Rivette Wrap up (2)

So, once more with the Rivette, and building on yesterday's post, I want to write a bit about duality and collaboration.

Out One: Spectre makes a particularly good starting place. Even more than usual for Rivette, it is built around matched pairs of things. The two investigators (Leaud and Berto); the two theater groups; the two plays; all the pairs within and between the groups: Thomas and Lilly (leaders of the two groups); the two outsiders, Sarah and Renaud, brought in to invigorate the two groups, who end up destroying them both by leaving. People with 2 names, like Pauline/Emily, and all the names Leaud goes by. Pauline/Emily's 2 kids. The two men who never turn up in the film, Pierre and Igor. The 2 "Thirteen" - Balzac's and the film's. The two sources of the secret messages, Lewis Carroll and Balzac. And around the film - it is, first up, itself part of a matched pair: Out One: Noli Me Tangere and Out One: Spectre. And the name itself has two parts - Out One/Spectre.

Doubles are everywhere in Rivette's films: doubles, matched pairs, halves. Though sometimes, 2's becomes 4s, become a string of supplements. A pervasive organizing principal: in Paris Belongs to Us: Juan and Gerard? And various couples arranged around them: Anne and Juan's sister; Anne and Terry. In The Nun? it's more of a series of contrasting pairs: Suzanne's mother and her mother superior; the first, good mother superior and the second, cruel one - then the second one and the indulgent one, who tries to seduce her. Other characters are arranged in pairs - the mother superior trying to seduce her/the confessor trying to seduce her; Suzanne and Therese, her "rival". L'Amour Fou? the principal is there, in the split between play and home, in the split between the play shown directly and the play shown through the odcumentary crew. Celine and Julie? Yes - the two heroines, of course; the two rivals in the melo, Sophie and Camille - and Camille and her dead sister (who are presented literally as doubles.) With repeated and doubled events and scenes - two performances on stage; two conversations with Grigoire - and all of it coming around in the end, two boats passing, and then the whole story looping around to begin again.

These structural patterns are more diffuse in the later films, but still visible: Gang of Four, like L'Amour Fou, is structured around 2 locations, the theater and the house in the suburbs; most of the theater scenes involve two actors at a time; there are, as well, two men, Antoine and Thomas, one present, one absent. La Belle Noiseuse: 2 pairs of lovers, 2 main interlopers (the art dealer and the sister), 2 paintings, and of course the bulk of the film is a two hander between Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Beart. Jeanne la Pucelle? it's split in two, with a certain parallism between the parts - it probably doesn't fit so neatly as some. Haut Bas Fragile? I'd say with these later films, the parallels and repetitions, which are still present, and powerful, have become more serial than dual - rather than a pattern of matched pairs, you have a series of pairs: A does something to B - B does something to C - C does something to D, etc. So Nathalie Richard forms a connection to Andre Marcon, who forms a connection to Marianne Denicourt, who forms an alliance with Richard and so on. Situations are repeated - couples form and evolve - all of it structured around the metaphor of dancing... Secret Defense, though, does revolve around fairly strict parallels: 2 sets of 2 siblings each, looking for vengeance, repeating situations, coming to see themselves in each other. Va Savoir? like Haut Bas Fragile, it's more serial than dual, though the main unit for the action is the couple. And The Story of Marie and Julien offers another set of examples: 2 ghosts, Marie's 2 lovers, repetition of events (notably Marie's fate, and her cumpulsion to repeat it), and so on. (And the film itself is, I think, part of a series with other Rivette films - a point worth noting, as he definitely repeats himself - returning to situations, actors, ideas, settings, and so on, over the years.)

This post has two parts: having listed off a bunch of example, I ask - what does it mean? Or (since I'm too resolute a formalist to take "what does it mean" too seriously), what does it do? Why are they there? I am tempted to invoke the spectre of structuralism, with its binaries and parameters - not without some justification, I suspect. (See this article on Cahiers de Cinema in New Left Review, or Girish's summary - Rivette brought structuralism and similar ideas to Cahiers during his turn at the helm....) But it is also connected to his interest in theater, and in collaboration. Abstractly - everything in these films is realized - known, found, understood (as much as it is understood) - through reference to other things: through performance, through connections to another person, through the search for something missing, through repetition, repeating things differently, trying to get them right this time.

But more than this: the abstraction of doubled and repeated characters and images is related to the concrete importance of collaboration in Rivette's films. Many of these pairs collaborate explicitly - Celine and Julie, Frenhofer and Marianne, Ninon and Louise (Richard and Denicourt) in Haut Bas Fragile. And collaborating pairs recur through the films, even when they are not central to the plots: consider the theater exercises in Out One; the dancers in Haut Bas Fragile. And this spirit of collaboration, of making it up together, extends beyond the doubles that appear - theater and acting are fundamental to Rivette's work, but the type of theater is important as well - it is almost always highly collaborative, improvisational (even when working with great texts) and very tentative. Consider the constant repairing of characters and actors in Gang of Four; or the way the dancers change partners in Haut Bas Fragile, or integrate others into their dancing. All of which, finally, is a reflection of the films themselves - highly collaborative, with a loose, fluid style, an improvisational feel, and their emphasis on cooperation. The way, for instance, Rivette highlights the painter - the real painter, whose hands play Frenhofer's hands - in La Belle Noiseuse. He is always interested in how art is made, showing the process, say, of the development of that painting, or of the relationship between Frenhofer and Marianne (which itself moves toward collaboration over time), or showing the details, the starts and stops, of putting on a play in all the theatrical films.