Secrets and Lies, or How (not) to write about Jacques Rivette

Abstract

It has become a critical commonplace for writers on Jacques Rivette to lament - in addition to the difficulty of accessing some of his films - the paucity of critical writing on his work. Writing about Jacques Rivette is certainly scarce compared to the amount of criticism devoted to the leading lights of the New Wave, Godard and Truffaut, and even to the critical work on their less celebrated peers Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Agn s Varda. Where the first monograph on Godard was published in 1963, the first on Rivette did not appear until 2001. The current collection of articles aims to redress that balance, and contributors to this number are also responsible for the first English-language books on Rivette. It is also true, however, if less frequently pointed out, that much of the existing writing on Rivette, though sometimes evocative, is often singularly unhelpful to the scholar seeking to understand something of the director's work. Writing about Jacques Rivette, rather like the director's films, has a stubborn tendency to go round in circles: in other words, just as Rivette's films, such as Paris nous appartient (1961), Out 1 (1970) or Le Pont du Nord (1982), are often described as turning circles around an absent centre, whether physically, metaphorically or narratologically, so too Rivette criticism tends to build a self-referential discourse that contains the films within a kind of closed circuit of analysis, often without engaging much with their material or cinematographic reality. It is not within the scope of the present article to produce an exhaustive review of the literature on Jacques Rivette; nor does this article seek to provide the close reading of Rivette's films lacking in so much existing literature. Rather, I shall seek, in what follows, simply to tease out some of the most common tropes of Rivette criticism, necessarily focusing on a handful of the director's most prominent commentators: among others, these will include Helene Frappat, inevitably, but also Serge Daney's writing in Liberation, Marc Chevrie's in Cahiers du cinema, and the early championing, in the Anglophone world, of Jonathan Rosenbaum.