documents – reading

The Comings and Goings
of People in Space
By Chris Fujiwara

Rivette: Texts and Interviews, Jonathan Rosenbaum (ed.), 1977, London, BFI.

I no longer remember what made me buy this book. At the time I bought it, I had never seen a Rivette film. I don't know if I had heard of Rivette. I was just starting to think about film seriously. I had a friend who might have told me about Rivette: possibly he had seen "Céline et Julie vont en bateau" (1974) though probably not, since the film hadn't been well distributed; and since neither of us lived in Paris or New York I don't know what opportunities we would have had to see Rivette films even if we had known about him.

Probably the cover. I remember being taken with the name Rivette. It looked very modern, cool and sharp. I was in my destroy-all-sentimentality phase, and the sound of the name Rivette attracted me with its crispness and hardness.

The book itself was amazing. I read it and immediately wanted to make Rivette-like films. The first one was a film in black-and-white Super-8, a one-roll one-take film in a classroom, a lateral tracking shot. It evidently owed more to Godard (whose films I had seen, a few) or Michael Snow (whose films I had only read about) than Rivette, but I think I thought of it as a Rivettian film for some reason. Maybe the supposedly Rivettian aspect was the idea that people, the characters in the film, could be plotted in space, and would be seen to come and go over the course of the shot, and that these comings and goings would have a chaotic aspect but would yet appear to answer to some kind of inevitability or synchronicity. (I'm describing the film I imagined I was making. The film itself, which I no longer remember well, probably just looked chaotic.)

As for the book. I was very impressed by what Rivette said about the conception and planning of "L'amour fou" (1969) and "Out 1" (1971). It wasn't for a few years after I first read the book that I was finally able to see "Out 1: Spectre" (1972) at Alice Tully Hall in New York. It became my favorite film; it was my favorite film before I ever saw it. And "Paris nous appartient" (1960) was my favorite title long before I saw that film. I was also reading Barthes at the time, "A Lover's Discourse" and "Writing Degree Zero" and Sade/Fourier/Loyola, and it was apparent to me that there was a connection between, on the one hand, what Barthes was saying about writing and excess and, on the other, the role of writing, of preexisting texts or texts still being created, in Rivette's films.

I was most strongly struck by Rivette's text on Fritz Lang's "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" (1956) which is included in the volume. I hadn't yet seen "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" either. When I finally was able to see it, a year or so after my encounter with the Rivette book, it disappointed me at first; "While the City Sleeps" (1956) seemed more important. It was only after repeated viewings that I realized the greatness of "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" to which I then devoted a long period of monk-like study.) For me this is still one of the most staggering pieces of film criticism. Why? One reason is its ability to find a single image, one that, without Rivette, probably would have tempted few viewers to single it out: the hand of the governor poised over the unsigned pardon — an image that if this were an average Hollywood production would probably have been entrusted to the inserts department or an ad-hoc second unit, but which I am convinced Lang shot — and position this image as a sign organizing the whole film (reminding us, tacitly, how definitive and defining hands are throughout Lang's work — the hand in "M" (1931) being the example that will instantly come to mind), makes it graspable by our intelligence. The way he writes about the hand — tucking his reference to it away in an inconspicuous part of the text, even though it gives him his title — tells us how much deviousness is required to understand such a film.

A few years later when I had the opportunity to program films — a series about architecture — I put "Beyond a Reasonable Doubt" on a double bill with Michael Snow's "Wavelength" (1967) and showed "Paris nous appartient" the following month. By then I had already got the sense that cinema (the part of cinema that was accessible to me) had somehow stopped, or at least had not sustained the rate of progress that the existence of Rivette's work led me to expect and desire. What confirmed that sense for me, in part, was that the one Rivette film that had in the meantime managed to get some distribution in the United States, "L 'amour par terre" (1984), seemed so much less than the films I had read about in the Rivette book. So the Rivette book came to signify for me a certain mythical moment, the moment when the cinema was moving most rapidly and farthest — and the emotional tone of that moment was affected by the fact that this movement was happening somewhere else, in Paris, and at another time (since by the time I read the book, it was already a couple of years old, and the texts in it still older, discussing films that had already been made). And undoubtedly if you think about it, that 'somewhere else, some other time' aspect has everything to do with film and film criticism, but I would rather not think about it right now.

The other two film books I might have chosen as the ones that most influenced me are Andrew Sarris's "The American Cinema" and Manny Farber's "Negative Space" , but I see they are on Jonathan Rosenbaum's list.

Chris Fujiwara
© Fipresci 2004

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