The Jacques Rivette Collection

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domino harvey
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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#426 Post by domino harvey » Tue Nov 08, 2016 12:44 am

I didn't realize til I started digging thru the set and didn't see it mentioned here yet, but for those who are region-locked: only the Out 1 films are Region B/2. The three other features are region free on their respective Blu-rays/DVDs

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#427 Post by knives » Tue Nov 08, 2016 1:07 am

18 Pages in it's easy to miss, but there has been a healthy amount of discussion on that front.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#428 Post by domino harvey » Tue Nov 08, 2016 1:13 am

That was actually an improv prompt and you aced it. Now let's keep this exercise up for eight pages to really capture the process

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#429 Post by domino harvey » Thu Nov 10, 2016 8:55 pm

Oh-kay, I have to be the first one to go here, so feel free to skip this because I won’t sugarcoat any of it. Given Rivette’s own critical hyperbole, I imagine he wouldn’t have minded these effusively negative comments too much anyways!

Early in the thread I joked that Jacques Rivette doesn’t suck. I’m less sure after finally getting through this box. Some of these films are so bad on such a fundamental level that it’s caused me to revise downwards my overall impression and esteem of Rivette as a director. I still think he’s made at least one masterpiece (Celine and Julie Go Boating) and quite a few good or great films. But I now have to reconcile that with the arrogance that could produce Out 1, Noroit, and Merry-Go-Round, films so wrongheaded and devoid of basic cinematic elements that the feverish protestations of those “in the know” in favor of their brilliance is the real peek into an “alternate reality” here.

Out 1 unexpectedly reveals Rivette to be the greatest Hitchcockian of the Young Turks, as no movie has ever made me hate actors more. Rivette’s entire methodology here, confirmed in spades by the accompanying feature-length doc, is one of the most arrogant approaches to filmmaking I have ever witnessed. Rivette has decided that the things he films and includes in his picture matter solely because he filmed them and included them. There is no meaning to anything other than via audience projection, and no pleasure or value inherent in any of his material other than sporadic blips on the overall flatline. The few scant parts that work are a result of the law of averages. There is no plot and no narrative, only vaguely cryptic scraps meted out as an afterthought to the collage of terrible, horrible, no good, very bad acting exercises and listless improv. Rivette shows no evidence of caring about the craft of acting, but is after an abstract notion of its employment and subsequent capture here that never once justifies the attention lavished on it. Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre Leaud, old hands who did not waste their real lives staging endless acting exercises, fare fine at directing themselves. Others, like Bernadette LaFont and Bulle Ogier, do not. I am not exaggerating when I say you could not pay me any sum of money to watch this film again, because I could not possibly sit through the exhausting and soul-deadening acting class sequences again. They join extended rape scenes on the shortlist of actual worst things I have ever had to sit through in any movie. And that ending! This is what it takes to get people to throw out superlatives like “best final shot of all time 4 ever”? It’s not even the best final shot of the eight segments. It means nothing. This entire film is itself an exercise, not in acting but in filmmaking by committee, only the results are like the Dziga Vertov Group without political impulse or craft or skill or value or worth of any kind. It is a Scared Straight reminder of what could have happened and didn’t to a legitimately provocative collective experimental work like Symbiopsychotaxiplasm. Thirteen hours of my life gone, good lord.

Duelle is at least interesting, and the use of live on-set (and often on-camera!) diagetic piano improv is an actual idea surrounding improvisation and film language, an entire idea in that direction more than Out 1 exhibited. The film’s awfully silly, but the un-ironic playfulness works more often than not, and there are moments of consideration for aesthetic pleasures and a working notion of mise-en-scène that are almost wholly absent from the other films in this set. Duelle is an okay movie. Its sister film Noroit is unbearable. Rivette returns to the well of improvised music but makes sure it’s atonal and unlistenable this time and gives the audience an embarrassing dress rehearsal of a real movie instead of something we might enjoy or follow or have any level of investment in, from intellectual to emotional to conceptual, whatever. Consider the switch to filters in the finale. Why are they there? What possible reason could justify their random employment when any normal shot of a second angle would do? Cahiers doesn’t get to shit all over A Man and a Woman and then ten years later do it worse.

I entertained myself as Noroit dragged on and on without anything of value occurring by making a mental Gallant list to Rivette’s Goofus works in this box, all relatively contemporary to the works themselves. To wit: If I wanted mysterious crypticism executed with style and intelligence, I would watch Raul Ruiz. If I wanted to see insights into actors and their craft, I would watch Ingmar Bergman. If I wanted to see variations on themes of conspiracies, I would watch Alan J Pakula. If I wanted to see a director play with notions of narrative and filmic time and evoke the grace notes of life, I would watch Jacques Rozier. If I wanted to admire a director’s scrappy low-budget spirit and playful shoddiness, I would watch the early films of Luc Moullet. There’s no defense for these films that can’t be answered by someone else’s superior work.

By the time I got to Merry-Go-Round, I was already counting down the clock as soon as it started. At two hours and forty minutes, the film is very long. Needlessly so. Rivette has used time to his advantage before (Celine and Julie Go Boating, Secret Defense, La belle noiseuse), but those films used their 3-4+ hour running times to explore cinematic notions of narrative time, focus, and expanse. This movie’s just long because the filmmakers are winging it at every step of the process and refuse to form it into something. When the most interesting part of the film is a bizarre and unexplained jaunt to a sand dune that makes no sense and has no real connection to anything else in the film, to the point where one of the main actors is recast by an old Rivette favorite, something is already dead and buried with the main feature. Speaking of, while I refute that anyone in any of these films gives a performance worth praising, I will somewhat add to the earlier praise of Hermine Karagheuz by pointing out that she does have a distractingly thick and beautiful head of hair!

Image

I was surprised to hear Rosenbaum compare Rivette to Kubrick with regards to his use of takes, because I got the opposite impression from Merry-Go-Round: everything looks like a first take. If Rivette was indeed filming these scenes over and over, then double shame on him for picking so many awful takes where the actors flub their lines, exchange banal and poorly timed improv, and even look at the fucking camera! At least Rosenbaum cops to these films being unpopular and not well-considered, something you’d never know from reading this forum… Of all the mysteries offered up by the box and its contents, the answer to why these films languished in obscurity for so long is one easily discovered.

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Drucker
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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#430 Post by Drucker » Thu Nov 10, 2016 9:15 pm

Dom, thanks for the write-up. Going through this set was definitely an exercise in me asking myself: what am I missing? If there was one silver lining to going through this set, it is that I committed to stop blind-buying films on the strength of some supposed reputation that I am "supposed" to get.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#431 Post by dda1996a » Fri Nov 11, 2016 2:09 am

It's funny because after watching half of Out 1 I sort of gave up. Now when will this be OOP at arrow so I can make a healthy profit?

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#432 Post by swo17 » Fri Nov 11, 2016 2:30 am

Well I mean, yesterday would not have been the best day to watch Out 1. For some reason domino, I thought you'd already seen it and liked it.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#433 Post by oh yeah » Fri Nov 11, 2016 3:32 am

I have a lot of love for Rivette, but strangely that love is mostly concentrated on one film of his (The Story of Marie and Julien). Oh, don't get me wrong, I also am very fond of Don't Touch the Axe and Duelle and Celine and Julie, plus Gang of Four and to a lesser extent La Belle Noiseuse. I haven't yet seen Out 1 but if I have some trepidation about it it's not so much about the running-time as it is that I feel I prefer the later more polished works of Rivette to those earlier more improvised and raw efforts. So even with Celine and Julie I struggle a bit to get as immersed in it now as I used to, I just don't appreciate aspects of his style as much as I used to. But I think when he's on point, he's a terrific, effortless filmmaker. Secret Defense is something I'd like to watch again; I thought it was merely alright the first time but it's so intriguing and intriguingly-crafted that it stays in the mind. None of his other films have hit me on every level like Marie and Julien does, though.

I guess there is something potentially reckless, indulgent and nonsensical about Rivette features like Duelle and especially Noroit. Again, I recall adoring the latter when I first saw it years ago, but now I'm not so certain. Such great command of mise-en-scene but in service of what? It's probably one of the most difficult films to mount a convincing defense of, and I actually do kinda like it. But if Rivette is all about immersion in a unique cinematic world, then I think the later films (of which I still need to see several) do a better job than the earlier ones, partly because the earlier ones have a kind of dress-rehearsal quality dom mentioned. It can be charming, but that charm can wear thin quick. On the other hand, a film like Va Savoir, though not a favorite of mine, feels professionally-made, without being overtly polished or anything. The use of sound in the later films is especially great too, all the floor creaking is wonderful. I'm not trying to say that "more polished aesthetics" always equals better films, but with Rivette I do mostly prefer the place he ended up in from, say, '88-'08, to what came before. I also believe that the late/great DP William Lubtchansky's immense talents were a huge aid to those later films -- not to downplay Rivette's talent, but Lubtchansky had a very distinct style which really transformed everything.

Nevertheless, despite whatever flaws Rivette has I'll always be grateful to him for making that aforementioned 2003 masterpiece, which I feel is very much worthy of being a thematic follow-up to films like Vertigo and Tarkovsky's Solaris -- and much more like those films than, say, The Sixth Sense or The Others, despite the common lazy critical shorthand.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#434 Post by pzadvance » Fri Nov 11, 2016 4:50 am

What a week... Trump is prez, Leonard Cohen is dead, now it turns out Rivette is a fraud...

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#435 Post by barryconvex » Sat Nov 12, 2016 4:01 am

dda1996a wrote:It's funny because after watching half of Out 1 I sort of gave up....
I gave up after the first episode. And i fast forwarded through a good chunk of that. I still love the guy and i can even find a place in my heart for Noroit but 13 straight hours of this or just about anything else is not my idea of a good time.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#436 Post by tenia » Sat Nov 12, 2016 7:10 am

"the exhausting and soul-deadening acting class sequences again"

This is exactly what made me give up Out1 after the 1st episode. Even when fast forwarding through them, it felt endless.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#437 Post by repeat » Sat Nov 12, 2016 7:45 am

Not that I think for a moment that this will convince anyone, but I genuinely doubt if this film can work anywhere else than the movie theatre (a suspicion that actually made me jump at the chance to see it thus when an opportunity presented itself). There's no way anyone will sit through those "longueurs" (as Rivette himself called them) other than in the relative confinement of the theatre. I'm saying this as someone with a very ambivalent attitude towards Rivette: had a hard time with Celine et Julie, Duelle and Noroît on DVD, but Out 1 theatrically was an experience that made me want to revisit even those with a new mindset.

Also:
Jacques Rivette wrote:It is 16mm, but it was made with the big screen in mind: it has a meaning on the big screen which it wouldn't have on the small screen. Even visually it is composed of elements implying a massive image - a monumentality is putting it too grandly but that's it nevertheless. This struck me at each of the screenings we had for television with five or six people present. Even if people liked it, I felt the relationship to the film was wrong, because it is first and foremost theatre.
(http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/ok/TXTINT-out.html)

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#438 Post by dda1996a » Sat Nov 12, 2016 8:27 am

I'm not so sure. For me watching a film in a theater is obviously the best option, but from a personal opinion good movies tend to be better for me while so so films are worst. So if I hated those sequences in my own home and could fast forward them and still found half of Out 1 boring, I highly doubt a screening would change that

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#439 Post by tenia » Sat Nov 12, 2016 8:47 am

I've discussed quickly Out1 with Michel Ciment and he told me : "Who has the time to sit in a theater for 13hrs straight to watch Out1 ? In the week, people are working. On the week-end, they don't have the time for this kind of things. They want to spend time with their family, get some rest. So who is this movie for ?".

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#440 Post by hearthesilence » Sat Nov 12, 2016 9:35 am

Given the rise of "binge watching" (yeeesh), I guess Out 1 finally found its mass audience.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#441 Post by Ribs » Sat Nov 12, 2016 10:57 am

I'm only mostly horrified by the posts here; I found the set diminishing returns as each film was less great than the last BUT Out 1 is so fantastic and wonderful. I know it's not a case of I-get-it-and-you-don't given I trust everyone's intelligence around here but I think you are meant to find the entire thing overwhelming and at times staid, especially in the rehearsal sequences. But I don't really care for Celine & Julie so what do I know?

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#442 Post by hearthesilence » Sat Nov 12, 2016 11:37 am

I may get Noroit and more likely Duelle if they are ever available separately, but I always got the impression that they were considered to be less-than-fully realized works compared to Rivette's more celebrated work.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#443 Post by dda1996a » Sat Nov 12, 2016 12:51 pm

Ribs wrote:I'm only mostly horrified by the posts here; I found the set diminishing returns as each film was less great than the last BUT Out 1 is so fantastic and wonderful. I know it's not a case of I-get-it-and-you-don't given I trust everyone's intelligence around here but I think you are meant to find the entire thing overwhelming and at times staid, especially in the rehearsal sequences. But I don't really care for Celine & Julie so what do I know?
Well I sort of liked the mystery itself, sort of proto Lynch, and Léaud is predictably great. And even the first group exercising was fine but almost an hour of the other group pretending to be mentally challenged and whatever completely ruined it for me. I've always loved these mysteries and conspiracies, but I much rather stick to stuff like Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks thank you very much. Maybe the second half will be fine once I get to it. The problem is I have to force myself to sit down and hope it gets better rather than watch something else I know I'll like

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#444 Post by repeat » Sat Nov 12, 2016 1:10 pm

I'd just like to clarify that I meant it should ideally be seen in a theatre (huge screen, other people, no chance to control the temporal element), not that it should be watched in one sitting: it was divided into four chunks of two when I saw it. There is actually some very interesting stuff going on with the rhythm and pacing especially during the first half that will probably be completely destroyed if you start messing with the remote during episodes.

And there is the element of a group of people determined to sit through this thing together, which you can't get alone in your home: you should at the very least get together a bunch of people and make a little event out it or something. I mean there was an actual ovation in the theatre at the ending of episode six (I think it is?)
Ribs wrote:I think you are meant to find the entire thing overwhelming and at times staid, especially in the rehearsal sequences
Yes and I think Rivette acknowledges this quite clearly in that interview with Eisenschitz et al.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#445 Post by domino harvey » Sat Nov 12, 2016 1:28 pm

That thing you think is awful would be great if you were forced to go to a theatre and pay to sit through it

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#446 Post by RossyG » Sat Nov 12, 2016 6:20 pm

barryconvex wrote:
dda1996a wrote:It's funny because after watching half of Out 1 I sort of gave up....
I gave up after the first episode. And i fast forwarded through a good chunk of that. I still love the guy and i can even find a place in my heart for Noroit but 13 straight hours of this or just about anything else is not my idea of a good time.
I watched episode one soon after getting the set and have yet to summon the energy for episode two. I was amused by Leaud making a silly noise on his harmonica, Harpo Marx style, but that was all I liked about it. All the rest was tedious.

I love Celine & Julie and Pont and was so looking forward to this, but episode one was like watching paint dry while someone shrieks.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#447 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Nov 12, 2016 6:52 pm

When the box and Criterion's Paris nous appartient came out, I took the opportunity to watch most of his output, having never before seen a single film of his. (By contrast, I've seen all of Truffaut & Rohmer, and nearly all of Godard, just missing a couple, and love all three dearly). Even with a good book to make sure I understood what he was doing (Douglas Morrey & Alison Smith, Jacques Rivette), it was a disappointment.

I liked the long version of Out 1 (quite wowed at certain moments) (the "short" version a lot less), La Religieuse (my favorite), Secret Défense (a Hitchcockian thriller but with Rivette's consistent concerns and style), the slightly more mainstream La Belle Noiseuse (long version) & Jeanne La Pucelle, and, with reservations, the decidedly quirky Le Pont du Nord. But none of these films would likely make my top 400, say. Most of his output I thought was somewhat interesting but fair at best: Paris nous appartient, Wuthering Heights, Va Savoir, Don't Touch the Axe, Céline & Julie (a big disappointment in itself here), Love on the Ground, Gang of Four, Merry-Go-Round. A typical reaction was: Oh, there are the same themes & tropes again: conspiracy, mystery & intrigue, the theater, the big house with the many rooms, jealousy - it's "original" work but always variations on the same themes, and at times fascinating, but as many other times quite dull, and too meandering. Histoire de Marie et Julien I liked less than all of these, and Duelle and Noroît were the bottom of the barrel, really painful to get through.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#448 Post by oh yeah » Sat Nov 12, 2016 8:51 pm

hearthesilence wrote:Given the rise of "binge watching" (yeeesh), I guess Out 1 finally found its mass audience.
It's quite fitting that it's on Netflix, then.

(And, on a different note, it's also quite incredible if you think about it! Having Out 1 in HD quality on Netflix and A Brighter Summer Day on Criterion blu makes 2016 look like some kind of cinephile's dream-year which could only be pitifully longed for even just a decade ago...)

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#449 Post by oh yeah » Sat Nov 12, 2016 8:58 pm

Rayon Vert wrote:When the box and Criterion's Paris nous appartient came out, I took the opportunity to watch most of his output, having never before seen a single film of his. (By contrast, I've seen all of Truffaut & Rohmer, and nearly all of Godard, just missing a couple, and love all three dearly). Even with a good book to make sure I understood what he was doing (Douglas Morrey & Alison Smith, Jacques Rivette), it was a disappointment.

I liked the long version of Out 1 (quite wowed at certain moments) (the "short" version a lot less), La Religieuse (my favorite), Secret Défense (a Hitchcockian thriller but with Rivette's consistent concerns and style), the slightly more mainstream La Belle Noiseuse (long version) & Jeanne La Pucelle, and, with reservations, the decidedly quirky Le Pont du Nord. But none of these films would likely make my top 400, say. Most of his output I thought was somewhat interesting but fair at best: Paris nous appartient, Wuthering Heights, Va Savoir, Don't Touch the Axe, Céline & Julie (a big disappointment in itself here), Love on the Ground, Gang of Four, Merry-Go-Round. A typical reaction was: Oh, there are the same themes & tropes again: conspiracy, mystery & intrigue, the theater, the big house with the many rooms, jealousy - it's "original" work but always variations on the same themes, and at times fascinating, but as many other times quite dull, and too meandering. Histoire de Marie et Julien I liked less than all of these, and Duelle and Noroît were the bottom of the barrel, really painful to get through.
I know what you mean about Rivette's almost pathological preoccupation with big houses and theater groups and grand conspiracies, etc. But then, isn't the same true for every director, every "auteur"? I guess it's just a matter of whether one thinks those preoccupations are worked into the films in a consistently interesting way (like with, let's say, Nicholas Ray) -- or if they make each film feel more disposable than and similar to the last (like with, increasingly since the 90s, Woody Allen).

Surely Marie and Julien has the best big house, though...? I mean, what a terrific location. And that cat! Seriously, though, part of why that film gels so perfectly for me is because it feels like such a just-right combination and tuning of all the familiar Rivette elements -- for instance, to me it's the most mysterious and atmospheric Rivette, the one most evocative in its use of night/shadow and hints of some kind of supernatural plot or conspiracy. Something like Love on the Ground, on the other hand, I could barely sit through -- the same tropes felt very stale somehow. Kind of hated the former on first viewing though, actually -- one of those films I just got wrong, but which stuck in my head enough despite my boredom with it, to the point where I was so confident I'd like it more the next time that I bought a copy. And boy was I right.

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Re: The Jacques Rivette Collection

#450 Post by Rayon Vert » Sat Nov 12, 2016 9:14 pm

oh yeah wrote:Surely Marie and Julien has the best big house, though...? I mean, what a terrific location. And that cat! Seriously, though, part of why that film gels so perfectly for me is because it feels like such a just-right combination and tuning of all the familiar Rivette elements -- for instance, to me it's the most mysterious and atmospheric Rivette, the one most evocative in its use of night/shadow and hints of some kind of supernatural plot or conspiracy. Something like Love on the Ground, on the other hand, I could barely sit through -- the same tropes felt very stale somehow. Kind of hated the former on first viewing though, actually -- one of those films I just got wrong, but which stuck in my head enough despite my boredom with it, to the point where I was so confident I'd like it more the next time that I bought a copy. And boy was I right.
I thought Marie and Julien was well done but dull at times, and the thing is the supernatural theme didn't engage me. That may reflect just a personal idiosincrasy, however, as I've noticed that when Rivette takes that route (Céline & Julie, Duelle) I lose a bit of interest.

You're right about auteurs and their preoccupations. I guess in the end Rivette's concerns exercise a limited appeal for me, and his style I find (too much of the time anyway) a little flat, insufficiently "stylish" (for my taste).

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