Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette (born March 1, 1928, Rouen, France—died January 29, 2016, Paris) was a French film director associated with the New Wave film movement and known for his experimental evocative style.

Before becoming a director, Rivette had a career as a writer and film critic. In 1950 Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, and Eric Rohmer founded the film magazine La Gazette du Cinéma, which published five issues. After it folded, the four went on to work for the highly influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinéma, with Rivette eventually becoming its editor in chief. Along with another Cahiers du Cinéma writer, Claude Chabrol, the critics became the core directors of the New Wave (French: Nouvelle Vague) film movement, in which the director was seen as auteur and encouraged to include a strong personal point of view in his films. The movement also promoted a more naturalistic filmmaking style, with location shoots, improvised dialogue, and natural lighting.

Rivette began making short films in the 1950s, including Le Coup du berger (1956; Fool’s Mate). He made his feature-length debut in 1961 with Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us), a sprawling atmospheric account of a young woman’s gradual involvement in both a low-rent theatre troupe and a vaguely sinister political movement. Rivette’s next film, La Religieuse (1966; The Nun), enjoyed commercial success, aided by the fact that the French government banned it for a time because of its cynical look at the Roman Catholic Church. The film, which was based on a book by French philosopher and writer Denis Diderot, told the story of a young woman forced to become a nun because of her family circumstances. Rivette’s most critically acclaimed work, La Belle Noiseuse (1991; “The Beautiful Troublemaker”), was nominated for five César Awards as well as the Palme d’Or at the 1991 Cannes film festival, where it was given the jury Grand Prize. His other films include the highly surreal Céline et Julie vont en bateau (1974; Celine and Julie Go Boating); La Bande des quatre (1988; Gang of Four), a film that, like Rivette’s debut, had unsettling conspiratorial undertones; and 36 vues du Pic Saint Loup (2009; Around a Small Mountain).