Jacques Rivette (1 March 1928 – 29 January 2016) occupies a singular place in postwar French cinema: a critic-turned-filmmaker whose work pushed the boundaries of duration, theatricality, improvisation and the relationship between fiction and daily life. Unlike some of his better-known New Wave colleagues who achieved early international fame with relatively compact films, Rivette built a reputation for sprawling, sometimes infamously difficult works — films that ask the spectator to become an active mapmaker of meaning rather than a passive recipient. His career is best approached as a sustained investigation into theatricality, collaboration, mise-en-scène as a thinking process, and the porous boundary between performance and offstage existence. That investigation made him both the most “maverick” and the most consistently rigorous of the Cahiers-du-Cinéma generation: a director who never surrendered to fashion and who transformed the terms of cinematic possibility for later generations of filmmakers and critics.
From critic to director: Cahiers du Cinéma and the New Wave context
Rivette’s formation came out of the most influential film-review milieu in postwar France. He was part of the circle that gathered around Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s — an intellectual hotbed where young critics like François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Rivette rethought cinema through the concepts of authorship and critical engagement. The magazine’s emphasis on director-as-author (the auteur theory) and its rigorous attention to style and mise-en-scène shaped Rivette’s approach: film was not merely narrative content but an orchestration of visual, rhythmic and performative decisions by a director who thought with the camera. Rivette’s early critical writings are notable for their insistence on cinema as a field of constant interrogation rather than mere reporting; they also reveal an early attraction to theatricality and to directors who blurred genre expectations.
Yet Rivette’s transition to filmmaking also marked a stubborn independence from the commercial and promotional circuits that buoyed other New Wave names. Where Truffaut and Godard quickly made films that circulated widely (and that built durable film-star images), Rivette’s aesthetic choices pushed toward experimentation: very long running times, collaborative and improvisatory scripting processes, and a willingness to leave puzzle-like elements unresolved. Early difficulties in financing and distribution also shaped his trajectory — and helped produce the image of Rivette as an “outsider” within even the New Wave.
Major phases and works: an overview
Rivette’s career resists neat periodization precisely because he returned repeatedly to a handful of preoccupations — theatricality, improvisation, networks of interpersonal allegiance and betrayal, and the city-as-stage — developed in different formal modes. Still, for clarity, it helps to consider a rough division into early and middle career (1950s–1970s), the long-form and theatrical experiments of the 1970s, and his “mature” late films (1980s–1990s) that reasserted narrative clarity while preserving his concerns with performance and the making of fiction.
Early films and the formation of a poetic–political sensibility (1957–1969)
Rivette’s first significant feature, Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us), was produced in the late 1950s but only released in 1961. The film — a dense, paranoid tale of secretive groups in postwar Paris — already shows Rivette’s taste for urban labyrinths, conspiratorial undercurrents, and an inclination toward ensemble casts whose relationships form the film’s engine. Paris nous appartient established a recurring tonal mix in Rivette’s cinema: a plot that seems to promise genre resolution (mystery, thriller) that keeps being deferred by discursive digressions, theatrical interludes, and a privileging of atmospheric investigation over tidy denouement.
In the 1960s Rivette also directed La Religieuse (The Nun, 1966), an adaptation that ignited controversy for its critique of institutional religion, and L’Amour fou (Mad Love, 1969), a film that uses theatrical rehearsal and breakup as a crucible to interrogate love, authorship and the limits of staging. L’Amour fou in particular is paradigmatic: a film about a theatrical company rehearsing an increasingly elaborate production, whose dissolution becomes a vehicle for thinking about obsession, control and the collapse of representational frames. Rivette’s affinity for the rehearsal process — film as rehearsal, theater as testing ground for cinematic possibilities — becomes explicit here.
The 1970s: Out 1 and the politics of duration
The early 1970s are where Rivette’s reputation among cinephiles reached mythic proportions. Out 1 (1971), an approximately 750–760 minute work in its original form (often encountered in shorter “Spectre” versions), stands as perhaps the most extreme public demonstration of Rivette’s interest in scale, improvisation and labyrinthine storytelling. Conceived partly as a television project, Out 1 was refused by the broadcaster and shown only once in long form at its initial premiere — an event that entered cinephile lore. The film weaves together two groups of young Parisians inhabiting overlapping social circles and becomes a sprawling study of conspiracy, theatre, surveillance and the desire for collective formation.
Alongside Out 1, the 1970s produced some of Rivette’s most inventive and humane work. Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974) is formally lighter but no less radical: a playful, intertextual, and deeply theatrical film in which two women discover a house that functions as a looping narrative machine. It is at once a comedy of friendship, a fairy-tale riff, and an inquiry into the pleasures of making and sharing stories. Whereas Out 1 challenges spectators by demanding an act of sustained endurance and mapping, Céline and Julie invites collaboratorship and delight; yet both films share a theatrical consciousness and a fascination with how fiction colonizes everyday life.
Late career: refinement and narrative renewal (1980s–1990s)
From the 1980s onward Rivette produced films that, while retaining his central obsessions, returned more regularly to clearer narrative arcs, sometimes shorter running times and a renewed engagement with actors’ craft. Notable among these is La Belle Noiseuse (1991), an extended, interior exploration of artistic creation in which Rivette deploys his patient camera to observe the labor of an ageing painter and a young model. La Belle Noiseuse is often hailed as an exemplary study of artistic process: long takes, sparing editing, and an ethical attentiveness to how representation happens in relation to desire and age. Rivette’s later films — including Le Pont du Nord and Va savoir (2001) — balance playful plot devices with an unmistakable insistence on theatrical interplay and collaborative ensembles.
A working method: rehearsal, improvisation, ensemble, and duration
To understand Rivette’s films is to understand his method. He often worked with tight ensembles of actors across multiple films and favored processes that blurred rehearsal and performance. Two interlocking pillars structured much of his practice: (1) the theatrical model — staging as investigation — and (2) improvisation as a method for letting characters and scenarios discover themselves in the act of performance.
Theater as laboratory
Rivette frequently framed films as theatrical enterprises: companies rehearsing plays, writers staging readings, or characters playing roles for one another in quasi-theatrical situations. Theatre isn’t merely a subject for Rivette; it is a model of how to build a film. The rehearsal becomes a fertile site where dramatic tension and the politics of authorship are visible. In L’Amour fou, the breakup of a couple engaged in staging a play becomes indistinguishable from the collapse of the play itself; in Céline and Julie, playing with dramatic texts produces narrative openings and recursive loops. For Rivette, then, performance discloses structures of identity, power and possibility.
Improvisation and collaboration
Across films Rivette commonly developed scenarios collaboratively with actors and co-writers; scripts might contain scaffolding rather than fixed dialogue, and actors would often inhabit a character whose choices were discovered in rehearsal. This method produced a freshness and unpredictability in performance — a sense that characters were living rather than reciting — and required a director willing to respond to discoveries made on set. The risk, of course, is formal looseness; the reward is a cinematic space that feels alive and undetermined. Rivette’s films, then, are less declarations than invitations: invitations to the actors, the crew and the public to participate in meaning-making.
Duration as tactic
One of Rivette’s most debated tactics is his use of extended duration. Whether in the 750-minute Out 1 or in long, observational scenes in La Belle Noiseuse, duration functions as a way to render processes visible — the slow work of politics, of rehearsal, of erotic negotiation — and to counter the commodified rhythm of mainstream cinema. Long takes and extended scenes also demand an ethical posture from the spectator: attention, patience, and an openness to uncertainty. Rivette trusted time to reveal pattern and to allow marginal, accidental events to accrue meaning. In this sense, duration is not mere spectacle or an indulgent sign of auteurial freedom; it is a formal commitment to the conditions under which meaning emerges.
Themes and recurring motifs
Several thematic axes recur in Rivette’s work and bind together otherwise formally diverse films.
The politics of networks: conspiracy and collectivity
Many Rivette films stage groups — companies, conspiratorial cells, circles of friends — and explore how those networks form, succeed and disintegrate. Out 1 is paradigmatic here: a story of scattered conspirators and the desire to constitute a group that might alter the world. For Rivette, groups are sites of fascination because they reveal how subjectivity is formed in relation to others; and because they pose questions about trust, secrecy and betrayal.
The porous border between fiction and life
Rivette’s films are obsessed with the moment when fiction intrudes upon life and life is staged as fiction. Houses that repeat episodes from the past (Céline and Julie), rehearsal rooms whose tensions bleed into relationships (L’Amour fou), artistic projects that function as crucibles for ethical decisions (La Belle Noiseuse) — these situations proliferate across his oeuvre. The recurring question is ethical as much as aesthetic: what are the responsibilities of those who make fictions toward those who inhabit them? How does play alter desire and responsibility? Rivette’s cinema constantly asks viewers to notice the seams between performance and the “real,” and to attend to the effects of making (and being made into) a character.
Women, collaboration and the politics of gaze
As a director, Rivette has been praised and criticized for his representations of women. Films like Céline and Julie present women as inventive agents who resist objectifying narratives: they are players who rework stories; friendship between women is foregrounded. La Religieuse, by contrast, probes institutional violence against a young woman and can be read as a fierce critique of patriarchal structures. La Belle Noiseuse stages the gaze of the painter in dialogue with the agency of the model; it is a film that forces spectators to ask who is looking, who is being looked at, and what the ethical consequences of that dynamics are. In Rivette’s best films, female subjectivity is complex: women are not mere objects of aesthetic desire but co-authors and resistors of imposed narratives.
Critical reception and institutional fortunes
Rivette’s critical reception has been uneven but consistently intense. British and American critics who value formal rigor and the interrogative potential of cinema have praised his risk-taking and philosophical depth; museum and festival circles established a strong Rivette cult, especially around the rarified spectacle of Out 1. In France, reviewers were sometimes baffled by his long forms and theatrical preoccupations; yet among cinephiles and many serious critics, Rivette was often considered the most uncompromising member of the New Wave. Obituaries and retrospective appraisals since his death in 2016 emphasize his independence, exacting standards and the underappreciated consistency of his work across decades.
Institutionally, Rivette’s films were not always commercially successful; many were shepherded by small producers and required patient cultivation in arthouse circuits. Out 1’s initial near-invisibility, and the later piecemeal release of its shorter versions, contributed to the mythic status of the film while also limiting its immediate audience. That scarcity, paradoxically, amplified appreciation when restorations and revivals allowed contemporary viewers to re-encounter his staggering projects.
Influence and legacy
Assessing influence is always partly speculative, but Rivette’s legacy is clear on several fronts.
First, he helped legitimize the idea that cinema could be an open-ended laboratory rather than a packaged commodity. The model of rehearsal, the use of long duration and the privileging of ensemble improvisation can be traced forward into experimental European cinema and into directors who treat film sets as sites of research rather than assembly lines.
Second, Rivette’s interrogation of theatricality and mise-en-scène has influenced film theory and criticism: his films are often cited in debates about performance, the ethics of representation, and the filmic staging of subjectivity. Rivette showed that mise-en-scène could itself be an argument — a way to pose philosophical and political problems without subordinating them to didactic plot.
Third, on a practical level, Rivette’s insistence on trust and collaborative risk has encouraged filmmakers to build long-term repertoires with actors and writers and to treat financing as an ongoing conversation rather than a single bargain. This relational approach, though not glamorous from a festival-market perspective, has nurtured durable creative communities in French cinema and beyond.
Close readings: three films
Out 1 (1971; Noli me tangere)
Out 1 is the paradigmatic Rivette experiment in scale and social dramaturgy. In its longest form it stretches to some twelve hours and unfolds as a multiplex of chance encounters, surveillance, conspiratorial notes, and theatrical rehearsals. The film’s structure is deliberately porous: episodes collapse into improvisatory scenes, narrative threads are begun and abandoned, and a mythic subplot about a “secret society” functions less as a plot engine than as a foil for Rivette’s true interest — the possibility of collective transformation.
Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974; Céline et Julie vont en bateau)
A strikingly different tone, Céline and Julie is a fairy-tale of female friendship and narrative play. Two women stumble into a haunted house whose repeated scenes can be entered, decoded, altered and ultimately used to rewrite experience. Rivette treats narrative as a toy and a weapon; play becomes a technique of liberation. The film is formally ingenious: it mixes slapstick, magical realism, literary allusions and theatrical devices. The joy of collaboration animates the film — both onscreen between the protagonists and offscreen between Rivette and his actors and co-writers.
La Belle Noiseuse (1991)
Here Rivette’s patience becomes an ethic. The film offers long, contemplative sequences following a painter at work with his model. There is a narrative — the painter’s process, the model’s awakening, interpersonal entanglements — but Rivette’s camera privileges the unadorned observation of making. The film is a meditation on representation, embodiment and time: how an image is made, what it costs, and how a work of art relates to the flesh it represents. La Belle Noiseuse demonstrates that Rivette’s long-form tendencies did not merely seek spectacle; they pursued an ethics of attentiveness that animates the best observational cinema.
Criticisms and contested readings
Honest appraisal requires attending to criticisms. Rivette’s maximalism can be read as indulgence: long run times and improvisatory meanderings risk alienating viewers and masking formal incoherence. Some critics and viewers have argued that his films are too esoteric, too theatrical, or insufficiently concerned with ethical clarity in their portrayals of gender and power. Others point to his uneven output: the philosophical reach of films like Out 1 and Céline and Julie is not always matched by narrative momentum in all his works.
These criticisms have merit when they attend to particular works; yet they often miss what Rivette’s cinema attempts as a whole: an inquiry into how meaning is produced in rehearsed life, and a defense of cinematic time as ethically and philosophically necessary. When Rivette’s films succeed — and many do with remarkable force — they transform endurance into insight and theatrical risk into ethical attention. To judge him by commercial or conventional narrative standards alone is to misread an artist committed to expanding the grammar of the medium.
Rivette in historical perspective: New Wave, revision, and recuperation
The standard histories of the French New Wave tend to privilege early energy — the youthful rejections of the “tradition of quality” and the immediate, publicity-friendly successes of Godard and Truffaut. Rivette’s history complicates that narrative because he remained experimental even as the movement’s commercial visibility grew. Over time film historians have revised their accounts: the New Wave is now understood not as a single uniform bloc but as a plurality of approaches, among which Rivette’s rigorous formalism is essential. Recent scholarship has emphasized how Cahiers’s polemical start matured into divergent practices: some of its contributors became populist auteurs; others, like Rivette, remained committed to cinema as an ongoing process of discovery and risk. Exhibitions, restorations and renewed academic attention since the 1990s (and especially after Rivette’s death) have clarified his achievement for a new generation of viewers and filmmakers.