L’amour fou: A Revolution in Realism, Reflexivity, and Oneiric Reverie

Bulle Olgier in L'amour Fou. Photo: Pierre Zucca & Alain Levent.

It was during the filming of the documentary Jean Renoir le patron (1966), which consisted of three programs for the fledgling television series “Cinéastes de notre temps” (cofounded in 1964 by the late André Bazin’s wife, Janine Bazin, and Cahiers du cinéma critic and filmmaker André S. Labarthe), that Jacques Rivette discovered a new vision of filmmaking based on that of the aging director. Rivette had felt compelled to completely alter his course following the experience of La religieuse (1965), when he found himself hemmed in by his own scripted adaptation of Diderot’s text. He found inspiration for a stylistic revolution in Renoir, who, in his estimation, had created “a cinema which does not impose anything, where one tries to suggest things, to let them happen, where it is mainly a dialogue at every level, with the actors, with the situation, with the people you meet, where the act of filming is part of the film itself.”(1) The two weeks that he spent with Renoir, listening to him talk about the cinema and his relationship with his actors, renewed his desire to pursue completely different avenues in his own work. Rivette also was inspired by the work of documentary filmmaker Jean Rouch, whose films, he insists, uphold the tradition of realism established in Renoir.(2) Rivette’s relationship with his actors would shift significantly following his encounter with Renoir and would become central to the experimental style of L’amour fou (1969), Out 1, noli me tangere (Out 1, Touch Me Not; 1971), and Out 1: Spectre (1971; released 1974).

Rivette’s stylistic revolution coincides not only with the completion of his documentary on Renoir but also with the cultural revolution in France following the events of May 1968. Testifying to the radical moment of cultural change, the nearly thirteen-hour Out 1, noli me tangere, and the reedited four-hour version, Out 1: Spectre, represent the culmination of Rivette’s effort, which began with L’amour fou, to break from the strictures of narrative form, from the inflexibility imposed by a script, and from the acting style required by rigid adherence to the script. The four-hour experimental L’amour fou (the title pays tribute to André Breton’s 1937 surrealist text) initiates Rivette’s exploration of temporal duration. At the request of the film’s distributor, Cocinor-Marceau, a reedited two-hour version was also produced and released in tandem with the original; however, Rivette did not sanction the release of this reedited film, and so disowned it. This unauthorized version was subsequently refused commercial distribution and thus remains unavailable for commentary. The full-length film edited by Nicole Lubtchansky uses duration in a mise en abyme construction where Rivette’s 35 mm black-and-white film records a television crew directed by André S. Labarthe, which uses 16 mm black-and-white film stock to document a stage production of Jean Racine’s seventeenth-century play Andromaque. Rivette uses reflexive theatricality in the film to explore the boundaries of classical theatre and the Italian Renaissance stage, which had largely determined the mise-en-scène of both Paris nous appartient (1961) and La religieuse. In L’amour fou, Rivette pushes beyond the boundaries imposed by narrative, script, and acting style, which he felt had constrained him during the filming of La religieuse, to enter into a new dimension in filmmaking, which is disclosed in this Pirandello citation used to introduce the story outline: “I have thought about it and we are all mad.”(3)

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Forced to work within the severe budgetary restrictions imposed by the film’s producer, Georges de Beauregard, Rivette was compelled to shoot L’amour fou in Paris with a limited production team, few decors, and in just five weeks. The film reworks the story and structure of Paris nous appartient, moving back and forth between the world of the theatre and the world backstage, between the work of a theatre director, Sébastien Gracq (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), who oversees his troupe’s rehearsals of a production of Andromaque, and the life he shares with his partner Claire (Bulle Ogier), an actress involved in the production. While L’amour fou shares with Paris nous appartient its focus on theatre, each film provides a singular response within its respective era. Whereas Paris nous appartient can be viewed as a prescient, political response to the menacing rise of Gaullisme in the late 1950s, L’amour fou does not openly address politics but rather evolves from within, and thereby reflects the pervasive atmosphere of revolt, unrest, and uncertainty in the years immediately preceding the events of May ’68. Dismissive of the film directly based on political themes, Rivette describes L’amour fou as “a deeply political film,” as his “Prima della rivoluzione,” because of its moral stance on human relationships, affirming that the moral choices made by those involved with the production, during the filming and editing, are finally political choices.(4) Rivette did not believe that film was the medium for sermonizing: L’amour fou instead offers a serious inquiry into film’s complex means of production, which is why it remains one of the most powerful and political of films to have come out of the New Wave.

Rivette confided to me at Café de la Bastille in 1999 that, of all his films, Paris nous appartient and L’amour fou were the two that he viewed as autobiographical, to a certain extent. The figure of the director takes centre stage in both. It is not difficult to see elements of the young, idealistic filmmaker Rivette in the beleaguered theatre director Gérard Lenz (Giani Esposito), who confides to Anne (Betty Schneider) that he would be willing to do almost anything to put on his play. It is well known that Rivette similarly encountered financial difficulties during the filming of Paris nous appartient, which was among the first of the New Wave films to go into production but the last to be released, in late 1961. We can surmise that Rivette encountered the moral dilemmas borne by Gérard in the course of the film’s protracted production process and, perhaps, was even fearful of losing his actors and crew to well-subsidized television productions. He must have felt himself to be – far more so than his Cahiers colleagues – a chartered member of the “order of exiles” that Gérard insists he has been inducted into. Whereas Gérard encounters the difficulties of directing a play not well known to French audiences, Sébastien stages a canonical classic in a highly experimental style in L’amour fou. Unlike Gérard, Sébastien appears to be oblivious to financial considerations, expressing his disdain for public perception: “I don’t think that the work can reach the public or please them.” Rivette may have similarly suspected that the experimental textual strategies of L’amour fou and also its duration would preclude its commercial viability; if so, his suspicions have proven correct, because the film remains currently unavailable in any format. Unlike the solitary, tormented director who in Paris nous appartient confronts existential choices, the figure of the director in L’amour fou is bisected into theatre director Sébastien and television director Labarthe. The threat that had been implicitly posed by the media to the theater director in Paris nous appartient invades the stage in L’amour fou and is even reflexively incorporated into the play’s production. We can surmise that Rivette would have identified easily with either role, for each, at times, mirrors the other.

At this point in his film career, Rivette was eager to examine theatre from a completely different perspective, that of documentary reportage.(5) Labarthe was the obvious choice to direct the 16 mm film of the theatre troupe. Rivette’s admiration for the televised series, “Cinéastes de notre temps,” that Labarthe had cofounded, and his work with him on Jean Renoir le patron, which had also been shot in 16 mm black-and-white film, motivated his choice. Rivette allowed Labarthe and cameraman Étienne Becker complete freedom on the set. Labarthe adopts a mock-cinéma verité style, zooming in at crucial moments to capture an actor’s expression in close-up, yet he does not intentionally interfere with the dramatic progression of the play. Offstage, he played a pivotal role in the interviews he conducted with members of the troupe.

While Labarthe and Becker were shooting their 16 mm footage, Rivette and his cameraman Alain Levent were simultaneously filming the troupe from a greater distance with a 35 mm Mitchell camera. Rivette maintains that the 35 mm camera was there to merely record the events as neutrally as possible, maintaining the same invisibility and proximity to the stage as that of a theatre spectator.(6) He characterizes the diminutive role of the 35 mm camera in the theatre as akin to “the intruder who doesn’t come too close because he’ll get yelled at if he comes any closer, who watches from the corners, who looks down from the balcony, always hiding a bit. It has its oppressed voyeur side to it, like someone who can never come up as close as he would like to, who doesn’t even hear everything.”(7) The scenes in the theatre testify to the disparity between the Mitchell and the Coutant, which Rivette describes as “two opposite forms of indiscretion, a passive one and an active one, one sly and one bossy,” respectively, while pointing to the inalterable presence of the reality that preexists both.(8) Rivette was well aware that the grainy, unpolished look of the 16 mm footage would come to represent the “cinema” vis-à-vis the seeming transparency of the 35 mm film. Yet its role in L’amour fou was not entirely predetermined, and Rivette was surprised to discover that “the 16 mm brought in suspense, . . .” not simply in terms of the fiction that at times seemed closer to a conception of the cinema associated with Hitchcock than Renoir, but also in terms of the very nature of the 16 mm that when intercut into the 35 mm film recharged it, plastically and dynamically, making “it possible to give the shots back the power they had in the rushes and which they lost in the end-to-end; . . .”(9)

The actors’ work and that of Kalfon in the role of metteur-en-scène Sébastien take center stage in theatre scenes; however, the film spectator is never permitted to remain pleasurably immersed in theatrical spectacle. Passive identification with Rivette’s 35 mm camera is virtually impossible because of the frequent, intermittent jumps to Labarthe’s 16 mm images, which are complemented by the periodic appearances of Labarthe and his TV crew filmed in 35 mm. The white, box-shaped stage, literally housed within the Palais des Sports in Neuilly, is surrounded on all four sides by several rows of empty seats, thus resembling, as Hélène Deschamps observes in her important study of the film in Jacques Rivette: Théâtre, amour, cinéma, “a boxing ring,” “a circus ring,” or even “a blank cinema screen.”(10) Freed of all decor that would serve to demarcate space and time, actors resemble astronauts cast adrift within the vacant white chambers of a spaceship, similar to those in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Onstage, these performers rehearse scenes from Racine’s five-act play that reworks Greek myth to present three interwoven stories of unrequited love set in the thick of the Trojan War. The play is never performed in its entirety, however. Rehearsed scenes recur in piecemeal and are scattered throughout the film. What L’amour fou retains of Racine’s canonical classicist tragedy is the residual “savagery” of its alexandrine verse in which, Rivette maintains, the words have “the same violence as the actions of the Living Theatre’s plays: words that hurt, that torture.”(11)

It was, in fact, the physicality of Ogier’s and Kalfon’s performances in the experimental productions of fringe director Marc’O that, Rivette notes, had initially inspired him to make a film chronicling three weeks in the lives of a couple.(12) Well-known to the artistic community that frequented La Coupole in St. Germain, members of Marc’O’s company were practiced in the techniques of improvisation and psychodrama, having performed in such theatrical productions as Les bargasses and the 1968 film Les idoles. Rivette was impressed by these young actors, whose “performance style had not been deformed by a certain tradition associated with Le Conservatoire,” which was heavily reliant on the conventional interpretation of character psychology and sentiment.(13) Rivette hand-picked Ogier, whose physical demeanor defines the role of the apprehensive actress Claire, initially cast in the role of Hermione in Andromaque. Having already worked as both a professional actor and also a metteur-en-scène of various theatre productions, Kalfon embraced the role of Sébastien, the director of Andromaque and an actor playing the key role of Pyrrhus in his own production. Once filming began, Rivette allowed Kalfon the latitude to stage the play according to his own conception, and also welcomed those actors from Marc’O’s troupe that Kalfon brought to the set with him, Michèle Moretti in particular, who in the role of Michèle acts as Sébastien’s assistant, and also Josée Destoop who, in the role of Marta, fills in as Claire’s replacement in Andromaque.

Structured self-consciously as a flashback, the film begins at the story’s end, completing a circular narration that opens and closes with Claire’s departure by train to an undisclosed destination, as Sébastien remains behind, listening to an audio recording of her voice from the solitude of their apartment while his anxious troupe anticipates his belated arrival at the theatre. A cut from Sébastien’s pensive expression to the subsequent scene in the theatre where Claire is rehearsing her lines invites us to read this scene and, indeed, the remainder of the film, from his point of view as his recollection of the past. Yet rather than providing an immediately comprehensible visual image of the past as would the traditional flashback, L’amour fou’s reflexive presentation of both film and theatrical performance raises theoretical issues concerning the problem of vision. As the rehearsal of Andromaque progresses, a conspicuous oscillation between 16 and 35 mm representations of Claire’s performance places in question the film’s visual presentation of memory. Recalling the use of the flashback in modernist films like Alain Resnais’s L’année dernière à Marienbad (Last Year in Marienbad, 1961) or Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962), its appearance at the outset of L’amour fou raises comparable questions about the status of the image, memory, and daydream, which demand, as Maureen Turim affirms, “an investigation into the means of narration, voice, and `vision’ in films.”(14)

Claire’s subsequent refusal of the role of Hermione precipitates her departure from the set, where Sébastien remains with Labarthe and his TV crew. Sébastien phones his ex-girlfriend Marta, who agrees to replace her. An experienced performer, Marta assumes Claire’s role gracefully and welcomes the presence of the TV crew, even granting Labarthe an interview, during which he assumes the self-appointed role of “psychoanalyst.” Indeed, Marta’s rise from the stage to the stature of televised celebrity is made possible by Labarthe and his TV crew. Meanwhile, Rivette’s 35 mm camera impassively records Claire, who sequesters herself in her apartment, where she is beset by suspicions that a conspiracy has formed among the theatrical players expressly to exclude her, foremost among them Sébastien, who she believes is unfaithful to her. Claire’s jealous obsession recalls that of Racine’s “proud” Spartan heroine Hermione, who is driven to seek revenge against her betrothed, the king, Pyrrhus, because of his perceived betrayal of her with his Trojan captive Andromaque. When Claire airs her suspicions to Sébastien, she taunts him with flattering portraits of the other women, Célia (Célia-Andromaque), Maddly (Maddly-Céphise), and Michèle, who work with him on the set of Andromaque. A 16 mm image of each woman taken from Labarthe’s rushes shot in the theatre accompanies each description and illustrates it, thus throwing the film’s visual presentation of imagination into question.

Bulle Ogier on stage in L'amour Fou. Photo: Pierre Zucca & Alain Levent.

As Marta recites Hermione’s lines in the theatre, addressing an audience of stage and screen spectators, Claire reinvents the role at home, repeating identical lines while recording them onto the audiotape that she replays to herself. Marta’s dark onstage persona mirrors that of the fair-haired Claire, whose solar, translucent presence, as Deschamps points out, is underscored by her association with the name “White Queen,” inscribed on a brasserie marquis.(15) This epithet could as well refer to her blond American counterpart, Jeannie (Gena Rowlands), a high-class hooker who is caught up in a frenetic whirlwind of desire and the desperation of a couple in John Cassavetes’s 16 mm independent production, Faces (1968). Unlike Cassavetes’s camera that relentlessly moves forward to frame Jeannie’s face in illuminating close-up, Rivette’s 35 mm camera keeps its distance to reveal Claire’s evanescent bodily appearance that seems at times to vanish within the overexposed shots of the sun-drenched apartment she inhabits, or the passageways connecting those Paris stores she frequents. As Claire’s connection to the darker world of theatre becomes increasingly tenuous, she refuses its scripted verse and instead chooses to play with sheer sound. Crouched beneath the window of her apartment, she records various sound effects, such as a sonorous choir on the radio, an airplane roaring overhead, a high-pitched flute, and even her own breathing, and then numbers them in sequence as would a sound editor planning to retrieve them for a future film production. At one point, she even tunes in to Arthuys’s haunting musical score from Paris nous appartient playing on her radio and rerecords it as if to resurrect the past.

As Claire’s isolation deepens, Marta’s shady seduction of Sébastien becomes visibly evident, represented in silhouette as the two leave the theatre together at dusk. Marta clearly inhabits the lunar realm of the theatre; however, black actress Célia in the role of Andromaque is the literal “Black Queen,” Hermione-Claire’s scripted rival for the love of Pyrrhus-Sébastien. When her jealous fixation reaches a pinnacle of intensity, Claire approaches Sébastien as he sleeps and attempts to pierce his eye with a hat pin. This peculiar episode, Rivette confides, represented “a crisis, a bad patch, as everyone has” and adds that he based it on an actual incident that occurred in the life of dramatist Luigi Pirandello, whose wife Antoinetta was not only truly mad but also prone to paroxysms of jealous rage.(16) Alone in her apartment, Claire not only relives the role of Racine’s jealous heroine Hermione but also that of Pirandello’s mad wife in contradistinction to her double Marta, who discloses to Labarthe that she assumed the name of Pirandello’s mistress, Italian actress Marta-Abba, to pay tribute to the playwright. Marta’s stage name that foregrounds her professional stature as a theatre performer also places her within a double-tiered Pirandellian scenario, which determines her relation to Claire, with whom she must compete–not only for the love of the director Sébastien-Pyrrhus but also that of dramatist Sébastien-Pirandello. Such multilayered scenarios continue to open up in L’amour fou that both intrigue and frustrate the film spectator, in the same way that the Russian doll that Claire purchases to amuse herself ultimately ensnares her within a seemingly endless process of opening and reopening, ad infinitum.

Rivette confides that L’amour fou was ultimately “a film entirely about rehearsals/repetitions: the rehearsals of Andromaque, which are only repetitions of the same words and the same scenes; his [Sébastien] life with Claire that unfolds repetitively, in the same places, with the same heads, at the same bistrots where the two go twice or three times, . . .”(17) Indeed, the metaphor of the mirror determines the relation of repetition and difference that exists between film formats (16 mm and 35 mm), spaces (inside and outside the theatre), characters (scripted and nonscripted), directors (TV and theatre/theatre and film/film and TV), and stories (Andromaque and L’amour fou). Sébastien’s role as director at times mirrors that of Labarthe, for he remarks to Labarthe after having seen the rushes that he finds the production to be “too directed, too manipulated” (which could refer either to his perception of his own role as a theatre director or to the role played by Labarthe, who is also directing a production). Moreover, Rivette’s role is likewise mirrored in that of his alter ego Sébastien, who claims in the course of the same conversation with Labarthe that he finds himself to be “too manipulating,” later confiding to his assistant Michèle that he rejects the role of the “metteur-en-scène papa” who feeds actors their ideas (without doubt a veiled reference to Rivette’s newfound willingness to allow actors the freedom to improvise during the shoot). Even the intermission that begins and ends with a dissolve of two empty chairs on the theatre set divides the film into two halves that mirror each other.

Finally, the couple’s separate psyches come to reduplicate each other when, in the second half of the film, the madness that invades Claire and that silences her finally overtakes Sébastien. This transmutation commences in the scene where Claire rediscovers her voice when she witnesses her own self-abnegation mirrored in his. After an evening out at a familiar bistro, Claire expresses to Sébastien her intention to leave him. Voiceless, Sébastien simply stands before her and begins to lacerate the shirt he is wearing with a razor blade. As it becomes apparent that he is out of control and means to cut all the clothes in his wardrobe into shreds, Claire, perceptibly troubled, repeats in quiet desperation, “Stop, Sébastien, stop!” and thus assumes the therapeutic role toward him that he had previously played with her. Their shifting interaction recalls the character dynamic in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966) in which a famous stage actress starring in Electra, Elizabeth Vogler (Liv Ullmann), is struck dumb following a psychosomatic illness, and her caretaker, Nurse Alma (Bibi Andersson), then speaks for both of them while she cares for her companion during her convalescence.

Sébastien and Claire, formerly sequestered in separate spaces of work and play, respectively, finally reunite in the apartment where they enclose themselves for two days. Laughing hysterically, they huddle in bed and phone the theatre, making up the entirely believable story that Sébastien has decided to take time off to rethink the play. Like truant children, they both don matching black bowler hats and draw larger-than-life-sized portraits of Claire on the wall above their bed. Claire impulsively decides to cut these out and then declares triumphantly, “Each has his own work to do, in his own time!” As the two cradle each other, rocking back and forth, boundaries between their psyches begin to blur. Bit by bit, Sébastien’s mock-historical description of Andromaque is reduced to gibberish as prerecorded sounds of the surf and waves crashing around them obliterate his words. Claire’s elegiac voiceover narration retrieved from audiotape supersedes his discussion of the play, when it inaugurates a montage sequence in which black intervals punctuate successive still images of the lovers’ intertwined bodies framed from diverse angles. She affirms, “We’re like fishes. We pass each other and meet. Then, we sleep. Early morning, late morning. We’re there.” In this voiceover recitation, Claire and Sébastien’s struggle acquires an aural dimension by which each attempts to appropriate narrative agency, each with a measure of success. Through the voice, Claire is able to imaginatively re-envision her relation with Sébastien in a panoply of illustrative, oneiric images. Yet, her elusive narration simultaneously serves as the extension of the audio recording that in the film’s opening sequence prompted Sébastien’s flashback, and so, sutures the successive, descriptive images into the film’s visual presentation of his memory. In either instance, regardless of which aural perspective predominates to determine a reading, the sequence remains, as Deschamps points out, “the only representation possible of emotional truth.”(18)

Still by Pierre Zucca

Dressed as deranged mountaineers, Claire and Sébastien join forces during the latter part of the episode when they proceed in the frenzied spirit of folie à deux to chop down a wall in the apartment with an axe. Totally improvised and unplanned, the event stands apart within a film based on rehearsals, repetitions, and reduplications. No retakes were possible, as the space and the decor were literally in tatters afterward. Ogier insists that she and Kalfon were waiting for Rivette to stop them and say, “Cut!” but he refused to intervene, as he was eager to see where the actors would go on their own.(19) In a final crazed gesture, Sébastien tosses his axe directly into the television screen, which implodes, emitting a brief flash of light and puff of smoke. This visceral attempt to destroy a medium omnipresent throughout the production of the play is as inane as it is exhilarating. Rivette has suggested that Claire and Sébastien’s zany antics in this sequence recall those of Barnaby Fulton (Cary Grant) and his wife Edwina (Ginger Rogers), who in Hawks’s Monkey Business (1952) ingest a potion that induces regression and psychically reshapes them as troublesome teens.(20) In the lull that follows the exhilaration of auto-destructive acts, Sébastien and Claire come together in an exhausted embrace on the balcony above Rue de Turbigo. This fated moment on top of the world echoes that of émigré gangster Tony Camonte (Paul Muni) and his sibling moll Cesca (Ann Dvorak), who in the final stand-off scene in Hawks’s Scarface (1932) similarly reunite in an incestuous embrace, throwing themselves into a last-ditch effort to fend off the police force that closes in around their sequestered apartment, as Cesca proclaims, “You’re me and I’m you, and it’s always been that way.”

Alone and face to face, Claire at last understands that they have “played too much” and that she no longer wishes to see Sébastien. He phones the theatre to schedule a rehearsal and subsequently returns to work, where the television crew rejoins him. Andromaque is soon ready to be performed in full. A slow pan follows Sébastien as he paces from room to room through an apartment in shambles. The phone rings, and it is Françoise at the other end who is calling to let him know that Claire has left him. As Claire waits at the station for her train to depart, the costumed actors at the theatre touch up their makeup and anxiously await Sébastien’s arrival. Claire confides to Françoise, “I feel that I’ve just woken up.” With this final admission, Claire’s eyes metaphorically open, as she retrospectively re-envisions the film’s story from within her perspective as her daydream. At that very moment, Sébastien’s eyes metaphorically shut, as his recollection of the past initiated by her audio recording has just commenced back at the flat, reframing the film’s narrative from within his perspective as a flashback. In situating the originating moment of Sébastien’s flashback at the film’s opening rather than at its end, Rivette invites the spectator to fill in this temporal gap, and in so doing exposes the film’s duplicitous narrative logic, which implodes, at last, to offer not a conclusive ending, but rather an interrogation of personal identity that occurs when memories and daydreams are cut loose and dispersed. L’amour fou ultimately calls for the murder of conventional vision and, in this way, aligns itself with Breton’s surrealist poetics of love, expressed in his own ars poetica: “Reciprocal love, such as I envisage it, is a system of mirrors which reflects for me, under the thousand angles that the unknown can take for me, the faithful image of the one I love, always more surprising in her divining of my own desire and more gilded with life.”(21) A final image of the vacant, white stage seems to wipe away Sébastien and Claire’s shared past and uncertain future, circling back to the film’s opening, where the impatient audience, like the fussy, crying child recorded in synch, awaits the recommencement of the play’s performance. Rivette wryly concedes, “It is a film that won’t stop ending. That’s why it lasts so long.”(22)

This except from the forthcoming book on Jacques Rivette published by University of Illinois Press is reprinted with the kind permission of the author and the publisher.

The book is available through Footprint Books in Australia and New Zealand.

All images used courtesy of Collection Cinémathèque Française, Cocinor and BFI Collections.