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November 8, 2006
OGIC: Rivette everywhere
This week the Museum of the Moving Image in New York begins a Jacques Rivette retrospective. The bloggers at The House Next Door have been doing a fantastic job over the last week or so of prefacing the series with a cascade of links to stories, interviews, and critical considerations of the French director, whose 1974 movie Céline and Julie Go Boating--very loosely based on two Henry James novellas--is one of my personal landmark films and simply a joy to watch (Céline and Julie will be shown at MOMI this Saturday at 6:00 and Sunday at 4:30).Another devotee of this film is David Thomson, who, in the New Biographical Dictionary of Film, declares:
It is a generous reconciliation with literature through fiction, and whereas Kane was the first picture to suggest that the world of the imagination was as powerful as reality, Céline and Julie is the first film in which everything is invented.
Today Keith Uhlich at The House Next Door links to a newer piece of writing by Thomson on Rivette, an essay that appeared in the Guardian last April. This is a glorious little piece of work; in it Thomson hits on a handful of really vivid and lucid ways of identifying what's distinctive about Rivette's filmmaking and its relation to film's affiliated art forms, especially literature. This piece should hold up to a reading by anyone interested in film or literature, whether they've seen a frame of Rivette's stuff or not. Try it:
It is just that Rivette thinks the cinema runs the risk of turning vulgar and foolish if it starts to stress the visual over everything else. The visual is a given; it is the norm; it is the world, or its engine--and Rivette, without reservation, loves that world even when it frightens him. I doubt he has ever composed a shot without seeking both grace and an austere absence of all those signs that say: "Here is grace." Just look at Céline and Julie Go Boating, which, apart from anything else, is one of the most inspiring films about the way Paris looks in the summer, and about the illusion that we can catch its fragrance. (You can find the same compositional severity, the fierce effort to restrain beauty, in Bresson and Buñuel.)
So it is not that you can put your eyes away with Rivette. But you may need to rediscover them if they have become habituated to shock cuts, fancy camera angles and special effects. What is special for Rivette is cinematography, so revolutionary that it needs no editorialising.
The next key to his world is the passion for characters and stories, and the concomitant belief that once you start filming anyone then, gradually, storyline and character will seep up, like moisture in the ground. We cannot look at a shot of a person without asking: "Who is that?" We cannot take in a following shot--of a sea-shire, say--without assuming, "Ah, that person is at the sea, or going there? Or what?" We allow for mystery, but we cannot do without meaning. Above all, the characters will become actors, and they and their stories, as they build, become increasingly tests on our belief.
Rivette estimates that story is like weather. It is always there, but we don't always notice it: thus a dull day may turn sinister late in the afternoon, and the girl you met in the park may seem to be less a chance acquaintance than a figure in a story that now contains you.
This captures beautifully how the narrative style feels in Céline and Julie: the film is rife with moments that feel like possible stories in the making, but that suspend you in uncertainty for a time--a waiting period that proves not only surprisingly tolerable but positively engaging and productive. In the last half of the movie, this suspense finally has an enormous payoff in the form of a gripping story (straight out of James), which the movie lets you really savor by replaying it again and again, revealing more pieces in each iteration.
But even beyond these local observations about Rivette and movies, I think, Thomson gets at something more basic here about our appetite for stories, so insatiable it approaches a will to find them and draw them out--"like moisture in the ground," indeed. The essay ends:
So there we are--what are Rivette's films about? Women, the light, place, and the way a story begins to slink from a woman's feet across the space and through the light--just like one of the cats Rivette is always ready to show us, watching the story as if it were a mouse. He has remained loyal to a belief not much in fashion now--that the movies are the natural extension of theatre, literature and the study of story. The human condition, he has no doubt, is that of audiences always surprised when they have to become actors.
Posted November 8, 2006 6:08 AM
