Jacques Rivette

Handsome young general Armand de Montriveau has searched across the seas for the woman he fell madly in love with five years ago. He finally finds Antoinette, the Duchess of Langeais, living chastely in a Majorcan convent… It was love at first sight for Montriveau upon meeting Antoinette, a married coquette who frequents the most extravagant balls of 1820s Restoration Paris, where hypocrisy and vanity reign. Flattered by his attentions, the alluring Antoinette orchestrates a calculating game of seduction, but she repeatedly refuses Montriveau. Despite his sincere romantic declarations, Montriveau’s passion remains unfulfilled. When the humiliated Montriveau eventually seeks his revenge, Antoinette’s love awakens. But it may well be too late for the star-crossed lovers.Read More »

The culmination of New Wave master Jacques Rivette’s legendary middle period (which ranged from L’Amour fou through Out 1, Céline and Julie Go Boating, Duelle, Noroît, and Merry-Go-Round), Le Pont du Nord envisions Paris as a sprawling game-board marked off with tucked-away conspiracies, where imagination and paranoia intermingle; where the hinted-at stakes are sanity, life, and death.Read More »

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Ostensibly an adaptation of the oft-filmed Wuthering Heights, Jacques Rivette’s Hurlevent (or Howling Wind, per the translation) feels more like a schematic indication of Emily Brontë’s famed novel, though that should not be taken as a criticism. This is one of Rivette’s most stripped down works; emotion is secondary to the film’s tight and taut surface (updated to the Cévennes countryside circa the 1930s) where passions flare imperceptibly and a romantic tragedy is performed as if preordained, though this is more than just Céline and Julie Go Boating’s haunted house melodrama played straight.Read More »

IMDB wrote:
More than just an abbreviated form of “La Belle Noiseuse”, Rivette re-cut his footage with some important differences in point of view – this one being more from Marianne’s point of view, shifting the emphasis from artist to model.Read More »

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Paris, mid-90s, summer. Louise has just left the clinic having woken up from a five-year-long coma, and finds she inherits a house from her aunt as well a family plot involving her father. Ninon is a petty thief who begins a job as a courier, but fears she has been caught stealing by Roland, a set decorator who works across the street. A friendship between Ninon and Louise forms through Roland. Meanwhile, Ida, a librarian, searches for her birth mother. Paris transforms such that life becomes a musical.Read More »

Second film in the Renoir documentary trilogy directed by Jacques Rivette, featuring a conversation between Jean Renoir and Michel Simon.

A quote from “Projections of Memory: Romanticism, Modernism, and the Aesthetics of Film” by Richard I. Suchenski:
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First part of an over four hour documentary for TV in which Rivette visited Renoir at his country place, lunched with him, and let him talk about his work, interspersed with extracts from some of his oeuvre.Read More »

Sébastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Weekend) is staging an adaptation of Racine’s tragedy, Andromaque while a film crew captures their rehearsals on handheld 16mm. The production’s star and Sebastian’s wife, Claire (Bulle Ogier, Out 1), cannot take the pressure and removes herself. Life imitates art, creating a tragedy for the couple when Sébastien recasts the role with his ex. L’amour fou is a hypnotic study of tempestuous love, told with director Jacques Rivette’s signature reflexivity and containing striking examinations of performance, art, theatre and life. A classic of the French New Wave and one of Rivette’s most radical works, L’amour fou was unavailable for years, with the original elements tragically burned in a fire. Now meticulously restored, Radiance Films is proud to present this masterpiece from a new 4K restoration.Read More »

After her brother was killed by a notorious all-female pirate gang, Morag dedicates her life to bringing the murderers to justice. Soon, she has become an important member of the pirate gang and has begun acquiring the loyalty of key members. Eventually, she makes her move and challenges the leader, a demi-god (literally), known as “The Daughter of the Sun.” The story of Noroit is based on an early 17th-century tragedy by Cyril Tourneur, and, though it is only the third one filmed, the movie is the concluding episode in a four-part series by director Jacques Rivette.Read More »