A note to the audience about to watch L’Amour fou, the 1969 film directed by Jacques Rivette: the movie is over four hours long. Be prepared – find a soft seat, stock up on food and drink. Give your companion at the show a soulful look and tell them you love them, ‘cause you’re both on the cusp of an adventure in time. And that’s not all: nearly half the film was shot in 16mm, and has the grainy, student-made look to prove it. In short, welcome to the militant wing of the French New Wave. (Granted, many of you are here because of those things, not despite them.) 

When he made L’Amour fou, Rivette was a leading player in that explosive film movement that set a series of New Waves in motion in the United States, Europe and other parts of the film world. Born in the northern French city of Rouen, he came to Paris in his early twenties to become a filmmaker after being inspired by Jean Cocteau’s published diary about the filming of La belle et la bȇte (Beauty and the Beast, 1946). Almost immediately after his arrival, he fell in with members of the core group that would write film criticism for the journal Cahiers du Cinéma, edited by the now legendary André Bazin, and form the first band of New Wave directors. Rejected from film school, Rivette joined Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut and others who trained themselves in cinema by watching old films every day in the first row of the Cinémathèque Française. This refuge for movie nerds became for Rivette (to paraphrase Herman Melville’s metaphor) “his Harvard and his Yale.” He began writing film criticism in 1950 but never stopped considering himself a filmmaker. He made several short films before attempting his first feature in the late 1950s, Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us, released in 1961). This film set an important template: it was the first of many works whose central focus was theatre, specifically a theatre troupe rehearsing a play. Rivette would return to this theme repeatedly, beginning with L’Amour fou. 

But before that came his second feature film, La religieuse (The Nun, 1966), a conventionally told story based on an 18th century novel by Denis Diderot. The title character was a woman forced by her noble family to enter a convent and who makes every attempt to escape her fate. The film was highly controversial due to its implicit criticism of the Catholic Church. A year-long battle with censors ended in Rivette’s favour, with The Nun ultimately enjoying a succès de scandale. Ironically, this huge hit was the first and last time Rivette would try to deliver a straight narrative to audiences. His next film, L’Amour fou, would eschew conventional cinema; it would be a challenging four-hour black and white picture with a storyline that was anything but straight.

In pushing the envelope, Rivette was not alone. Ten years earlier, his good friend Jean-Luc Godard had disturbed the peace of the film world with À bout de souffle (Breathless, 1960). He doubtless remembered, along with everyone else, the excitement that black and white had engendered (especially in an era transitioning to virtually all colour), along with a host of cinematic rule-breakers unleashed on unsuspecting audiences. For Godard and his cohorts – critics and commentators writing for Cahiers du Cinema – had a mission: wake up filmmakers who they thought had fallen asleep on the job.

But the assault was also aimed at audiences and centred on two fronts: the past and the future. For its past film attitudes, the world received a good scolding from the Cahiers writers (with Rivette, according to the testimony of his peers, at the forefront1). We had been all wrong in the way we watched and appreciated films: the films we dismissed were the wrong ones (Douglas Sirk, Nicholas Ray); the films we liked, we liked for the wrong reasons (John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock). They introduced us to an unfamiliar word for the director: auteur. Following the pronouncements of the New Wave writer/directors, we returned to films of the past with renewed interest and a changed perspective. Few have doubted the impact of Rivette and his colleagues on how the world looks at film today.

On the second front, whose objective was to change the future of filmmaking, Godard led the attack. Breathless was the opening salvo.2 The stylistic shocks of this milestone film are by now familiar – the jump cuts, the use of available light with its uneven effects, the discontinuous editing, the actors’ improvisations – but they were powerfully surprising to contemporary audiences. It was as though Godard, with the support of the other Cahiers critics, including his close friend Rivette, were shaking the viewer’s shoulders and shouting “The days of watching movies in comfort are past! No more coddling with Hollywood’s smooth continuity editing! We’re here to remind you that going to the movies is a political act – stay awake, stay aware, stay engaged!” A potent component of unease was narrative confusion. Godard once famously said “A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order.”3

However, the work of the major New Wave directors – Godard, Truffaut, Rivette, Chabrol, and Rohmer – was not all of a piece. Truffaut’s tapestry of heterogeneous narratives, Chabrol’s elegant Hitchcockian thrillers, and Rohmer’s gentle tales are very different from Godard’s activist oeuvre. Rivette came closest to the militant Godard in discommoding viewers, although his revolutionary tactics were of a different order. For the most part he eschewed the choppy edits and unsettling effects of the Breathless director, but his narrative practices and improvisational allowances made for some uneasy viewing. 

Most of all, Rivette challenged audiences with the length of his works. Few of Rivette’s films are less than two and a half hours long. One of his most famous, Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974), is three hours; L’Amour fou and La belle noiseuse (1991) are four hours; Jeanne la pucelle (Joan the Maiden, 1994), Rivette’s take on the Joan of Arc story, is over five hours and is broken up into two films. The notorious Out 1 (1971), a largely improvised story of conspiracies (and once again involving actors rehearsing plays) is Rivette’s longest film, nearly thirteen hours.4 Out 1 Spectre is a four-hour abridged version.

Rivette took advantage of the freedoms from conventional filmmaking strictures that the New Wave directors had assumed for themselves in order to frequently give his actors the space and the time to improvise their roles. Improvisation, such an important feature of Breathless, was part of the new technique that Rivette adopted with L’Amour fou. Improvisation was enjoying a vogue around the world. Rivette, whose interest in the theatre had been kindled by a fully mounted theatrical production of The Nun that he undertook before filming began on that controversial picture, had been so impressed some years later by a troupe of improvisational actors called the Marc’O players that he hired many of them to perform in L’Amour fou.5 This included Bulle Ogier and Jean-Pierre Kalfon as the leading lady and her director in a theatre troupe rehearsing a production of Jean Racine’s tragedy Andromaque. The two are also a struggling married couple.

L’Amour fou is a multi-layered film in which a number of different interactions are happening simultaneously. The frustrated love stories and betrayals in Andromaque are mirrored in the behaviours of the characters playing them, while the film prominently features not one but two directors: the first is the stage director (Kalfon) trying to evoke natural performances from his actors (he urges them to speak their dialogue as “conversations”); the second is a TV director filming a documentary about the theatrical rehearsal process (André Labarthe). And of course there is a third director, Rivette himself, filming his own verité. Any film about a movie director invites autobiographical speculation, another overlay in this busy kaleidoscope of a film.6 To add to the real vs. theatrical/cinematic complexity, the actor Kalfon was allowed to direct the players himself, as he had done in the Marc’O troupe, while TV interview sequences were shot under Labarthe’s direction in 16mm in the then-popular cinema verité style. In these interviews, the actors were allowed to be themselves, with the viewer left to determine the level of reality on which the players were operating. In her excellent analysis of the film, Mary M. Miles notes significant differences in the movements of the 16mm and 35mm cameras, as though the viewer can detect Rivette himself entering and exiting the proceedings at various times.7 “We have, then,” says Robin Wood,Rivette making a film of Labarthe shooting a documentary of Kalfon producing a play by Racine reinterpreting a Greek myth.”8

What does the viewer experience in this compelling example of Rivette’s New Wave politics? Fascinating aesthetic complexity or punishing disorientation? Well, perhaps a little of both.  L’Amour fou provides a rich experience to audiences but may require a bit of heavy lifting on their part. Perhaps first-time viewers may find James Monaco’s comment of special interest: “The true test of the success of L’Amour fou might just be in the quality of our response to the story, not while we are watching it, but a day – a week – later.”9

L’Amour fou (1969 France 252 min) 

Prod. Co: Cocinor Dir: Jacques Rivette Prod: Georges de Beauregard Scr: Marilu Parolini, Jacques Rivette Ed: Nicole Lubtchansky. Anne Dubot Phot: Etienne Becker (16mm), Alain Levent (35mm) Sound: Jean-Claude Laureux, Bernard Aubouy Mus: Jean-Claude Eloy  

Cast: Bulle Ogier, Jean-Perre Kalfon, André S. Labarthe 

Endnotes

  1. Richard Brody, “Postscript: Jacques Rivette,” The New Yorker, 29 January 2016: “Jean-Luc Godard credited Rivette with the founding text of the French New Wave, a piece called “We Are No Longer Innocent,” published in the house organ of Eric Rohmer’s Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin in February, 1950.” Rivette became the editor-in-chief of Cahiers du Cinéma after Bazin’s death and Rohmer’s resignation.
  2. Chronologically, Agnès Varda, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut beat Godard to the gate with La Pointe Courte (Varda, 1955), Chabrol’s Le beau serge (1958) and Les Cousins (1959) and the Les quatre cent coups (The 400 Blows, Truffaut, 1959). All were well received, and the Truffaut film was a notable hit. Nevertheless, it was Breathless that made the biggest splash. Even today, film professors wanting to instruct their students about the sudden impact of the French New Wave will turn first to Breathless, still a hot picture more than 60 years after its release.
  3. Fiachra Gibbons, “Jean-Luc Godard: ‘Film is over. What to do?’,” The Guardian, 13 July 2011.
  4. Unavailable for many years, Out 1 can now be viewed online.
  5. Mary M. Miles, Jacques Rivette (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012), pp 45-46.
  6. Miles reports that in a 1999 interview, Rivette told her that Paris nous appartient and L’Amour fou were both autobiographical films.
  7. Miles, pp. 43-53.
  8. Robin Wood, “Two Films of Jacques Rivette,” Film Quarterly Vol 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 1981), p. 5.
  9. James Monaco, The New Wave (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 322.

About The Author

Joseph Sgammato has written for Sight and Sound, The Wordsworth Circle, The College Language Association Journal, and other publications. He teaches English and Film at Westchester Community College, a division of the State University of New York (SUNY), in Valhalla, New York, USA, and lives in Norwalk, Connecticut.

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