Film Born Out of the Spirit of the Theatre, or the New Wave and Pessimism: Films by Jacques Rivette

Tomasz Kłys

Abstract

Basic themes of Jacques Rivette’s work are apparent already in his early films: the theatre of life, where characters perform in front of each other, and a vision of a mysterious conspiracy threatening society. Those first films were made in a traditional way – according to a precise screenplay, with actors playing roles first developed in detail, and speaking words first learned by heart. Starting with the film L’Amour fou (1968) Rivette abandons the detailed screenplay for the sake of a plot line only roughly outlined in key points, and during the work on the set relies largely on actors’ in­tuition and improvisation. The plot does not become illogical and chaotic, but emerges and crystalizes gradually according to the direction defined in the first place by the original plan, and the logic and “directional tensions” of scenes in part improvised on the film set. Starting with L’Amour fou the stage of filming will be at the same time a process of emerging of diegesis in statu nascendi, just like during a play on a stage of a theatre, where the performance of a spectacle is also its creation (at the meta level) and making real for the audience the fictional world presented on stage – it is not by chance that theatre production is an important theme in a number of films by Rivette.