Jacques Rivette

http://movingimage.us/site/screenings/mainpage/rivette.html

"box dinner available" for Out 1! Lots of coffee I hope.

what means this?

i watched Celine and Julie the other night on film4. much funnier second time round, also it was surprisingly suited to TV viewing because you don't have to give it 100% of your attention.

I generally love Sandrine Bonnaire, so I just reserved Joan the Maid at the library.

what i love about celine and julie is that no matter how long Rivette is stretching the whole thing out for it's never so long that he won't throw in another leghty, pointless and just plain funny digression. coming up for the three hour mark there's a needless plot development which involves the sweets running out and C&J having to steal a book from the library so that they can make up a potion. for some reason they have to steal the book wearing wetsuits, balaclavas and rollerskates (hott). the other night this struck me as the funniest thing ever whereas first time round i just found it frustrating. what changed?

http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/15195_PARIS_BELONGS_TO_US

the bfi dvd looks good, has some of his shorts on it.

"Having recently seen the long Out 1 subtitled in English for the first time at the Vancouver International Film Festival, I can only reiterate how invaluable it would be to have both versions on DVD. Rivette devoted the better part of a year to editing Spectre, striving to make it as different from the long version as possible, and the ways that the same shots often have radically different meanings and functions in the two versions are an important part of what makes this magnum opus so fascinating. But it can’t shake off its legend and become a legitimate part of film history until we can see both versions.
Maybe this is a function of the risks of innovative art—to be ignored by the more traditional critics as if it never existed. That’s presumably how Keith Reader could recently publish a supposedly authoritative piece about Jean-Pierre Léaud’s career in Sight and Sound without mentioning Out 1—even though, thanks to Geoff Andrew, both versions had recently screened at London’s National Film Theatre. (Needless to say, Moullet’s A Girl is a Gun goes unmentioned as well.) This isn’t very far from the David Denby school of canon restriction that tidily limits the span of existing works to whatever Denby has seen. When Denby recently wrote, “The great study of an Iraq vet, in either documentary or fictional form, has yet to be made,” he was essentially reassuring the New Yorker’s readers that they didn’t have to think about anything apart from what he was reviewing—including a film as great as The War Tapes (now available on DVD). Or did he actually mean he’d been tracking and viewing all the undistributed videos about returning veterans in order to arrive at his considered judgment?"

It's a shame, I think, that the BFI chose Paris... to restore, rather than L'Amour Fou - the former may be the more 'seminal new wave document' blahdiblah but the latter is pure uncut Rivette, the real gd hard stuff

Anyone seen his new one? Probably catch it on sunday..

Saw it when I visited London just after Xmas - its a real chamber piece ("restrained" is how my companion neatly put it) and i'm afraid i started snoozing abt 20 minutes in. Apart from the Joan of Arc two-parter - which is surprisingly action-packed, relatively speaking, for a Rivette movie - I'm not that big a fan of Rivette's historical pieces, tbh - they are very exacting exercises in framing/tableaux/ritual/spectacle/costume, but don't have the same necromantic thrill as the best of his 'modern-day' movies. Don't Touch The Axe has no music and is verrrrry slow in terms of both narrative exposition and movement into/within the mise-en-scene. Aspects of it reminded me of late Rossellini, Dreyer, Bresson - deliberately so on Rivette's part, I'm sure.

Three new Region 2 Rivette DVDs: GANG OF FOUR is especially welcome

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=66945

you gotta salute their bravery.

i saw 'paris nous appartient' on the weekend; it was awesome.

the one time I saw PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT, the print burnt up in the projector!

dayum. you don't get that with dvd, really, though when i saw 'muriel' there was some kind of glitch that made the sound go out of sync...

yeah, DVD glitches are v. interesting, as are digital broadcasts where the signal breaks up and pixilates - a whole new way of seeing the image deformed - is there a visual equivalent of the Oval/Yasunao Tone CD glitch aesthetic/practice?

the one time I saw PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT, the print burnt up in the projector!

-- Ward Fowler, Monday, 18 February 2008 19:31 (58 minutes ago) Link

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Ward I saw this, I agree that its more of a chamber piece/slow burner. Kind of closed you in, but far more palatable than a BBC costume drama (those clocks of his), which isn't saying much, I know.

"Don't Touch The Axe has no music and is verrrrry slow in terms of both narrative exposition and movement into/within the mise-en-scene."

I remember that there was a bit of music? Don't the main characters discuss a quality belonging to a partic piece played in the film.

Must track 'Gang of Four'.

Happy 80th birthday.

hb, JR.

Saw 'Secret Defense' last week on yer cheapo VHS! Someone sort me out 'L'Amour Fou' plz!

Sort you out?

Oh, I'm an idiot, never mind. I don't think there's a dvd (R1 or 2).

Yeah, I know there isn't a DVD -- ws thinking more of a clandestine copy of it :-)

julio - i've been trying to contact you for a bit. i tried that mesageboard email thing but i didn't hear back. anyway can you email me on colinohara at gmail dot com? cheers.

"mesageboard email thing"

i meant the ILX send message to a user function.

Sigh.

My very close friend who first turned me on to Rivette (and lotsa other art cinema) died last week at the age of 52. I have kind've avoid mentioning his passing on ILX for fear of the snark squad, but one of the things that has lifted my spirits has been the knowledge that both of us did live long enough to see the complete OUT ONE - the phrase "a once in a lifetime experience" turned out not to be mere hyperbole.

Happy birthday, Jacques Rivette. I am so glad you're still making movies, even if I will never get to see them with (x).

Today I saw a Basset hound in real life for the first time, thanks to a kind neighbor who warned us that Barney was out on the block. Il s'appelle Valentino.

Hopefully tomorrow I will see the Duchess of Longeais.

I did. And I found out that the story is by Balzac. Rohmer had the Marquise of O. What kind of steady diet of classics they must have had to come up with these. And what kind of nationalism and amour de la patrie.

He came up with an outline for a contemporary mystery called “Next Year in Paris.” When financing failed to materialize, he looked for an existing story to accommodate these two actors and for the third time in his career was drawn to Balzac. “The Duchess of Langeais” is the centerpiece of Balzac’s trilogy about a secret society, “The History of the Thirteen,” which Mr. Rivette had used as the jumping-off point for the conspiratorial web of “Out 1.” A Balzac story was also the inspiration for “La Belle Noiseuse,” his 1991 film about a painter and his muse.

Mr. Rivette discovered Balzac late in life, despite the urgings of an esteemed friend and colleague. “Rohmer told me in the ’50s that there are two novelists every filmmaker needs to read: Dostoyevsky and Balzac,” he said. “But I had a hard time with Balzac.” He had read almost no Balzac when he decided to use the “Thirteen” mythology as the linchpin for “Out 1” (though Mr. Rohmer has an amusing cameo as a Balzac scholar in that film).

Rohmer, in his writing especially, seems more marked by that kind of French education.

I brought that photo of Bulle Ogier with me to get my hair cut. And another in which she is looking in a mirror, courtesy of the Chicago Reader. In "Ne touchez pas la hache," one of the pleasures was seeing the active traces of her youthful beauty.

http://www.chicagoreader.com/features/stories/moviereviews/2007/070525_2/out.jpg

for future reference

"L'Amour Fou"

how the fuck do i get this movie?

And just to wet your appetite there is this neat piece on L'Amour Fou.

It reminded me of The Travelling Players and the description of destruction that goes on => also the less playful, but no less '68, than Akermann's Saute ma Ville.

Made me think of how it became my 'lost' film. There should've been others but I've always come across them before reading a ton of stuff and becoming obsessed: 'Jeanne Dielman' had that one screening at the NFT; the Lumiere broadcast 'La Mama et La Putain'; 'Herostratus' is one of the BFI's great restoration jobs; Marker's 'Grin Without a Cat' got a release (love it, can't say I'm arsed about the extra added hour that is supposed to be knocking around, its 3 hrs long already!); and I read about Resnais' 60s films first in James Monaco's cool study but a cpl were available straight away and for the remainder it was simply a patient wait, culminating in 'Je T'aime, Je T'aime' just last year. Now when I often read about something it could be on youtube, as was the case with Kiju Yoshida's 3 and 1/2 hrs cracker from '68 'Eros Plus Madness'.

I was thinking that maybe 'The Man Who Left his Will on Film' by Oshima could be a companion, but no, Tate are screening it in March.

So to have a film that is truly lost: that you have no prospect of seeing, and when you do you know that it will be in such a crappy condition you'd want to get yr money back is almost to be treasured.

(Just kidding, btw...)

ty for that link, julio. great pic of bulle o at the top - if nothing else, the sequence in L'Amour Four where ogier's character goes mad in her flat and starts making bizarre tape recordings shld be preserved forever in a pristine print

a little while ago someone v kindly transferred for me my legit uk vhs version of the mother and the whore to dvd, as afaik there's still no disc version of that. i watch it along with my dvd transfer of renaldo and clara, most sunday afternoons.

Nice combo! (imagine so anyway, frm reading about 'Renaldo and Clara', not seen...)

yeah it's mindblowing that le maman ... isn't on dvd. i always figured it was the kind of thing bfi might be able to release that would be a little more populist than some of their worthier titles. routine watching would probably send you the way of the actors tho

The screening at the ICA was nearly sold out.

I saw a poor torrent rip of this 10 years ago and didn't get as much out of it as in this viewing as you just don't have to work so hard.

Interesting how this and "La Maman et la Putain" got a clean up and re-release in the same year, as they are of a similar vein. Though here the relationship disintegration is set alongside a piece of art coming together. A strangled death and a painful birth. The half an hour destruction of the flat as the couple try to rebuild their relationship looks forward to "In the Real of the Senses" too.

Probably the film in which he became a really great filmmaker.