Jacques Rivette’s Late Style

Programmed by: Avivit Ashman and Hannah Yang

For Jacques Rivette, the role of the filmmaker is to open a work within the necessarily closed form of cinema. Within a film, which has the essential limitation (according to Rivette) that reels must be arranged in order, all phenomena "can occur of circulating meanings, functions and forms; moreover, these phenomena can be incomplete, not finally determined once and for all…[the film] must continue to function, and to create new meanings, directions and feelings," as he claims in an interview with Bernard Eisenschnitz.

Rivette’s films are troves of possibility. His late works, forays into completely new genres – a medieval battle film, a revenge thriller, a supernatural romance, and an MGM-style musical, among others – boast a particular sense of liberty and spontaneity within his oeuvre. Far from any expectation of late style’s "reiteration of conservative vision," as James Quandt describes the late work of Chabrol and Rohmer, in the 1990s and 2000s Rivette is as daring as ever.

These late films do not necessarily stray from the beloved themes that characterize Rivette’s earlier work: theatricality and artifice, conspiracy and family secrets, improvisation and bodily freedom. Yet neither are they rote repetitions of these interests; Rivette remains experimental to the end, even if (as in his swan-song Around a Small Mountain) his approach is notably gentler. Encompassing the complete filmography of the last fifteen years of his career with most films (with the exception of Up, Down, Fragile, Va savoir, and Joan the Maid) never before screened at Doc, this series understands Rivette’s late films as far from conservative rehashings of his earlier work, but exciting achievements in their own right.

Sponsored by the France Chicago Center.