Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette (1928–2016) was a French film director and critic associated with the French New Wave. His films often use improvisation, extended duration, theatrical performance, and stories that resist closure.

Céline and Julie Go Boating: A 1974 French film in which two women enter a mysterious, repeating melodrama through a Parisian house. Its playful improvisation and unstable storytelling are among Rivette’s clearest signatures.
Improvisation: The creation of material spontaneously, without fully fixing it in advance. Rivette used improvisation to let actors develop scenes and relationships during filming.
French New Wave: A movement in French cinema of the late 1950s and 1960s marked by stylistic experimentation and independent production. Rivette belonged to the movement that reshaped postwar French filmmaking.
Jean-Luc Godard: A French-Swiss film director and critic associated with the French New Wave. Godard and Rivette emerged from overlapping Parisian film criticism and filmmaking circles.
Agnès Varda: A French film director whose fiction and documentary work helped establish the French New Wave. Varda’s personal, often documentary-inflected filmmaking offers a different route through the movement.
Paris Belongs to Us: A 1961 film about a young woman drawn into a circle of artists and a possible conspiracy. Rivette’s first feature makes theatrical circles and uncertain plots central.
Theatricality: The quality of emphasizing staging, performance, and artifice rather than concealing them. His films often treat everyday life as a stage and theatrical rehearsal as lived experience.
Cahiers du cinéma: A French film magazine founded in 1951 that helped shape modern film criticism and the New Wave. Rivette wrote for the magazine before becoming a feature-film director.
François Truffaut: A French film director and critic whose work helped define the French New Wave. Truffaut shared Rivette’s passage from Cahiers criticism into directing.
Alain Resnais: A French film director known for formally inventive films about memory and time. Resnais also unsettled conventional storytelling, but through tightly designed structures rather than Rivette’s open processes.

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