For some years now, picked his silhouette, arched, had ceased to slip silently, almost seeming to apologize, in Parisian cinemas. Inflation movie releases, and soon age and illness, had been right in the frenzy that since his youth animated Rouen: Jacques Rivette belonged to the category of moviegoers filmmakers
. In the service of his passion, he first put his analytical skills and his pen, like Rohmer, Chabrol, Godard, Truffaut, constituting with them a phalanx of lovers gathered in the “Cahiers du Cinema”, taking the middle 60s the direction of the magazine instead of Rohmer, then everything which opposed it. The experiment did not last long, a year and a half, and he promptly found its place as a filmmaker.
Of all, he was the first to stage short films in Rouen start, then in Paris, where he also serves as an assistant on the set of “French Cancan” by Jean Renoir, to which he devoted a portrait in the series “Filmmakers of our time.” He then formed with François Truffaut an inseparable tandem, their friends and their enemies sometimes jokingly nicknamed Truffette and Rivaut.
Between dream and reality
“Paris Belongs to Us” his first feature film (1960), will the months to emerge, like a premonition of what will his career, often prevented by the embarrassment of production, output difficulties. Like “Suzanne Simonin, religious Diderot” with Anna Karina, banned by the censors before being completed – action that will inspire Godard a letter to André Malraux, “the Minister of Kultur” then , published by “Le Nouvel Observateur”.
The presentation of the film will only be allowed nearly ten years later in 1975. Meanwhile, Rivette directed “L’Amour fou” film more than 4 hours, in other words almost a short film with reference to the duration 12:29 “Out 1″ newly reissued. He experimented, he started, grants to its actors, actresses and his even more, an absolute freedom, providing them draw together they make the film, observing more than he directs, filming in continuity , letting them live.
“Celine and Julie Go Boating” (1974), with Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Dominique Labourier, the culmination of this period and allows it to finally touch recognition which previously was private: the film bears the mark of Rivette’s attraction to the occult, parallel worlds, confusion of reality and dreams. The filmmaker and his actors (who co-signed the script) play together and play with the viewer, who has to be carried away by their imagination and fantasy to enter a world of which he knows nothing (and also probably).
Women, theater, Balzac …
It is the same for his subsequent films, until the filmmaker comes to a form of more traditional inspiration, bringing it to “la belle noiseuse” with Michel Piccoli, Jane Birkin and Michel Piccoli, variation on the painter and his model, which won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes in 1991. To follow, he Sandrine Bonnaire Joan of Arc magnificent, turning to the advantage of the film financing difficulties encountered by the project, to keep it away from the din of battle and draw the vibrant portrait of a young woman.
always at the forefront of his films, women now form the heart and Rivette remains faithful to the actresses he has chosen, which Jeanne Balibar will join soon. Women, but also the scene, but the great writers Balzac in mind, he will deliver with “Beware of the ax” a superb adaptation of “La Duchesse de Langeais” (2007).
On that occasion, he said to us: “The staging is the art of suspense, of all the possible ways to have the first treaty of suspense, but then the word was written without ‘e’ end, it is. Pierre Corneille, which is the basis of everything. Work is always arranging and writing. The only difference is the object of worship, this massive machine that is the camera, which sometimes creates around himself . We are a strange agitation as high priests around this object, otherwise there is no real difference between the theater and the cinema: a great actor is someone who can stand before a camera . ”
All this, yes, and a lot of other things, and more, the mystery, the mysteries, he carried with him.
Pascal Mérigeau
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