Perhaps we had lost track of him a bit. Now we suddenly learn that Jacques Rivette has passed away. And we are sorry to have missed the last, unreleased titles of this great French filmmaker.
Rivette was one of the 'gang of seven' in the 1960s, the brash bad boys who changed French cinema forever with their Nouvelle Vague. He died on 29 January of Alzheimer's.
In our country, many film fans will associate him with the rise of movie houses in the 1970s. How we swooned at Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974). Two girls, like Alice twins in Wonderland, giggling elatedly after each exciting visit to a strange house where they try to intervene in a drama that plays out there again and again. It was new, different, enchanting and romantic, a film you wanted to see again and again.
With remarkable tenacity, Rivette has stuck to his own ideas. His work, which testifies to his love of theatre and actors, among other things, can be seen as a playful exploration in the area between appearances and reality. Fantasies in which his preferably female protagonists often get caught up in conspiracies and plots. He himself called it, "A search for truth, in a way that can only be untrue." Behind his thriller-like fairy tales is an obsession with manipulation and role-playing.
All these elegantly shifting relationships and attempts to make the viewer complicit meant that the length of his films could get out of hand. Something he didn't care about. In La belle noiseuse (1991), for instance, he had a draughtsman sketch a model in the actual time such a thing takes. Rivette's most extreme film was Out 1 (1972), based on theatrical improvisations with more than 30 actors, which in its original length of 12 hours was only seen at a few festivals.
The last we saw of his in the Netherlands was Va savoir (2001), an elegant comedy full of delightful flirts and misunderstandings, a no-haste gem for lovers of subtle irony.
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