Jacques Rivette, the veteran French film director who became a stalwart of the French new wave of the late 1950s and 60s, has died. He was 87, and had reportedly had Alzheimer’s disease for some years.
In 1953, Rouen-born Rivette joined the likes of François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol as a writer on the influential magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, edited by André Bazin, and like them was encouraged to make a move into feature film-making. His debut, Paris Nous Appartient (aka Paris Belongs to Us), was a critical, if not commercial success on its release in 1961.
Rivette remained within the fold of film criticism, however, and became editor of Cahiers in 1963. Under his stewardship the magazine became more politically engaged, reflecting Rivette’s own Marxist politics as well as the intellectual drift of the time. Rivette stepped down in 1965, and recommenced film-making with The Nun, starring Anna Karina as woman attempting to escape her oppressive life in a convent. The film aroused much controversy and it was banned until 1967. Rivette followed The Nun with the experimental improvised piece L’Amour Fou.
Rivette then began to become known for the increasing length of his films: Out 1, released in 1971, ran at 770 minutes – over 12 hours – which was followed by the comparatively-modest 192 minutes of what remains probably his most celebrated film, the 1974 release Céline and Julie Go Boating. Shortly afterwards, Rivette suffered a nervous breakdown and had to abandon a subsequent project, the four-part Scènes de la Vie Parallèle.
In 1991, Rivette’s La Belle Noiseuse – running at 237 minutes – became an unexpected success, perhaps due to its theme of an elderly artist undergoing a creative rebirth, which led to a similar revival of Rivette’s own fortunes. It enabled him to make a two-part film about Joan of Arc, starring Sandrine Bonnaire, which runs at 336 minutes in total. His final film was Around a Small Mountain, featuring Jane Birkin, which was released in 2009.
