Masters: Jacques Rivette
Most cinema lovers are aware of the cohort of young film critics—among them Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Éric Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol—who would go on to notoriety as the preeminent figureheads of the French New Wave. Of the young Cahiers du cinéma critics operating under the informal tutelage of André Bazin, it was Jacques Rivette who would, as a filmmaker, take most directly to heart Bazin’s insistence that the cinema might be able to distinguish itself from the theatre most distinctively by repurposing its texts and templates. Rivette’s early criticism excelled at assessing the interrelation between the arts, and he continued as an active filmmaker to believe in cinema as an “impure” form assimilating elements from all those to have preceded it. From the outset presenting a radical break from tradition nevertheless in a constant, exceedingly dynamic dialogue with traditions (on any number of fronts at any given time), the films included in Calgary Cinematheque's Masters: Jacques Rivette series are first and foremost emancipatory collaborations with actresses, seeking to establish methods by way of which theatrical ritual might serve to indulge a return to archaic matriarchal myths, provoking a radical break with the thrust of industrial modernity and its image culture.
Series Films
The Nun (1966)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Oct 12, 2020
Widely attacked leading up to its release for its perceived anti-Catholic bias, The Nun stars French New Wave icon Anna Karina as a young woman forced by her family to receive ordination as a nun. Though her first Mother Superior is a sympathetic figure, sensitive to her new charge’s plight, Suzanne will be subjected to increasing campaigns of ill-treatment and outright abuse at the hands of the supposedly pious protectors tasked with overseeing her care.
Céline AND JULIE GO BOATING (1974)
Directed by jACQUES rIVETTE
Oct 22, 2020
Rivette’s most successful and widely beloved achievement follows magician Céline (Juliet Berto) and librarian Julie (Dominique Labourier), who are launched through the looking glass and straight into a labyrinthine comic adventure involving a haunted house, psychotropic candy, and a murder mystery as, all the while, the line between illusion and reality grows ever fainter. This giddy surrealist masterpiece had an especially major impact on second wave feminists and served as the main influence for Desperately Seeking Susan (1985).
Duelle (1976)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Oct 26, 2020
The first and one of only two films completed at the time intended to kick-off a series of four, Duelle tells the story of the all time gangbusters knock-down-drag-out battle between two celestial goddesses Viva and Leni, personification of Sun and Moon respectively, vying to acquire a magical jewel that will allow the goddess who possesses it to remain on Earth and rule over it uncontested.
Noroit (1976)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Oct 29, 2020
Morag (Geraldine Chaplin) vows to avenge the death of her brother against the power-mad Giulia (Bernadette Lafont), leader of an isolated band of pirates who occupy a remote island castle. She enlisting the assistance of Erika (Kika Markham), who operates as a piratic double agent. Various parties become involved in overlapping conspiracies, and a staged piece of amateur theatre, veiled commentary in the manner of Hamlet’s play within a play, sets in motion the final apocalyptic showdown between Morag and Giulia, two larger than life and monomaniacally vengeance-bent matriarchal archetypes with nothing left to lose.
Paris Belongs To Us (1961)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Nov 2, 2020
A long and winding tale of theatre, conspiracy, and the Sphinx-like city of Paris herself, Rivette’s debut feature follows Anne Goupil (Betty Schneider), a new arrival to the city who, having innocently attended a conspicuously solemn party, becomes involved with a vast network of people various degrees of shady who may or may not have something to do with what may or may not have been the suicide of somebody named Juan.
Le Pont du nord (1981)
Directed by Jacques Rivette
Nov 5, 2020
Marie (Bulle Ogier) is an ex-radical who has just been released following a lengthy prison sentence. Freshly landed in Paris, she repeatedly runs into Baptiste (Pascale Ogier), a young leather-jacketed woman ever zooming about on her scooter. Baptiste quickly draws the claustrophobic Marie into a labyrinth of paranoid conjecture, involving a briefcase, cryptic clues, statues imputed to possess diabolic agency, and a map that may lead to the lion’s very den. The city of Paris is now a game-board though this is free-form play steeped in mounting dread.
