Jacques Rivette, French New Wave film director, dies at 87

Jacques Rivette, a French director who was a secretive pioneer of convention-bashing New Wave film and was renowned for creating rich roles for women such as Emmanuelle Beart, died January 29 in Paris.

Rivette was clearly unconcerned with the requirements of classical theatrical exhibition, and his films struggled to obtain even a fraction of the financial success of the more classically formatted works of New Wave colleagues such as Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol, Eric Rohmer and Francois Truffaut. Serge Toubiana of the Cinematheque museum in Paris described Rivette’s “sense of conspiracy, sense of secrecy” and the “magnificent place” he provided to women characters.

Perhaps his most famous work is “Celine and Julie Go Boating” (1974), an elliptical and enchanting movie about movies – “at once a leisurely exercise in narrativity, a comic rite of spring, an extended riff, a genial incantation, and a feminist buddy film”, according to J. Hoberman in a piece for ARTINFO – received a revival run at Film Forum in 2012. In 1971, he completed the 12-hour Out 1.

Now 75, Karina said Friday: “French cinema has lost one of its freest and most inventive directors”.

More than half a century ago, Mr. Rivette wrote in the Cahiers du Cinéma that “there are things that should only be faced with fear and trembling; death, without a doubt, is one of them”.

Thanks to technical advances in the late 1950s – lighter cameras and increasingly light-sensitive film – the New Wave directors brought a fresh breath to movies, shooting outside in natural settings with trimmed-down budgets and crews, and no stars.

His last film was 2009’s “36 vues du Pic Saint Loup” (“Around a Small Mountain”). “Rivette was a fascinating artist, and it’s unusual to think that he’s gone”. “Because if you came of age when I did, the New Wave still seems new”.