Rivette Wrapup (1)

So now that the Rivette series at the HFA is over, I want to write up some of my thoughts on it. It's not easy - as Michael Kerpan said in the comments to one of my previous notes on the series, Rivette's films are hard to write about. They resist analysis - for, I suspect, some pretty good (and analyzable) reasons. They are very fluid - the look, the story telling style, the treatment of themes and character, the themes themselves. They are about fluidity - about theater and performance, about self-invention, about living, moving through a world, consciously, actively. That's how they look - with their mobile staging, the graceful moving camera, that constantly reshapes the space, creating deeper and shallower staging in the same shot. Rivette's style is hard to describe - he doesn't seem to have a characteristic look to his films - though they are, in the end, almost instantly recognizable. That flow and pulse of people and the camera, around, through, spaces....

His style also appears in the images and events that keep reappearing in his films. I do not list such repeating images, ideas, actions, situations, places, in vain. Rivette returns constantly to these things: pairs of things, twins, ghosts, old houses, theaters, theater, lost manuscripts (or tapes or keys or art works) - conspiracies, collaborations - cats, park benches, rooftops, stairways, people slipping, tripping, stumbling. He works variations on them - and creates formal patterns out of the variations. That’s my goal, here, by the way - the next post, taking a closer look at some of these repetitions, and their possible meaning - or at least function. But now I want to point to the sense of play in his films. They are organized around those recurring elements - not so much around the meanings of those elements, as using them to generate the fiction. Take a group of actors, plus the filmmaking crew, plus his customary set of devices, plus a book of play or work of art to work from - and see what you come up with. Literally? it seems close to it in some cases - the screenwriting credits for the casts of Celine and Julie Go Boating or Haut Bas Fragile might attest to it; the long attention to the theatrical troops in Out One and L'Amour Fou seem to work on some of the same principals.

But whether they are generative or not - the films' structures have a ludic quality: think about Va Savoir - the way the story starts with Jeanne Balibar and Sergio Castellito on stage, and slowly works outward, bringing in other characters, one or two at a time, establishing primary and secondary relationsships among them, until all of them are related to all the rest. Things are set in motion - plots are enacted and schemes hatched, people assume a series of roles, different roles with different characters - and it plays out - and comes back around to where it started, ending with everyone dancing with the one that brought them. It is heartfelt - there's never any doubt that Rivette can make you feel something with his characters - but it is explicitly a game, and usually (as here) with games inside the games.

These qualities make it hard, I say, to analyze Rivette - to define his style, his interests, the meaning of his work. It is devoted to a kind of freedom and experimentation - to exploring the possibilities of the ways we invent ourselves (if you have to have a large theme) - to ways we invent worlds. It is about secrets and mysteries, but about their contingency - and the exact nature of the conspiracies that turn up in his films varies from film to film. Maybe it's real - maybe it's a game - maybe it's someone's imagination - maybe it's Balzac. It changes, and can change every time he returns to it. And the result is, his films seem inexhaustable.

Tomorrow (or whenever I get it written): a closer look at one of the recurring patterns in his films - duality, doubles and pairs, and sometimes series' - with special attention to Out One: Spectre, which pushes the principal very far. And possibly some shameless Interpretation, or at least, an attempt to draw parallels between all those doubles and the theme of collaboration that runs through his work.