Jacques Rivette’s Late Style

Rivette’s films blur structure and spontaneity, inviting circulating meanings, unfinished forms, and ever-evolving interpretations. In his final decades, he ventures boldly into new genres — from medieval epics to musical fantasies — while staying true to his core themes of performance, mystery, and freedom.

Far from a quiet “late style,” these films are daring, playful, and deeply alive — a testament to a filmmaker who never stopped experimenting.

Supported by the France Chicago Center at the University of Chicago

Program

Up, Down, Fragile (Haut bas fragile) directed by Jacques Rivette, 1995, 169m, DCP
Tuesday, March 24 7:00 PM
Three women — a librarian, a petty thief, and a woman who just came out of a coma — forge new identities in a conspiracy-ridden, maze-like summertime Paris. Rivette’s ode to 50s MGM musicals, Up, Down, Fragile is a musical of the everyday, a euphoric explosion of bodies in motion.

Who Knows (Va savoir) directed by Jacques Rivette, 2001, 154m, 35mm
Tuesday, March 31 7:00 PM
An actress touring with an Italian production of a Pirandello play returns to Paris, drifting back into the arms of a former lover. In the meantime, her director (and husband) becomes obsessed with tracking down a long-lost Goldoni script with the help of a student and her brother, a jewel thief. Rehearsals, flirtations, and coincidences intertwine in this freewheeling screwball.

The Story of Marie and Julien (Histoire de Marie et Julien) directed by Jacques Rivette, 2003, 150m, 35mm
Tuesday, April 7 7:00 PM
Clockmaker Juliens scheme to blackmail a rich woman leads him to the enigmatic Marie, who may or may not be a ghost. Rivette originally started shooting in 1975 as part of a tetralogy with Duelle, Noroît, and an unrealized film with Anna Karina, and resumed work on The Story of Marie and Julien 27 years later with pieced-together notes from his then-assistant Claire Denis.

Love on the Ground (L’amour par terre) directed by Jacques Rivette, 1984, 177m, DCP
Tuesday, April 14 7:00 PM
Two actresses (Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin) are invited by a playwright to rehearse a new unfinished work. Boundaries between scripted drama and real life begin to blur as rehearsals progress in his extravagant mansion and as a magician and a mysterious other woman are added to the mix. Seen by critics at the time as an overly derivative revision of Céline and Julie Go Boating, the film nevertheless shows a maturation of Rivette’s characteristic explorations of theatricality, female friendship, and self-reflexivity.

Joan the Maid: The Battles (Jeanne la Pucelle: Les batailles) directed by Jacques Rivette, 1994, 160m, DCP
Tuesday, April 21 7:00 PM
Rivette’s epic treatment of the rise of Joan of Arc is, at first glance, something of an outlier in his filmography. Joan the Maid nevertheless shows signs of Rivette’s hand; quiet, observant, and interested in the choreography of the body, Rivette’s film refuses to see Joan through any mythic or spectacularized lens.

Joan the Maid: The Prisons (Jeanne la Pucelle: Les prisons) directed by Jacques Rivette, 1994, 176m, DCP
Sunday, April 26 1:00 PM
Part two of Joan the Maid traces Joan’s capture and imprisonment (but leaves out her famed trial), becoming a patient meditation on language and doubt, lingering on small gestures of faith and exhaustion.

Secret Defense directed by Jacques Rivette, 1998, 174m, DCP
Tuesday, April 28 7:00 PM
Rivette’s take on the revenge thriller follows a reserved scientist (Sandrine Bonnaire) as she sets out to confront the man she suspects of her father’s murder (Jerzy Radziwiłowicz). The result is less like an old Hollywood suspense film than it initially appears. Rivette’s interest in routines and journeys heightens the mystery in a subtler, measured way, always circling around secrets rather than resolving them.

Jacques Rivette, the Watcher (Jacques Rivette, le veilleur) directed by Claire Denis & Serge Daney, 1990, 125m, DCP
Tuesday, May 5 7:00 PM
In this documentary commissioned for ARTE’s Cinéma pour notre temps series, Claire Denis follows her former mentor Jacques Rivette as he wanders Paris with Serge Daney. Over a day and a night, Daney and Rivette discuss not only the latter’s filmmaking but also film history at large (Daney and Rivette both worked together as critics for Cahiers du cinéma). Framed by the careful hand of Agnès Godard, the film is a moving portrait of Rivette as flâneur, veilleur, and solitary genius.

The Duchess of Langeais (Ne touchez pas la hache) directed by Jacques Rivette, 2007, 133m, 35mm
Tuesday, May 12 7:00 PM
A general (Guillaume Depardieu) in 1820s Paris becomes enamored with an unpredictable noblewoman (Jeanne Balibar), whose flirtation turns courtship into theater. Jacques Rivette revisits The Order of the Thirteen which previously featured in Out 1, adapting its second novella into a hypnotic drama of conspiracy and erotic obsession.

Around a Small Mountain (36 vues du pic Saint-Loup) directed by Jacques Rivette, 2009, 84m, 35mm
Tuesday, May 19 7:00 PM
In Rivette’s gentle final work, an Italian traveler (Sergio Castellitto) encounters a small traveling circus in the Languedoc-Roussillon countryside and becomes enamored with stoic performer Kate (Jane Birkin). Shot by Irina Lubtchansky, daughter of Rivette’s longtime cinematographer William Lubtchansky and editor Nicole Lubtchansky, the film drew comparisons to the films of Howard Hawks and Jerry Lewis; as a 2010 Film Comment review notes, this film has “pinpointed Hawks’s particular genius succinctly….[it is] a ballet of sly subtle gestures, a silent call-and-response between bodies that seems to get to the heart of what makes pure cinema great.”