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Out 1: Noli me tangere
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Dedicated to the memory and the legacy of performer-photographer-writer Hermine Karagheuz, who died 30 April 2021. It’s reassuring that there are some forms of pessimism
which are, for me, also forms of optimism.
– Juliet Berto, 1985 (1)
1. Unfree Man in Melbourne
Out 1 – it was always the Dream-Film.
And not only for me, but for many others of approximately My Generation.
Elusive, impossible to see, the truly unattainable text. A myth and a legend.
I was only a child when it screened at Le Havre in the
early 1970s. When it screened at Rotterdam in the late 1980s, I was already
grown-up, and already a film critic, but not yet travelling to Film Festivals
around the world. Not Joni Mitchell’s Free Man in Paris, but my very own Unfree
Man in Melbourne.
The short Spectre re-cut version was the only consolation, and even that was hard to find. An
Australian friend, Edward Colless, made a short film in 1990 called Wet Madeline (homage to Hitchcock and
Poe), and then re-edited down to an even shorter companion-piece, Wet Spectre. We were all officially
obsessed with the Out 1 phenomenon.
So we chased it, for the better part of a
quarter-century, knowing it was not really there to find. No Betamax, VHS or
Laserdisc copies. We dreamed it into existence, mainly through the enthusiastic
documentation of Jonathan Rosenbaum’s 1977 BFI booklet Rivette: Texts and Interviews – and later highbrow fandom led by such redoubtable cheerleaders as critic historian Bernard
Eisenschitz, scholar Mary Wiles and novelist Hélène Frappat.
Finally, there were glimmers of hope. A screening in
episodes on German TV, and thus pirated digital versions. Not great quality,
but something watchable, at least. But what about English subtitles for us
predominantly Anglo types? Big problem. “Fan subtitles” circulated
clandestinely. At a screening at Queensland Cinematheque in Australia, there
was even “live subtitling” via computer. That must have been a creative
performance.
Finally came the multiple official DVD releases, the
retrospective articles, the comments for and against, the “binge watching”, the
video essays. And the subtitles. I have seen it several times, intensively and
extensively, but I still have the sense that I am not “across” it, that I cannot
hold it all in my head, cannot remember and cross-reference its thousand
pieces. I even feel that Jacques Rivette, deliberately, never kept it all in
his head, either. He didn’t control it; it grew, lurched this way and that,
became the sacred monster that it is. The Dream-Film is the very image of
freedom.
Oddly, when the first official DVD release became
available in Europe, I immediately bought it, but didn’t keep it. I instantly
gave it away as a gift to another filmmaker friend – who happens to be the
webmaster of this very site you are reading. Out 1 is not a work we should possess; we should pass it on, just
as each character passes the story onto another character, from episode to
episode …
2. The Great Manipulator
Toward the end of the 1960s, in his book The Logic of Sense, the French
philosopher Gilles Deleuze remarked that, to initiate and dynamise a game – or,
indeed, any logical system – a missing element, an absence, is required.
Jacques Rivette (1928-2016) seems to
have learned this lesson very early in his career as a filmmaker. Many of his
plots begin with someone who is no longer in his or her place, who has gone
missing. In Merry-Go-Round (1981), a
man and woman are summoned to a Sofitel hotel in Paris to meet a mutual
acquaintance; however, this person who initiates the narrative will never be
found, or even seen. Duelle (1976)
begins in a similar fashion: mysterious characters converge at a series of
interlinked locations (hotel, casino, dance hall, aquarium) in search of an
absent Max Christie who will never turn up. Already in his first feature, Paris Belongs to Us (1961), a network of
diverse characters scurried around the void left by the vanished Juan, and the
legacy of his lost tape recording.
Rivette may well have imbibed this narrative idea from
a modest but potent American film he long admired: The Seventh Victim (1943), produced by Val Lewton and directed by
Mark Robson. In that movie, as any fan of it will never be able to forget, over
half an hour passes before we glimpse the character, Jacqueline (Jean Brooks),
whom everyone incessantly talks about and seeks – and when we do, at last and
without warning, arrive at this moment, her face appears silently, for only an
instant, in the interval between a door opening and that same door closing.
In Rivette’s career, as The Story of Marie and Julien (realised in 2003 but originally
planned for the mid 1970s) shows, the traces of this central, missing, and at
some point likely dead character tend to inexorably, uncannily spread
throughout the world of the fiction, creating ghostly atmospheres, and drawing
the living into somnambulant, possibly fatal repetitions of a past, obscure
trauma …
Above all, this device of a missing character provides
the narrative motor that enables encounters,
in the strongest sense, to occur. “When strangers meet” could be the motto of
virtually every Rivette film. He was candid about it: “I like that idea: two people get together because a third, who has
arranged to meet them, does not show up. They have no choice but to get to know
each other”. (2) So characters are thrown
together in a common cause (such as the search for their absent companion),
paths intersect, stories cross. Certain kinds of settings – like bars, train
stations, country estates in the holiday season, gambling dens, theatres or
hotels – are especially propitious for this style of encounter. (A line in Duelle: “She’s a fantasist, you know.
Hotel lobbies are full of them”).
Rivette, with his team of close collaborators
including Suzanne Schiffman and his first wife Marilù Parolini, spent a
lifetime cultivating an intimate knowledge of such real-life spaces for use in
his fictions. He was sometimes happy to bring together actors who had not
previously met (this was the case with Joe Dallesandro and Maria Schneider on Merry-Go-Round), and that he himself had
not previously worked with; all this could be put in service of “the spectator
feeling that he’s witnessing an encounter”.
Rivette’s favoured way of shooting also worked to
enhance this feeling. It is often said that Rivette’s signature style is
synonymous with the hallowed ideal of mise
en scène in cinema: staging actors and actions for the camera in such a way
that the environment – a room, a park, a street, a building – counts just as
much as the plot machinations or the internal motivations of the characters. As
he states in Claire Denis’s lovely documentary portrait Rivette, the Watchman (1990), he liked a large, spacious frame, in
which he could follow the mutual interactions of bodies from head to toe; he
generally disliked fast cutting and close-up fragmentation of bodily parts.
In the work of many filmmakers, this might all add up
to a purely abstract, theoretical, programmatic idea. But not in Rivette. His
sense of the rhythmic, choreographic, truly musical unfolding of a scene, his
ability to capture the impulses, hesitations, attractions and repulsions
playing between two (or more) bodies, was without peer in contemporary cinema.
You have to revisit the movies of Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls or Jean Renoir to
find such grace and vibrancy, such poetry and force, in a mise en scène.
Yet, at the same time, Rivette was very much a modern
artist, and self-consciously so; he sought not to laze tranquilly and
nostalgically in the recreation of a classical tradition (as does, say, Terence
Davies or Clint Eastwood), but to expand that tradition by resisting,
questioning and going beyond it.
It may seem an odd thing to say but, while for many
people Rivette is still a relatively obscure figure, the impassioned writing on
his work by fans since the 1960s has tended to smother the richness and variety
of the films in a litany of oft-repeated, frequently unchanging, critical
clichés. Only since his death has there been some signs of new life and insight
in this cinephile discourse, as evident in the tributes paid to Rivette in
publications including Belgium’s Photogénie and Australia’s Senses of Cinema during 2016. (3)
Back in the early ‘70s, when such appreciation for the
director was still fresh and original, the noted, former Cahiers du cinéma critic and then burgeoning video artist
Jean-André Fieschi (1942-2009) composed a superb entry on Rivette for Richard
Roud’s two-volume Cinema: A Critical Dictionary (eventually published in 1980). (4) This piece laid out the fundamental
elements of Rivette’s art, as indicated in its opening section heading: “The
group, the theatre, the conspiracy” – to which he later adds the terms “madness”
and “excess”. Fieschi comments: “In so far as spotting motifs or threads is
concerned, everything is already there in Paris
Belongs to Us”. And Rivette would remain true to this spray of motifs, in
various combinations, throughout his entire career.
According to Fieschi’s account, the logic of these
interrelated motifs goes something like this. In the well-defined setting of a
city, suburb or semi-rural retreat, “people pursue each other”, trying to solve
some mystery. They tend to be obsessive, and easily slide into paranoia. Their
encounters lead, at least for some of them, to the spontaneous formation of a
group or “gang” (bande in French).
Malign conspiracies, the traces of which slowly seep to the surface of everyday
life, seem to be everywhere: they might be the work of terrorist groups, of the
government, or of secret sects that wield mysterious influence over society –
it is usually pretty hard to pinpoint the exact network involved, or its
ultimate motivation.
The idea of a project – whether the staging of a play, or the exposing of a conspiracy, or both, more
or less simultaneously – takes hold of the characters, unifying them in their
errancy and confusion, their doubts, fears and desires. And yet this project,
whatever it may be, is doomed to falter: the ties that bind the gang start
fraying, with its members going their separate ways; the signs of conspiracy
either suddenly vanish into thin air or suddenly overwhelm everybody and
everything; a meaning to the events cannot be found, or it slips away at the very
moment it seems it might materialise. The more that the characters atomise into
solitude and solipsism, the closer they arrive to a state of catatonic madness.
Twenty years after writing The Logic of Sense – a complex
work that I believe directly influenced Out
1, given their proximity in time and their shared Lewis Carroll fixation –
Gilles Deleuze returned to thinking about sliding, mutually imbricating, serial
structures … this time, in the cinema of Rivette. He doesn’t talk about shots
or mise en scène or montage or any of
the things cinephiles usually love to talk about; he pretty much sticks to
describing the strange mechanisms of the plot in what was, at that moment, the
filmmaker’s latest, Gang of Four (1989). But the philosopher’s way of understanding this plot is unique.
For him, Gang of
Four is comprised of three circles that communicate, influencing each other in unpredictable ways. The first
circle is the theatre class run by Bulle Ogier as Constance. The second is the
interplay between four particular girls from that class, as they share a house.
The third is the intrigue factor, introduced by a mysterious man (Benoît
Régent) who encounters each girl in turn – in search of what, and for which
exact law-abiding or criminal purpose, is hard to ever completely ascertain.
This is already a complicated, multi-level diagram of
mutual interferences: theatre imitates life, life imitates a bad spy movie, and
so on. But Deleuze also, for good measure, throws in a fourth circle, “a great external Circle governing the other
circles, dividing up their light and their shadow” – and that is comprised
of the twin forces well known to us from Duelle, Noroît (1976) and The Story of Marie and Julien: the sun
and the moon, the solar and the lunar. For Deleuze, the interpenetration of
these circles, whose movement creates the film we watch, adds up to a poignant
“vision of the world” on Rivette’s part which is “uniquely his own”.
We are all
rehearsing parts of which we are as yet unaware (our roles). We slip into
characters which we do not master (our attitudes and postures). We serve a
conspiracy of which we are completely oblivious (our masks). (5)
What a definition of the human being! Not a serene,
stable self, but only the uneasy, unstable assemblage of a role we play,
postures we strike, and masks we wear. As Deleuze remarks, there is the constant sense that these Rivettian
figures – whatever level of the narrative intrigue they are stationed at – are,
at some fundamental level, unformed,
searching for an identity: their difficult role in a theatrical performance is
rhymed with their unknowable place in some scary New World Order.
But, as Fieschi already made clear over 40 years ago,
there is more to Rivette’s cinema than these seductive narrative “motifs or
threads”, which have by now been enumerated by literally hundreds of
commentators worldwide. It is easy to get stuck on that level of this auteur’s
(or any auteur’s) work, either celebrating or decrying the repetition of
more-or-less the same plot situations and intrigues. More important is the fact
that Rivette constantly experimented with form and style, moving between, and
eventually fusing, classical and modern approaches.
And we must also pay attention to the passage of
Rivette’s familiar obsessions through time, the way in which each new film
ineluctably shaped itself as a gesture in relation to the different social and political periods of his home country
of France as well as the wider, western world. As Jeanne Balibar, one of his
favourite actors, wisely observed after his death, “He had this porosity in relation to the epochs
through which he passed”. (6)
For many viewers, the real, hardcore encounter with Rivette’s
cinema is only beginning now, with the long-awaited release of his most
legendary production, Out 1: Noli me
tangere. The legend comes partly from its invisibility, its lack of
accessibility – it, too, functioned as the missing piece that set the cult
around this director well and truly spinning. Although often dated as 1971,
that year marked only the public screening of a 12 hour and 40 minute workprint
of Out 1; it was not until 1990 that
Rivette was able to satisfactorily complete a version (15 minutes longer) that
then appeared at some film festivals, and on several European TV channels.
With the grand release of Out 1 on DVD and Blu-ray by Carlotta in France, Arrow in the UK and
Kino Lorber in USA, it has been assimilated to TV binge-watching culture. This
is a characteristic that one of its actors, Juliet Berto, had insisted on long
ago, when she complained during the 1980s that, if televised serially in its
episodic construction, it would be “able to be followed by everyone, no
problem”; in fact, on this level, it was “even better than Dallas”. Out 1 was,
according to Berto, “not written to be a single, 13 hour film and, moreover, it
was not performed in that spirit, either”. (7)
What was the previous familiarity of many people –
even those (like me) who proudly labelled themselves Rivette fans or even Rivettians – with his career before the
first DVD/Blu-ray wave of riches? It was, in some sense, the softer core of the
director’s output: the marvellous Céline
and Julie Go Boating (1974), his most accessibly playful and reflexive
work, and still probably his most widely loved; Gang of Four, the first film in which Rivette seemed to be recapping
himself and his obsessions; the patient but quietly agonised, artist-and-model
drama of La Belle Noiseuse (1991); Va savoir (2001), the liveliest of his Pirandellian life-intertwined-with-theatre
pieces, energised by the debut appearance in his regular troupe of Jeanne Balibar;
the intensely dramatic return to ghost-story territory in The Story of Marie and Julien (2003); and his joyous swansong
before Alzheimer’s terminated his filmmaking capacity, Around a Small Mountain (aka 36
vues du Pic Saint-Loup, 2009).
Some of us, if we had studied film and visited
cine-clubs in university settings, or faithfully attended film festivals and
cinémathèques, might have also caught Paris
Belongs to Us, The Nun (1966), North Bridge (1981), L’Amour par terre (Love on the Ground, 1984), his 2-part historical drama Jeanne la Pucelle (1994), Top Secret (1997), or Don’t Touch the Axe (2007). These films
have struck many resistant viewers and reviewers down the years as variously
difficult, demanding, minimalist, cryptic, and so on; but their entertainment
value (and I don’t mean that in a derogatory way!) is high compared to the
experimental rigours of Out 1 and the
other, long unseen movies of the ‘70s that have returned to us in the box-set
bonanza: namely, Duelle, Noroît and Merry-Go-Round.
Paris Belong to Us, at least, has
received the deluxe Criterion treatment; I came to fully appreciate this film
by providing the audio commentary for the British Film Institute’s subsequent 2018
edition. It is an odd work to re-watch today, since Rivette is very far from
attaining mastery of his mise en scène technique, and is still only beginning to find his favourite, intersectional
narrative form based on criss-crossed secrets, lies, delusions and
conspiracies. Yet it achieves a grim, grey, apocalyptic mood that holds us, and
– on a brighter side, as Cristina Álvarez López has pointed out – it trembles
with an almost teenage delight in the realisation that one need not go anywhere
foreign or exotic to find adventure; the adventure is right here, all around
us, in our everyday routines, as the banal gives way to the mysterious and
even, sometimes, the magical.
Some remaining Rivette titles – setting aside several
shorts (such as the three earliest, silent films made between 1949 and 1952
that have been uncovered by his widow, Véronique Manniez-Rivette, since his
death) and several alternate versions of his features – remain, alas, hard to
see with decent English subtitles in good digital versions, such as his first
experimental breakthrough, L’amour fou (1968), his generally underwhelming Wuthering
Heights adaptation Hurlevent (1985), and his utterly disarming musical Haut
bas fragile (Up Down Fragile,
1995), which I consider to be among his very finest works. The good news, as of
mid 2021, is that there is an ongoing program of digital restoration of
Rivette’s works, and they are once again beginning to recirculate on Blu-ray
thanks to Manniez-Rivette and Potemkine Films.
Perhaps the oddest and least expected immediate
after-effect of the dawning of Out 1 over global film culture is the sudden eclipsing of the only trace of it that,
for many years, existed: the 4 hour re-edit titled Out 1: Spectre (1974). Few of the many remarks included in the
box-sets mention it much at all – if so, they relegate it to mere bonus status
as a curiosity – and fewer bother to dig out the substantial differences in
plotting and structure between the two versions. While Spectre is indeed a film with its own integrity, its own form and
its own daring, for now it’s certainly Out
1 in its full extension that commands our attention. So what’s it all
about?
It has often been suggested that a central, driving
principle of Rivette’s cinema is his
fascination with anything that an actor (or non-actor or semi-actor) does,
whether or not they stay strictly “in character”. This principle extends even to – from a strictly professional viewpoint
– the hit-and-miss amateur singing and dancing in Up Down Fragile. Rivette indeed loved actors, their presence and
their performance: that constitutes the very basis of his cinematic art, at
least from L’amour fou onward. And
what presences they were! Bulle Ogier, Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Juliet Berto, Sergio
Castellitto, Jeanne Balibar, Michel Piccoli, Emmanuelle Béart … the list is
long, and many of them returned for the Rivettian encounter numerous times
over.
Rivette frequently attended theatre (of both classical
and modern types) and, on several occasions, jumped at the opportunity to
direct for the stage himself. It was a source of inspiration for him, but also
a kind of raw material to be transformed once it was carried over to film; as
Deleuze remarked, in Rivette’s work there is a “theatricality of cinema” which
is quite distinct from a “theatricality of theatre”. The medium of theatre, for
this filmmaker, is less a matter of finished, public spectacle than of
semi-clandestine workshops, laboratories, private performances – everything
that is in-process and up in the air.
Mainstream filmmakers from Lloyd Bacon and George
Cukor to Blake Edwards and Bob Fosse have also been drawn to depicting theatre in a similarly
fragmentary way – showing us only the intrigue-filled process of auditions and
rehearsals before the ultimate set-pieces for the stage are revealed on opening
night. This is part and parcel of an entire sub-genre of the backstage musical.
But Out 1 takes this backstage
principle to its extreme, spending much of its vast running time documenting
the unfolding actions of not one but two theatre troupes as they work through
exercises and improvisations somehow suggested by the classic texts (both of
them by Aeschylus) taken as a point of departure.
These prolonged passages of experimental theatre-work
inspire reflex distaste in some viewers. Certain contemporary responses to Out 1’s wide release are not shy in
calling out its rehearsal scenes as “excruciating”, “painful”, “irritating” –
swiftly reducing Rivette’s avant-gardism to the image of a bunch of privileged
hippies screaming and rolling around on the floor. How quick we are, today, to
mock and demonise the experiments of the 1960s, in all domains of life,
politics and art!
But, as someone who has a high regard and respect for
theatre – and, in particular, alternative, experimental theatre – I find Out 1 to be a uniquely rich and remarkable
document of ideas and practices in this field. (8) It gathers the traces of
many art movements happening throughout the world during the 1960s:
psychodrama, performance art, “happenings”, the Living Theatre of Julian Beck
and Judith Malina, the Artaud-inspired work of Carmelo Bene in Italy, Jerzy Grotowski’s Poor
Theatre, the Basque collective Jarrai including musician Mikel Laboa, Richard
Schechner’s The Performance Group, Peter Brook’s 1968 book The Empty Space … A truly cosmopolitan encounter of theatrical
laboratories, the combustible energy of which was instantly drawn upon by
filmmakers including Pier Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci. But it adds
up to something of a Lost World today, a time and a sensibility to which Out 1 allows us some precious access.
However, for many observers of the Out 1 phenomenon yesterday and today,
Rivette’s film is ultimately about something much larger than its theatre
games. It’s allegorical: a testament to post-1968 disillusionment, to the
retreat from political activism into mute solipsism – a document of growing,
depressive melancholia spreading over an entire generation. It is in the criss-crossing
of the twin theatre troupes with the trajectories of two loners – played by
Berto and Jean-Pierre Léaud – that the shady, conspiratorial fiction of Out
1 slowly begins to knit itself together.
The complot,
this time around, seems to be generated from clues contained in Honoré de Balzac’s
cycle of novels devoted to “the 13” (a network of shadowy individuals in high
places, wielding great power) – as well as Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of the Snark, words and phrases from which Léaud
recites in a trance-like daze, as if its surface nonsense will ultimately
reveal the hidden sense of the world. Or is it all just a paranoiac delusion, a
vain and ultimately futile attempt to read an ordered meaning into the random
disorder of everyday life?
The scholar Laura U. Marks sums up a prevalent
interpretation of Out 1 in a 2016
piece where she refers to its “agonistic relationship between life and meaning”
– thereby pointing to the gap between what really goes in the world of
Rivette’s characters (life) and the grand designs they attempt to either impose
on it or draw from it (meaning). (9) The end result of that agonistic
relationship is paralysis, failure, silence, withdrawal. Many other critics,
particularly those of a 1960s vintage, would more or less agree with that
reading.
Moreover, Marks gives this account of political failure
in Out 1 a decidedly 21st century nudge: for her, the “irritating patterns” (irritating to her, not me!)
of the unfolding plot suggest an “algorithmic structure”, and the film thus
becomes an essay in “information management”, prophetically in tune with our
current, neo-liberal age, since it’s all about (in its form as well as its
content) indefinitely “stalling until meaning arrives or the grant runs out”.
Once upon a time in the 1960s, she suggests, the libertarian extolling of the
body, affect and intensity promised a Utopia, a “break on through to the other
side” (as Jim Morrison sang it); now our entire society is obsessed with the
kind of minute, fancy “workshopping” that Rivette’s actors ecstatically, yet so
fruitlessly, embody.
Marks’ account of Out
1 is almost perversely obtuse (at least to a true believer like me) – it
begins with the statement that “Like most cinephiles, I abhor
the theatre”, and things don’t improve much in the next sentence: “The
incantatory treatment of presence, and the performers’ straining to be raw and
in the moment, embarrass me”. Well! Nonetheless,
her piece raises intriguing questions, especially of a political order. Rivette’s
own political stance in relation to what he presents in his films has always
been ambiguous, and frequently debated by his admirers and detractors alike.
On the one hand, Rivette seems to be gesturing toward
a recognisably leftist critique of the demonic, soul-destroying power of the
capitalist state – an attitude that is clearest in North Bridge and Top Secret.
On the other hand, he seems, at times, to adopt a lofty position more akin to a
fatalist metaphysics, presumptuously “above” the political fray, which he damns
as mere ideological delusion and fanaticism. What can appear as the stark
choice between total sense (society as conspiracy) and total nonsense (as
Prince sang: let’s go crazy!) is, in any real-world political terms, no choice
at all – as it leaves precious little room for individual or collective agency,
or the possibility of social change.
It is often claimed that Rivette himself withdrew from
radical politics at the dawn of the ‘70s, and that the evidence for this is
plain in the films he made from Out 1 onwards. I find this reading facile. Certainly, he resisted (as he explicitly
states in an archival interview included in the Carlotta set) the siren call of
Maoism that overtook many of his former associates at Cahiers du cinéma in that period (save for his friend Michel
Delahaye, excommunicated from the magazine’s editorial bande around the time he appeared in Out 1), creating a “new austerity” and purism in all matters of
political praxis that lasted almost to the decade’s end. By the same token,
Rivette certainly participated in explicitly political projects during the
events of 1968 in France, including firmly speaking out in defence of Henri
Langlois as head of the Cinémathèque française when he was sacked by André
Malraux’s Ministry of Culture; and later signing his name to one of the
documents emanating from the États
généraux du cinéma movement seeking to radically reform the national film
industry.
Yet there was a shift in the director’s political
orientation – or, at least, a displacement to a new terrain, involving a
different definition of political work and activity. Actor Bernadette Lafont,
fresh from the filming of Noroît (and
earlier, Out 1), once jokingly
referred to Rivette himself as “a kind of Mao”, since his films represented a
Cultural Revolution all of their own. (10) Her blague points to an important truth, and an under-researched aspect
of the director’s career. For, like Robert Kramer contemporaneously in the USA,
Rivette went very deeply into several currents of ‘70s lifestyle counter-culture,
rather than adhering to the political line of any specific leftist party. This
counter-culture mingled, pell-mell, avant-garde art, rock music and fashion,
with experiments in sex/gender identity (“sexual metamorphosis” and a “strange
androgyny” that “had never appeared in French cinema before Rivette”, according
to Lafont), and arrangements of cohabitation beyond the traditional, monogamous
couple (the Rivettian bande, once
again!). Without this florid background, the formalist excesses of Duelle and Noroît are utterly unimaginable.
Despite the multiple breakdowns we observe in the
final episode of Out 1, I cannot
accept that, therefore, it is a bleak testament, a great howl of despair. There
is a clear contradiction between this represented conclusion, and the evident
energy, inventiveness and artistry that went into the project’s entire making.
We must try to imagine the other 1970s – not the sad myth of post-68 decline,
but the creative renewal, on many social and personal fronts simultaneously, of
forms of life.
Alongside sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, we can add
another, perhaps unlikely fellow traveller in the counter-cultural adventures
of the 1970s: namely, the intellectual field of semiotics, particularly in its
post-structuralist phase, when the supposed rules of orderly, systematic logic
gave way to freer, more poetic options and modes. It’s actually not such a
surprising inclusion: hedonism courses through, for instance, the writing of
Roland Barthes (his The Pleasure of the
Text was written not long after the making of Out 1), and Rivette himself made casually familiar use of this
theorist when he spoke in a 1973 interview of “a weight to what is on screen,
and which is there on screen as a statue might be, or a building, or a huge
beast. And this weight is perhaps what Barthes would call the weight of the
signifier”. (11) The proud bearers of this signifying weight were, in Rivette’s
mind as in many minds of the time, artists such as the filmmakers Bene and Werner Schroeter.
Let’s turn to the playfulness, the game element that
is so much part of Rivette’s oeuvre (especially in Céline and Julie, Up Down
Fragile and Around a Small Mountain)
– alongside all that madness, angst and conspiracy. I have already mentioned
the likely influence of Gilles Deleuze’s The
Logic of Sense on Out 1. In that
text, Deleuze offers a view of the “relationship between life and meaning” that
is far from (in Marks’ terms) “agonistic”. Deleuze’s particular variant on
post-structuralism (which has many affinities with Rivette’s storytelling
method) aims to counter the essentially melancholic, or even tragic, views of
theorists from that era including the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and the
deconstructive philosopher Jacques Derrida.
For Deleuze, the search for meaning is not futile, and
we are not condemned to be haunted by the black holes, lacks and absences which
Lacan and Derrida cast as fundamental to existence (as well as to any political
action). Rather, meaning is a process,
like a game or a chase: it is constantly loading up with weighty, material
signifiers (such as the colours, rhythms, sensations of a movie), and just as
constantly emptying itself out at the level of final or ultimate signifieds,
meaning-labels. This philosophic discussion is reminiscent of Godard’s
wonderful description of his Pierrot le
fou in 1965: “Life is the subject, with Scope and
colour as its attributes [...] Life, in other words, fills the screen as a tap
fills a bath that is simultaneously emptying at the same rate”. (12)
And this is exactly,
literally what we see happening in Out 1 over almost 13 hours: a vast production of heavy signifiers leading to a
scramble for explanatory theories … which all get put back into the signifying
blender. The words of Louis Althusser (admittedly, not a terribly joy-filled
political philosopher) resonate here: “From the first moment to the last, the lonely
hour of the ‘last instance’ never comes” – as it might appear to come to the
various protagonists of Out 1.
Rather, there is always a way out, and a chance to begin again, with a new
experiment. This is where, in general, theatre and politics, performance and
theory, the individual and the group, ultimately converge in Rivette’s cinema.
Certainly, there is an overarching sense of doom, of
impending death, that haunts many Rivette films, from Paris Belongs to Us onward: the fear that a Big Other, a veritable
Dr Mabuse looms, pulling the strings. But also – and this is a Deleuzian-style,
amused flip we often find in Rivette’s films – we may just as easily discover
that a collectively spooked, paranoid intuition turns out to be baseless, at
which point the bad, depressing fantasy it causes, with all its attendant
traumas, suddenly vanishes into thin air. Things can turn on a dime within such
a dynamic, hyper-logical system. This dynamic, in all its playfulness, helps
explain the exhilaration and elation we feel when we watch L’amour fou, Out 1, Céline and Julie or Duelle … all the way down the line to Up Down Fragile and Around a
Small Mountain.
Rivette often spoke in paradoxes about his creative,
collaborative process. These paradoxes had a very similar shape – tracing a
path from an original assumed openness to, ultimately, something more closed
and finite. He started the making of Out
1 in 1970 with the idea of exploiting a wildly “heteroclite and
heterogeneous” casting – an assortment of actors with completely different
styles and methods of performance – but ended up realising that “this heterogeneity is much less flagrant than I’d
originally planned”. (13) Likewise, juggling various types of material from the
troubled, stop-start shoot of Merry-Go-Round (Maria Schneider had abandoned the project mid-way, to be replaced, completely
visibly, by Hermine Karagheuz), Rivette hoped to make it the avant-garde,
meta-document of a film that “searches for itself three times, three times
searches for a way out” – but, even here, the thread of a story ended up
imposing itself and making everything more coherent and unified than he
actually intended.
Many of Rivette’s actors, it would appear, absorbed
this selfsame type of paradox. In a colourful career interview with Cinéma magazine in 1985, Juliet Berto
(who died of cancer, tragically young, in 1990) looked back on her
collaborations with the director and asserted that, while her initial intention
was to defy and subvert this “old man” who had evidently cast her as a “Godardian
actress” in Out 1, she eventually
grasped that “the portrait was right-on, he had won”. (14) Bulle Ogier has
often testified that what at first seemed like very open, free and democratic
processes of improvisation and collaboration on the sets of the films were
often underpinned by Rivette’s stealthy manipulation of the psychologies and
proclivities of all involved (and thus not so far removed, on this level, from
a filmmaker such as Rainer Werner Fassbinder).
Indeed, during the “Duelle Remembered” interview contained in the Arrow box set, Ogier
goes so far as to call Rivette, with evident fondness, “the great manipulator”
– quite clearly the model for Ogier’s own playing of a charismatic but
stealthily controlling acting coach in Gang
of Four. And never forget that, as a 29 year-old critic at Cahiers du cinéma (contributing many
pieces that he would later refuse to have anthologised into a book since, after
becoming a director himself, he no longer agreed with his own, former opinions)
(15), Rivette celebrated the Mabuse-like, controlling “hand” of Fritz Lang,
sometimes literally visible in the insert shots of his films! So: the Watchman
is also a Manipulator.
Jacques Rivette’s greatness as an artist lies in the
way that he completely identified with what he thought of as the permanently
open, unfinished process of filmmaking, which could sometimes be terrifying –
he often declared that, for a movie to be any good, it had to be constantly
putting itself at risk. (16) In a tribute interview for Cahiers du cinéma, Jeanne Balibar reflected upon how – even long
after the freewheeling experiences of the 1960s and ‘70s – Rivette remained
true to this method of openness and instability.
He worked in the moment. He hadn’t used improvisation in a long time
but, all the same, he retained his taste for Mallarmé (whose writings he knew
by heart). Every day, there must be a throw of the dice … allied with this idea
that chance produces meaning, that all we need to do is let it emerge. Rohmer, too, trusted in
chance. They were people of the 1960s, influenced by Freud and Lacan. They
shared this faith, and Jacques trusted himself on this score, as well as
trusting the cinema-machine itself. Just set a dispositif going, and see what happens … (17)
And yet, at the same time, as the Great Manipulator,
Rivette achieved a mastery, after all: he was able to create enough distance from
the experimental process that he could sculpt it into a form and reflect upon
it. Through this dual method, a perpetual risk factor, for him and for us,
became a species of happiness, and a source of vital energy. Balibar says it
best, couching her testament in wonderfully unexpected terms that immediately
revitalise our appreciation of Rivette.
He was an “English” French filmmaker. Classical French culture and
Anglo-Saxon music (Pink Floyd and Bob Dylan) are both in the form of Rivette’s films, more so
than in Godard’s One Plus One [1968].
Rivette is the filmmaker who most fully translated rock into cinema, as a
history that is at once classical and new. In fact, we all worked together like
a rock band. To grasp Rivette, you have to read the memoirs of Dylan, or Keith
Richards. Of course, he also possessed the culture of Lewis Carroll and Emily
Brontë – but I think there was also a bit of Syd Barrett, psychedelia and jazz.
Many have attempted this, but only he succeeded, even if he never announced it
as his goal. Moreover, you can see it in his choice of actors, from Juliet
Berto to Pierre Clémenti, by way of Jean-Pierre Kalfon and Bulle Ogier: those
are the bodies of rockers! Ogier is our Marianne Faithfull. Godard is more pop,
so is Anna Karina. But Rivette is really rock. (18)
MORE Rivette: Lumière and Company
(2) Serge Daney & Jean Narboni, “Interview with
Jacques Rivette”, English translation by Louise Shea on the website devoted to
Rivette, Order of the Exile. The French original of this interview appeared in Cahiers du cinéma, no. 323/324 (May/June 1981). back
(3) See particularly Tom Paulus, “The Revenant:
Revisiting Rivette”, Photogénie, 29
March 2016;
and articles by Mary Wiles, Hamish Ford, Brad Stevens, Donatella Valente, and
Daniel Fairfax in issue 79 (July 2016) of Senses
of Cinema.
My own further contribution to this ongoing reinterpretation and revelation is
“The Broken Trilogy: Jacques Rivette’s Phantoms”, LOLA, issue 6 (December 2015). back
(4) Jean-André Fieschi (trans. Michael Graham),
“Jacques Rivette”, in Richard Roud (ed.), Cinema:
A Critical Dictionary, Volume Two (London: Secker & Warburg, 1980), pp.
871-877. back
(5) Gilles Deleuze, “Rivette’s Three Circles”, in Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews
1975-1995 (New York: Semiotext(e), 2007), p. 361. Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, referred to
throughout this essay, is published in English translation by Columbia
University Press. back
(6) Jeanne Balibar interviewed by Joachim Lepastier,
“Rivette Rock”, Cahiers du cinéma,
no. 720 (March 2016), p. 20 (translation mine). back
(7) “Entretien: Juliet Berto”, p. 20. back
(8) Cristina Álvarez López and I have devoted three
video essays and a short text (under the general title Paratheatre: Plays Without Stages) to this aspect of the film, as
part of a wider, collective project (running from August 2014 to May 2016) concerning Out 1 at the website MUBI
Notebook. back
(9) Laura U. Marks, “Workshopping for Ideas: Jacques
Rivette’s Out 1: Noli me tangere”, The Cine-Files, issue 10 (2016). back
(10) John Hughes, Bernadette
Lafont: An Interview in Central Park (New York: The Thousand Eyes, 1977),
p. 43. This rare book contains a priceless evocation of Rivette at work on Out 1 and Noroît. back
(11) Bernard Eisenschitz, Jean-André Fieschi &
Eduardo de Gregorio (trans. Tom Milne), “Interview with Jacques Rivette, April
1973”. back
(12) Tom Milne (ed. & trans.), Godard on Godard (London: Secker &
Warburg, 1972), pp. 213-214. back
(13) “Interview with Jacques Rivette, April 1973”. back
(14) “Entretien: Juliet Berto”, p. 20; an English
translation of this passage appears in the booklet accompanying the
Carlotta/Kino Lorber Out 1 box set. back
(15) Rivette’s writings (including precious
unpublished pieces) were posthumously gathered in Textes critiques (Paris: Post-Éditions, 2018), scrupulously edited
and annotated by critic-filmmakers Miguel Armas & Luc Chessel. back
(16) Rivette’s most elaborated statement on this
crucial idea, granted to Hélène Frappat in the late ‘90s, is the
interview-dialogue “The Secret and the Law”, an essential key to his cinema and
thought. A serviceable English translation by Srikanth Srinivasan (unwisely rendered as “Secrets and Laws”) can be
consulted;
a detailed summary and discussion of the original (with altered translations) is
included in my forthcoming book Filmmakers
Thinking (San Sebastián: EQZE, 2021). back
(17) “Rivette Rock”, p. 20. back
(18) Ibid. back
© Adrian Martin July 2016 / February 2017 / June 2021 |
