Retrospective Jacques Rivette

Film equals theatre, theatre equals life, and life equals film: it is these three equations that form the heart of Jacques Rivette's cinema. The French filmmaker has brought the concept of life as performance and performance as art to the screen in a radical fashion that remains unparalleled. Again and again, he has staged the myriad relationships between reality and fiction and art and life, with theatre rehearsals being merely their preferred form of expression. Rivette’s gift for effortlessly transitioning between the real and the familiar and the mysterious and the fantastic is characteristic of his cinema. The magic of his films is based on the power of the imagination.

Arsenal is dedicating a complete retrospective to Jacques Rivette, which includes many of his rarely shown films. Rivette's legendary magnum opus OUT 1, NOLI ME TANGERE (1971/90), which has a running time of nearly 13 hours, will also be screened. For the opening on October 2, we are presenting the Berlin premiere of his last (and shortest) film 36 VUES DU PIC SAINT LOUP (2009).

Jacques Rivette (*1928) founded the magazine Gazette du cinéma together with Eric Rohmer in 1950. After it folded, he went on to write reviews for Cahiers du cinéma from 1953 to 1967, acting as its chief editor from 1963–65. Rivette started realizing film projects earlier than critic colleagues Rohmer, Truffaut and Godard, with his short film LE COUP DU BERGER (1956) being regarded as the start of the Nouvelle Vague. Even today though, following 20 films stretching across five decades, he is still an outsider among France's great auteurs and the most idiosyncratic of the Nouvelle Vague's co-founders. His unconventional working methods display a joy in experimentation, often doing away with a script and drawing heavily on improvisation, meaning his shoots were themselves already adventurous enterprises. Yet watching Rivette’s films is also an adventure, given their disregard for standard narrative patterns, unusual lengths and frequent unsolved mysteries. The city of Paris plays a leading role, as do the various female protagonists that dominate Rivette’s films, played by actresses such as Bulle Ogier, Juliet Berto, Sandrine Bonnaire, Emmanuelle Béart, Jane Birkin and Jeanne Balibar. It is their bodies in space or in motion that determine the course of his films. Frequently inspired by literature (primarily Balzac, but also Diderot, Racine, Emily Brontë, Henry James, Luigi Pirandello, Lewis Carroll and Robert Louis Stevenson, to name just a few), Rivette lays out his cinematic games in unique, labyrinthine and fantastic fashion.