Hurlevent allows these parallels to be made, it is only because they are mediated by other films, via Renoir’s adaptations of Zola and Bresson’s appropriation of Bernanos. It is the special gift of cinema to allow us to see the eternal return of these forms of emotional and libidinal life across generations of artists and artworks.

9 ‘in a delicate tumult of old lace found in an attic’ 10 ‘pre-existing material that is infinitely reproducible’ 11 ‘The principle of adaptation is that of eternal return’

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Jeanne la Pucelle Rivette’s film of the life of Joan of Arc is based almost entirely on historical documents. The end credits of the film make explicit reference to the studies used in preparing the film, in particular the work of the historian Régine Pernoud whose Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses, first published in 1962, uses depositions from the trials of condemnation and rehabilitation of Joan in order to reconstruct the facts of her life. As a result, Jeanne la Pucelle becomes, in the words of Pernoud herself, ‘de loin le film le plus juste, le plus précis, le plus vrai jamais réalisé sur Jeanne’12 (Pernoud 1994). The influence of a new historiography, based less on the cult of personality than on the practical details of everyday life, is shown in scenes in the film that linger over the work of a blacksmith, or that detail the difficulties involved in financing the battle of Orléans (Macia 1994). Even the film music appears as a piece of historical research, composed by the medieval music specialist Jordi Savall and based on Gregorian chant and the work of the period’s best known composer, Guillaume Dufay (Erikson 1994). In distinction to other artistic accounts of Joan of Arc that have tended to concentrate on either the beginning or the end of her life, Rivette’s film depicts instead the entirety of Joan’s career between her spiritual awakening in Domrémy and her trial and execution in Rouen. Where earlier versions of Joan are thus largely static, Rivette and his team sought above all to depict Joan in motion (Bonitzer et al. 1993: 26). As Sandrine Bonnaire, who plays Joan, remarks, this stress on movement tends to underline Joan’s youthful impatience, thereby making her seem more human (Bonnaire 1994a: 51–2). Jeanne la Pucelle is divided into two films, Les Batailles, lasting 160 minutes, and Les Prisons, 175. The two films correspond roughly to what we might call Joan’s rise and fall, the first film depicting, in the words of the screenwriters, ‘sa force de conviction’, and the second ‘les moments où elle craque’13 (Laurent and Bonitzer 1993: 20). Given the extraordinary length of the complete work, time, as so often in Rivette, is of particular importance in Jeanne la Pucelle. In fact, for a film intended to depict Joan in action, Jeanne la Pucelle devotes a great deal of scenes to Joan waiting: waiting to leave for Vaucouleurs, waiting to meet the dauphin, waiting to do battle, waiting to be 12 ‘by far the fairest, truest and most accurate film ever made about Joan’ 13 ‘the force of her conviction’, ‘the moments when she breaks’

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194  jacques rivette tried and executed. The result, as Jean Collet points out, is a kind of riverine experience of time, ‘à l’image de la Loire au cours si nonchalant, imprévisible et capricieux’14 (Collet 1994: 551), such that the history presented is not one of grand events but rather the gradual emergence, over the course of apparently insignificant acts, of a truth that only becomes apparent in retrospect (551–2). Borrowing heavily from Pernoud’s book, and particularly from the Trial of Rehabilitation, Jeanne la Pucelle is regularly punctuated by eyewitness accounts from people who knew Joan. The film opens with Joan’s mother, Isabelle Romée (played by Tatiana Moukhine), in Paris at the end of her life, supported by two nuns and struggling to breathe as she recounts the life of her daughter. This opening account dispenses with the need for scenes of Joan’s childhood in Domrémy, since her mother describes Joan’s early religious fervour. As the film progresses, we hear from a number of other witnesses, all filmed in mid-shot framed against a bare stone wall and speaking directly to camera as though giving an official deposition. Friends and acquaintances discuss their impressions of Joan at Vaucouleurs, while soldiers and pages give accounts of the campaign to liberate France and restore the dauphin to the throne. These accounts have a number of functions. First and foremost, they are an economic device, both in the sense of dispensing with expensive historical reconstructions – many of Joan’s battles are recounted rather than shown – and providing ellipses between scenes to mark the passage of time. (As Rivette joked, if he had really been faithful to the detail of Joan’s life, the film would have lasted for three days and three nights, or for two and half years! (Rivette 1994a).) Frequently, the eyewitness accounts have a cumulative function, suggesting the repetition of an act or scene that has been shown only once, as when Catherine Le Royer (Bernadette Giraud) in Vaucouleurs says ‘Et beaucoup d’autres, jour après jour, croyaient en ses paroles’.15 In addition, though, the accounts, which, especially in Les Batailles, occur every five to ten minutes, play a crucial role in generating the film’s rhythm, and in linking together a series of well-known historical episodes in order to give them the coherence of a lived experience (Lefort et al. 1994). Nevertheless, the principal concern in the filming of all the scenes in 14 ‘in the image of the Loire that flows so nonchalantly, capriciously and unpredictably’ 15 ‘And many others, day after day, began to believe in her words’

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adaptation   195 Jeanne la Pucelle remains that of historical accuracy. History tells us that, upon meeting the dauphin, Joan won his trust by telling him a secret that could have been known to him alone. But, since no one knows what this secret might have been, the camera, in this scene of the film, remains patiently outside with the milling crowd while Joan has her audience with the dauphin. One liberty taken by Rivette’s team is the reconstruction of Joan’s first Trial of Examination in Poitiers, for which the transcripts are lost. But, on the assumption that she would have been asked very similar questions about the origin of her mysterious Voices and so on, Rivette adapted this episode from the transcripts of the Trial of Condemnation in Rouen (Rivette 1994b). It is known that Joan briefly escaped from captivity in the château of Jean de Luxembourg. However, since no one knows what happened to Joan after she escaped, Rivette films this scene with Bressonian simplicity: a medium-close shot shows Joan praying in her cell before tracking out to a full shot as she uses her bed sheets to climb out of her window. In the immediately succeeding shot, however, Joan is brought back up the castle stairs, unconscious on a stretcher. Since all that is known of Joan’s escape attempt is that ultimately it failed, and that she was injured, this is all that Rivette chooses to film. Another function served by all the eyewitness accounts in the film is that of framing Joan. Since Joan of Arc is such an enigmatic historical figure, and since her life and her identity have been the subject of such fervent and partisan appropriation (as we shall see below), Rivette’s determined policy is to approach Joan through the eyes and the words of her contemporaries. This leads to a particularly complex and variable view of Joan, since we hear from her devoted admirers – ‘Écoute comme elle parle,’ says Catherine Le Royer, ‘C’est de l’or qui coule de sa bouche’16 –, from soldiers who admire her horsemanship and from others who regret their salacious intentions towards her person, but who may simply be frightened into impotence by the prospect of battle (Les Cinémas Le Parc et Churchill 1994: 82). Joan’s English opponents, meanwhile, refer to her as a ‘witch’ and a ‘whore’. Over the course of the film, we see Joan as a fearsome warrior (doing battle with a sword in a skirmish outside Paris), as an incongruous child in a world of men (kicking her legs distractedly against the table in the trial at Poitiers), as an impatient adolescent 16 ‘Hear how she speaks’, ‘It’s like gold flowing from her mouth’

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196  jacques rivette (itching to get into battle, she grows short-tempered with her men), as a gifted strategist (in the King’s Council of War), and above all as a sentient, mortal human being, weeping in pain when pierced by an arrow and screaming in terror when read her death sentence. Much of the richness of this portrayal of Joan is down to Sandrine Bonnaire’s brilliantly nuanced performance, universally praised upon the film’s release. Indeed, Rivette has stated that it was the desire to work with Bonnaire that inspired the film in the first place: when asked ‘Pourquoi Jeanne?’ he replied simply, ‘Parce que Sandrine’17 (Bonnaire 1994a). The role of Joan of Arc accords neatly with Bonnaire’s star persona since, like Joan, the actress came from a modest background to take the French cinema world by surprise with the astonishing conviction of her performance in Maurice Pialat’s À nos amours (1983) at the age of just fifteen. Descriptions of Bonnaire by critics, like accounts of Joan, have a tendency to stress her simplicity, her naturalness, her ingenuousness (for instance Vatrican in Bonnaire 1994b: 27). It was Bonnaire, apparently, who insisted that Joan be shown praying on screen, something that Rivette was wary about (Bonnaire 1994c). But, as Jean Collet remarks, the camera keeps its distance from Joan in prayer, respecting her intimacy (Collet 1994: 552). Jeanne la Pucelle avoids images of Joan in ecstatic communion with her voices: she prays with her eyes cast down to the ground rather than up to heaven (Nevers 1994: 26), concentrated upon herself (Bonnaire 1994b: 29). The shots of Joan in prayer are generally static, painterly images, with Joan framed in long shot kneeling in the distance. Careful attention is paid to natural light sources and shadow and the shot is held, with perhaps a very slow track backwards, for up to a minute. Indeed, for most of Jeanne la Pucelle, Joan is filmed in medium or long shot, frequently surrounded by other figures, and it is only towards the end of the film – in prison and at trial – that she is filmed in close-up and alone (Rivette 1994a; 1994c). The paradox, as Jean Collet points out, is that Joan can be alone when surrounded by her soldiers (for instance when she withdraws to pray), but becomes less and less alone once she is imprisoned, since she is harassed and persecuted, threatened with torture and rape, and the increasing number of close shots at the end of the film effectively conveys this restriction of Joan’s space in which to act (Collet 1998: 148). It is perhaps ultimately for this reason that the second part of Jeanne la Pucelle, which was originally 17 ‘Why Joan?’ ‘Because Sandrine’

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adaptation   197 to be entitled Les Solitudes (Bonitzer et al. 1993: 29), was renamed Les Prisons. Jeanne la Pucelle, then, is careful to avoid any depiction of Joan that would consign her to a kind of ready-made and one-dimensional stereotype. As already pointed out, Rivette avoids representing Joan’s childhood in Domrémy which saw the birth of her vocation and accounts of which tend to stress the mystic or ecstatic side of Joan’s faith (as in Charles Péguy’s Le Mystère de la charité de Jeanne d’Arc (1910)). But Jeanne la Pucelle also largely avoids the famous Trial of Condemnation which provides the focus for the two most famous film treatments of Joan of Arc (at least in France): Carl Dreyer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc (1928) and Robert Bresson’s Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc (1962). These films have played a significant role in shaping two of the most prominent meanings that are attached to the figure of Joan: Dreyer’s film highlights the extremity of her suffering, casting Joan as a Christ-like martyr; Bresson’s film stresses her dignified and unwavering (indeed, inhuman) strength of resistance in the face of the English invader–occupier. The religious appropriation of Joan’s life and personality began with the Trial of Rehabilitation in 1456 and reached its apogee with her canonisation in 1920. Her political appropriation, on the other hand, dates particularly from the French Revolution when the two concepts of the ‘nation’ and the ‘people’ gained their modern currency (Crépu 1994). Ever since, Joan of Arc has been a powerful symbol both of loyalty to and defence of the nation on the right, and of the will of the people on the left. In the Second World War, for instance, the figure of Joan was used in symbolic support of both the collaborationist Vichy regime (against the English enemy) and the Communist Resistance (Duby 1994). Jeanne la Pucelle, by showing so many sides to Joan’s personality, allows for all of these interpretations, but implies that none is adequate in itself to explain Joan’s life. Rivette’s film differs from other versions of Joan’s life in that it makes no attempt to explain (Bonitzer et al. 1993: 28), it has nothing to prove (Collet 1994: 550); there is no simple lesson, no global interpretation to be drawn from the bare presentation of the facts in Jeanne la Pucelle (Les Cinémas le Parc et Churchill 1994: 76). In the words of Anne de Gaspéri, the film becomes ‘une réflexion à mi-chemin, humaniste et mystique, sur la volonté tour à tour triomphante et brisée et l’individu éclairé de l’intérieur par une volonté

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198  jacques rivette de justice, de sagesse qui le dépasse et dont aucun système, aucune politique ne peut venir à bout’18 (Gaspéri 1994). Nonetheless, as Jean Roy points out, if Jeanne la Pucelle refuses to take up position on the ultimate meaning of Joan’s life, it does take a firm stance within the opposing aesthetic camps that have characterised the history of Joan’s treatment on film: rejecting the pomp and ceremony of versions by Cecil B. DeMille (Joan the Woman, 1917), Victor Fleming (Joan of Arc, 1948) and Jean Delannoy (Jeanne, 1954), Rivette comes firmly down on the side of cinematic modernity represented by the austerity, the rigour and the circumspection of Dreyer, Bresson and Roberto Rossellini (Giovanna d’Arco al rogo, 1954) (Roy 1994: 2). A number of critics have described Jeanne la Pucelle as a highly moral film, with Rivette’s care to protect the figure of Joan from pre-fabricated images appearing as the ultimate demonstration of his own ethics of cinema. Indeed, more than one critic cited Rivette’s famous article ‘De l’abjection’ (as discussed in Chapter 1 above on Rivette’s criticism) in the context of Jeanne la Pucelle, Jean Collet for instance suggesting that faith is just as unfilmable, or at least demands just as much awe in filming as death: ‘Le réalisme de l’image filmée ne saurait assumer – rendre visible à tous – ce qui est de l’ordre de la Foi, d’une croyance personnelle, intime’19 (Collet 1998: 143). The ethical importance that Rivette attaches to aesthetic decisions in the filming of Jeanne la Pucelle can perhaps best be understood if we measure the film’s distance from the look of so-called ‘heritage’ cinema. Period-set costume dramas, frequently based on classical works of literature or the lives of important historical figures, have become one of the staples of French and other (particularly British) national cinemas since the 1980s. But these films have been criticised for presenting a simplistic world view that casts history as spectacle and turns the past into property: the individuals, the landscapes and the artworks of a nation’s history become, in the heritage cinema, so much merchandise to sell to spectators. The historical complexity and prudence of Jeanne la Pucelle has already been demonstrated. But we 18 ‘a half-humanist, half-mystical reflection on a will that is now triumphant now broken, and on an individual who is lit from within by a will for justice and wisdom that is beyond her comprehension and that no system, no politics can account for’ 19 ‘The realism of the filmed image is incapable of assuming – of making visible to all – that which is of the order of Faith, of a personal, intimate belief’

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adaptation   199 would suggest also that Rivette’s concern to avoid any appropriation of Joan testifies to an awareness of the danger of treating the past as property. And furthermore, this goes hand in hand with an attention to the role of property in economic history – we have already mentioned Rivette’s interest in the war accounts of Orléans – and to that which cannot or must not be given a monetary value. In one scene, a soldier shows Joan his talisman – a piece of the True Cross on which Jesus died, purchased in the Holy Land for 30,000 gold crowns: ‘C’est trop peu,’20 retorts Joan, unimpressed. Later, it is Joan herself who becomes merchandise when she is literally sold to the English. When she is injured in her failed escape attempt, Jean de Luxembourg remarks that, for the price they are paying, the English are entitled to a prisoner who can stand upright. This prostitution of Joan’s person is made explicit when, following her abjuration, she is visited by an English lord who says he has paid a lot of money in order to see her in women’s clothes. His subsequent attempt at rape leaves no doubt as to what the lord thought he was paying for. In comparison to most heritage films, Jeanne la Pucelle is strikingly short on spectacle. Perhaps the one exception to this rule is the intricately detailed recreation of the coronation of King Charles VII in the cathedral at Reims where we watch the bishops swing censers and prepare precious oils, and see the king anointed, robed and crowned as a crowd of eager onlookers is held back by soldiers. But even this sequence differs from most heritage films by its sheer length (it goes on for some thirteen minutes) which gradually serves to dispel the fascination of period spectacle such that the scene takes on a kind of documentary realism (Roy 1994: 3). Alain Riou is perhaps fair to suggest that this ceremony – ‘qui n’est jamais qu’une messe un peu plus raide que les autres’21 – actually grows a little tedious for the spectator (Riou 1994). At the same time, though, the magnificence of the spectacle is undone by the spectator’s intuition that the scene of the coronation marks the moment when, as Camille Nevers puts it, ‘l’idée s’est corrompue’22 (Nevers 1994: 26). As the camera pans across the onlookers, it shows Joan, ‘maladroite et désemparée’23 (Pascaud 1994), as though aware that the coronation marks the beginning of 20 ‘That’s not enough’ 21 ‘which is nothing but a slightly stiffer than normal mass’ 22 ‘the idea has become corrupted’ 23 ‘awkward and lost’

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200  jacques rivette the end for her glorious campaign. Joan’s cause will subsequently be taken away from her by the King’s truce with the English and she will be abandoned by her voices. If the ceremony of coronation nevertheless retains some spectacle, there is little to be found in Rivette’s minimalist battle scenes. As already mentioned, many of Joan’s battles are in part or in whole described by witnesses rather than shown on screen, notably the battle of Patay which saw a particularly large number of English casualties. Elsewhere, Rivette films the preparations for battle and the aftermath – Joan protecting the English wounded from the murderous or covetous intentions of her men – but omits the fighting itself. When battles are shown, complete with weapons and stunts, they are generally very short – the raising of the siege of Orléans, for instance, is cut off the moment Joan passes through the city gate, with no chance to witness French reprisals against the fleeing English (Les Cinémas Le Parc et Churchill 1994: 86) – and modestly filmed. Injuries tend to occur off-screen: when Joan is hit by an arrow in the thigh, we hear the sound of the arrow through the air before cutting to a shot of the wounded Joan. The same procedure is used twice in succession to show a soldier who is shot first in the foot and then in the head. Naturally, the primary reason for filming the battles in this way is economic: a more complicated and expensive make-up effect is required to show the impact of an arrow than to show an arrow already impacted. The budget of Jeanne la Pucelle – 40 million francs – although significant by Rivette’s standards, represents only a quarter of the budget of a major historical epic like Germinal (1993), and is a meagre sum to finance what essentially constitutes two long historical dramas (Frodon 1994; Rivette 1994d: 80). Nevertheless, Rivette’s choice to limit the scale of the battles was not made exclusively on economic grounds but partly because reliable facts and figures for these conflicts are simply not available: as Régine Pernoud points out, the practice of taking account of numbers after battle had not yet become commonplace by this stage of the Middle Ages (Pernoud 1964: 106–7). With both these factors in mind, Rivette often contents himself with filming what his producer Martine Marignac calls ‘une idée de bataille’ (the idea of a battle) (in Frappat 2001: 172). In one scene, he even films a small group of French soldiers and a small group of English throwing stones at each other across a narrow point in the river. The battle is won when one of the Frenchmen charges

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adaptation   201 across the water and displaces the English flag. If such scenes can initially appear desultory, their impact is strengthened by Rivette’s clever use of off-screen space: the battles are generally filmed on the edge of a forest, by the side of a river, or at the threshold to a fortress, such that whatever is on the other side of the obstacle – the English army – imposes its presence on the scene without actually being visible (Lefort et al. 1994). Ultimately too, this restriction of scale helps, as Jean-Luc Macia suggests, to give an analytic presentation of the battles, to get a sense of the delicate balance of power that tips over suddenly and unexpectedly in favour of the French (Macia 1994). Such is the case in the disconcerting scene before Orléans, in which an almost-comical aside featuring a Basque soldier brandishing Joan’s flag cheekily before the ramparts suddenly gives way to the arrival of Joan herself and, in clamour and confusion, and only after a vertiginous temps mort, the French finally take the city (Les Cinémas Le Parc et Churchill 1994: 81). Rivette’s adaptations of classical novels and historical events succeed in erecting a variety of formal framing devices around their narratives which help to preserve the complexity and richness of the source material. The complicated framing mechanism of Diderot’s La Religieuse is matched, in Rivette’s film, by the self-conscious theatricality of its aesthetic, by the anachronistic music and by the symbolic use of sound and colour, all of which help to install a distance between the spectator and the events of the narrative. As a result, Rivette’s film, like Diderot’s novel, achieves the paradoxical feat of appearing at once chaste, distanced and respectful towards its protagonist, while also coming across as a startlingly physical, sensuous, corporeal experience. The proliferation of narratorial points of view and the everreceding structure of enclosures and repetitions in Brontë’s Wuthering Heights finds an equivalent in Rivette’s use of space in Hurlevent, the use of doors and windows, the mobile camera and careful character blocking creating a film world that is at once spacious and claustrophobic, open and intimate. Meanwhile, something of the peculiar vertigo of Brontë’s genealogical ladder is approached through the paradoxical slowness and reserve with which scenes of violent passion are enacted and which tends to cast impetuous moods as repetitions or rehearsals of older structures, already played out. Jeanne la Pucelle, ‘adapted’ from historical research, is a subdued and patient portrait of Joan of Arc, the stress on the slow and lengthy passage of time

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202  jacques rivette rather than on heroic deeds, the discretion of Rivette’s style in terms of camera placement and editorial sequence serving to guarantee the historical authenticity of the film, while the resistance to spectacle and the framing of the heroine from a variety of points of view presents a complex, nuanced, human portrait of Joan. All of these films are marked by a peculiar combination of stillness and motion: the restricted spatial dimensions of the convent in La Religieuse offset by the rough physicality of Suzanne’s ordeal; the studied, calculating gaze of Hurlevent calming the torrid passions and restless camera; the lengthy pauses for reflection and prayer generating the slow rhythm of what is nonetheless a portrait of Joan on the march. In this way, Rivette comes across as the simultaneous inheritor of two of French cinema’s greatest masters: on the one hand Robert Bresson, whose own cultivation of a mysterious stillness lent an almost mystical quality to his film adaptations; and on the other Jean Renoir, whose fluid, energetic depictions of bawdy goings-on were always also arrested, at one level, by their enclosure within a theatrical frame. It is perhaps Rivette’s ability to combine the qualities of such radically different filmmakers (like those of another opposite pair frequently cited in commentaries on Rivette: Rossellini and Lang) that is the most remarkable achievement of his adapted films.

References Anon. (1965), ‘Après deux prises de position officielles le producteur de La Religieuse (menacée d’interdiction) contre-attaque …’, Aurore, 3 December. Anon (1966), ‘Pourquoi Diderot gêne-t-il encore?’, France Nouvelle, 6 April. Aumont, J. (1967), ‘Voir la nuit’, Cahiers du cinéma, 194, 64–5. Baron, J. (1985), ‘Hurlevent sans hurlement’, La Croix, 10 October. Bataille, G. (1957), La Littérature et le mal, Paris, Gallimard. Bersani, L. (1984), A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature, New York, Columbia University Press. Bonitzer, P., Laurent, C. and Rivette, J. (1993), ‘Jeanne la Pucelle’, Trafic, 5, 25–38. Bonnaire, S. (1994a), Le Roman d’un tournage: Jeanne la Pucelle, Paris, Archimbaud/Éditions Jean-Claude Lattès. Bonnaire, S. (1994b), ‘Entretien’, Cahiers du cinéma, 476, 27–32. Bonnaire, S. (1994c), ‘L’expérience de Sandrine’, La Croix, 9 February. Bonnet, J.-C. (1984), ‘Revoir La Religieuse’, in E. de Fontenay and J. Proust (eds.), Interpréter Diderot Aujourd’hui, Paris, Le Sycomore/S.F.I.E.D, 59–79.

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adaptation   203 Bory, J.-L. (1966), ‘Une religieuse “particulière” vue par un “particulier”’, Arts, 13 March. Branch, B. (1985), ‘The Art and Fallacy of Filmic Adaptation’, in D. RadcliffUmstead (ed.), National Traditions in Motion Pictures, Kent, Kent State University Press, 66–72. Brontë, E. (2003 [1847]), Wuthering Heights, London, Penguin. Broughton, S. (1999), ‘Le mystère des voix bulgares’, in S. Broughton, M. Ellingham and R. Trillo (eds.), World Music: The Rough Guide, Vol. 1: Africa, Europe and the Middle East, London, The Rough Guides, 39. Buffat, M. (2001), ‘Pour un spectateur distant’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25, 68–79. Burton, K. (1999), ‘Bulgaria: the mystery voice’, in S. Broughton, M. Ellingham and R. Trillo (eds.), World Music: The Rough Guide, Vol. 1: Africa, Europe and the Middle East, London, The Rough Guides, 36–45. Caplan, J. (1985), Framed Narratives: Diderot’s Genealogy of the Beholder, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Carcassonne, R. (1966), ‘Sur l’interdiction du film La Religieuse’, Le Populaire de Paris, 20 May. Cervoni, A. (1966), ‘L’affaire de La Religieuse’, France Nouvelle, 6 April. Chauderlot, F.-S. (2001), ‘“Becoming-Image”: Deleuzian Echoes in Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25, 88–100. Chevrie, M. (1985), ‘La main du fantôme’, Cahiers du cinéma, 376, 5–7. Cinémas Le Parc et Churchill, Les (Centre Culturel des Grignoux et Centre de Documentation du C.T.L. – Liège & Cinélibre) (1994), Jeanne la Pucelle. I. Les Batailles. II. Les Prisons: un film de Jacques Rivette, Liège, Les Grignoux. Cobast, C. (1985), ‘Hurlevent’, L’École libératrice, 26 October. Collet, J. (1994), ‘Jeanne la Pucelle de Jacques Rivette’, Études, 380, 4, 550–3. Collet, J. (1998), ‘Jeanne la Pucelle: Histoire et territoire’, Études cinématographiques, 63, 141–61. Crépu, M. (1994), ‘Jeanne, du symbole au fétiche’, La Croix, 9 February. Davies, S. (1994), Emily Brontë: Heretic, London, The Women’s Press. Decamps, A. (1966), ‘L’affaire de La Religieuse’, Cinéma 66, 106, 5–7. Déon, M. (1963), ‘La Religieuse’, Les Nouvelles Littéraires, 14 February, 12. Duby, G. (1994), ‘Cette fille était rebelle’, L’Humanité, 9 February. Erikson, F. (1994), ‘La Pucelle selon Jordi’, L’Express, 3 February. Favret-Saada, J. (1993), ‘L’affaire Rivette, une dispute de ménage’, Cinéma, rites et mythes contemporains, 16, 61–79. Frappat, H. (2001), Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma. Frodon, J.-M. (1994), ‘Un miracle en marche’, Le Monde, 10 February. Frodon, M. (1966), ‘Suzanne au bûcher’, Cinéma 66, 107, 40–2. Gaspéri, A. de (1994), ‘Avec l’épée sans l’auréole’, Le Quotidien de Paris, 9 February. Godard, J.-L. (1966), ‘Lettre à André Malraux’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 6 April. Grainville, P. (1985), ‘Hurlevent’, V.S.D., 10 October. Jackson, K. (2002), ‘“Carnal to the Point of Scandal”: On the Affair of La Religieuse’, in R. Mayer (ed.), Eighteenth-Century Fiction on Screen, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 139–56.

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204  jacques rivette Jousse, T. (1988), ‘Théâtre de la cruauté’, Cahiers du cinéma, 413, 24–5. Königsberg, I. (1981), ‘Cinema of Entrapment: Rivette’s La Religieuse (1966)’, in A. Horton and J. Magretta (eds.), Modern European Filmmakers and the Art of Adaptation, New York, Frederick Unger, 115–29. Lachize, S. (1966), ‘Le fait du Prince’, L’Humanité, 2 April. Laurent, C. and Bonitzer, P. (1993), ‘Jeanne la Pucelle’, Cahiers du cinéma, 464, 18–25. Lefort, G., Peron, D. and Séguret, O. (1994), ‘La Jeanne de Jacques’, Libération, 9 February. Macia, J.-L. (1994), ‘Rivette: L’hommage à la Pucelle’, La Croix, 9 February. Marcorelles, L. (1985), ‘Histoires d’amour maudit’, Le Monde, 16 August. Ménil, A. (2001), ‘Réflexions sur une “erreur séduisante”: La Religieuse de Rivette’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 25, 101–15. Miller, J. H. (1982), Fiction and Repetition: Seven English Novels, Oxford, Basil Blackwell. Nevers, C. (1994), ‘L’avenir d’une illusion’, Cahiers du cinéma, 476, 24–6. Pascaud, F. (1994), ‘Jeanne la Pucelle’, Télérama, 9 February. Pérez, M. (1985), ‘Splendeurs et misères du cinéma d’auteur’, Le Matin, 15 October. Pernoud, R. (1964), Joan of Arc by Herself and Her Witnesses, trans. by E. Hyams, London, MacDonald. Pernoud, R. (1994), ‘Le sacre de Jeanne’, Le Point, 5 February. Reader, K. (2000), Robert Bresson, Manchester, Manchester University Press. Ribes, B. (1966), ‘L’affaire de la Religieuse, procès d’inquisition?’, Études, May, 688–98. Riou, A. (1994), ‘La longue chevauchée de Jacques Rivette’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 10 February. Rivette, J. (1985), ‘Jacques Rivette: Cinéaste de l’amour fou’, L’Autre Journal, 8, October, 91–7. Rivette, J. (1994a), Interview, L’Express, 3 February. Rivette, J. (1994b), ‘Montrer une Jeanne en marche’, La Croix, 9 February. Rivette, J. (1994c), ‘Chronique des regards’, Le Monde, 10 February. Rivette, J. (1994d), ‘La voix humaine’, Les Inrockuptibles, 53, 1 March, 77–83. Rochereau, J. (1967), ‘Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Diderot’, La Croix, 7 August. Roy, J. (1985), ‘Un regard glacé’, L’Humanité, 9 October. Roy, J. (1994), ‘Jeanne la Pucelle’, L’Humanité, 9 February, 2–3. Sadoul, G. (1966), ‘Chronique’, Les Lettres Françaises, 21 April. Singerman, A. J. (2000), ‘Desperately seeking Suzanne: The semiotics of the sound track in Jacques Rivette’s La Religieuse’, Diderot Studies, 28, 141–60. Skorecki, L. (1985), ‘Hurlevent, l’enfance du cinéma’, Libération, 9 October. Théolleyre, J.-M. (1966), ‘L’affaire de la Religieuse devant le tribunal administratif’, Le Monde, 18 December. Touchais, B. (1966), ‘L’oublié de La Religieuse’, Le Nouvel Adam, 1, July, 32–5.

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8 Pushing the envelope: bodies, love and jealousy Love When L’Amour fou was completed in 1968, Rivette confessed that he had decided to film a love story, the study of a couple, because – partly due to prompting by François Truffaut – he considered it a kind of obligation or rite of passage: ‘Je pensais que chaque cinéaste doit faire un devoir sur ce sujet imposé’1 (Rivette 1968). Rivette’s subsequent career has given the lie to this somewhat disingenuous claim, however, since many of his later films are based around couples and romantic intrigue and, in particular, around questions of jealousy, which is to say that which divides a couple. Critics from René Girard (1961) to Marjorie Garber (1995) have noted the frequency with which, in the fundamental courtship narratives of western culture, a lover ‘wins’ or fails to win her or his beloved from a rival. As Garber comments: ‘It is as though love can only be born through an obstacle’ (Garber 1995: 423). Hence the centrality of adultery and the ubiquity of the triangular structure in love stories. Although this triangular structure implied by the presence of the rival often gives rise to comic or farcical situations in our culture, Émile Breton has pointed out that the strength and the rarity of Rivette’s romantic cinema is in taking seriously the theme of jealousy (Breton 2001). In doing so, Rivette shows that the romantic triangle is often too simplistic, that the dynamics of love and jealousy frequently involve a more complex and unstable geometry. Thus, in L’Amour fou, the love triangle is not a triangle, since Claire (Bulle Ogier)’s rival is never identified for certain; in L’Amour par terre 1 ‘I thought every filmmaker was obliged to do a composition based around this subject’

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206  jacques rivette (1984), the circuits of jealousy connect four characters – two men and two women – plus an absent fifth; in La Belle Noiseuse (1991) too there are four characters all of whose jealousy ultimately centres around the fifth, and most important character, a painting; while, in Va savoir (2001), the network of jealousies and infidelities is woven between six characters. This chapter will investigate, then, the manifestations and meanings of love and jealousy in these four films, asking ultimately how they shed light on the concepts of the work of art and artistic work that are at the heart of Rivette’s filmmaking enterprise. At the same time, the themes of love and jealousy may offer further insight into Rivette’s infamous work with duration. For, as Jean-Louis Bory has suggested, time, just as much as love, is the central theme, indeed the central character, of L’Amour fou, which lasts for four hours and twelve minutes. In this film, love is time, in the sense that the absolute demands of love can only exist in eternity: ‘l’amour est fou en ceci que le temps n’a pas prise sur lui’2 (Bory 1968). Hélène Deschamps suggests something similar when she remarks that, in the scene in which Sébastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and Claire play with a children’s toy in bed, a series of jump cuts seem repeatedly to rewind and replay the sequence, as though desirous of establishing ‘une éternité d’amour’ (an eternity of love) (Deschamps 2001: 79). Love turns to jealousy, perhaps, when the eternity of this ‘mad’ love is interrupted by the disappointment of entropic, chronological time. In that case, the lover grows jealous, not so much of another person as of a prior incarnation of their love: love becomes nostalgia. Rivette has suggested that this is the principle at work in L’Amour fou: that the characters of Racine’s Andromaque – which is being rehearsed throughout the film – are in the thick of this ‘mad’, sick love, whereas the characters of the film can only pine for a love that they have known in the past, and make derisory attempts to resurrect it (Rivette 1968). Similarly, the characters of L’Amour par terre remain preoccupied by past loves and lovers. Clément Roquemaure (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), owner of the large house in which the film is set, in the words of Éléonore (Sandra Montaigu) ‘a la nostalgie d’une femme idéale’,3 the mysterious Béatrice who disappeared from his life some time ago, whose room is preserved exactly as she left it, and who has become the subject of a play that Clément is rehearsing with Charlotte ­(Geraldine 2 ‘love is mad insofar as time has no hold over it’ 3 ‘is nostalgic for an ideal woman’

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bodies, love and jealousy   207 Chaplin) and Emily (Jane Birkin). The invisible, but very tangible presence of Béatrice in this large, and rather spooky house suggests a deliberate reference to Alfred Hitchcock’s film of Daphne DuMaurier’s Rebecca (1940). And the preservation of Béatrice’s memory lends the house a peculiar, unreal atmosphere, as though it existed somehow out of time: although Charlotte and Emily are only present in the house for a week to rehearse the play, Charlotte feels as though she has been there ‘depuis des siècles’ (for centuries) and Emily ‘toute une vie’ (her whole life). But Charlotte too mourns the loss of her first and most passionate lover, David, a New York playwright who destroyed the greatest role he ever created for her, because he couldn’t bear to give her to the public. In fact, the whole film comes across as a kind of panorama of lost loves, even minor characters giving vent to their romantic nostalgia: Emily meets a young woman begging in the metro who tells her how she was drawn into a life of crime by a man who pretended to be blind (‘On est prêt à tout pour un aveugle,’4 she explains); whereas Charlotte encounters a woman in a bar who had a successful business designing perfumes until her boyfriend ran off with the formula for a bestseller called Loup-Garou (Werewolf). It is because of this relation to time – the demand for eternity and the nostalgic preoccupation with a past perfection – that love, mad love, becomes trapped in a circular logic, condemned to repeat. As Henry Rabine puts it: ‘L’Amour fou est un amour étrange. Tant qu’on aime de son amour à lui, tant qu’on aime follement, rien à craindre, la folie, c’est pour les autres. Mais dès qu’on aime moins follement, aussitôt, la folie accourt. D’ailleurs, aimer moins follement quand on a aimé follement, c’est d’abord douter du “follement” de celui – ou de celle – qui vous aimait, c’est être jaloux, et la jalousie rend fou’5 (Rabine 1969). This infernal logic is contained within the circular form of L’Amour fou, which has been well described by Jean-Louis Bory (1968). The film’s narrative is circular since it is based around a flashback structure: the film begins on the opening night of Andromaque with Sébastien, director and star of the play suspiciously absent. He 4 ‘You’ll do anything for a blind man’ 5 ‘Mad love is a strange love. As long as you are in love, as long as you love madly, there is nothing to fear, madness is for other people. But the moment you love less madly, madness comes running. Besides, to love less madly when you have loved madly is first and foremost to doubt the “madly” of he – or she – who loved you, it is to be jealous, and jealously drives you mad’

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208  jacques rivette is in fact hiding at home, listening repeatedly to a recording made by Claire, who has finally left him and is seen travelling in a train. The film then details the rehearsals for Andromaque as well as the gradual breakdown of Sébastien and Claire’s relationship, before returning to this same point. Love and madness are further defined, argues Bory, by enclosure, by their confinement to private, intimate spaces. The vast majority of L’Amour fou takes places in two locations: the theatre where Sébastien rehearses the play and the apartment where Claire, no longer part of the play, broods upon Sébastien’s possible infidelity and sinks further into madness. The stage, in L’Amour fou, is an enclosure that is, paradoxically, open on all sides to the audience, and has been compared by many critics to a boxing ring, or even a sacrificial altar (Bory 1968). And the mania for enclosure in this film is further complicated by the vertiginous structure in which one level of reality is enclosed within another: thus the tragedy of love and jealousy in Sébastien and Claire’s relationship becomes reflected and worked through in the preparation of Andromaque; these rehearsals are filmed in 16mm by a television crew led by André S. Labarthe; and the whole thing is filmed in 35mm by Rivette: Rivette films Labarthe filming Sébastien/Kalfon performing Racine. The film appears in the image of the scene in which Claire endlessly takes apart a nest of Russian dolls, finding forever smaller ones inside.

Jealousy Perhaps the most common form of pathological, or ‘mad’ love, then, is jealousy which provides the spur to all of the narratives under consideration in this chapter. In L’Amour fou, Claire, having abandoned her own role in Andromaque, is jealous of Sébastien’s continued interaction with the theatre troupe, and suspects him of infidelity with one or more of the women involved, especially Marta (Josée Destoop), who has taken over Claire’s role as Hermione. In L’Amour par terre, Charlotte becomes involved with Clément and is jealous of his earlier relationships with Éléonore and Béatrice, relationships that were already the site of a jealous tussle between Clément and his friend Paul (André Dussollier). Paul, in turn, takes an interest in Charlotte, but only after having seduced Emily, who then becomes jealous of her friend. In La Belle Noiseuse, Nicolas (David Bursztein) encour-

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bodies, love and jealousy   209 ages his girlfriend, Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart), to pose for the eminent artist Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli), but then regrets his actions as Marianne spends long days in the studio, her nudity exposed to the gaze of the artist. Meanwhile, Liz (Jane Birkin), Frenhofer’s wife, grows jealous of Marianne who seems to have usurped her rightful role as artist’s muse. Finally, in Va savoir, Camille (Jeanne Balibar) returns to Paris after three years, touring with an Italian theatre company directed by her husband Ugo (Sergio Castellito). Camille is forced to confront her jealous former lover Pierre (Jacques Bonaffé), while Ugo grows enamoured of a young student, Dominique (Hélène de Fougerolles), who helps him search for a missing manuscript by Goldoni. Meanwhile, Pierre’s current partner, Sonia (Marianne Basler) is involved in an intrigue with Dominique’s half-brother Arthur (Bruno Todeschini). As may already have become clear from the preceding descriptions, in all of these films the romantic plots revolve around the production of a work of art: a painting in La Belle Noiseuse, a play in the other films. And the work of art has a central role to play in the development of the jealousy that drives the narrative. In L’Amour fou, it is Claire’s departure from the production of Andromaque, and her replacement by Marta that initially provokes her suspicions. Clément’s play in L’Amour par terre not only represents the love triangle that existed between him, Paul and Béatrice (‘Ce n’est pas du théâtre, c’est une photocopie!’6 protests Paul), it also sets up a rivalry between Charlotte and Emily, since they are in competition for the single feminine role in the play (and perhaps, therefore, for Clément’s affections?). (In a clear case of life imitating art, Jane Birkin has confessed that she was jealous of Geraldine Chaplin on the set of L’Amour par terre, envious of her co-star’s role and convinced that she was receiving more attention from Rivette (Birkin 1984).) Numerous examples in La Belle Noiseuse demonstrate that what the characters are jealous of is not so much each other as works of art, or perhaps more accurately the process and experience of art (we will elaborate on this distinction below). When they visit Frenhofer for the first time, Marianne admits to their friend, the art dealer Porbus (Gilles Arbona), that she is growing jealous since, the closer they get to the artist’s studio, the less Nicolas seems to be interested in her. Later that evening, at dinner, Frenhofer asks 6 ‘This isn’t theatre, it’s a photocopy!’

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210  jacques rivette Marianne how she would feel if Nicolas put his art before her: ‘Vous accepteriez de le perdre pour un tableau?’7 Elsewhere, Marianne, who has aspirations to be a writer, describes to Liz the importance of artistic rivalry to the dynamic of her relationship with Nicolas, which has changed since his first successful exhibition: ‘Tôt ou tard, entre lui et moi, ce sera la guerre’.8 When Nicolas begins to regret offering Marianne as a model for Frenhofer, Liz reassures him that her husband is a gentleman and he has nothing to fear. ‘Ce n’est pas de lui que j’ai peur,’9 replies Nicolas. Liz’s own jealousy is sparked when Frenhofer paints over an old portrait of her in his continued studies of Marianne’s naked form. When Liz confronts Frenhofer with her jealousy, it is the experience of the art work, in its duration, that she seems to miss most of all, recalling a time when they didn’t leave the studio for a whole week and time ceased to have any meaning – this swollen, dilated time, the time of love, of madness, and of art, is now being shared by Frenhofer and Marianne. But love and jealousy are further tied to the work of art in these films since, through Rivette’s near-constant preoccupation with theatre, it is made clear that love and jealousy are above all issues of performance, or acting out. This has also been suggested by Roland Barthes in his consideration of the lover’s discourse. Barthes argues, for instance, that, in awaiting the return of the other, the lover will enact the loss of that other, staging, in miniature, the effects of grief for a lost love: ‘Cela se joue donc comme une pièce de théâtre’10 (Barthes 1977: 47). In general, continues Barthes, however much the lover tries to conceal the strength of his passion, he cannot help but give it away: ‘je m’avance en montrant mon masque du doigt’11 (53). Falling in love is a drama, but a drama in a very specific sense that Barthes borrows from Nietzsche (110), necessitating grand declamatory gestures that refer to action that has taken place elsewhere (offstage, as it were): if the action of falling in love is difficult to locate in any precise time or event, the enaction of this falling-in-love seeks to repair that missing moment with grandly declared and overdetermined scenes. 7 ‘Would you be prepared to lose him for a painting?’ 8 ‘Sooner or later it will be war between us’ 9 ‘It’s not him I’m afraid of’ 10 ‘It is acted out like a stage play’ 11 ‘I advance by pointing out my mask’

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bodies, love and jealousy   211 L’Amour par terre makes clear this idea of love and jealousy as so many performances, since not only does the central play rehearsed in the house reflect the amorous complications between the characters but an earlier play, enacted by Charlotte, Emily and their friend Silvano (Facundo Bo), also based on a work by Clément Roquemaure and performed in a private residence, revolves around a rather farcically drawn love triangle. Meanwhile, amid the various shenanigans going on in the big house are Charlotte’s discussions and subsequent ludic performance of scenes from Othello – the Ur-text of jealousy – with the butler Virgil (Laszlo Szabo). At the same time, of course, the film becomes, in Marc Chevrie’s words, a metaphor for its own elaboration, since the situation of the characters, collaborating in the production of a play of whose final act they remain ignorant, precisely mirrors that of the actors on Rivette’s film set (Chevrie 1984: 41–2). So much so that Olivier Seguret, visiting the set during filming, wonders whether the scene in which Charlotte/Chaplin forgets her lines and is temporarily replaced by Emily/Birkin was simply performed for the play-within-the-film, or whether it was in fact poorly acted for the film and subsequently incorporated into the fictional rehearsals for the play (Seguret 1983: 19). The miracle of L’Amour par terre, as Chevrie comments, is precisely that, while it is highly structured, tightly organised and densely self-reflexive, it gives the impression of complete liberty and openness to chance, as though it were being freely invented before our eyes, and in this it comes close to a work as prodigious as Renoir’s La Règle du jeu (1939) which, with its countryhouse setting and amorous misadventures, L’Amour par terre recalls more than once (Chevrie 1984: 42). Va savoir is also indebted to Renoir (the name of Camille, her presence at the centre of a theatre troupe acting in what is not her first language, and her trio of suitors – Ugo, Pierre and Arthur – are all borrowed from Le Carrosse d’or (1953)), and Serge Kaganski’s remark about the 2001 film could apply equally well to any number of films by either Rivette or Renoir: ‘Tout le nuancier des rapports indémêlables entre la vraie vie et ses formes de représentations est le sujet profond de Va savoir’12 (Kaganski 2001). Here too, then, love and jealousy are self-consciously acted out, and not only when Pierre tempestuously locks Camille in a room, declaring that he won’t let her get away a 12 ‘All the subtle shading of the inextricable links between real life and its forms of representation provides the ultimate subject of Va savoir’

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212  jacques rivette second time, and requiring her to escape over the rooftops (where the clacking of her heels on the zinc recalls the creaking of the boards in the theatre (Jayamanne 2001)); nor only when Ugo challenges his rival to a duel to the death over the woman they love, each of them drinking from a bottle of vodka on a gangplank in the flies high above the theatre, until one of them falls. In the early part of the film, the theatrical nature of love and jealousy is suggested by the dialogue, and more particularly by the monologue that Camille keeps up for the opening half-hour or so. She talks to herself relentlessly throughout these early scenes, describing and commenting upon the nervousness she feels at being back in the same city as her jealous ex-lover. Eventually she declares: ‘Ça ne peut pas continuer comme ça. Il faut que je le voie.’13 And then, with less certainty: ‘J’y vais?’ (Am I going?). It is as though language here were almost, but not quite, performative, Camille seeking to will a situation into existence by pronouncing it. This sense of the performativity of language deepens when Camille confronts Pierre in a park where he is reading a newspaper. As Patrice Blouin has pointed out, if Rivette’s camera is sufficiently mobile within the space of the theatre to abolish the distinction between the stage and the audience, in this scene in the park, the camera remains static and Camille/Balibar is obliged to enter from the side of the frame in order to address herself to Pierre, as though she were auditioning in front of a particularly tough jury (Blouin 2001: 74). Camille continues her semi-performative monologue here, as though to convince herself of the reality of the situation: ‘Oui, je le vois, il est là’.14 The same uncertain tone is then taken up by Pierre, the two characters seemingly testing the veracity of their vision, and of their feelings, through a series of simple assertions. ‘Tu vois, je suis à Paris’, says Camille, to which Pierre responds, ‘Je vois’.15 ‘Tu aimes cette vie, j’imagine?’ asks Pierre, to which Camille replies, ‘J’aime cette vie, absolument’.16 ‘Tu ne t’assieds pas?’ (Won’t you sit down?) continues Pierre. Camille tries sitting, but immediately stands up again: ‘Non, je ne peux pas’ (No, I can’t). As she leaves, she wonders, ‘On s’embrasse?’ (Do we kiss?) and Pierre confirms, ‘On s’embrasse’ (We kiss). The whole scene has a curious degree of secondarity to 13 ‘It can’t go on like this. I have to see him’ 14 ‘Yes, I see him, there he is’ 15 ‘You see, I’m in Paris’, ‘I see’ 16 ‘You like this life, I imagine?’ ‘I like this life, absolutely’

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bodies, love and jealousy   213 it, as though the characters were watching someone else enact their reunion. This sense of watching a performance is important to the understanding of love and jealousy since, in jealousy in particular, a visual investment seems to be particularly privileged. In his study of the psychology of jealousy, Daniel Lagache identified ‘false perceptions’ and ‘scopophilic fantasies’ as two key ‘ways of knowing’ within the experience of jealousy (Lagache 1997 [1947]: 466–7). The importance of vision is demonstrated in a lengthy sequence in L’Amour fou where the extent of Claire’s jealousy first becomes clear. L’Amour fou presents a world in which, as Hélène Deschamps puts it, ‘voir fait mal’ (seeing is painful) (Deschamps 2001: 55), yet, as this sequence demonstrates, it is also a world in which vision cannot be trusted. As Sébastien leaves the theatre with Marta following rehearsal one day, Claire, hiding around a corner on the street, spies on them. A reverse shot shows Sébastien looking back in her direction, but from his gaze it is not clear whether or not he has seen Claire. Deschamps points out too that the reverse shot appears significantly darker than the first shot, as though dusk had suddenly fallen in the space between these two images. For Deschamps, this gives a symbolic significance to the moment which marks ‘le bousculement de sa conscience dans le soupçon’17 (Deschamps 2001: 54–5); but it also raises a degree of doubt over what we, and what Claire, have seen. Back at their apartment, Claire starts talking to Sébastien about a number of the actresses and assistants he works with in the theatre, seeking to determine whether or not he is attracted to them: ‘Tu trouves pas qu’elle a de jolis yeux?’18 she says of one, and of another, ‘Tu as remarqué les hanches qu’elle a?’19 Throughout, Claire stresses the visual evidence of the women’s beauty and, as she talks, brief shots of each woman are inserted into the scene, though it is not clear whether we are to take these as expressions of Claire’s imagination, or Sébastien’s, or simply as the omniscient operation of the film reminding us of these women. Later, in the bathroom, Claire stands with Sébastien in front of the mirror and declares, ‘On est pas mal tous les deux, quand-même, on fait un beau couple.’ But after a moment, she adds: ‘Avec Marta

17 ‘the toppling over of her consciousness into suspicion’ 18 ‘Don’t you think she’s got pretty eyes?’ 19 ‘Have you noticed her hips?’

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214  jacques rivette aussi, vous faisiez un beau couple.’20 Once again it is visual evidence – the appearance of the couple she makes with Sébastien versus the memory of the couple he made with Marta – that Claire weighs up in assessing Sébastien’s faithfulness. And, later still, when Marta comes over to the apartment, Claire asks if she has noticed anything different about Sébastien, saying, ‘Je crois qu’il est en train de vivre une grande passion. Il me trompe. Je n’ai pas de preuves mais je suis patiente, très patiente.’21 Addressing Sébastien, she tells him: ‘Je t’observe, je te connais, je te perce à jour’.22 Here knowledge is clearly equated with vision. But the situation is further complicated in the scene which follows. Sébastien wakes up in bed and sees Claire looking out of the window; it appears to be morning. The sound of a ticking clock is heard, unnaturally loud, on the soundtrack. In the next shot, Sébastien is asleep again, and it appears somewhat darker than before; the sound of the clock has ceased. Claire comes over to the bed, crawls on top of Sébastien and holds a needle over his face, gradually bringing it towards his eye. The sound of the clock begins again. Sébastien wakes up and begins making love to Claire, who is crying. We might suggest here that Claire, having overinvested in a visual fantasy of Sébastien’s infidelity, seeks, through a displacement of this painful vision, to attack his own sight. Indeed, her apparent desire literally to pierce his eyeball reflects the piercing vision that she was directing at him in the previous scene. Yet, once again, the status of this scene is uncertain: the strange, non-naturalistic sound that cuts out at one point, the shifting light, the fact that Sébastien is now awake, now asleep, all of this gives the scene a dreamlike aspect, but, in that case, whose dream is it? Sébastien’s, as convention would seem to suggest, since he is the one in bed/asleep? But in that case, the pathological, and paranoid obsession with vision in this relationship would seem to belong to him just as much as it does to Claire. In L’Amour par terre also, compelling, but ambiguous or misleading visions are associated with love and jealousy. The character Paul is a magician, or illusionist, who seems to be able to channel visions through female mediums (this, it turns out, is precisely what he used 20 ‘We look pretty good together, after all, we make a nice couple’, ‘You and Marta, you made a nice couple too’ 21 ‘I think he’s having a great love affair. He’s cheating on me. I don’t have any proof, but I’m patient, very patient’ 22 ‘I’m watching you, I know you, I can see right through you’

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bodies, love and jealousy   215 to do with Béatrice). Paul, however, is not necessarily in control of these visions. The first time he meets Charlotte, he shakes her hand and she sees herself in a mirror, drinking whisky. Later, she finds herself in precisely the same pose she had earlier envisioned. On another occasion, when Paul touches her, she sees herself smoking an opium pipe, a pipe that she will later discover in Virgil’s study. But these visions do not always have a direct, anticipatory relation to the future: sometimes they seem to represent a possibility that may be misinterpreted, or that may be rejected altogether. At the end of the film, when Paul expresses his hope that Charlotte will stay around a little longer, he moves to kiss her, but Charlotte sees a vision of the two of them in bed together and, slapping him around the face, walks away indignant. Meanwhile, Emily, in bed with Paul, sees a vision of herself apparently dead, with a woman in red standing over her, but this turns out to be an image from the play, and the woman in red is Béatrice (Isabelle Linnartz), returned to sabotage Clément’s selfimportant spectacle. In keeping with the uncertain ontological status of these visions, their existence within the filmic diegesis is equally the result of a trick or sleight of hand: for the visions seem to occur within the same shot of the actress who sees them, linked only by a pan from her gaze, but these shots conceal cuts, disguised by the whip pans that link Charlotte to her visions, or hidden in the slow pan across the dark wall of Emily’s bedroom. The strange kinds of vision portrayed in these films, and the specific investments made in the visual in cases of love and jealousy, suggest an unusual proximity between vision and touch. Ian James has suggested that interior vision – of the kind experienced by Charlotte and Emily in L’Amour par terre – belongs less to a scopic economy than to a sensible economy since, rather than affirming the external objectivity of that which is seen, it tends to blur the distinctions between inside and out, self and other, such that vision becomes a kind of touching (James 2000: 206). This is all the more clearly the case in L’Amour par terre where these internal visions appear as a result of touching Paul. The psychological proximity of vision and touch has also been remarked upon by Georges Didi-Huberman who discusses a certain delirium of touch (délire du toucher) identified by the nineteenth century psychiatrist Legrand du Saulle. Similar in nature to what might now be recognised as paranoiac or obsessivecompulsive disorders, the delirium of touch requires the sufferer to

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216  jacques rivette avoid all contact with other people or objects they have touched, for fear of contamination. But, remarks Didi-Huberman, this phobia of touching cannot be separated from a strong visual investment: ‘Le délire du toucher semble plutôt poindre dans la dimension adhésive et “haptique”, saisissante, du regard. L’ancrage de ce délire du toucher dans le visible est, en effet, fondamental: il procède d’une supposition selon laquelle tout ce qui est visible peut venir me toucher, me touche peut-être déjà’23 (Didi-Huberman 1985: 17). This may help us to understand the hysterical investment – for instance Claire’s investment – in the visual in jealousy: for if sight is confused with touch, then to see your lover with another is already to imagine them in sensual contact with each other.

Skin In these films, then, Rivette appears not only to be questioning the reliability of the fundamental visual evidence of cinema but also asking to what extent cinema, as a predominantly visual medium, may grant access to – or reproduce – the experience of the other senses. This question has been the focus of much attention in recent film theory. Vivian Sobchack has argued that the cinema is uniquely placed to reflect to us our sense of ourselves as phenomenological subjects. The cinema at once shows us sights but also comes across as the agent of its own vision and, in doing so, it seems to replicate our own status as both subjects and objects of sense, present for others as much as for ourselves (Sobchack 1992: 23–4; 2004: 147–50). At the same time, through its capacity for movement, the cinema exceeds its visual remit, creating ‘a space that is deep and textural’ through the appeal to motor functions and tactile sense, thereby generating not so much points of view as ‘concrete situations of viewing – specific, mobile, and invested engagements of embodied, enworlded, and situated subjects/objects’ (Sobchack 2004: 151). Sobchack goes on to discuss how this embodied experience of the cinema is grounded in the full range of the senses. If sight and hearing are the most ­prominent of the senses deployed by 23 ‘The delirium of touch would seem to emerge in the adhesive, or “haptic” – the piercing – nature of the gaze. This delirium of touch is, in fact, fundamentally based in the visible: it proceeds from a supposition according to which all that is visible may come and touch me, may be touching me already’

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bodies, love and jealousy   217 the filmgoer, we do not, as Sobchack points out, leave our other senses at the door, and it is precisely our capacity to smell, to touch and to taste that allows us to experience in a heightened way on film events or activities that would engage those senses in real life. If we abandon the strict hierarchy of the senses and accept, for instance, that ‘vision is informed by and informs our other senses’ (Sobchack 2004: 80), then it need no longer be in an exclusively metaphorical sense that the cinema ‘touches’ us. Sobchack proposes that we speak of the ‘cinesthetic subject’ of cinema, a neologism she forms from synaesthesia – ‘the exchange and translation between and among the senses’ – and coenaesthesia – which refers to ‘the way in which equally available senses become variously heightened and diminished’ to convey an overall sense of embodiment (69). Sobchack argues that spectatorship works by rebounding off the sensual experience represented on screen and returning to the spectator’s own body such that, in experiencing what takes place on screen, I ‘touch myself touching, smell myself smelling, taste myself tasting, and, in sum, sense my own sensuality’ (76–7). In what follows, then, we want to suggest ways in which Rivette’s films appeal, beyond vision, to the other senses, and may be experienced by the whole body – may be experienced, in particular, on the skin. The skin – the human body’s largest organ – and the sense of touch that passes through it have received considerable attention within French theory. The psychoanalyst Didier Anzieu has persuasively argued for a primal role played by the skin in the formation of what Freud termed the ego. The skin is arguably the first organ that marks and is marked by our interaction with the world, since infants absorb information about the world through their skin before they do so, for instance, through their mouths (all the more so since the lips, and inside of the mouth, are also covered with skin). The skin is that which joins together other organs and bodily products into a unifying whole, providing a surface for the body and a support for the psyche. It is in this way that Anzieu comes to think of the ego – which he rebaptises as the Skin Ego – as an ‘envelope’ (Anzieu 1989: 9). In proposing the concept of the Skin Ego, Anzieu seeks to unite the physical and the psychological, since the skin is ‘of both an organic and an imaginary order, both a system for protecting our identity and a first instrument and site of interaction with others’ (3). Meanwhile, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has elaborated at length

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218  jacques rivette a complex concept of touch. Nancy is interested in the body to the extent that it is a site of touching, in other words the point that marks the limit between me and not me. By extension, Nancy interprets all limit-situations in terms of touch, in particular works of art where a physical inscription (ink on page, paint on canvas, photons on celluloid) meets and coincides with – touches – an incorporeal sense (Nancy 2006: 13). Nancy suggests that, if it is often forbidden or impossible to touch works of art (we must not touch the painting in the museum or the celluloid in the film cans; we cannot touch the images on the screen), it is because art offers us a kind of touch at a distance or deferred touch at the point where the physical reality we see intersects an intangible meaning. As such, the work of art reminds us that it is precisely in a combined movement of approach and withdrawal that touch has its sense: if the hand that touches us didn’t pull away, it would lose its significance as communication with the sense of the other (Nancy 2003: 81–2). In the same way, the sense of a work of art resists and recedes from us even as we feel most sure of touching its intimate secrets. The skin is thus a limit par excellence, it is that which separates inside from outside, me from not-me; indeed, if Anzieu and Nancy are right, then the consciousness of our skin and of the touching that takes place on its surface plays a fundamental role in the very formation of concepts such as self and other, even as it allows the ego to exist as a discrete entity. The skin is also the border between surface and depth – it is at once the surface of the body, that which gives the body a surface, and that which most immediately suggests its fleshy physical depths, through the appearance of veins, blushes and so on. Georges Didi-Huberman, in a commentary on Balzac’s Le Chef-d’œuvre inconnu – the story upon which La Belle Noiseuse is loosely based – rejoins this notion of the skin-limit in his attempt to circumscribe that mysterious phenomenon (what he calls l’incarnat, or the incarnadine) whereby a work of art – a painting – seems to take on an almost-real existence in the world of sentient flesh. The incarnadine works at once as tensile surface and as the suggestion of an undercurrent, a world below the surface; it exists, in other words, only as an in-between: between surface and depth (Didi-Huberman 1985: 24). This same play with surface and depth is at work in La Belle Noiseuse, not so much in the final masterpiece produced by Frenhofer – which we never see – as in the way Rivette

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bodies, love and jealousy   219 films the process of producing that painting, and the relationship between Frenhofer as artist and Marianne as model. Frenhofer tells Marianne: ‘Je veux savoir, voir ce que vous avez dans le corps … Je saurai ce qu’il y a à l’intérieur, et à l’envers de votre petite surface’,24 but the only way he can get at this ‘interior’ is precisely by repeatedly returning to the surface, by endlessly staring at, and sketching Marianne’s body. Naturally, Frenhofer has Marianne pose nude, but this stripping away of the layers of her ‘surface’ reveals no secrets, no hidden depths, since nudity, it turns out – Marianne’s bare skin – is just another surface, just another sign. Frenhofer himself remembers another model whose peculiarity was that ‘Nue, elle avait l’air habillé, et habillée, elle avait l’air nu’.25 The sheer duration of the gaze at Emmanuelle Béart’s naked body in La Belle Noiseuse – on the part of Frenhofer but also, obviously, of the spectator – ultimately works to remove any prurient response or sense of being privy to an erotic revelation and rather reveals Béart’s body – in all its simplicity and its complexity, in its density and impenetrability – as the skin in which she lives. We watch the expressions of boredom on Marianne/Béart’s face, see her scratch her leg and flex her neck, fall victim to cramp and pins and needles. And, if Marianne/Béart’s skin is initially resistant, if she barricades herself behind it, crossing her arms over her breasts and retreating into her closed body, she later relaxes into her role and takes to strolling naked around the studio in between poses. As Gérard Legrand suggests, after a while we cease even to notice Béart’s nakedness, and begin to look upon her body as a series of abstract shapes, ‘des écritures à peine figuratives’26 (Legrand 1991:  8). But that is not all. For our mode of relating to Marianne/Emmanuelle Béart in La Belle Noiseuse, and our understanding of the relationship between artist and model does not only pass through vision. Crucial to the spectator’s experience of the work of art as it proceeds in Frenhofer’s studio is the sound of these sequences, the highly amplified noises of the artist’s tools as they create forms in response to Marianne’s model. As Olivier Seguret has remarked with regard to these sequences: ‘on a vu du bruit’ (we have seen 24 ‘I want to know, I want to see what’s inside your body … I’ll find out what’s on the inside, on the other side, of your surface’ 25 ‘When she was naked, she appeared to be clothed, and when she was clothed she appeared to be naked’ 26 ‘a kind of writing that is barely even figurative’

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220  jacques rivette noise) (Seguret 1991). I would be tempted to qualify this statement, however, by suggesting that we have not only seen but felt noise. For the scenes in the artist’s studio in La Belle Noiseuse are a prime example of Sobchack’s ‘cinesthesia’: Frenhofer begins his work with pen and ink drawings in his sketchbook and the loud noise of the nib scratching across the thick, woody paper is not only heard but felt by us as spectators, deep into our skin. This is a sound that you feel, rather like fingernails scraping down a chalkboard: it is vivid enough to raise the hairs on your skin. It allows us to experience the texture of the paper on which Frenhofer is working. This is perhaps what Pascaline Cuvelier meant when she suggested that the sound in the studio gives a kind of depth of field to the image (Cuvelier 1991): not a deeper visual perspective but rather a greater sensory depth, an appeal to other senses. As the film continues, and Frenhofer’s work progresses, sound continues to be central to our apprehension of his work – first the sound of charcoal on paper, and then, ultimately, brushes and oil on canvas. Because the sound of these instruments is, throughout, associated with the gaze of the artist, and with our views of Marianne/Béart’s naked body, and because these sounds are so textural, because they add a kind of haptic depth to the visual, they allow us as spectators to identify at once both with Marianne’s being-in-a-body and with Frenhofer’s sensual appropriation of that body for his art. The complexity of this identification is demonstrated in a moment when Marianne, during a pause where Frenhofer has left the studio, approaches a nude portrait of Liz and runs her hand over the line of her buttocks. What is happening in this movement? Is Marianne identifying with the gaze – the controlling, possessive gaze – of the artist, tracing with her hand the movement of his eye, and his own hand – via the proxy of the canvas – over the model’s body? Or is she identifying with Liz as model, to the extent that the experience of posing has brought her into a heightened awareness of her own body? And where, between the possibilities of these various gazes, are we to situate the look of the spectator? The importance of sound in generating the total sensory experience of La Belle Noiseuse is matched by the use of sound in L’Amour fou. Serge Daney, writing on the occasion of a revival of L’Amour fou in 1982, suggested that, whereas the sound was received, on the film’s initial release in 1969, as an example of the then-fashionable ‘direct’ sound – the unfiltered, untreated, naturalistic sounds of the city –

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bodies, love and jealousy   221 it appears, in retrospect, as a very deliberate, expressionistic tactic; indeed the sound of L’Amour fou almost constitutes a character in itself (Daney 1982). For one thing, the sound of the film seems to be designed around certain motifs, one of which is a rhythmic knocking or banging. Sébastien, for instance, plays on more than one occasion, with a set of drums in the apartment, notably as a very deliberate way of ignoring Claire when she begins telling Marta about her suspicions of Sébastien’s infidelity. This rhythmic beat is matched, in the theatre, by the regular handclaps, and, later, the elaborate array of gongs and other percussive devices that are used to mark units of sense in the verses of the play. But it is also matched, later on, by Claire’s persistent banging on the bedroom door after Sébastien comes home and, finding her crouched in terror in the corner, simply leaves her there. It initially seems as though sound may be used as an aid to characterisation, to help establish the rupture between Sébastien and Claire. Thus, while Sébastien is associated with the classicism and rational order of Racine’s language in the theatre, Claire seems to move away from symbolic language into nonsense and sheer noise. She begins reading lines from the play into a tape recorder – as though in competition with Marta’s performance as Hermione, as crosscutting between the theatre and the apartment makes clear – but the language soon breaks down into a meaningless associative chain of rhymes: ‘coup de grâce, coup d’angoisse, coup de masse, coup de tasse …’ Next, she starts recording the ambient sounds of traffic noise, her own breathing, a de-tuned radio. Claire’s running monologue during these sequences presents the noises as so many items of evidence in her paranoid investigation of Sébastien’s infidelity. But, as the film goes on, the distinction between Sébastien and Claire on the level of their sonorous existence proves untenable. For, if Sébastien uses percussion to mark units of sense in the verse, it is in an attempt to break with the mesmerising authority of the alexandrine’s rhythm. And yet, particularly as the marking of sense becomes more elaborate with the introduction of musical instruments, the rhythm of the alexandrine gradually reasserts itself and the constant banging of gongs serves only to distract from the sense of the lines. Ultimately, it is as though both Sébastien and Claire were creating and performing modernist musical compositions, with the whole of L’Amour fou becoming a kind of sound installation: Sébastien’s musical theatre recalls percussive works by the likes of Boulez and Messiaen,

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222  jacques rivette while Claire’s recordings seek to introduce randomness somewhat in the manner of John Cage (who de-tuned radios) or Pierre Schaeffer (who recorded ambient noise for his musique concrète); Rivette has also spoken of the influence of Stockhausen over L’Amour fou, the use of extended duration as a way of exploring the commixing of the contrived and the aleatory (Rivette 1999 [1968]: 293). Besides, the music that Claire finds while tuning through the radio dial is a little too conveniently atonal and eerie to be plausibly arbitrary, and a little too loud and clear to be unequivocally diegetic. Furthermore, although it may initially be tempting to associate Sébastien with the clarity of Racine’s verse, he cannot, in the end, be aligned with rational speech. As Daney points out, ‘il ne parle pas, il psalmodie, il murmure’27 (Daney 1982). Indeed, Sébastien seems incapable of speaking – either to Claire or to anyone else – about what is really going on in his life, incapable even, as Michèle (Michèle Moretti) remarks, of externalising his feelings in the play. His mute impotence is most memorably demonstrated in the scene in which, as Claire suggests they need to spend some time apart, Sébastien takes a razor blade and begins slicing and slashing at his clothes. The extraordinary, hyperrealist soundtrack of L’Amour fou appears almost, as Daney argues, to substitute for Sébastien’s aphasia. Ultimately, then, the distinction between Sébastien and Claire breaks down in L’Amour fou, the two are united in their morbid passion for one another, gradually regressing to a state in which they seem unable to maintain their separate identities. This regression is signalled not only by the sound of a child’s cry that opens and closes the film but by the way in which the couple play with and exchange their food – Sébastien takes a piece of chewing gum from Claire’s mouth as he kisses her; Claire makes Sébastien taste her food before cutting it up and feeding it to her – and by the lengthy climactic scene in which the two lock themselves in their apartment for several days and draw on the walls, tell fairy stories, play with each other and smash things until they are too tired to go on (Rivette apparently had plans for this scene to be even more childish, involving food fights and scatology (Rivette 1999 [1968]: 286–7)). As they embark upon this double regression, ‘Le son,’ writes Serge Daney, ‘c’est la houle dans laquelle les deux personnages du film flottent’28 (Daney 1982) and indeed, during this last apart 27 ‘He doesn’t speak, he chants and he mumbles’ 28 ‘Sound’ ‘is the swell on which the two characters of the film float’

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bodies, love and jealousy   223 ment scene, we hear the incongruous sound of waves breaking on the soundtrack, the percussive rhythms from earlier in the film finally reduced to this phantasmatic ebb and flow. In a study of the voice in cinema and psychoanalysis, Kaja Silverman has suggested that the infant child is surrounded by what she calls the ‘sonorous envelope’ of the maternal voice (Silverman 1988: 72). This enveloping voice is fundamentally ambiguous in that it is one of the first objects to be identified by the child, yet it is only ever incompletely separated from the self. As the child must achieve separation from this voice in order to shore up his individual ego, he tends to project on to the maternal (and thus, by extension, the female) voice precisely those qualities of irrationality and meaningless musicality that more properly characterise the infant’s speech. But, owing to the inherent reversibility which characterises the voice (since it can be both emitted and heard by the same subject), the subject’s precarious accession to subjectivity through the abjecting of the maternal voice may always be threatened by a falling-back into indistinction in an enveloping well of sound. This appears to be what has befallen Sébastien at the end of L’Amour fou when, following Claire’s departure, he is left crouched in a near-foetal position in the apartment, obsessively listening to Claire’s disembodied voice on the tape recorder saying, ‘Je respire à travers ta peau … Personne ne t’aimera comme moi … Tu ne trouveras rien d’autre … Tu me chercheras toujours …’29 In L’Amour fou, the sound is the skin in which the whole experience of the film is wrapped.

Boredom In the preceding section, then, we have used the skin as a metaphor – a metaphor that is sometimes literalised – for those liminal phenomena that Rivette seems to be particularly interested in in these films, and that work to link or temporarily unite two or more people without ever quite belonging to either of those individuals: a love relationship, a jealous passion, a work of art. Indeed, rather than the regressive fusion of the lovers, the madness of love is perhaps marked by the obsessive presence of a limit that prevents this fusion, even as 29 ‘I breathe through your skin … No one will love you like I do … You won’t find anything else … You will search for me always …’

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224  jacques rivette it constitutes the very possibility of the love relationship. Roland Barthes, in his considerations of the lover’s discourse, suggests that Arthur Rimbaud’s famous line ‘Je est un autre’ has had a disproportionate influence over our conceptions of madness, understood as a form of depersonalisation. On the contrary, suggests Barthes, ‘c’est de devenir un sujet, de ne pouvoir m’empêcher de l’être, qui me rend fou. Je ne suis pas un autre: c’est ce que je constate avec effroi … Je suis indéfectiblement moi-même, et c’est en cela que je suis fou: je suis fou parce que je consiste’30 (Barthes 1977: 140). The madness of the lover – the madness of Sébastien and Claire in L’Amour fou, despite the apparent erasure of the boundary between them – is in the inability to become the other, the impossibility of crossing, finally, the gulf of intimacy. The dialogue of Va savoir repeatedly makes reference to this self-resemblance which constitutes the inescapable state of subjecthood, and suggests that we are animated at once by a desire for and a fear of escaping from this self-similarity. Thus, when Ugo confesses to Camille that he is afraid of losing the theatre troupe, she tells him ‘Ça ne te ressemble pas,’ to which he replies, ‘C’est ça qui me fait peur’.31 Later, when Arthur claims to be ‘paralysed’ by his admiration for Camille, she remarks sarcastically, ‘Ça vous ressemble’ (How like you), but he insists, ‘Vous m’avez transformé: je ne suis plus le même’.32 Dominique, envious of Ugo’s life in the theatre, tells him, ‘Vous avez de la chance d’être tous les soirs quelqu’un d’autre’.33 In the play that they are performing – Pirandello’s Come tu me vuoi – Camille in fact plays a woman without an identity, ‘un corpo senza nome’, a character with no memory of her previous life and who invites others to fill her body with their memories. And yet, at the beginning of the film, when Camille is distracted by the thought of being once again in proximity to Pierre, she finds herself unable to inhabit this character, forgetting her lines and spoiling her performance, just as Charlotte, in L’Amour par terre, fluffs her lines in rehearsal the morning after her row with Emily over Paul. The theatre, in these films, as well as being a powerful metaphor for the duplicity and deception of these 30 ‘it is becoming a subject, being unable to prevent myself from doing so, that drives me mad. I am not another: that is what I realise with horror … I am unfailingly myself, and it is in this that I am mad: I am mad because I consist’ 31 ‘That’s not like you’, ‘That’s what I’m afraid of’ 32 ‘You have transformed me: I am no longer the same’ 33 ‘You’re lucky you get to be someone different every night’

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bodies, love and jealousy   225 characters, thus becomes also, and paradoxically, a measure of their inability to be other than themselves in their various lovesick states. After all, Claire leaves the production of Andromaque when she is unable to pronounce a line to Sébastien’s satisfaction: as he corrects her numerous times and she repeats the line in an identical manner, her inability to be other than herself becomes clear. And doesn’t Sébastien grow increasingly distant from the theatre as the crisis with Claire deepens, until, by the end of the film, the very existence of the play in performance appears to be in doubt? There are a number of possible emotional responses to this experience of the fatigue of being oneself, the constitutional impossibility of stepping outside of oneself. If anxiety and madness are extreme or pathological responses, a more prosaic and everyday reaction is one of boredom. In a recent book about boredom, Elizabeth Goodstein examines Heidegger’s remarks on the topic, outlining the German philosopher’s hierarchical taxonomy of different modes of boredom. Firstly, there is being bored by, in which we attribute to an object or event the cause of our boredom. Secondly, we may be bored with something, which is a deeper, and more general kind of boredom whereby the failure of some amusement or occupation to keep us entertained ‘becomes the occasion for self-reflection on the constitution of being-in-the-world’ (Goodstein 2005: 321). That is to say we temporarily detach ourselves from the routine clock-time of everyday existence and enter into what, for Heidegger, is a more ‘authentic’ mode of being, one in which we are forced to interrogate the sense of our own mortality. This can ultimately give way to a third level of boredom, marked by the impersonal construction ‘it is boring’ (es ist einem langweilig): a kind of pervasive mood of uncertain origin that is neither caused by something, nor a mode of reflecting on our everyday being, but rather ‘a way of being into which we are thrown’: this final, and deepest, level of boredom ‘exposes us as beings faced with the problem of the meaning of our transient being’ (325). We would like to argue that Rivette’s experiments with duration in his films can work to bring the spectator into an ‘authentic’ relation with being – with being as it exists in its mortal state, unprotected by the utilitarian shield of pragmatic clock-time – in a process similar to that which Heidegger identifies in the experience of boredom. We are not, for a moment, implying that Rivette’s films are boring. However, it is hardly controversial to suggest that the length of Rivette’s films –

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226  jacques rivette twelve hours, four hours, even the two hours forty minutes or so of Va savoir and the full-length version of L’Amour par terre – demand of the spectator a different relationship to time than that commonly experienced in the cinema. For one thing, films like L’Amour fou and La Belle Noiseuse do not fit easily into cinemas’ schedules which are very much based around everyday clock-time with its division of the day into discrete units waiting to be filled with appropriate activities: as Robin Wood has argued, the institutionalised patterns of cinema-going exist as part of a rigorously circumscribed leisure time within a system of capitalist patriarchy, such that a film is something to be ‘packed into a 2–3 hour slot between the time the kids are put to bed and the “early night” required by the next day’s hard toil’ (Wood 1981: 3). A film such as La Belle Noiseuse may have to be consciously marketed, as Thomas Elsaesser points out, in terms of a ‘special occasion contract it has with its audience’ (Elsaesser 2005: 174), demanding more from them – in terms of time and attention – presumably in return for more (more quality, more value?). Nonetheless, it is difficult not to recognise that the viewing experience must become at times – even if only in a purely physical sense – an ordeal. As Jean Roy suggests, the discomfort and fatigue, the cramps and pins and needles suffered by Marianne in La Belle Noiseuse are matched by those of the audience in their seats (Roy 1991). Hence the importance of the intermission which arrives after Marianne and Frenhofer grow irritable with each other, Marianne laughs to break the tension and then, as Frenhofer leaves the room, she falls asleep. And Rivette has underlined the significance of the intermission in both L’Amour fou and La Belle Noiseuse, its importance to the rhythm of the film and the natural cycle of the spectator’s attention; it is important to restore to the audience their freedom, suggests Rivette, and to give them the chance to leave halfway through the film if they want to (Rivette 1999 [1968]: 298). In addition to the sheer duration of the experience, though, much of what Rivette films is, if not boring, arguably boredom. For Rivette deliberately focuses upon or chooses to retain moments of dead time, the time between those events that might be central to a more classical narrative. Consider L’Amour fou: Claire’s suicide attempts, which would provide a dramatic climax to a more traditional portrait of mental illness, are deliberately elided from Rivette’s film: the first takes place off-screen, and is only revealed through a phone call to the theatre where, after several lengthy rehearsal scenes, we have

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bodies, love and jealousy   227 temporarily lost sight of Claire. The second suicide attempt (if it is one – and this very uncertainty demonstrates the equivocal textual significance of these events) occurs towards the end of the film when Sébastien returns home and finds Claire holding a razor blade and with a drop of blood trickling from her temple as her incantatory voice plays on the tape player. But this scene is not explained or resolved, since it cuts directly to a dress rehearsal of the play. Instead the film follows Claire through her empty, directionless days as she waits for Sébastien to return from the theatre, detailing her increasingly nonsensical recordings and her ridiculous quest to find a particular breed of puppy with which she has become obsessed. Meanwhile, the scenes in the theatre are given over to endless rehearsals, frequently of the same scenes from the play (Rivette 1999 [1968]: 280), without ever arriving at a definitive performance, just as nearly half of the screen time of La Belle Noiseuse – almost two hours – is devoted to Frenhofer’s sketches, often unfinished or discarded, and we never see the triumphant realisation of the final masterpiece. For much of the duration of the film, then, the spectator is, as Thomas Elsaesser rather mischievously puts it, ‘alone with his thoughts, “watching paint dry”’ (Elsaesser 2005: 174). And yet the astonishing thing about these films, as countless remarks by critics testify, is that they are not boring; in fact, quite the contrary is true. Jean Roy writes of La Belle Noiseuse: ‘Paradoxe, dans ce film où il ne se passe à peu près rien, on est pris à chaque seconde par un immense désir de voir la suite’34 (Roy 1991); and Jean-Luc Macia: ‘des éternités s’écoulent en nous avec la fureur d’un film d’angoisse’35 (Macia 1991). This reference to a ‘film d’angoisse’ is significant, as others have remarked that, buried within La Belle Noiseuse, are the ingredients of a horror film. Elsaesser suggests that the scene in which Liz, clad in a deep red velvet dress, sneaks into the studio at night to steal a look at Frenhofer’s finished painting, and marks the back of the canvas with a single black cross, ‘as if to confirm that this has been painted by a ghost …, turns La Belle Noiseuse into something close to a horror film, halfway between the gothic tales around painted portraits mentioned in the beginning, and Roger Corman’s Tomb of Ligeia [1964] or Fall of the House of Usher [1960]’ (Elsaesser 2005: 173). Indeed, the screenwriter 34 ‘Paradoxically, in this film in which next to nothing happens, at every second we are struck by an immense desire to know what happens next’ 35 ‘eternities pass by with all the fury of a suspense thriller’

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228  jacques rivette Pascal Bonitzer has noted the influence of the nineteenth-century literary theme of the vampiric effect of painting upon both artist and model, present not only in Balzac but in Poe’s ‘Oval Portrait’ and Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray (Bonitzer 1991). But it is the character of Liz who provides the focus for much of the subtle terror that gradually descends over La Belle Noiseuse, Liz with her stuffed birds and her arsenic soap, Liz with her voodoo past (she confesses to having stuck 33 pins into a voodoo doll of an ex-lover and tells young Magali (Marie Belluc) that, although she never saw him again, ‘Je suis sûre qu’il est mort à trente-trois ans’36). And it is not just La Belle Noiseuse that contains these elements of horror: L’Amour fou, with its portrayal of mental illness, is, in some respects, on similarly disturbing psychological ground to a film like Polanski’s Repulsion (1965); whilst the house in L’Amour par terre, with its absent, but lingering mistress, its visions of death and debauchery, its incongruous sounds (exotic birds, waves, low-flying helicopters) and its dark, locked rooms – one of which, glimpsed on two or three occasions, seems to contain a hunched figure that may be Paul, although his face is never clearly visible – is the site of a very peculiar haunting. Serge Daney has remarked that L’Amour par terre, and by extension all of Rivette’s films, are precariously balanced halfway between playfulness and terror, with games always threatening to become frightening just as terror becomes a game, as though Rivette were unable to film one in its pure state without falling into the other (Daney 1984). And theatre, Daney argues, serves in Rivette’s work as a system – or a kind of lens – through which terror may become a game (as in Andromaque, as in Clément Roquemaure’s sadistic mises-en-abyme), just as the game (or acting: le jeu) becomes terrifying (witness Camille’s ‘trouille’ at the beginning of Va savoir, or the breathtaking audacity – and productive terror – of beginning an opening-night performance of a play without knowing how the final act turns out (L’Amour par terre)). We would like to suggest that this terror that steals unexpectedly over Rivette’s films is similar in nature, and function, to the terror that Heidegger glimpsed in boredom, and that brings us into an unavoidable confrontation with our own mortality: indeed it is Rivette’s work with duration, and his straying into the terrain of boredom, that produces this terror that is coincident with the threatened collapse of the film, the actors and 36 ‘I’m sure he died aged thirty-three’

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bodies, love and jealousy   229 the spectator’s attention; if Rivette is playing a dangerous game, it is because the precarious nature of his filmic enterprise cannot help but remind us of our own less-than-solid foundations in being. In her presentation of Heidegger’s writings on the philosophical import of boredom, Elizabeth Goodstein is highly critical of the dangerously ahistorical focus of Heidegger’s argument. Rather than considering the economic and material conditions that might be conducive to a certain kind of boredom – the very notion of standardised clocktime, for instance, is actually a fairly recent historical invention – Heidegger presents boredom as ‘a lived symptom of modern nihilism’ (Goodstein 2005: 282). His argument is thus bound up with a critique of modernity, but this critique is based not so much in reasoned economic or cultural argument as in a romantic anti-capitalism that, for Goodstein, helps to explain Heidegger’s notorious seduction by the promised cultural revolution of National Socialism (284). His ahistorical rhetoric of ‘authenticity’ ‘escalates uncannily into the Blut-undBoden register of right-wing revolutionaries’ (310), while his focus on the ‘distress’ and ‘inner terror’ central to the experience of authentic being ‘portend his susceptibility to a politics aimed at using precisely those means to bring forth a new and better form of human being’ (331). Given this contentious nature of Heidegger’s philosophy, if we are to appeal to it in our attempt to understand Rivette’s cinema, then it is worth looking quite carefully at the cryptic cameo role played by the German philosopher in Va savoir. In this film, Pierre – Camille’s somewhat unstable ex-partner – is struggling to finish a thesis on Heidegger. When she meets him in the park, he tells her that his title has changed from the rather dry and sensible ‘Heidegger, des Présocratiques à la Nouvelle Pensée Allemande’ to the much more mysterious and allusive ‘Heidegger, le jaloux’.37 Although this title clearly chimes neatly with the film’s theme of jealousy – and further complicates the issue of Pierre’s romantic pathology – no explanation is offered at this point. But Heidegger comes up again during an extremely awkward dinner party hosted by Pierre and Sonia in honour of Camille and Ugo’s arrival in Paris. Before the mortified Camille, Pierre has been discussing the ‘hell’ he went through following her departure, but concludes that he had been locked in a kind of prison of jealousy. He then goes on to announce that the epigraph to his 37 ‘Heidegger, from the Pre-Socratics to New German Thought’ ‘Heidegger, the jealous one’

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230  jacques rivette thesis, drawn from Malaparte, reads: ‘La dictature, c’est la forme suprême de la jalousie’.38 Before Sonia moves the conversation on to less weighty matters, Pierre has time to explain that, ‘Même s’il paraît dire le contraire – l’ouverture à l’être, la vérité comme dévoilement – il [the epigraph] cerne parfaitement le style incantatoire du vieux de la Forêt Noire’.39 What are we to make of these remarks? What does jealousy have to do with dictatorship, and how do they relate to Heidegger’s philosophy and politics? In his study of the psychology of jealousy, Daniel Lagache explains that the jealous lover always has in view an imaginary partner, because only an imaginary partner can give her- or himself totally to the other. Faced with a real partner – who necessarily conceals a plurality of thoughts, moods and dispositions that the other can never completely know – a jealous lover can only be frustrated and disappointed, regardless of whether the partner is actually unfaithful (Lagache 1997 [1947]: 409–10). Pierre’s totalising jealous love is demonstrated when he locks Camille in a room: he seeks to have complete control over her movements; in his delirium, he can only possess her totally by removing her freedom. Meanwhile, if Heidegger’s dangerous flirtation with the totalitarian politics of National Socialism is related to jealousy, as Pierre seems to suggest from his well-informed vantage point, then it is through his nostalgia, criticised by Goodstein. A connection is made here between Heidegger’s anti-modern stance and his nostalgia for an imagined, idealised past, conjured up through his admiration for ancient Greek philosophy, his exeges on Romantic literature (especially Hölderlin) and the discourse of origins in his philosophy of art. If Heidegger is jealous – and this is the implication of Pierre’s changed title – it is of these imaginary precursors in the fields of literature and thought, just as Pierre’s jealousy seeks to preserve, or return to, an idealised relationship with Camille that doubtless never existed. This issue of nostalgia is important to Va savoir since, as Thierry Jousse has noted, if Rivette can generally be considered a filmmaker whose characters inhabit a kind of pure present, in Va savoir, for once, the past catches up with them (Jousse 2001). This is clearly the case for Camille who, upon her return to Paris is, as we have seen, 38 ‘Dictatorship is the supreme form of jealousy’ 39 ‘Even if he seems to be saying the opposite – the opening up to being, the truth as deconcealing – it [the epigraph] captures perfectly the incantatory style of the old man of the Black Forest’

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bodies, love and jealousy   231 paralysed by her memories. But it is also the case for Sonia who has kept an elegant engagement ring as a sort of talisman from her former life, ‘une autre vie, très différente’,40 as she tells Camille. Sonia later reveals that she fell in love with a young outlaw who introduced her to a life of crime which even led to a spell in prison. At one point, Camille wakes Sonia from a deep slumber and she cries out in panic, ‘Non, pas les yeux!’41 before explaining that she had momentarily thought herself back in her prison cell with her greasy-haired, cigar-smoking cell mate: ‘Qu’est-ce qu’elle a pu me cogner!’42 Sonia’s ring subsequently becomes a kind of Hitchcockian MacGuffin – and Rivette is naturally very conscious of the homage (Rivette 2001) – that serves to unite the characters as it circulates between them: it is stolen by Arthur and then stolen back by Camille, who makes a pact with Sonia. But another kind of relation to the past is established by Ugo who, in exasperation at Pierre’s behaviour, and himself jealous in the face of Camille’s increasing distraction, proposes to his rival that they resolve the issue with a duel to the death: ‘Il y a deux siècles,’ he says, ‘cela se serait réglé sur le Prater avec des pistolets’.43 At this stage, with the film almost over, it begins to look as though Va savoir may end in tragedy with Ugo and Pierre engaged in a stupidly macho fight over Camille, as though she were a possession to be disputed between them. But, in its final minutes, the film undergoes a dramatic and delightful shift in tone that leads, not just to a standard happy ending, but to an ending that installs a rare and profound degree of happiness, an unexpected kind of jubilation. Indeed, Rivette, who confesses to having modelled the ending on Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro, describes it as ‘un tutti du bonheur’ (Rivette 2001). Critics have remarked on its generosity (Royer 2001), its optimism (Borde 2001) and its wonderful lightness of touch (Blouin 2001: 75); Olivier Seguret, comparing it to the heights of American screwball comedy, describes the ending as ‘un sommet de cocasse cukorien’44 (Seguret 2001). Ugo, then, takes Pierre up into the flies where they are to drink vodka until one of them falls. What he hasn’t told Pierre, however, is that there is a net to catch him. They are discussing Heidegger – or rather, laughing at his silly hat and 40 ‘another life, a very different one’ 41 ‘No, not my eyes!’ 42 ‘Oh how she would hit me!’ 43 ‘Two centuries ago’, ‘this would have been resolved on the Prater with pistols’ 44 ‘a comical climax worthy of Cukor’

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232  jacques rivette pompous moustache – when Pierre, reciting a quotation from the famous philosopher, steps off into the void. Meanwhile, Dominique and her mother (Catherine Rouvel), having found the missing Goldoni manuscript in what they thought was an old cookbook, have come to the theatre to present it to Ugo along with a large cake. Camille returns her ring to Sonia, but she invites Camille to keep it, declaring that she feels better without it, ‘mille fois plus légère’.45 The gift is enough to save the ailing fortunes of the theatre troupe and to safeguard the prolongation of their tour in Vienna. As the two couples – Ugo and Camille, Pierre and Sonia – retire together, their loves rekindled, Mme Desprez cuts the cake and Dominique dances with Arthur as Peggy Lee sings – on the soundtrack – ‘Senza fine’. If the ending of Va savoir is so intoxicating, it is because the burden of the past – Camille’s history with Pierre, the painful memories symbolised by Sonia’s ring, Ugo’s fruitless search in the dusty archives, Pierre’s wallowing in Heidegger’s nostalgia – is suddenly, almost magically, lifted. The farcical nature of Ugo and Pierre’s duel highlights the ridiculousness of their possessive claims on Camille; Heidegger’s ponderousness is gently mocked, the film finally coming down, as Thomas Sotinel (2001) points out, more on the side of Venetian comedy than of German philosophy; in much the same vein, the discovery of the missing play in a cookbook demonstrates that, as Serge Kaganski puts it, ‘dans ce film, le charnel n’est jamais loin du spirituel, le sensuel contrebalance toujours le cérébral’46 (Kaganski 2001); and finally Sonia’s renouncing of her own ring proves how healthy it can be to let go of the past. As Patrice Blouin comments, the film ends in ‘une adéquation de la vie avec elle-même dans un pur présent’47 (Blouin 2001: 75). Senza fine: a happiness without end.

45 ‘a thousand times lighter’ 46 ‘in this film, the carnal is never far from the spiritual, the sensual always counterbalances the cerebral’ 47 ‘life in accord with itself, in a pure present’

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Anzieu, D. (1989), The Skin Ego: A Psychoanalytic Approach to the Self, trans. by Chris Turner, New Haven, Yale University Press. Barthes, R. (1977), Fragments d’un discours amoureux, Paris: Seuil. Birkin, J. (1984), ‘Jane Birkin rêve de chanter Peter Pan’, France-Soir, 31 August. Blouin, P. (2001), ‘Nos retrouvailles’, Cahiers du cinéma, 561, 74–5. Bonitzer, P. (1991), ‘Le cinéaste et son modèle’, Le Monde, 29 August. Borde, D. (2001), ‘Comme au théâtre’, Le Figaro, 17 May. Bory, J.-L. (1968), ‘Le nouveau martyre de Sébastien’, Le Nouvel Observateur, 21 October. Breton, E. (2001), ‘Rivette joue dans tous les sens du verbe’, L’Humanité, 10 October. Chevrie, M. (1984), ‘Masques et prodiges’, Cahiers du cinéma, 364, 41–2. Cuvelier, P. (1991), ‘Le crissement des outils du peintre’, Libération, 15 May. Daney, S. (1982), ‘Revoir L’Amour fou’, Libération, 22 August. Daney, S. (1984), ‘L’étoffe des Éros’, Libération, 17 October. Deschamps, H. (2001), Jacques Rivette: Théâtre, amour, cinéma, Paris, L’Harmattan. Didi-Huberman, G. (1985), La Peinture incarnée, Paris, Minuit. Elsaesser, T. (2005), European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press. Garber, M. (1995), Vice Versa: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life, London, Penguin. Girard, R. (1961), Mensonge romantique et vérité romanesque, Paris, Grasset. Goodstein, E. S. (2005), Experience Without Qualities: Boredom and Modernity, Stanford, Stanford University Press. James, I. (2000), Pierre Klossowski: The Persistence of a Name, Oxford, Legenda. Jayamanne, L. (2001), ‘Va Savoir! (Who Knows!, 2001, Jacques Rivette)’, Senses of Cinema, 2, 20, available at http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/02/20/ va_savoir.html (accessed 23 April 2006). Jousse, T. (2001), ‘Personnages en quête d’auteur’, Cahiers du cinéma, 558. Kaganski, S. (2001), ‘Manège enchanté’, Les Inrockuptibles, 9 October. Lagache, D. (1997 [1947]), La Jalousie amoureuse: Psychologie descriptive et psychanalyse, Paris: Quadrige/P.U.F. Legrand, G. (1991), ‘De la beauté comme labyrinthe: La Belle Noiseuse’, Positif, 367, 6–9. Macia, J.-L. (1991), ‘Aux sources du chef-d’œuvre’, La Croix, 1 September. Nancy, J.-L. (2003), Noli me tangere: Essai sur la levée du corps, Paris, Bayard. Nancy, J.-L. (2006), Corpus, Paris: Métailié. Rabine, H. (1969), ‘L’Amour fou’, La Croix, 21 January. Rivette, J. (1968), ‘Entretien’, Le Monde, 2 October. Rivette, J. (1999 [1968]), ‘Le temps déborde’, in Antoine de Baecque and Charles Tesson (eds.), La Nouvelle Vague: Claude Chabrol, Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma, 264–314. Rivette, J. (2001), Interview, Les Inrockuptibles, 9 October. Roy, J. (1991), ‘Rivette au tableau d’honneur’, L’Humanité, 15 May. Royer, P. (2001), ‘Le petit théâtre de Jacques Rivette’, La Croix, 10 October. Seguret, O. (1983), ‘Jacques Rivette, la veille pour le lendemain’, Libération, 20 July, 18–19.

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234  jacques rivette Seguret, O. (1991), ‘Rivette, artiste peintre’, Libération, 15 May. Seguret, O. (2001), ‘Va voir Rivette’, Libération, 17 May. Silverman, K. (1988), The Acoustic Mirror: The Female Voice in Psychoanalysis and Cinema, Bloomington, Indiana University Press. Sobchack, V. (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of the Film Experience, Princeton, Princeton University Press. Sobchack, V. (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkeley, University of California Press. Sotinel, T. (2001), ‘Va savoir: Passacaille pour cœurs et corps sur une partition de Jacques Rivette’, Le Monde, 18 May. Wood, R. (1981), ‘Narrative Pleasure: Two Films of Jacques Rivette’, Film Quarterly, 35, 1, 2–12.

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9 Out of time: the unconsoled in Rivette’s late works Since his return to public prominence – and international distribution – with Va savoir in 2001, Rivette has approached filmmaking with renewed vigour. His most recent films, Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) and Ne touchez pas la hache (2007), are superficially very different – a supernatural love story and a suprisingly faithful adaptation of Balzac – even if they demonstrate continuities with trends in Rivette’s œuvre: thus Marie et Julien is, in many ways, a portrait of a jealous passion, similar to those analysed in our chapter above on ‘Bodies, love and jealousy’; while Ne touchez pas la hache belongs to Rivette’s occasional series of costume dramas marked by La Religieuse (1966), Hurlevent (1985) and Jeanne la Pucelle (1995). This chapter will seek to identify points of convergence between these two very different films and will ask whether it is possible to find, in Rivette’s work, the traces of what Edward Said (2006) has referred to as a ‘late style’. Histoire de Marie et Julien is a fantastical tale about a woman who returns from the dead to be with a lover. Rivette has remarked that he appended ‘Histoire de’ to the original title Marie et Julien in order to stress that the film belonged to the realm of the fairy tale (in Frodon 2003: 17): ‘Histoire de’ might almost be replaced by ‘Légende de’ … In discussing the film, both filmmakers and commentators have cited the work of Jean Cocteau, one of the very few French directors to deal in the fantastic. Meanwhile, Richard Porton, remembering Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974), has called Histoire de Marie et Julien ‘an almost Jamesian ghost story’ (Porton 2003: 15). Rivette’s film dutifully ‘quotes’ much of the iconography of the fantastical genre, as classified by Jean-Louis Leutrat in his 1995 volume Vie des fantômes: there is an

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236  jacques rivette omnipresent, and very jittery, cat, named Nevermore with a nod to Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Raven’; clocks tick and chime throughout the film – Julien (Jerzy Radziwilowicz) repairs antique time pieces and his home is full of these objects that Marie (Emmanuelle Béart) describes as resembling ‘torture devices’; much of the suspense revolves around Marie’s mysterious goings-on in a disused attic room where mirrors are covered up; as is frequently the case in supernatural or horrific tales, there is an equivalence between tears and blood (Leutrat 1995: 57), Marie’s inability to cry or bleed marking her uncertain status in the limbo between life and death, the final flow of tears and blood signalling her apparent deliverance; finally, much of the film, especially the scenes in Julien’s house, are shot in heavy shadow – Marie’s surname in the film is Delambre, only a nasal vowel away from ‘de l’ombre’: from the shadows. Rivette’s work with sound is also crucial in generating the sinister atmosphere of this film. The sound design is subtle, and largely naturalistic, but there are occasional sounds whose source may or may not be diegetic, or at least whose source is not visible – acousmatic sounds, in the sense defined by Michel Chion (1982: 26) – that allow a degree of unease to grow with the passage of the film. The film’s opening credits are accompanied by the sound of passing traffic, which might reasonably be heard from the park where Julien is asleep in the first scene; yet, alongside this traffic noise, there grows, and then fades, a peculiar, echoing drone. When Julien first meets Madame X (Anne Brochet), a woman he is blackmailing, a series of high-pitched squeals punctuate their conversation, although neither character appears to notice or react to the sound. It might conceivably be the squeaking of a gate or the sound of a vehicle’s brakes, but the frequency of its interruptions, and its variable duration and intensity undermines such a hypothesis and the noise adds a further layer of uncertainty and tension to the scene. The disturbing presence of Marie in Julien’s life and home appears initially as sound, as when Julien returns home to hear the incongruous sound of Italian shouting from upstairs, eventually attributed to a radio; or when the sound of running water is traced to taps left on in Marie’s absence. Surprising, but not entirely unrealistic sounds are also heard during some of Marie and Julien’s love scenes: running water, again, or an improbably loud wind. Elsewhere it is the memory of a sound that proves chilling. Evelyne Jardonnet has accurately pointed out that even the

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rivette’s late works   237 most insignificant of secondary roles in Rivette’s films can take on a power to disturb the narrative and the viewer (Jardonnet 2006: 286). In Histoire de Marie et Julien, it is a brief performance by Mathias Jung that generates perhaps the film’s most unsettling sequence. Julien goes to visit Marie’s last known address where the concierge, played by Jung, shows him to her apartment. Jung, with his large square face, his white bald head, his hooked nose and big chin, has the physiognomy of a classic horror actor: there is something of the Boris Karloff about him. He leads Julien into a room identical to the one that Marie has been fashioning in Julien’s attic. There, he explains, Marie was found hanging from the ceiling. As Julien, in the foreground, raises his eyes to the ceiling, the concierge is framed in the background, backlit by the dim light entering through the shuttered window, the incongruous red of his sweater picked out by the blood-red curtains. With downcast eyes and hunched shoulders, he explains how he found Marie’s body, and knew something was amiss when he heard a strange sound in the apartment: the rhythmic tck tck of a needle stuck in the run-off groove of a vinyl record. The mere evocation of this eerie sound is enough to send shivers down the spine of the spectator, even as its sense of a mechanical phenomenon at once rhythmic and stuck in a loop accords neatly with the broken clocks in Julien’s workshop, and the film’s mysterious and troubling time scheme. Histoire de Marie et Julien begins, rather like Céline et Julie, with Julien sitting, possibly sleeping, on a park bench. Marie walks past and the two excitedly remember the previous occasion they met, at a party a year ago. Suddenly Marie raises a knife. Julien wakes with his head on a table in a bar. Outside, in the street, he bumps into Marie and says he has just been dreaming of her. They arrange to meet the following day. The opening of Marie et Julien thus immediately sets up an unstable and disquieting distinction between dream and reality and, as Jean-Marc Lalanne comments: ‘La suite du récit, d’engourdissements en réveils en sursaut, se tiendra désormais dans l’entre-deux indécis et ouaté de ces deux régimes, trop explicitement désignés pour ne pas paraître totalement arbitraires’1 (Lalanne 2003: 14). In another scene, Julien comes to find Marie in a hotel where she 1 ‘The rest of the narrative, moving between periods of drowsiness and waking with a start, will all take place in the uncertain and downy space between these two states which have been too explicitly designated to appear as anything other than completely arbitrary’

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238  jacques rivette is sitting on the bed in her coat, surrounded by her suitcases. When he asks whether she has just arrived or is about to leave, Marie replies, ‘Je ne sais plus’ (I don’t know any more). The film finds its place in this undecidable gap between the always-already and the not-quite-yet, too early and too late. Just as it has two beginnings, the second casting doubt upon the reality of the first, and vice versa, Histoire de Marie et Julien has two endings. When Julien, finally appraised of Marie’s ghostly status, seeks to kill himself in order to join her in the afterlife, she resorts to the ‘forbidden gesture’, splaying her palms beside her head before crossing them in front of her face. The result is that Julien forgets all about Marie, who remains in the shot but visible only to the spectator. After she watches Julien conclude his business with Madame X, Marie begins to cry and a wound on her wrist starts to bleed freely. The subsequent fade to black seems to imply that Marie has finally been delivered unto death. Yet the scene fades back in as Julien wakes in his chair and asks ‘Quelle heure est-il?’ (What time is it?). Marie is still there, and still holding her bleeding wrist, but Julien does not recognise her and even claims that she is not at all his type. Evelyne Jardonnet has remarked that it is ‘un retour obstiné du même qui forme le terreau dans lequel s’enracine la terreur rivettienne’2 (Jardonnet 2006: 259). And the curious repetition with which Marie et Julien ends, or fails to end, just as it had struggled to begin, giving the sense of having always already begun, invites us to pose questions about the chronology of the narrative. For instance, the mysterious upstairs room in Julien’s house is the subject of narrative suspense even before Marie enters the building. In an early scene, when the cat Nevermore looks up at the ceiling, Julien asks if he has been snooping around upstairs again and, when Marie moves in, Julien informs her defensively that ‘Il n’y a rien là-haut’ (There’s nothing up there). But this anticipation of the sinister events that will unfold upstairs defies narrative logic, since Marie recreates the scene of a suicide that took place in another building entirely. Similarly, in the film’s opening scene, when discussing the party at which they met, Marie and Julien claim to remember only one word from their conversation: ‘Deliverance’. But this is a word that only makes narrative sense in the context of revenants trapped in the limbo between life and death. As such, it invites us to question whether Marie was ever other than a ghost, even 2 ‘the stubborn return of the same which forms the mulch in which Rivette’s terror takes root’

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rivette’s late works   239 though her suicide is dated at six months after the party. In this way, the film turns around itself, unable to escape its circular time scheme, as Marie is unable to escape from limbo. Other narrative lacunae can only be explained through similar circular logic. For example, why is Julien blackmailing Madame X? He has happened upon some compromising documents but there is no realistic explanation as to how he should have come into their possession. The only logical explanation is that they have been given to Julien by another ghost, Adrienne (Bettina Kee), the late sister of Madame X who harbours an angry jealousy and is seemingly trying to frame her sister for her own death. We do indeed witness Adrienne handing a letter to Marie. But why should Adrienne choose Julien to blackmail her sister, unless through the connection of fellow ghost Marie? Again, the plot circles around itself: there seems to be no outside to this narrative, no reliable way back to a fictional world of realistic relations that would pre-exist the film’s ghost logic. In his workshop, Julien teaches Marie to hear the difference between a healthy, isochronal clock and a broken clock ‘qui boite’ (which limps). Histoire de Marie et Julien itself seems to be stuck in this stumbling, asynchronous time, a time that is, in the words of Hamlet, ‘out of joint’. Jean-Louis Leutrat points out that time that appears frozen, or split, or circular is a common feature of ghost narratives, ‘car le temps est spectral et les spectres viennent moins du passé qu’ils ne sont enchâssés dans le présent et qu’ils témoignent auprès de nous d’un avenir en souffrance. Les fantômes sont des émanations du temps, ils résultent de sa propension à se dédoubler, à se hanter lui-même’3 (Leutrat 1995: 16). Time is always already double because a present moment immediately gives rise to a past, and that past anticipates a future that will take its place. As Jacques Derrida comments, the present only ever has a spectral presence as the instant between that which has already gone and that which is not yet here. In a sense, he suggests, time is always and necessarily out of joint since it can never catch up to itself (Derrida 1993: 42, 52). One consequence of this is the impossibility for the self ever to coincide with itself – the self becomes doubled into a past and future self which effectively 3 ‘because time is spectral and spectres don’t so much come from the past but are embedded in the present and bear witness to a future that hasn’t yet arrived. Ghosts are emanations from time, they are a result of its propensity to double itself, to haunt itself’

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240  jacques rivette haunts itself. This is Derrida’s conclusion: to be is to be haunted – ‘je suis hanté par moi-même qui suis …’4 (Derrida 1993: 212). In this sense, ghosts are a reality, or at least a certain spectrality or ghostliness is the reality of human experience: since everything we learn necessarily takes place in the space between past and future, between life and death, between self and other, learning to live, for Derrida, can effectively be understood as learning to live with ghosts (Derrida 1993: 14–15). Jean-Louis Leutrat further points out that ghosts and ghostliness are not only the preserve of fantastic or horror films but are central to the operation of cinema. The cinema presents a double of reality, but it is a double that is evanescent, translucent, without the thickness of real life. Apparition and disappearance have been among the favoured themes of cinema: Leutrat notes that the co-existence of two worlds, one on the wane, and the other beginning to emerge, has provided a central structuring opposition to key cinematic genres like the western and science fiction (Leutrat 1995: 10). At the same time, cinema has been obsessed with repetition and return, constantly appealing to the same characters, the same actors, the same stories and themes, with the themes of repetition and doubling themselves featuring in some of the medium’s most auspicious successes, such as Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958). ‘Le dédoublement est au cœur du métier d’acteur,’ writes Leutrat, ‘comme toute image est un double du visible que je vois’5 (Leutrat 1995: 64). Such eerie repetitions, ghosts and echoes of the past are common in Rivette’s late works, not just within the diegesis but between the individual films and Rivette’s earlier works. Both Histoire de Marie et Julien and Ne touchez pas la hache take up ideas or inspirations from previous decades of Rivette’s filmmaking life. We have already noted that the involuted narrative of Marie et Julien bears some passing resemblance to Céline et Julie vont en bateau. As a matter of fact, the film finds its origins in the 1970s, having been originally planned as a third instalment of ‘Scènes de la vie parallèle’ following Duelle and Noroît (both 1976). Marie et Julien, as it was to be called, began shooting in the autumn of 1975 – Leslie Caron and Albert Finney 4 ‘I am haunted by myself who is …’. As ‘je suis’ means both ‘I am’ and ‘I follow’, Derrida’s formulation also contains the ambiguous sense: ‘I am haunted by myself who is/who follows’ 5 ‘Doubling is at the heart of the actor’s trade’, ‘just as every image is a double of the visible world I see’

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rivette’s late works   241 were to play the leads. But Rivette, exhausted from the back-to-back shooting of the two previous films earlier that summer, abandoned the set and, as legend has it, ‘disappeared’ for two years. Histoire de Marie et Julien thus bears the scars of this difficult time, and the film’s evocation of a ‘parallel’ world or dimension recalls those of Duelle, in particular, notably in the short scenes where Marie and Adrienne meet in an indeterminate space surrounded by golden stained glass (as in the 1970s films, this parallel world adjoins seamlessly to the normal world through the magic of editing: Marie exits Julien’s bedroom and enters this strange, other space in a single cut). Ne touchez pas la hache, meanwhile, is an adaptation of Balzac’s novel La Duchesse de Langeais (1834), one of the three volumes that make up his Histoire des treize, whose prologue provided the idea for the secret society at the heart of Out 1 (1970). If the recent costume drama is superficially worlds apart from that modish improvisational epic, Antoine Thirion points out that, in fact, the resemblances are many: ‘goût pour les confréries secrètes, les mystères et les pièges; récits de persécution, femmes tour à tour impérieuses et sadisées, hommes tantôt manipulateurs, tantôt abusés; rigueur morale comiquement soumise à des ajustements; manipulation ludique du temps’6 (Thirion 2007: 10). Furthermore, as critics were quick to point out, the finale of Ne touchez pas la hache, in which a team of sea-bound men seek to kidnap the duchess from a remote, cliff-top convent, recalls the gleeful pirate games of Noroît. At the same time, the early scenes, in which Armand de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu) addresses the cloistered duchess (Jeanne Balibar) from behind a screen, are particularly reminiscent of La Religieuse. Rivette’s tendency to re-use the same actors further complicates this play of echoes. Jerzy Radziwilowicz comes to Histoire de Marie et Julien with his already rather menacing persona from Secret Défense (1998), while Nicole Garcia, in a minor role, is a survivor from the time of Duelle. Emmanuelle Béart, meanwhile, is a revenant from La Belle Noiseuse (1991), her body appearing disconcertingly the same yet different, following the actress’s cosmetic enhancement. Ne touchez pas la hache reprises Balibar from Va savoir, Michel Piccoli from La Belle Noiseuse and Rivette regular Bulle Ogier. Guillaume Depardieu, though appearing for the first time in Rivette, is at times 6 ‘a taste for secret fraternities, mysteries and traps; tales of persecution, women who are now imperious, now tortured, men now manipulative, now abused; a moral rigour subject to comic adjustments; a ludic manipulation of time’

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242  jacques rivette uncannily reminiscent of his father Gérard incarnating a similarly displaced Napoleonic officer in another Balzac adaptation, Le Colonel Chabert (Yves Angelo, 1994). Yet, if these two late films clearly have numerous parallels to earlier works, they also strike the viewer as singular in such a way that they encourage us to reconsider Rivette’s œuvre as a whole. As JeanMichel Frodon writes, Ne touchez pas la hache is a film ‘d’une force et d’une prestance peu communes, d’un maintien si singulier qu’on ne sait trop à quoi le comparer, y compris dans l’œuvre de Jacques Rivette’7 (Frodon 2007: 8). The singularity of Rivette’s late work is perhaps to be found in the bare, stripped down nature of the films’ narratives and characters. With just a couple of minor additions (the cameos already mentioned for Nicole Garcia and Mathias Jung), the dramatis personae of Histoire de Marie et Julien consists essentially of the eponymous couple, together with Madame X and her sister Adrienne, whose ghost story illuminates that of Marie and Julien. Ne touchez pas la hache, meanwhile, is basically a two-header, the more populous prologue and epilogue to the film book-ending the substance of the narrative in which all other characters – domestic staff, relatives, society ladies and gentlemen – appear only as distractions from the duchess and Montriveau’s intense, unwavering focus on each other. But it is Rivette’s style too that is pared down to the essential. Ginette Vincendeau describes how the seemingly lurid events of Marie et Julien’s narrative are ‘couched in the most uncompromisingly minimalist European art cinema mode’ (Vincendeau 2004: 56). Evelyne Jardonnet (2006: 259) points out that Rivette’s aesthetic is based on precision and that terror, when it inhabits his films, is not achieved through special effects or through dissimulation but through clear and precise presence (2006: 282). In this way, he is able to achieve lasting emotional and psychological impact with apparently little effort. As Philippe Azoury puts it, Rivette is ‘l’homme qui fait les films avec l’air de ne pas y toucher’8 (Azoury 2007). The style of Ne touchez pas la hache partakes of this simplicity. A costume drama made with minimal resources – Rivette has described the enterprise as like trying to make The Leopard (Visconti, 1963) for FF 3.50 (Rivette 2007) –, the film deliberately avoids what 7 ‘of such uncommon force and bearing, of such singular deportment that it is difficult to know what to compare it to, even within Jacques Rivette’s own work’ 8 ‘the man who makes films without appearing to touch anything’

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rivette’s late works   243 Frodon calls the ‘codes of seduction’ of the heritage film (Frodon 2007: 9). It is a still, measured film, the scenes generally shot from a sober distance of medium or full shot, the camera generally only moving if the characters do. Although shot in period costume and interiors, there is little attempt to underline the value of these props. Not for Rivette the self-congratulatory crane shots over expensive exterior locations or tracks through stately homes; for most sets, only a single, sparsely-furnished room will be used, the rest of the property barely glimpsed through an open doorway. Might it then be possible, given these clear stylistic choices, to identify a ‘late style’ in Rivette’s work? The notion of late style has recently been explored by Edward Said who elaborates the concept based on Theodor Adorno’s analyses of the late musical works by Beethoven. Late style, for Said, would designate works that are situated at the end of an artistic life and career but that, rather than demonstrating a ‘spirit of reconciliation and serenity’ are characterised by ‘intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contra­diction’ (Said 2006: 7). Although late works may pick up themes from earlier in an artistic career and are prepared by a lifetime of technical effort, they stand somewhat apart from the rest of the œuvre, ‘unreconciled, uncoopted by a higher synthesis’ (Said 2006: 12). ‘Unreconciled’ seems an apt word to describe Rivette’s most recent films. Whether or not it describes the relation of the films to others in Rivette’s œuvre, it certainly seems to capture the character relations within the films: the restless spirits of Marie and Adrienne, unable or unwilling to relinquish their claims to mortal life; and the turbulent passions of Montriveau and the Duchesse de Langeais, not prepared to surrender their pursuit of the other, even in the face of repeated refusals, unbearable cruelty and indefinite disappearance. This seems, in retrospect, one of the most consistent themes in all of Rivette’s work: personal relations – often between couples but also frequently between family members – that have somehow missed their moment and are condemned forever to try and catch up with each other. JeanMarc Lalanne suggests that the fantastic, in Histoire de Marie et Julien is, in the end, little more than a sophisticated MacGuffin, that the film is, above all, the extended and remorseless autopsy of a couple (Lalanne 2003: 15). At any rate, the ghost stories that provide the film’s most significant cultural intertexts – Vertigo, Hitchcock’s adaptation of Du Maurier’s Rebecca (1940), Poe’s story ‘Ligeia’ – are all works

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244  jacques rivette that deal in the disturbing persistence of love – or erotic obsession – beyond death. Histoire de Marie et Julien is, then, first and foremost, a film about a couple. But which couple, and why? It is striking, upon reflection, how little we really know about Marie and Julien and their own relationship. They met a year ago at a party, though neither seems to remember much about the occasion (aside from the premonitory word ‘Deliverance’), and certainly neither speaks of love at first sight. Now they are together again, but it is almost as though they adopt the signifiers of a relationship – having sex, moving in together, making jealous scenes about former lovers – without any of the warmth or companionship that this should imply. This is, we suggest, not a failure of acting, casting or screen chemistry, but rather a deliberate choice on the part of the filmmakers to represent an absence at the heart of the couple, or a relationship that turns around an absent other. This other is sometimes a former partner: Marie grows jealous of Estelle, Julien’s former lover who has returned to Montauban leaving her clothes in the wardrobe and her scents in the bathroom. Meanwhile, Julien gradually learns about Marie’s ex-boyfriend Simon, as Lalanne puts it, ‘grand absent et véritable spectre du film’9 (Lalanne 2003: 14). Various witnesses – Marie’s former employer and a friend, the concierge – explain that Marie and Simon made a strikingly handsome couple but that their relationship became mutually destructive. Delphine (Nicole Garcia) claims that they were not so much partners as prisoners of each other, driven mad by the tyrannical image of beauty that they reflected to one another, but meanwhile, ‘il ne se passait rien entre eux, rien’.10 Perhaps the greatest mystery of Histoire de Marie et Julien, never explicitly formulated within the film, is why Marie should be haunting Julien rather than Simon. We discover that she killed herself after mutilating her face with a knife, seemingly in order to frame Simon for murder. In this sense, her suicide, like Adrienne’s, was what screenwriter Pascal Bonitzer calls an ‘assassinat par procuration’ (murder by proxy) (in Frodon 2003: 19). If Adrienne thus returns to seek reconciliation with her sister, why should Marie haunt Julien? Perhaps because Simon is himself now dead, killed in a road accident. Nonetheless, there remains a curious mismatch in Marie and Julien’s relationship. Lalanne suggests that, following her destructive passion 9 ‘the missing piece and the real ghost of the film’ 10 ‘there was nothing between them, nothing’

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rivette’s late works   245 with Simon, Marie seeks comfort from Julien precisely because he is so different, ‘une figure rassurante de compagnon, un homme sans narcissisme, une pure instance protectrice’11 (Lalanne 2003: 14). Yet there is, in a sense, no more substance to this relationship than to the previous one. Madame X tells Julien, ‘Vous l’aimez, elle vous aime, vous ne savez rien sur elle’12 while Marie cries, ‘Il y a un abîme entre toi et moi et je ne sais pas comment le franchir’.13 In this sense, Marie’s ghostlike status can be read as metaphorical, and not just, as Ginette Vincendeau laments, for the old cliché of the ‘unknowable woman’ (Vincendeau 2004: 56). Histoire de Marie et Julien captures with precision the way in which a love relationship will turn around an image of love that is in the past: the moment of falling in love is an irretrievable memory that continues to haunt a relationship, becoming, in some cases, the focus of that relationship at the expense of the partners’ real, ongoing knowledge of each other. It is in this way that a love story becomes – but in a sense is perhaps always already – a ghost story. This impression of a troubling and unreachable otherness in the sexual partner is forcefully conveyed in the astonishing love scenes of Histoire de Marie et Julien. Critics were surprised by the carnal intensity of these scenes from a director so notoriously bashful, even prudish, as Rivette. Jean-Marc Lalanne goes as far as to class the sex scenes among ‘les plus belles et les plus inventives vues au cinéma’14 (Lalanne 2003: 14). But, although the scenes contain nudity, they are shocking not for their visual explicitness, but for the free rein given to fantasy and the imagination. As Emmanuelle Béart has commented, it is the voice, it is words that lead the movement of bodies in these scenes (in Frodon 2003: 20). The most powerful of these sequences are, above all, examples of storytelling, which has always had a large place in Rivette’s cinema. In one, Marie and Julien tell each other the story of ‘the forest’. The scene is shot in medium close-up and, although the couple hold and caress each other’s bodies, they adopt none of the conventional positions of intercourse; instead, the erotic charge of the scene is transferred to their words. Taking it in turns to speak a line or two at a time, Marie and Julien tell a story in which she 11 ‘a reassuring companion figure, a man without narcissism, a pure example of protection’ 12 ‘You love her, she loves you, yet you know nothing about her’ 13 ‘There is a gulf between us and I don’t know how to cross it’ 14 ‘the most beautiful and inventive ever seen in the cinema’

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246  jacques rivette is a woman lost in a forest, her dress torn and her feet bleeding, who meets a dirty man with butcher’s hands who leads her deeper into the forest, through brambles and thorns to a cabin where he ties her to an iron bed laid with nettles. For Lalanne, the scene suggests that sex is the grown-up equivalent of the fairy story told before bed, with its requisite portion of mystery and fear, ‘une histoire pour femmeenfant terrorisée lorsque tombe la nuit’15 (Lalanne 2003: 15). In another, more violent scene, where the couple pull each other across the bed in more conventional sexual poses, Marie styles herself as a ‘warrior’ and the lovers enact a mutually carnivorous battle. Marie’s sex, they agree, has the smell of damp earth. However awkward such scenes may have felt for Rivette on set (as Béart testifies, in Porton 2003: 16), they have a force on screen that belies any bashfulness. As Edward Said has written: The one thing that is difficult to find in [late] work is embarrassment, even though [the artists] are egregiously self-conscious and supreme technicians. It is as if having achieved age, they want none of its supposed serenity or maturity, or any of its amiability or official ingratiation. Yet in none of them is mortality denied or evaded, but keeps coming back as the theme of death which undermines, and strangely elevates their uses of language and the aesthetic. (Said 2006: 114)

For all its differences of period, genre and players, Ne touchez pas la hache shares some fundamental similarities with Histoire de Marie et Julien. If Marie and Julien’s relationship can sometimes come across as a curiously unmotivated or unexplained, a strangely centreless connection, then so too can the passion that unites the Duchesse de Langeais and Armand de Montriveau. In the film, as in Balzac’s novel, each partner determines to win the other after a single, brief meeting, and seemingly more out of a kind of challenge to the self than from desire for the other. Antoinette de Langeais has no intention of becoming Montriveau’s lover, but seeks to elicit from him the signs of his devotion because he is, as her friend points out, ‘à la mode’. The duchess thus initiates a curiously cold and objectless seduction; the French philosopher Alain has commented about the character that she is equipped with ‘un artifice de grande envergure, mais sans projet’16 (Alain 1935: 95). Yet Armand de Montriveau, 15 ‘a story for a child-woman terrorised by nightfall’ 16 ‘an artifice of great scope, but without a project’

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rivette’s late works   247 though more simple and honest, makes an equally arbitrary pledge when he promises himself, after their first meeting, ‘J’aurai pour maîtresse la Duchesse de Langeais’.17 The couple’s passion, it thus appears, comes not from any initial attraction but is kindled and fed by the subsequent strategies of seduction and defence that each employs in their lengthy and heated discussions which turn around the never explicitly stated stake of Montriveau’s carnal possession of the duchess. This is, then, a peculiarly abstract relation – Balzac at one point offers an almost algebraic formulation of their unbalanced equation, she constantly thinking while feeling nothing, he feeling too much to think (Balzac 1976: 149). At the same time, though, there is a kind of animal immediacy to their passion: Montriveau is compared, several times, to a lion or an eagle; the duchess, threatened with Montriveau’s vengeance, is compared to a woman on her knees before a stampeding horse (Balzac 1976: 166–7). It is this imagery that allows for the sudden shift in tone in Balzac’s narrative, from an analytical drama of society morals to the most lurid of melodramas, and finally to the almost swashbuckling adventure of the epilogue. Rivette has stated (in Douin 2007) that it was a desire to find a cinematic equivalent to this style of Balzac’s, with its abrupt and disconcerting changes in rhythm, that attracted him to the adaptation of La Duchesse de Langeais. As Jonathan Romney points out (2008: 67), Rivette matches Balzac’s ‘tonal discontinuity’ in the menacing sequence in which Montriveau kidnaps the recalcitrant duchess and threatens to brand her forehead with a red-hot iron. Here, suggests Jean-Michel Frodon (2007: 9), and as in Histoire de Marie et Julien, the love story spills into the domain of horror, but without the trappings of the genre. As critics have pointed out (Douin 2007; Frodon 2007: 9), Rivette has largely evacuated the political considerations from La Duchesse de Langeais. Rivette reclaims Balzac’s original title, Ne touchez pas la hache, but its allegorical significance is arguably diminished. The axe in question is that which decapitated Charles I, subject of the sinister prohibition by the executioner in the Tower of London, which becomes a chilling threat voiced by Montriveau to the duchess. This reference to regicide is thoroughly pertinent within the context of La Duchesse de Langeais since Balzac’s novel constitutes a lesson 17 ‘I will have the Duchesse de Langeais for my mistress’

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248  jacques rivette about political power and class privilege set against the tumultuous French history of Revolution, Empire and Restoration. Specifically, the Duchesse de Langeais appears as a metonymic representative of her aristocratic class, too selfish and frivolous to command the respect of, and the right to lead, the people. Balzac argues that noble families, ruined by the Revolution, focused exclusively on restoring their own wealth and position, without concern for the health and stability of ‘la grande famille aristocratique’ (Balzac 1976: 80). Such considerations, expressed through authorial interjections and a lengthy excursus on the nature and politics of the faubourg Saint-Germain, could not easily be transposed to the screen. On the contrary, the scope of Rivette’s adaptation is so drastically reduced, the focus so intense upon the two central protagonists, that the surrounding society all but disappears. Society, in Ne touchez pas la hache, is almost akin to the secret society in Balzac’s Histoire des treize: Balzac’s Thirteen is the ghost of an idea, sketched out in the prologue and all but forgotten in the novels making up the trilogy, glimpsed in occasional exploits such as the kidnapping of the duchess. But in Ne touchez pas la hache, the secret society – marginal, shadowy figures glimpsed through a doorway, masked and tending the brasier to heat the duchess’s brand – is hardly less present than the rest of society, espied only occasionally through doorways into other rooms, existing on the fringes of Armand and Antoinette’s urgent interviews. In Rivette, society itself has become the secret, a conspiracy seeking to prevent the union of the two lovers. It is worth remembering, though, that Balzac’s political analysis is already gendered, with the effect that the burden of his social statement is nonetheless carried by the relationship between Montriveau and the Duchess. For, in Balzac’s frequently objectionable rhetoric, the people is cast as a woman, and women are capricious creatures who need to be steered with a firm hand (that is, the people require stern guidance from the aristocracy). The full sense of Balzac’s narrative, both as political allegory and as sexual melodrama, is contained in the following lines: ‘il faut tout faire vouloir au peuple, même son bonheur, et … la France, femme capricieuse, veut être heureuse ou battue à son gré’18 (Balzac 1976: 81). What Rivette’s film perhaps adds to this sexual-political agenda is a subtlety born paradoxically of the 18 ‘the people must be made to want everything, including their happiness, and France – a capricious lady – will be happy or will be beaten, as she pleases’

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rivette’s late works   249 fact that Montriveau and the Duchess’s relationship is grounded in the very real bodies of two actors. For, where Balzac’s central relationship remains somewhat abstract, the passion between Armand and Antoinette in the film is convincingly conveyed by the remarkable performances of Depardieu and Balibar. It is thus the gazes exchanged by the two characters that carries the charge of desire otherwise abstracted from Balzac’s descriptions. In her first appearance as the society Duchess (i.e. following the prologue in the convent), Balibar’s performance is initially wordless, her character’s social superiority conveyed through movement and smiles, gestures and glances. It is the sight of Montriveau – initially in a gaze off-screen front-right, as the Duchess stops listening to her friend – that changes her countenance, introducing a stillness and pallor to her face. Later, her gaze moves from his eyes to his clasped hands as he tells the story of his African desert ordeal, and the Duchess’s attraction to the soldier takes on an immediacy and an evidence that is absent from Balzac. At the same time, though, the sensitivity of the performances is able to convey the delicate shifts in the balance of power in this relationship. Thus, when Armand enacts his cruel vengeance on the Duchess, his dishevelled, pale appearance and his choked, lachrymose voice belie his adopted posture of casual contempt. Then too, when Armand threatens the Duchess with the firebrand, her gaze – open-mouthed in a sort of sexual ecstasy – demonstrates that sexual power is rarely a simple one-way exertion of will: when she looks at Armand it is lustily, and with a hint of triumph, having understood that this branding, designed as an outright rejection of the Duchess, instead seals them together as one another’s most intimate property: ‘Quand tu auras ainsi désigné une femme pour la tienne …, tu ne pourras jamais l’abandonner, tu seras à jamais à moi’19 (Balzac 1976: 182). The film thus becomes, as Jacques Mandelbaum points out, a series of ‘rendezvous manqués à la fois entre les personnages, mais aussi entre les personnages et l’Histoire’20 (in Rivette 2007). When Armand’s ardour is at its peak, the Duchess teases him disinterestedly; it is only when he turns his back on her that she is compelled to love him, making public displays of her affection that threaten to compromise her 19 ‘Once you have marked a woman as yours in such a way, you will never be able to abandon her, you will forever be mine’ 20 ‘missed appointments both between the characters, and between the characters and History’

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250  jacques rivette position, prompting the Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry (Bulle Ogier) to tell her, ‘Tu es de deux siècles en arrière avec ta fausse grandeur’21 (Balzac 1976: 216). She writes to Montriveau with a final ultimatum but he misses the rendez-vous, detained by garrulous friends and a stopped clock – this scene, as Jonathan Romney notes (2008: 67) is ‘suspensefully extended’ in the film through intercutting, compared to Balzac’s original in which Montriveau’s tragically missed date with destiny is casually dispatched in a half-sentence. Finally, having found the cloistered Duchess after years of searching, Montriveau arranges her abduction only to find her dead upon his arrival in the convent. A lover’s ultimatum missed because of an innocent misunderstanding over the time; a potentially beautiful relationship that thereby ends in tragedy: the dramatic climax of Ne touchez pas la hache is, in its way, uncannily similar to Paris nous appartient (1961). Rivette’s cinema is full of such missed opportunities, of emotions and attachments that have seen their chance pass by and are cut adrift in various kinds of limbo. Anne and Gérard’s inability to recognise the other’s love in time. Sébastien and Claire’s mutual destruction of their relationship through failed communication. Colin and Frédérique seeking to integrate a secret society after its brief utopian window of existence has been and gone. Céline and Julie trying to understand a ­household irretrievably condemned to the past and to a destructive cycle of mistrust and betrayal. Clément Roquemaure, paying to transform his own home into a theatre for the performance of a relationship long since dead. Cathy and Roch, bruising each other in their frustrated inability to return to the innocent perfection of their first relationship. Louise waking from a coma to discover her father’s identity dissolved in scandal. Sylvie Rousseau, understanding too little of a childhood tragedy, seeking revenge against the wrong man and instead killing an innocent woman, only to become, herself, the victim of this woman’s double. If late style, in Edward Said’s definition, is constituted by a certain refusal of the representational codes ascribed by timeliness (that is, subjects deemed appropriate for old age), then Rivette’s late work is, on the contrary, curiously timely in raising untimeliness to the centre of his filmic construction. Rivette’s latest films are not, in the end, so different in subject, style, or tone from his earlier work: what sets them apart is the purity of their design, the 21 ‘You’re two centuries out of date with your false grandeur’

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single-mindedness with which this problematic of the untimely takes centre stage, allowing Rivette to film, with more conviction than ever before, both the intensity of erotic passion and the pain of unrequited longing. ‘This is the prerogative of late style’, as Said has it, ‘the power to render disenchantment and pleasure without resolving the contradiction between them’ (Said 2006: 148).

References Alain (1935), En lisant Balzac, Paris, Les Laboratoires Martinet. Azoury, P. (2007), ‘“La Hache”, à l’amour comme à la guerre’, Libération, 28 March. Balzac, H. de (1976), La Duchesse de Langeais, La Fille aux yeux d’or, Paris, Gallimard. Chion, M. (1982), La Voix au cinéma, Paris, Éditions de l’Étoile/Cahiers du cinéma. Derrida, J. (1993), Spectres de Marx: L’État de la dette, le travail du deuil et la nouvelle Internationale, Paris, Galilée. Douin, J.-L. (2007), ‘Ne touchez pas la hache: filmer la passion qui torture’, Le Monde, 27 March. Frodon, J.-M. (2003), ‘Ce sont les mots qui animent le mouvement des corps’, Cahiers du cinéma, 584, 16–20. Frodon, J.-M. (2007), ‘Sauvagerie de Jacques Rivette’, Cahiers du cinéma, 621, 8–9. Jardonnet, E. (2006), Poétique de la singularité au cinéma: Une lecture croisée de Jacques Rivette et Maurice Pialat, Paris, L’Harmattan. Lalanne, J.-M. (2003), ‘Un couple’, Cahiers du cinéma, 584, 14–15. Leutrat, J.-L. (1995), Vie des fantômes: Le fantastique au cinéma, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma. Porton, R. (2003), ‘Acting as the Joy of Discovery: An Interview with Emmanuelle Béart’, Cineaste, 29, 1, 15–17. Rivette, J. (2007), ‘Comment fait-on Le Guépard avec 3,50 francs?’, Le Monde, 27 March. Romney, J. (2008), ‘Don’t Touch the Axe’, Sight & Sound, 18, 1, 67–8. Said, E. W. (2006), On Late Style, London, Bloomsbury. Thirion, A. (2007), ‘Étourdissant’, Cahiers du cinéma, 621, 10–11. Vincendeau, G. (2004), ‘Histoire de Marie et Julien’, Sight & Sound, 14, 10, 56.

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Conclusion

Jacques Rivette’s filmmaking career has now spanned nearly fifty years, during which he has developed, and pursued with remarkable consistency, an extremely individual trajectory which has made his output, and indeed his position in French cinema, unique even among his colleagues of the New Wave and its attendant currents. An extremely discreet figure, he has never been an overt polemicist for experiment after the manner of Godard, and he has remained faithful to the cinematic medium and to the fictional format: on the other hand he has neither embraced, nor by and large been embraced by, the mainstream and his work has consistently questioned the form and functioning of fiction on the screen. If one guiding principle might be said to have animated his career, it is perhaps curiosity: ‘Le jour où la curiosité disparaît’, he said to Serge Daney in 1990, ‘il n’y a plus qu’à se coucher et attendre le dernier soupir, je crois que la curiosité c’est la seule chose qui fait bouger, qui fait agir, dans tous les domaines’1 (Rivette 1990: 37). His first years in Paris, working on the Cahiers staff, were characterised by the development of an encyclopaedic film culture to serve as the raw material for his constant probing explorations of the meaning of the film medium: Chapter 1 has revealed the extent of his engagement with the ethics of cinema’s aesthetic and the demands he made of the films he saw and, later, of himself as filmmaker. His career has also been characterised by a more general intellectual curiosity which led him to seek out 1 ‘The day when curiosity disappears there’s nothing left but to lie down and wait for our last breath, I believe that curiosity is the one thing which makes us move, which makes us act, in all areas of life’.

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conclusion   253 Roland Barthes, Claude Lévi-Strauss and Pierre Boulez to interview them for Cahiers, and to cultivate a particular interest in experiments going forward in other artistic fields, especially theatre and music. All these contacts have left their mark on his films. On the other hand, as Daney quickly observed, Rivette’s system of storytelling depends explicitly on evoking curiosity in others: the audience must be drawn into the film by their need to know what happens in the next shot, or the next scene, and ‘je pense que Schéhérazade est la patronne de toutes les personnes qui essaient de jouer avec la fiction’2 (Rivette 1990: 38). The compulsion to go on a little further, not so much to reach the end of the story as to see what lies beyond the next bend, is a strong force allying filmmaker and audience throughout Rivette’s frequently very long films. Part of that compulsion is drawn from their frequent recourse to hints of a secret which the meanders of the film may gradually reveal: we may sense that the secret is as much a mystery to the storyteller as to the audience, that it exerts the same powerful and indeterminate fascination over both, and that it is not just its revelation but its very existence which is uncertain, but the ambiguity is all the more intriguing. This fundamental motif, discussed in Chapter 2, might be said to provide a pattern for the unfolding not only of individual films but also of Rivette’s œuvre as a whole. The sequence of his films, in their considerable variety – improvisations, experimental performances, adaptations of canonical literature, or carefully scripted dramas – constitutes the twisting course of an enquiry into the (secret?) nature of the fictions that make up not only cinema but our experience of our lives. The work is made coherent by a number of themes which recur, like potentially fruitful leads, in the course of this enquiry. The places within which we live, how they determine our movements and what they may have to reveal in the exploration of the hidden crannies, are fundamental to his films; as is the nature of play and of theatre, or the necessity, and the impossibility, of knowing other people in their physical presence and their subjective autonomy. In this book we have attempted to follow Rivette in his explorations of a number of such leads, and to indicate the sense which he makes of them, both regarding his own activity as filmmaker and his – and our – relation to the world which he films and experiences. As of the 2 ‘I think Scheherazade is the patron saint of everyone who tries to play with fiction’

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time of writing the investigation is ongoing: a project, as yet untitled, for a new Rivette film (uniting Sergio Castellitto and Jane Birkin) is announced for 2009. In the true spirit of Rivette’s films, therefore, we propose at most a provisional conclusion to a work which is still, necessarily, in progress.

Reference Rivette, Jacques (1990), ‘Le Veilleur: Entretien avec Serge Daney’, filmed by Claire Denis, reprinted in Daniela Giuffrida, Sergio Toffetti (ed.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Torino: Museo nazionale del Cinema di Torino/ Centre Culturel Français de Turin, 29–40.

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Filmography

Le Coup du berger (1956) 30 min., b/w Production company: Les Films de la Pléiade Producer: Claude Chabrol, Pierre Braunberger Screenplay: Charles Bitsch, Claude Chabrol, François Truffaut, Jacques Rivette Photography: Charles Bitsch Editing: Denise de Casabianca Principal actors: Virginie Vitry (Claire), Étienne Loinod (i.e. Jacques Doniol-Valcroze – Jean, the husband), Jean-Claude Brialy (Claude, the lover), Anne Doat (Solange, the sister), Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Claude de Givray, Claude Chabrol, Robert Lachenay (party guests) Paris nous appartient (1961) 140 min., b/w Production company: Les Films du Carrosse, AJYM Producer: François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol Screenplay: Jean Gruault, Jacques Rivette Photography: Charles Bitsch Editing: Denise de Casabianca Sound: Christian Hackspill Principal actors: Betty Schneider (Anne Goupil), Giani Esposito (Gérard Lenz), Françoise Prévost (Terry Yordan), Daniel Croheim (Philip Kauffman), Françoise Maistre (Pierre), Jean-Claude Brialy (Jean-Marc), Jean-Marie Robain (de Georges)

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Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Denis Diderot (1966) 135 min., col. Production company: Rome-Paris Films Producer: Georges de Beauregard Screenplay: Jean Gruault, Jacques Rivette Photography: Alain Levent Editing: Denise de Casabianca Sound: Guy Villette Principal actors: Anna Karina (Suzanne Simonin), Micheline Presle (Madame de Moni), Francine Bergé (sœur sainte Christine), Liselotte Pulver (Madame de Chelles), Francisco Rabal (Dom Morel), Christiane Lénier (Madame Simonin), Charles Millot (Monsieur Simonin) Jean Renoir le Patron (1966) Three programmes, 94 min., 90 min., 70 min., b/w Production company: ORTF Photography: Pierre Mareschal Editing: Jean Eustache Sound: Guy Solignac Principal actors: Jean Renoir, Michel Simon, Marcel Dalio, Pierre Braunberger, Catherine Rouvel, Charles Blavette L’Amour fou (1969) 250 min., b/w Production company: Sogexportfilm Producer: Georges de Beauregard Screenplay: Marilù Parolini, Jacques Rivette Photography: Alain Levent (35mm), Étienne Becker (16mm) Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Bernard Aubouy (35mm), Jean-Claude Laureux (16mm) Principal actors: Bulle Ogier (Claire), Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Sébastien), Josée Destoop (Marta), Michèle Moretti (Michèle) Out 1: Noli me tangere (1970) 750 min., col. Production company: Sunchild Productions Producer: Stéphane Tchalgadjieff Screenplay: Suzanne Schiffman, Jacques Rivette Photography: Pierre-William Glenn Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky

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filmography  257 Sound: René-Jean Bouyer Principal actors: Juliet Berto (Frédérique), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Colin), Michèle Moretti (Lili), Michael Lonsdale (Thomas), Bulle Ogier (Pauline/Émilie), Bernadette Lafont (Sarah), Françoise Fabian (Lucie), Jean Bouise (Warok), Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (Étienne), Hermine Karagheuz (Marie), Pierre Baillot (Quentin), Karen Puig (Élaine), Alain Libolt (Renaud), Edwine Moatti (Béatrice), Christiane Corthay (Rose), Sylvain Corthay (Achille), Éric Rohmer (Balzac specialist), Jean-François Stévenin (Marlon), Michel Berto (Honeymoon), Michel Delahaye (ethnologist) Out 1: Spectre (1974) 260 min., col. As above except: Editing: Denise de Casabianca Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) 185 min., col. Production company: Les Films du Losange, Renn Productions, Action Films, Les Films Christian Fechner, Les Films 7, Saga, Simar Production, Vincent Malle Productions Executive producer: Barbet Schroeder Screenplay: Juliet Berto, Dominique Labourier, Bulle Ogier, MarieFrance Pisier, Jacques Rivette, Eduardo de Gregorio Photography: Jacques Renard Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Paul Lainé Principal actors: Juliet Berto (Céline), Dominique Labourier (Julie), Bulle Ogier (Camille), Marie-France Pisier (Sophie), Barbet Schroeder (Olivier), Nathalie Asnar (Madlyn), Marie-Thérèse Saussure (Poupie), Philippe Clévenot (Grégoire) Duelle (1976) 120 min., col. Production company: Sunchild Productions Producer: Stéphane Tchalgadjieff Screenplay: Eduardo de Gregorio, Marilù Parolini, Jacques Rivette Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Pierre Gamet Principal actors: Juliet Berto (Leni), Bulle Ogier (Viva), Jean Babilée (Pierrot), Hermine Karagheuz (Lucie), Nicole Garcia (Jeanne/ Elsa), Claire Nadeau (Sylvia Stern)

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Noroît (1976) 130 min., col. Production company: Sunchild Productions Producer: Stéphane Tchalgadjieff Screenplay: Eduardo de Gregorio, Marilù Parolini, Jacques Rivette Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Pierre Gamet Principal actors: Geraldine Chaplin (Morag), Bernadette Lafont (Giulia), Kika Markham (Erika), Humbert Balsan (Jacob), Larrio Ekson (Ludovico), Anne-Marie Reynaud (Arno), Babette Lamy (Régina), Danièle Rosencranz (Celia) Merry-Go-Round (completed 1978, released 1983) 155 min., col. Production company: Sunchild Productions Producer: Stéphane Tchalgadjieff Screenplay: Suzanne Schiffman, Eduardo de Gregorio, Jacques Rivette Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Pierre Gamet, Bernard Chaumeil Principal actors: Maria Schneider (Léo), Joe Dallessandro (Ben), Danièle Gégauff (Élisabeth), Françoise Prévost (Renée Novick), Maurice Garrel (Julius Danvers), Sylvie Meyer (Shirley), Michel Berto (Jérôme) Le Pont du Nord (1982) 127 min., col. Production company: Les Films du Losange Producer: Martine Marignac, Barbet Schroeder, Margaret Menegoz Screenplay: Bulle Ogier, Pascale Ogier, Suzanne Schiffman, Jacques Rivette Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Georges Prat Principal actors: Bulle Ogier (Marie Lafée), Pascale Ogier (Baptiste), Pierre Clémenti (Julien), Jean-François Stévenin (Max) L’Amour par terre (1984) 170 min. (theatrical version: 120 min.), col. Production company: La Cécilia Producer: Martine Marignac

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filmography  259 Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Marilù Parolini, Suzanne Schiffman, Jacques Rivette Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Pierre Gamet, Bernard Chaumeil Principal actors: Jane Birkin (Emily), Geraldine Chaplin (Charlotte), André Dussollier (Paul), Jean-Pierre Kalfon (Clément Roquemaure), Facundo Bo (Silvano), Laszlo Szabo (Virgil), Isabelle Linnartz (Béatrice), Sandra Montaigu (Éléonore) Hurlevent (1985) 130 min., col. Production company: La Cécilia, Renn Productions Producer: Martine Marignac Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Suzanne Schiffman, Jacques Rivette Photography: Renato Berta Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Alix Comte Principal actors: Fabienne Babe (Catherine), Lucas Belvaux (Roch), Olivier Cruveiller (Guillaume), Olivier Torres (Olivier), Alice de Poncheville (Isabelle), Sandra Montaigu (Hélène), Philippe Morier-Genoud (Joseph), Marie Jaoul (Madame Lindon), Louis de Menthon (Monsieur Lindon) La Bande des quatre (1989) 160 min., col. Production company: Pierre Grise Producer: Martine Marignac Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette Photography: Caroline Champetier Editing: Catherine Quesemand Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Principal actors: Bulle Ogier (Constance Dumas), Benoît Régent (Thomas), Laurence Côte (Claude), Fejria Deliba (Anna), Bernadette Giraud (Joyce), Ines d’Almeida (i.e. Ines de Medeiros, Lucia), Nathalie Richard (Cécile) La Belle Noiseuse (1991) 240 min., col. Production company: Pierre Grise Producer: Martine Marignac Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette

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Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Principal actors: Michel Piccoli (Frenhofer), Jane Birkin (Liz), Emmanuelle Béart (Marianne), Marianne Denicourt (Julienne), David Burszstein (Nicolas), Gilles Arbona (Porbus), Bernard Dufour (the hand of the painter) La Belle Noiseuse Divertimento As above except run time: 120 min. Jeanne la Pucelle. 1. Les Batailles. 2. Les Prisons (1994) 160 min., 175 min., col. Production company: Pierre Grise Producer: Martine Marignac Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Principal actors: Sandrine Bonnaire (Jeanne), Tatiana Moukhine (Isabelle Romée), Baptiste Roussillon (Baudricourt), Olivier Cruveiller (Jean de Metz), Jean-Luc Petit (Henri Le Royer), Bernadette Giraud (Catherine Le Royer), Jean-Claude Jay (Jacques Alain), Jacques Rivette (the priest), André Marcon (Charles, dauphin de France), Marcel Bozonnet (Regnault de Chartres), Jean-Louis Richard (La Trémoille), Bernard Sobel (Pierre de Versailles), Wilfred Benaïche (Mathieu Mesnage), Jean-Pierre Becker (Jean d’Aulon), Bruno Wolkowitch (Gilles de Laval), Lydie Marsan (Hermine), Pierre Baillot (Jacques Boucher), Vincent Solignac (Pierre d’Arc), Mathias Jung (Jean Pasquerel), Florence Darel (Jeanne d’Orléans), Germain Rousseau (the Dauphin’s confessor), François Chattot (Arthur de Richemont), Emmanuel de Chauvigny (Gros-Garrau), Didier Agostini (Montmorency), Nathalie Richard (Catherine de la Rochelle), Philippe Morier-Genoud (Philippe Le Bon), Yann Colette (Jean de Luxembourg), Monique Mélinand (Jeanne de Luxembourg), Édith Scob (Jeanne de Béthune), Hélène de Fougerolles (Jeanne de Bar), Alain Ollivier (Pierre Cauchan, bishop of Beauvais), Michel Berto (Guillaume Erard), Jean-Claude Frissung (Nicolas Loiseleur)

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Haut bas fragile (1995) 170 min., col. Production company: Pierre Grise Producer: Martine Marignac Screenplay: Nathalie Richard, Marianne Denicourt, Laurence Côte, Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette Photography: Christophe Pollock Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Principal actors: Nathalie Richard (Ninon), Marianne Denicourt (Louise), Laurence Côte (Ida), André Marcon (Roland), Bruno Todeschini (Lucien), Anna Karina (Sarah), Wilfred Benaïche (Alfredo), Stéphanie Schwartzbrod (Lise), Laszlo Szabo (voice of the father), Jacques Rivette (Monsieur Paul) Une aventure de Ninon (1995) 1 min., b/w One of forty films made by different directors using the original Lumière brothers Cinématographe camera and distributed under the title Lumière et Compagnie. Principal actress: Nathalie Richard Secret Défense (1998) 170 min., col. Production company: Pierre Grise Producer: Martine Marignac Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Emmanuèle Cuau, Jacques Rivette Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Éric Vaucher Principal actors: Sandrine Bonnaire (Sylvie Rousseau), Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Walser), Grégoire Colin (Paul), Laure Marsac (Véronique/Ludivine), Françoise Fabian (Geneviève), Bernadette Giraud (Marthe) Va savoir (2001) 150 min., col. Production company: Pierre Grise Producer: Martine Marignac Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz

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262  filmography Principal actors: Jeanne Balibar (Camille), Sergio Castellitto (Ugo), Jacques Bonaffé (Pierre), Marianne Basler (Sonia), Hélène de Fougerolles (Dominique), Bruno Todeschini (Arthur), Catherine Rouvel (Madame Desprez)

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Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) 151 min., col. Production company: Pierre Grise, Cinemaundici, Arte France Cinéma, VM Productions Producer: Martine Marignac Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent, Jacques Rivette Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Principal actors: Emmanuelle Béart (Marie), Jerzy Radziwilowicz (Julien), Anne Brochet (Madame X), Bettina Kee (Adrienne), Olivier Cruveiller (editor), Mathias Jung (concierge), Nicole Garcia (friend) Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) 137 min., col. Production company: Pierre Grise, Cinemaundici, Arte France Cinéma Producer: Martine Marignac, Maurice Tinchant, Luigi Musini, Roberto Cicutto, Ermanno Olmi Screenplay: Pascal Bonitzer, Christine Laurent Photography: William Lubtchansky Editing: Nicole Lubtchansky Sound: Florian Eidenbenz Principal actors: Jeanne Balibar (Antoinette de Langeais/Sister Thérèse), Guillaume Depardieu (Armand de Montriveau), Anne Cantineau (Clara de Sérizy), Mathias Jung (Julien), Julie Judd (Lisette), Marc Barbé (Marquis de Ronquerolles), Nicolas Bouchaud (De Trailles), Thomas Durand (De Marsay), Victoria Zinny (Mother Superior), Remo Girone (Father Confessor), Bulle Ogier (Princesse de Blamont-Chauvry), Michel Piccoli (Vidame de Pamiers), Paul Chevillard (Duc de Navarreins), Barbet Schroeder (Duc de Grandlieu)

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Select bibliography

Until now, the only book-length publications on Rivette’s work have been written in French, hence the largely francophone bias of this bibliography. Readers seeking English-language articles on Rivette’s films (of which there are many good examples) are referred to the references in individual chapters of this volume. Chevrie, Marc (1989), ‘Supplément aux voyages de J.R.’, Cahiers du cinéma, 416, February, 20–5.

In the absence of more book-length studies of Rivette, this long article by Chevrie, published to coincide with the release of La Bande des quatre, remains one of the most useful overviews of his career to the end of the 1980s. Chevrie is particularly good on the black hole around which Rivette’s cinema seems to gravitate, what he calls its ‘lack of a dramatic centre of gravity’. There are also astute observations on the role of the theatre and the improvisatory or aleatory side to Rivette’s films, and how these relate to the recurring fascination for conspiracy.

Deschamps, Hélène (2001), Jacques Rivette: Théâtre, amour, cinéma, Paris, L’Harmattan.

A book-length study of L’Amour fou, useful in particular for think­ ­ing through Rivette’s relationship to theatre.

Frappat, Hélène (2001), Jacques Rivette, secret compris, Paris, Cahiers du cinéma. The first full-length monograph on Rivette was this idiosyncratic effort by critic and novelist Hélène Frappat. The book is ­beautifully

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264  select bibliography illustrated but written in a somewhat personal, impressionistic style as a series of fragments, testimonies and semi-poetic reveries on films and themes. As such, it is perhaps more useful for ­getting a sense of Rivette’s whole œuvre than for finding information about individual films, though the middle section constitutes a useful biography of Rivette’s early life and career as a critic, up to and including the production of Paris nous appartient, and the volume reproduces some of Rivette’s earliest, hard-to-find articles. Giuffrida, Daniela and Sergio Toffetti (eds) (n.d.), Jacques Rivette: La Règle du jeu, Turin, Centre Culturel Français de Turin/Museo Nazionale del Cinema de Torino, undated but probably 1991.

Very hard to find outside specialist research libraries in Paris, this bilingual (French/Italian) volume nonetheless contains a series of interesting interviews with Rivette’s collaborators, including considerable portions of the text of Serge Daney’s extended conversation with Rivette himself which made up the TV film Jacques Rivette:  Le Veilleur. The second part includes contributions from some important names in French and Italian film criticism. Notable are two discussions of Rivette’s critical writing, by Jacques Aumont and Paolo Meneghetti, Adriano Aprà’s brief but incisive study of the ‘ethics of the labyrinth’ in Rivette’s work, and François Thomas’s extremely well-informed analysis of the use of music in the ‘Scènes de la vie parallèle’.

Jardonnet, Evelyne (2006), Poétique de la singularité au cinéma: Une ­lecture croisée de Jacques Rivette et Maurice Pialat, Paris, L’Harmattan.

A slightly unusual, and in places rather abstract, comparative study of Rivette and Pialat that nonetheless concludes with a long and original chapter on ‘l’effroi de la précision’ in Rivette.

Liandrat-Guigues, Suzanne (ed.) (1998), Jacques Rivette: Critique et cinéaste, Études cinématographiques, 63, Paris, Lettres Modernes/ Minard.

A useful collection of articles augmented by an extremely full filmography and very complete bibliography including a helpful list of all Rivette’s published texts.

Rosenbaum, Jonathan (ed.) (1977), Rivette: Texts and Interviews, London, BFI.

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select bibliography  265 A useful introduction for those who don’t read French, this volume includes translations of some of Rivette’s most celebrated critical articles (including ‘The Hand’ on Beyond a Reasonable Doubt and the ‘Letter on Rossellini’) together with the long interview, ‘Time overflowing’, published in Cahiers du cinéma to coincide with the release of L’Amour fou.

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Index

400 coups, Les (1959) 53 À bout de souffle (1960) 53 Adorno, Theodor 243 Algerian War 32 Amour fou, L’ (1969) 2, 6–7, 34, 117, 124–5, 141, 149–56, 163, 169–70, 172–5, 188, 205–9, 213–14, 220–8, 250 Amour par terre, L’ (1984) 2, 3, 6–7, 53, 69, 75–6, 82–3, 87–9, 149–50, 160, 164, 169, 172, 174–5, 205–9, 211, 214–15, 224, 226, 228, 250 Andrews, Dana 18 Andromaque 125, 151–3, 206–9, 225, 228 Angel Face (1953) 11 Anges du péché, Les (1943) 181 Année dernière à Marienbad, L’ (1961) 25 À nos amours (1983) 196 Antonioni, Michelangelo 18 Anzieu, Didier 217–18 Artaud, Antonin 145, 160 Augé, Marc 59 Baader-Meinhof gang 32 Bachelard, Gaston 70–2, 74, 76 Bakhtin, Mikhail 71–2

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Balibar, Jeanne 209, 212, 241, 249 Balzac, Honoré de 7, 35–7, 57, 129, 178n.1, 218, 228, 235, 241–2, 246–50 Bande des quatre, La (1989) 2, 69, 75–6, 91–3, 149, 163–4, 169–70, 172–3, 175 Barthes, Roland 9, 210, 224, 253 Bataille, Georges 36, 38, 177 Bazin, André 9, 12, 147–8 Baudelaire, Charles 84n.9 Béart, Emmanuelle 209, 219–20, 236, 241, 245–6 Beau Serge, Le (1958) 53 Beethoven, Ludwig van 243 Belle Noiseuse, La (1991) 3, 7, 69, 76, 149, 206, 208–10, 218–20, 226–8, 241 Bergman, Ingmar 16, 18 Bernanos, Georges 192 Berto, Juliet 35, 66n.4, 96, 131, 134 Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) 13, 18, 33 Birkin, Jane 207, 209, 211, 254 Blanchot, Maurice 26 Bonitzer, Pascal 2, 34, 103, 153, 193, 228, 244

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268  index Bonnaire, Sandrine 77, 96, 100, 103, 193, 196 Boulez, Pierre 9, 221, 253 Bresson, Robert 16, 147, 181, 192, 195, 197–8, 202 Brontë, Charlotte 185 Brontë, Emily 6, 177, 185–6, 192, 201 Brook, Peter 156 Buñuel, Luis 16, 177, 192 Cage, John 222 Cahiers du cinéma 3, 9–10, 13, 17, 19, 37, 53, 61, 101, 150, 162n.14, 169, 252–3 Caillois, Roger 36, 39–40, 118–21, 123, 134–5 Camus, Albert 177 Caron, Leslie 240 Carrosse d’or, Le (1953) 211 Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974) 2–3, 5, 52–3, 66n.4, 69, 75–6, 82–7, 89, 96, 106–12, 131–4, 138, 141, 144, 149, 154–8, 160, 163, 235, 237, 240, 250 Cérémonie, La (1995) 103 Chabrol, Claude 53, 103 Chaplin, Charles 17 Chaplin, Geraldine 159, 206–7, 209, 211 Chéreau, Patrice 153 Chion, Michel 236 Cinemascope 12 Cixous, Hélène 31n.16 Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961) 53 Clift, Montgomery 16 Cocteau, Jean 11, 235 Collège de Sociologie 36–7, 40, 95 Colonel Chabert, Le (1994) 242 Condamné à mort s’est échappé, Un (1956) 181 conspiracy 3, 5, 18, 20, 22–4, 26–31,

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33–6, 42, 45, 91, 95, 98–9, 130, 142, 166–7, 183, 248 Corman, Roger 227 Coup du berger, Le (1956) 117–18, 149 Cukor, George 231 Dahl, Roald 117n.2 Dalí, Salvador 129 Daney, Serge 14, 17, 220, 222, 228, 252–3 Day-Time Wife (1939) 117n.2 Debord, Guy 28–30, 32 Decima Vittima, La (1965) 141 Delannoy, Jean 198 Deleuze, Gilles 40–1, 104–6, 148 DeMille, Cecil B. 198 Denis, Claire 15 Depardieu, Guillaume 241, 249 Derrida, Jacques 5, 97–8, 121–2, 124, 139–40, 143, 239–40 Diderot, Denis 1, 6, 177–9, 182–5, 201 Donen, Stanley 117 Doniol-Valcroze, Jacques 39 Dreyer, Carl 197–8 Duchesse de Langeais, La 35, 178n.1, 241, 247 Duelle (1976) 2, 52, 56, 59, 67, 124–5, 134–8, 140–1, 149, 157, 165, 240–1 Duras, Marguerite 25, 65, 72 Eisenstein, S. M. 12, 19 Fall of the House of Usher, The (1960) 227 Finney, Albert 240 Fleming, Victor 198 Franju, Georges 17 Freud, Sigmund 5, 96–7, 101–2, 105, 109, 217

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index  269 games 5, 28, 55, 61–8, 106–8, 112, 117–45, 160, 163, 172, 175, 228–9, 241 Gazette du cinéma, La 10 Germinal (1993) 200 Girard, René 205 Giscard d’Estaing, Valéry 4, 32 Godard, Jean-Luc 1, 9, 17, 20, 53, 148, 174, 183, 185, 252 Grass is Greener, The (1960) 117 Greenpeace 30 Griffith, D. W. 11 Grotowski, Jerzy 166 Guattari, Félix 104–6 Haut bas fragile (1995) 52–3, 56, 69, 74, 80–2, 92–3, 96, 106, 124, 141–3, 149, 250 Hawks, Howard 11–12, 16, 27 Hegel, G. W. F. 17, 19–20 Heidegger, Martin 225, 228–32 Hiroshima mon amour (1959) 19 Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003) 2, 7, 53, 69–70, 93, 138–9, 144, 149, 169, 235–47 Histoire des treize 7, 35–6, 241, 248 Hitchcock, Alfred 5, 12, 26, 101, 103, 117n.2, 160, 207, 231, 240, 243 Hölderlin, J. C. F. 230 Hungarian Revolution 4 Hunting of the Snark, The 55, 129 Hurlevent (1985) 6, 124, 149, 177, 185–92, 201–2, 235, 250 I Confess (1953) 101 improvisation 2, 10, 12, 16, 66n.4, 126–8, 134, 173, 177, 241, 253 Jacques Rivette, le veilleur (1990) 15, 188 James, Henry 83, 87, 110, 133–4, 235

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Jane Eyre 73 Jeanne la Pucelle (1994) 6, 51, 149, 177, 193–202, 235 Joan of Arc 6–7, 177, 193–202 Judex (1963) 17 Kafka, Franz 26, 31n.16 Kalfon, Jean-Pierre 206, 208 Kapò (1959) 3, 10, 14, 17 Kazan, Elia 18 Lang, Fritz 3, 10, 14, 18, 159, 202 Laurent, Christine 2, 34, 193 Léaud, Jean-Pierre 35, 125, 127, 145 Lebovici, Gérard 30 Lee, Peggy 232 Leiris, Michel 36 Leopard, The (1963) 242 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 9, 253 Lonsdale, Michael 37, 46, 125 Lubtchansky, William 2 Madame Bovary (1933) 192 Made in USA (1966) 20 Mallarmé, Stéphane 51 Malraux, André 183 Marignac, Martine 2, 200 Marriage of Figaro, The 231 May 1968, events of 4, 32, 37, 48, 90, 183 Merry-Go-Round (1983) 2, 5, 69, 74, 80, 96, 98–100, 106, 149, 157 Messiaen, Olivier 221 Midsummer Night’s Dream, A 164 Mistons, Les (1957) 53 Mizoguchi, Kenji 13 Monsieur Verdoux (1947) 17 Moonfleet (1955) 159 Mouchette (1967) 181 Moullet, Luc 9, 33 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 231 Murnau, F. W. 11

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270  index

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Mystère des Voix Bulgares, Le 187 Nancy, Jean-Luc 218 Nathalie Granger (1972) 72 Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) 7, 35, 53, 69–70, 144, 149, 178n.1, 235, 240–2, 246–50 New Wave (Nouvelle Vague) 1, 4, 9, 13, 17, 25, 53, 148, 156, 252 Nietzsche, Friedrich 157–8, 192, 210 Nixon, Richard 27 Noroît (1976) 2, 124–5, 138, 141, 149–50, 157–63, 165, 169, 240–1 Nouveau roman 25 Nuit et brouillard (1955) 14, 18

Picture of Dorian Gray, The 228 Pirandello, Luigi 143, 164, 175, 224 Poe, Edgar Allan 228, 236, 243 Polanski, Roman 228 Pont du Nord, Le (1982) 2–5, 30–4, 52, 56, 58–9, 61–9, 119, 124, 134, 139–41, 149, 157, 170 Pontecorvo, Gillo 3, 14 Preminger, Otto 11, 16 Procès de Jeanne d’Arc, Le (1962) 181, 197

Ogier, Bulle 30, 38, 52, 54, 63, 66n.4, 92, 107, 126, 134, 151, 173, 205, 241, 250 Othello 211 Out 1: Noli me tangere (1970) 2–5, 7, 32, 35–48, 52, 55–61, 69, 90–1, 95, 98, 117–18, 120–1, 124–31, 134, 141, 149, 157, 160, 163, 165–7, 169, 171–2, 175, 241, 250 Out 1: Spectre (1974) 2, 35, 126–8

Racine, Jean 153, 206, 208, 221–2 Radziwilowicz, Jerzy 100, 236, 241 Rebecca (1940) 79, 207, 243 Règle du jeu, La (1939) 211 Religieuse, La see Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Denis Diderot (1966) Renoir, Jean 11–13, 192, 202, 211 Repulsion (1965) 228 Resnais, Alain 14, 18–19, 25 Revenger’s Tragedy, The 158, 160 Rimbaud, Arthur 224 Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 25 Rohmer, Eric 36 Rossellini, Roberto 3, 10, 12, 198, 202 Rouch, Jean 37

Paris nous appartient (1961) 1, 3, 4, 6, 16, 22–8, 30–4, 42, 51–3, 55–7, 59, 90, 95, 98, 149, 163–4, 166, 169–70, 172, 174, 250 Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, La (1928) 197 Péguy, Charles 197 Pericles 22, 28, 164, 172 Pernoud, Régine 193–4, 200 Pialat, Maurice 196 Piccoli, Michel 209, 241 Pickpocket (1959) 181

Said, Edward 235, 243, 246, 250–1 Sans laisser d’adresse (1951) 53 Schaeffer, Pierre 222 Secret Défense (1998) 3, 5, 69, 74–80, 82–3, 95–6, 100–4, 106, 141, 149, 158, 241, 250 Seven Against Thebes 61 Shane (1953) 159 Sobchack, Vivian 216–17, 220 Southerner, The (1945) 13 Splendor in the Grass (1961) 18 Stiller, Mauritz 11 Stockhausen, Karlheinz 180, 222

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index  271 Suzanne Simonin, la Religieuse de Denis Diderot (1966) 1, 6, 124, 149, 177, 179–84, 201–2, 235, 241

Tomb of Ligeia, The (1964) 227 Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) 19 Truffaut, François 1, 11, 53, 205

Testament d’Orphée, Le (1960) 11 theatre directors 6, 22, 150–1, 154, 156–7, 163–4, 167, 169–75, 207, 209 rehearsals 3, 6, 28, 37, 57–8, 87, 127, 153, 163–6, 170–1, 206–8, 211, 213, 224, 226–7 relations with cinema 147–8, 150–7, 160–2, 166–7, 169, 173–4 theatricality 7, 148, 162n.14, 179–80, 192, 201–2, 212 theatrical space 6, 26, 28, 43, 51–2, 57–8, 82, 86–9, 92, 118, 145, 148–57, 162–70, 175, 179, 212 troupes 4, 37–8, 40–1, 43, 47–8, 57, 124, 131, 144, 151, 165, 167, 170–2, 208, 211

Under Capricorn (1949) 12

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Varda, Agnès 53 Varèse, Edgar 180 Va savoir (2001) 6–7, 52, 69–70, 75, 78, 117, 124, 143–4, 149–50, 160, 163–4, 166–70, 175, 206, 209, 211–12, 224, 226, 228–32, 235, 241 Vertigo (1958) 101, 103, 240, 243 Viaggio in Italia (1954) 12 Wayne, John 16 Wilde, Oscar 228 Wuthering Heights 6, 177, 185, 187–92, 201 Wyler, William 177, 189 Zola, Émile 192

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