Probably his most successful film was “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991), an adaptation of Balzac’s “Le Chef-d’oeuvre Inconnu” about the intense complicity between a painter and a young woman who agrees to pose nude for him.
Jacques Rivette, a French director whose challenging and often enigmatic work was revered by film aficionados, died Friday at his home in Paris. He was 87.
The French culture minister, Fleur Pellerin, confirmed the death on Twitter, calling Rivette a filmmaker “of intimacy and loving impatience.” Rivette had Alzheimer’s disease, according to Martine Marignac, his longtime producer.
Rivette never achieved the celebrity status of François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard, his fellow members of the group of French critics turned filmmakers that became known as the New Wave. But he always had his colleagues’ respect — Truffaut once admiringly called him “the most fanatic of all of our band of fanatics” — and he did enjoy some commercial success.
Probably his most successful film was one of his later ones, “La Belle Noiseuse” (1991), a loose adaptation of Balzac’s “Le Chef-d’oeuvre Inconnu” about the intense complicity that grows between a painter (Michel Piccoli) and a young woman (Emmanuelle Béart) who agrees to pose nude for him. The film’s demanding running time, nearly four hours, was typical for Rivette, who enjoyed exploring and exploding the limits of conventional movie storytelling, although its relatively transparent theme, the give-and-take between life and art, was not.
Most Read Entertainment Stories
More representative was “Céline and Julie Go Boating” (1974), a critically praised excursion, more than three hours long, in the company of two contemporary Parisians, a magician (Juliet Berto) and a librarian (Dominique Labourier). The two are drawn to a mysterious house where, their imaginations aided by magic candy, they witness an unfolding Edwardian melodrama involving a lonely widower (Barbet Schroeder) and a pair of conniving women (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier). Art and life are on the docket here as well, but the relationship between the two is shifting and complex. And it is by no means clear, at any given moment, whether the visitors are imagining the residents of the house or vice versa.
“It’s not just that the film holds up to repeat viewings,” the critic Dennis Lim wrote in The New York Times in 2012 when a new print of “Céline and Julie” was shown at Film Forum in Manhattan, “its very point is its seemingly infinite repeatability, its mysterious capacity to surprise both first-time viewers and those who know it as well as a magician reciting an incantation.”
Rivette was born on March 1, 1928, in Rouen, where his father was a pharmacist. He became fascinated by movies as a child, and as a teenager he founded a local film society. He made his first film, a short called “Aux Quatre Coins” in 1949, the same year he left for Paris to study at the Sorbonne.
His course work soon took a back seat to screenings at the Cinémathèque Française, where he met another young enthusiast and future filmmaker, Eric Rohmer. The two founded a magazine, La Gazette du Cinéma, which collapsed after five issues, and then joined the staff of Cahiers du Cinéma, where they fell in with a like-minded group of passionate cinephiles including Truffaut, Godard and Claude Chabrol.
For Cahiers, Rivette wrote influential appraisals of the work of Hollywood studio directors like Howard Hawks and Fritz Lang, widely considered at the time to be commercial filmmakers of no artistic interest, and helped found the radically revisionist school of criticism that became known in English as auteurism. He and his fellow Young Turks wrote articles attacking the traditional French cinema while continuing to work on one another’s short film projects and looking for a way to break into feature filmmaking.
In 1957, Rivette began work on a long film called “Paris Belongs to Us,” which contained many of the elements that would be part of his mature style: a meandering and frequently neglected narrative line based on a character’s discovery of a vast, ungraspable conspiracy; a group of actors observed in rehearsal (here for a production of Shakespeare’s “Pericles”); a documentary appreciation of the city of Paris; and a distinctive start-and-stop rhythm, created by the collision of stylized, scripted material and the real-world contingencies of improvisation and location shooting.
It took Rivette a while to complete “Paris Belongs to Us.” By the time it was released, in 1961, the international success of Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” (1959) and Godard’s “Breathless” (1960) had established “La Nouvelle Vague,” a name bestowed on the group by a critic for L’Express, as a brand to be reckoned with.
Rivette followed a more traditional path in 1966 with his second feature, an adaptation of Diderot’s anti-clerical novel “La Religieuse” starring Anna Karina as a woman compelled to enter a convent against her will. The film became a hit in France after the government obligingly held up its release for a year, on the ground that it offended “the feelings and consciences of a very large part of the population.”
With “L’Amour Fou” (1969), Rivette allowed his obsessions to expand into a drama more than four hours long centered on an actress (Ogier) who resigns her role in a production of “Andromaque” directed by her husband (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), eventually walking out on her marriage as well. This marathon work was followed in 1971 by the even more audacious “Out 1: Noli Me Tangere.”
Commissioned but rejected by French television, “Out 1” takes almost 13 hours to tell a convoluted and open-ended story, in eight episodes, about actors and a secret society. It received only limited exposure, and, a few years later, Rivette cut it down to 4 1/2 hours and retitled it “Out 1: Spectre.” The full version received occasional screenings over the years, including one in 2006 at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens, but it did not have an extended theatrical run until a restored version played for two weeks at BAMcinématek in Brooklyn in 2015. (It was presented two episodes at a time.)
After the well-received “Céline and Julie,” Rivette continued his march toward abstraction with an ambitious project that was to consist of four interrelated films in which goddesses interact with mortal men and one another; in the end only two parts were completed, released in 1976 as “Duelle” and “Noroît.”
Having seemingly reached a limit in terms of pure fantasy, Rivette’s films subsequently drifted back toward earth, or at least its outer atmosphere. “Le Pont du Nord” (1982), “Love on the Ground” (1984) and “The Gang of Four” (1989) revived a contrast of fictional invention and documentary observation while continuing to study the dynamics of theatrical groups and friendships between women.
The unexpected success of “La Belle Noiseuse” opened the way in the later part of his career to a steady stream of productions: the two-part “Jeanne la Pucelle” (1994), starring Sandrine Bonnaire as Joan of Arc; the convoluted romantic comedies “Up, Down, Fragile” (1995) and “Va Savoir” (2001); the deconstructed thrillers “Secret Defense” (1997) and “The Story of Marie and Julien” (2003). In 2007, Rivette returned to his beloved Balzac for “The Duchess of Langeais,” a historical drama in which an army officer (Guillaume Depardieu) traces his lost aristocratic love (Jeanne Balibar) to a convent in Spain.
“All of Jacques’ life was cinema, and what I hope for is that his films are seen, seen again and discovered by a new generation who maybe doesn’t know them,” Marignac, who has produced all of Rivette’s films since “Le Pont du Nord,” said in a phone interview on Friday. “I’ve lost a master, a friend and a chapter of my life professionally and personally.”
Marignac said Rivette met his wife, Véronique, about a decade ago; they married recently, after he had received the Alzheimer’s diagnosis. “Thanks to her, he avoided hospitals and was able to stay home,” she said.
On Twitter, Gilles Jacob, the former president of the Cannes Film Festival, described “La Belle Noiseuse” as Rivette’s “most accomplished film,” for its emphasis “on creative helplessness.”
Rivette’s last movie was “Around a Small Mountain” (2009), the story of a traveling one-ring circus. The movie’s length was a surprise to his devotees: At an hour and 24 minutes, it was a far cry from the epic-length works he was known for. But surprising audiences was nothing new for Rivette.
“It should not be that every filmmaker makes the films you expect of them,” he told The Times in 2008. He added, “I’d prefer to make nothing than make something that’s like my other films.”