Cline et Julie vont en bateau 1974 Jacques

Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974)

Jacques Rivette (1928 - ) • As a critic, helped to define the sense of ‘mise en scène’ • A devoted cinema-goer with an ecyclopaedic knowledge of film • Many films poorly distributed and long unavailable, ‘underground’

Rivette and duration • • • Paris nous appartient (1961): 2 hrs 20 mins L’Amour fou (1969): 4 hrs Céline et Julie (1974): 3 hrs 15 mins La Belle Noiseuse (1991): 4 hrs Jeanne la Pucelle (1994): 6 hrs Haut bas fragile (195): 3 hrs Secret défense (1998): 3 hrs Va savoir (long version, 2001): 3 hrs 30 mins Out 1: Noli me tangere (1970): 12 hrs 40 mins; Out 1: Spectre (1974): 4 hrs

Why make such long films? • To force the spectator into a different relationship with the film • To resist institutionalised divisions of time and attention • Spending more time with characters leads to increased sense of reality and identification

Reality and artifice in Rivette • A mixture of chance and improvisation with cleverly contrived narratives • Films often based around a partially-revealed conspiracy or secret • A combination of the physical reality of theatre and the absent presence of cinema • Interest in the process of making art rather than the finished product

French cinema in the 1970 s • The ‘lost decade’ of French cinema • Production in decline due to global recession and competition from television • Auteur directors absent, short-lived or little visible

French cinema and May ‘ 68 • New Wave filmmakers protested at government intervention in Cinémathèque Française • Cannes film festival suspended in support of striking students • Some filmmakers, including Godard, subsequently abandoned commercial cinema

Marxist film theory in the 1970 s • ‘The Brechtian/Althusserian position held that true ‘realism’ implied incorporating into the film elements drawing attention to, and thereby destroying, the ‘illusion of reality’ presented by the images: at its most developed, it required a film to present not only a representation but also an analysis of its content and, ideally, of its own production’ (Smith 2005: 11)

Rivette in the 1970 s • Scènes de la vie parallèle: • Duelle (1976) • Noroît (1976) • Marie et Julien, abandoned, completed as Histoire de Marie et Julien (2003)

Feminist film theory in the 1970 s • The personal/private considered political • Laura Mulvey (1975) argues gender relations in cinema modelled on Freud’s oedipal scenario: • Men = active heroes and focus of identification; women passive objects of an anxious, fetishizing gaze

Rivette’s women • Main protagonists of all his films • Period dramas based around historical and literary heroines: La Religieuse (1966), Hurlevent (1985), Jeanne la Pucelle (1994), Ne touchez pas la hache (2007) • Rebellion and drag in L’Amour par terre (1984) • La Belle Noiseuse (1991) interrogates the role of women’s bodies as art objects

The Legacy of Céline et Julie Mulholland Drive (David Lynch, 2001)

Bibliography • Morrey, D. and A. Smith (2010), Jacques Rivette, Manchester: Manchester University Press. • Mulvey, L. (1975), ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, 16, 3, pp. 6 -18. • Smith, A. (2005), French Cinema in the 1970 s: The echoes of May, Manchester: Manchester University Press. • Wood, R. (1981), ‘Narrative Pleasure: Two Films of Jacques Rivette’, Film Quarterly, 35, 1, pp. 212.