This translation was in the booklet of a
DVD of Rivette's Le Pont du Nord, now out of stock and discontinued. Thanks to
Craig Keller, the translator, for sharing it and allowing its publication here.
On Le Pont du Nord
Bulle and Pascale Go Boating in Paris (or in Ailleurs-les-Oies? [i.e., “Elsewhere-the-Geese”, connoting The Game of the Goose –ed.]). To properly choreograph these “Ogier Follies”, Rivette needed to succeed in orchestrating his comeback. Done.
As is customary, one says: I’m going to see a film. Often, one only sees two or three images floating inside of a void, shameful adverts, stretched-out commercials, but it doesn’t matter; one says: I saw a film. Force of habit, fatal grip of the a. Sometimes, one truly sees a film, something that doesn’t resemble anything else around – Le Pont du Nord, for example. And here, if one were being honest (and less a slave of the a), one would say: I saw films, or: I saw cinema. Nuance.
I’ll provide an example. Towards the end of Le Pont du Nord, the two Ogiers wander the length of a railroad. While Marie (Bulle) carries on in monologue, Baptiste (Pascale) lies down on the ground and puts her ear to the rail. Light euphoria in the theatre, cinephilic gag, a flash: we’ve already seen this image – we’ve seen it a hundred times, but we’ve seen it somewhere else: in westerns. It’s the classic situation of the solitary lawman, lost in a strange land, while some green-horn who wants to make himself useful follows along with the clumsy stubbornness of Rantanplan in Lucky Luke [a long-running Belgian comics series created in 1946 by cartoonist Maurice De Bevere, aka Morris –ed.] or John Derek in one of Ray’s westerns (Run for Cover [1955], to be exact).
Except that in Rivette, it’s more than a gag – it gives you the sudden urge to watch Le Pont du Nord over again from the beginning, but as a western. The film lets you: the concrete and scrap-iron city is like a desert (or like a ghost-town), the Indians (the “Max”s) are everywhere, there’s shelter to be found at night, places to get some water, a map, a compass, showdowns. It has to end with a rancid old story and rest can only be thought of – later on.
Fall off or dance?
This is just one example. Le Pont du Nord is also in fact a political thriller with a hunt for a woman and an urban setting, a documentary on the state of Paris in 1981, an old modernist film composed out of an incomplete and undecidable tale, of the Paris nous appartient type, a modern metaphor of ancient myths with Ariadne’s thread and the Minotaur, etc. These aren’t “levels of interpretation”, these are films to see and to listen to all at the same time. A film, Le Pont du Nord? Come on! One should see it like one slides a finger (nervously) along a dial in order to tune in to n free-radio stations. Free, that’s what the film is – Rivette is the needle, and we are the dial.
This is why it would be useless to try and “sum up” the scenario, the script, of Le Pont du Nord. On the pretence that the two heroines come from nowhere and wander about a Paris filmed as it never has been before (such a beautiful city!) – on the pretence that the film perhaps takes place in “Ailleurs-les-Oies” and that it has to do with terrorism, a blacklist, and a great deal of paranoia – we’d be pulled too quickly onto the side of allegory or capital-S Symbolism. No – we have to throw aside the open-ended artwork and the bon chic bon genre lacuna (this a bit worn out – at least for the time being) and speak differently about this film. Don’t start with the script.
There’s good reason for this. Rivette’s cinema always tells the same story: how to forget about the script, the scenario. A clarification, here: the Scenario is many things. It’s that thing dictated and banged out on the machine that you have to write to convince the Advance on Receipts [a French production-financing arrangement –ed.] or to reassure a financier. It’s that inevitability that ensures that each generation be deemed at some moment a “lost generation” (for example, a generation of terrorists, political and aesthetic, pre- and post-’68, a generation which the faces of Bulle Ogier and Pierre Clémenti incarnate in an almost documentary manner, all the way down to the twitching, the tics, and the hippie-locutions). A scenario is obsessive short-circuits too, the minuscule rituals we undertake throughout all life-experience and which create the automatic reflexes of the cinema, in some way its safety net. A glance should encounter an object, that’s the scenario – a bullet should go through a body, there’s another one – a line of dialogue should fall off before the end, that’s typical too. Every scenario is the story of a fall.
This is why, besides the fact that it’s a moment of superbly filmed euphoria, the final scene between Stévenin and Pascale Ogier, the karate lesson on the Pont du Nord, tells something of the truth of the film: “Don’t forget your enemy is imaginary,” Stévenin says. And if the glances, the bullets, the words “don’t carry”? And if there was only dance? And if dance alone – “the passion of being someone else” – allowed one to forget about the Scenario? And if Rivette (alone or almost so within French cinema) were a choreographer making his comeback? To speak of Le Pont du Nord as a musical comedy – the “Ogier Follies” or “Paranoid in Paris” – that’s already better.
One will say: but the Scenario doesn’t forget about you. Of course. It doesn’t neglect Marie Lafée who foolishly dies in a twist of fate after having brought to her murderer the precious “documents” (which were what, exactly? a map of Paris with a Game of the Goose drawn over the top: again a scenario, with 63 scenes!). It doesn’t neglect Rivette either, who needs it, but in the way one needs a negative pole, a trap to avoid, a threat to flee – a wicked North. Whence the Ogiers’ wanderings.
Return to Paris
Leaving the scenario aside, frustrating its inevitability, dancing it in order to shoot it, is already old news, that of modern cinema, that of Rivette. Le Pont du Nord is, on this day, its most recent episode, and its most joyful one, too. Let’s recapitulate. It all started with a paranoiac scenario out of Lang (Paris nous appartient), followed by a scenario of persecution whose sadised victim was a woman (La Religieuse [The Nun, Jacques Rivette, 1966]). Then, taking off from L’Amour fou and its entangled device, in which the scenario, which contained the same idea, was scrapped, with Rivette staying dedicated to his troupe of actresses (Ogier, Berto, Karagheuz, etc.). From Céline and Julie in their boat [as at the beginning of the essay, Daney refers here to Rivette’s 1974 film Céline et Julie vont en bateau / Phantom Ladies Over Paris, or Céline and Julie Go Boating or Céline and Julie Go Off the Deep-End, etc. –ed.] to the company of Amazons of Noroît [Scènes de la vie parallèle: 3: Noroît (une vengeance), or Scenes from the Parallel Life: 3: Nor’wester (A Vengeance), 1976], the most experimental period of his oeuvre corresponds to the unrealised project of the “Filles du feu” [“Daughters of Fire”]. Facing a scenario whose terms are set, more or less hypocritically, by men (stories of secret societies, scavenger hunts, traps), the women respond by inventing an even more aleatory way of acting! A game unto themselves, then a game between themselves – beyond all hope, parodic, and excessive. In the face of this fire, Rivette scorched his wings a little.
This is why Le Pont du Nord marks Rivette’s returning, in the double sense of the term. Returning to the circuit of cinema; re-turning in, retracing, his steps. Returning and new departure. For there’s a difference in stature. Up to this point, Rivette was only interested in what might happen between characters of the same age group. In stories of alliances and sects, as it were. With Le Pont du Nord, for the first time, he chances the description of two generations. His actresses have gotten older; they themselves could have children – have had them, in any case, and, what’s more, the children are all grown up. Which is where Bulle and Pascale come in. A generation is only ever lost when it no longer knows how to tell its story to the generation that follows. It’s rescued when it knows that it no longer knows anything. Between Marie Lafée and Baptiste, time has dug a strange gully. Rivette’s (and William Lubtchansky’s) camera becomes ethnographic again, a little Rouchian, sensitive to these two ways of speaking, of thinking, of moving, of shivering or taking in the sun, of acting and of withdrawing from the act. One must see Baptiste listening with a benevolent gravity to Marie’s soliloquies, and must see Marie cast a glance upon the prowess of karate-ka Baptiste. To speak of incommunicability is to say too much. “To each her own thing” would be better: to you, the voice; to me, the body; and an identical space to accommodate the two; an identical film to act in.
Not everyone gets the chance to make a first film twice. It’s a luxury that is paid in journeys across the desert and in blacklists. Like Marie Lafée, Rivette could say: But I’m still alive! Le Pont du Nord proves that he’s very much alive, even. Last year, Godard was said to be very happy to have made – with Sauve qui peut (la vie) [Every Man for Himself, 1979] – a first film for the second time, that is, for a second generation of spectators. Twenty years later. Rohmer, as well, said that after years in the studio and making costume films, he had rediscovered the desire to go down the street and see if Paris had changed any. This resulted in La Femme de l’aviateur [The Aviator’s Wife, 1981, the first in the series of Rohmer’s Comédies et proverbes, or Comedies and Proverbs]. I’m citing individuals from the Nouvelle Vague. Deliberately. These are the only ones today to carry any trace of our recent past – twenty years of adventures in and through the cinema. After a period of experimental withdrawal, having lost nothing of their independence, they’re starting once again from square one, from Paris, from this fictive and documentary Paris which was the theatre of their débuts. The Game of the Goose has once more been initiated. Amnesia is impossible but bereavement is done with; those rugged years of the Seventies are now in the distance.
Le Pont du Nord restarts in a minor mode what Rivette had once pretended to take too seriously. The squabbles over the scenario of men and the body of women? An enigma and a dance – nothing more. Jean-Claude Biette recently said that The Tragedy of a Ridiculous Man [La tragedia di un uomo ridicolo, Bernardo Bertolucci, 1981] was the first Italian film after the death of Pasolini. I’d offer that in France, Le Pont du Nord is the first film of the Eighties.
First published in Libération on March 26th, 1982. Translation by Craig Keller.
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INTERVIEW WITH RIVETTE by Serge Daney and Jean Narboni 1981
DANEY & NARBONI: You’ve just finished a film, Le Pont du Nord, which we haven’t seen yet. Can you tell us about it?
RIVETTE: Maybe only anecdotally, because I don’t even know what this film is yet – maybe I’ll never know, that’s what happens sometimes. But with this, we have the feeling (I say “we” not in the royal sense of the word; it’s a collective “we”, as this film was made with several collaborators, and I think we’re all in the same state of mind) that it’s very difficult to know what it is. And the reactions from a few people to whom we showed the work-print are so dissimilar that it hardly helps us any.
DANEY & NARBONI: At the start, you spoke about it as an “appraisal film” about the France of 1980...
RIVETTE: That’s only what I said when I started it!... But no, it’s a small story about two people who wander through Paris... Actually, we began with the desire to make, ten years after Out 1 [1971/1989] (since the project goes back to a year ago, April ’80, and the shoot of Out 1 was April ’70), the desire to make a different film... – “appraisal” is too much, but actually, still, a small sort of tableau of France as seen from my little tower: what Out 1 wanted to be, for even if, concretely speaking, Le Pont du Nord only deals with a couple people, I hope that something comes across of what France was like two years after ’68 and (this was exactly what the project of the film was) that it comes across in ricochets, without ever being addressed directly. So, with this, we had the desire with Bulle, and Suzanne [Schiffman], to kind of remake the same thing, ten years on; very quickly, we tried to bang out a story where there’d be Bulle, and eventually Juliet [Berto] – but it turned out the film project she’d been developing for several months was starting to take shape [this was Neige (Snow, 1981) –ed.], and that, as happens, she was no longer available enough to work with us – and then the same thing with Hermine [Karagheuz]. In fact, everything ground to a halt pretty quickly: because, first of all, we had the feeling that it risked being too much of the same thing from ten years prior, even if it was the same things that I’m into and with the people that I’ve always wanted to shoot a lot with: then, seen from the point of departure we’d taken (while using as the backdrop another Balzac novel), it risked being a copy of the first film too much. Actually, there was just as much risk of making a relatively expensive film, relatively difficult to edit, not to mention there not being that many producers on the horizon. And so one fine day, the fact that Juliet was tied up with her own film; the fact that, on the other hand, Bulle and Pascale were very attached to the project; the fact of being told that, if you wanted the chance to make the film, it had to be as marketable as possible – all this eliminated the initial project. So we started over with the principle of being as simple and economical as possible, therefore: to shoot a film with two characters (Bulle and Pascale) and with exteriors alone: where there wouldn’t be a single interior shot, not a single lit shot, everything in the streets of Paris, from the first image to the last, and without leaving the confines of Paris. Which gave us a good, precise, and stimulating framework. Only then maybe would there be the ability to return in bursts to the first project, “Tableau of France in 1980”, but this isn’t “Tableau of France”, it’s just glimpses, overtures, things like that, here and there, by way of these two characters and two male characters who cross their paths (Pierre Clémenti and Jean-François Stévenin)... It’s a film that, as is often the case with films I make (this is something I’ve always wanted to do and which sometimes works out well, sometimes badly) seems to be headed in a certain direction in the first half-hour, takes a 180 at the end of the half-hour, takes a second 180 a half-hour later, a third 180 again three-quarters of the way through... Sometimes I think this works well, like in Céline et Julie, sometimes less well, like in Merry-Go-Round [1978/1981]; sometimes the turns are a little hair-pin, like in Duelle [Scènes de la vie parallèle: 2: Duelle (une quarantaine), or Scenes from the Parallel Life: 2: Duelle (A Quarantine), 1976] and, in this moment of the 180, half the audience heads for the exit...
DANEY & NARBONI: Is this zig-zag construction, in general, premeditated, or does it occur to you only once the film is finished?
RIVETTE: This is a film that, in my opinion, doesn’t resemble Céline et Julie or Merry-Go-Round whatsoever, except through this principle of construction I was just talking about, but which operates, I hope, a little differently. Aside from this, it was shot in the same fashion, that is, there’s a pretty precise construction at the beginning, more precise than for Merry-Go-Round where we were obliged to modify things several times in the course of the shoot; here, we largely kept the construction we’d established beforehand, which anyway was a very simple one. And it was written, as we went along, by different people, the principal one being Jérôme Prieur who did the basic work of writing the dialogue; therefore at certain moments it’s Jérôme’s dialogue exactly as it was written, then at other, more simple moments, shot with more or less prepared improvisation (for example, Bulle improvises, but Pascale’s interventions were devised beforehand). This is a formula I really like: let the dialogue take its own shape as we go along via someone who’s been somewhat involved in the course of the shoot, with repercussions and interaction from the one to the other... Aside from this, it was very “aleatory” in the same shooting plan because we were outside the entire time; we were lucky in that it never rained, but on the other hand it was freezing cold and the days were very grey and short. And when you shoot in the cold, you’re not really doing the same things you’d do when it’s warm out. In this case, I suddenly understood why, as you’re aware, despite my being crazy about Altman, there’s one Altman film that I won’t defend – and that’s Quintet [1979]: because it’s a film paralysed by the cold!
DANEY & NARBONI: So the ignition was the desire to make a new film with people you’re friendly with?
RIVETTE: This is a film that started from the desire to make a film, as is always the case. And then to shoot once more with Bulle, because, if it goes great shooting with actors you admire and who aren’t yet well-known, like, for example, was the case with Geraldine Chaplin for Noroît or Maria Schneider for Merry-Go-Round, it’s insanely great to shoot with actors or actresses you’ve known for a long time and with whom you’ve already made several things; of course, it depends who it is – but I know that with Bulle, it’s the fifth film, and I have the impression that we could still make at least five other ones, and that I’d always discover even more new things. I think that with Juliet, it would be the same, with Hermine too, and several others... So, the project was born out of a conversation with Bulle, and Bulle got on board right away while proposing the idea for an eventual character. Then also Pascale came up with the idea for her character pretty quickly. And with Suzanne, we started tracing the steps of these two characters.
DANEY & NARBONI: There’s also often an idea, a principle, of music at work, as you start planning your films...
RIVETTE: The only music is a collage, after the fact, in the editing. There was, from the start, in the work-print, a three-minute sequence where there was no sound, and so that this sequence wouldn’t be too depressing a thing to have to sit through in the first work projections, we said: we’re going to put a record on – and then we got used to this record being there, and we left it in.
DANEY & NARBONI: What is it?
RIVETTE: It’s a tango by Piazzolla!... It’s somewhere between brothel music and church music, but I really like it! So we wanted to keep this music in and, as a result, there are two, three little echoes like this at other points in the movie, which come like little gusts of wind...
•••
DANEY & NARBONI: Are you thinking that we’re going to sense, with your film, the end of the reign of Giscard [Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, President of the French Republic from 1974 to 1981 –ed.], as you liked saying the last time we spoke?
RIVETTE: Of the first reign of Giscard, is what I said exactly!... Once again, it’s above all a film about two characters who meet and spend three-and-a-half days together. It happens that, at certain moments, they get to talking a little about things that connect them, and there’s a lot to say about France, but, in any case, Paris at the end of October and the beginning of November in 1980. Anyway, I was going to mention this explicitly at the beginning... I’ve got two kinds of films: there are those where I want to put a date at the opening, and those where I don’t. It’s used in Paris nous appartient, in Out 1 (the case of La Religieuse is totally different), it’s used with the date at the beginning of the film corresponding to the date of the shoot (or the writing of the scenario, in the case of Paris nous appartient). Since, at best, the film won’t be released earlier than six months from then, so I don’t know what the case will be with this one in six months’ time, but it will inevitably be very “staggered” by virtue of its connection with what October ’80 was... or maybe not even.
•••
DANEY & NARBONI: So, there are two tendencies in your films – films anchored in a particular moment in time, and then the mythical films; those that want to be marked with a date, and those that don’t. And yet what hasn’t been elucidated much is what it is for you that was the point in common with the Tetralogy [Scènes de la vie parallèle] that you were supposed to make: the four days off during which the dead return to earth.
RIVETTE: This was a point of departure, a point of reference for subsequently telling stories. Because I’m pretty crazy about the carnival, the Celtic myths... But it’s great when, suddenly, a desire to film meets certain elements, and you say to yourself: “Well, maybe this material’s possible after all!” and then this material ends up working out well, or doesn’t. Here, I had the feeling that this little book about the carnival by Gaignebet, which I came across at random, contained material which set me off on my way. In the end, it got mixed together with a bunch of other things: Duelle, for example, uses lots of elements of the quote-unquote French pseudo-poetic film, while trying to be, more or less successfully, something in a Cocteau-Franju vein; as for Noroît, there’s practically nothing other than that... But in these films there wasn’t really a general idea – it corresponded instead to something that I think I wasn’t the only one, at that moment, to have experienced, and which was already there in Céline et Julie – something which was, actually: the need to create types of little structures of protection closed-off from any connection with the outside world... I think that this is found in the same subjects: it’s not for nothing that Noroît takes place in a kind of citadel, and Duelle entirely in closed-off, nocturnal environments; and this would have been there just as strongly in [Scènes de la vie parallèle] Part One, if it got made – the love story between Leslie Caron and Albert Finney, which was practically nothing but a tête-à-tête between two people in an isolated house... [i.e., Marie et Julien, the material of which Rivette later revisited for his 2003 film Histoire de Marie et Julien, or Story of Marie and Julien, starring Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz –ed.] Yes, there was a period when I didn’t really want to make things that were related, either closely or loosely, with whatever was going on in France. It was a refusal, it held no interest for me, and this refusal has for the time being fallen a bit to the wayside.
The same thing can also be found in La Religieuse or L’Amour fou, which are just as much films of imprisonment (but more concretely so, less cut off from what’s called reality) and alternate with two films, Paris nous appartient and Out 1, which are a little more opened-up – let’s say that in them, from time to time the windows are open... However, generally speaking, they’re still films of imprisonment, when all’s said and done.
DANEY & NARBONI: Isn’t the element of the citadel, whether under siege or not, your central theme?
RIVETTE: Perhaps. Except that in this most recent one, there’s no citadel. Or rather, it’s Paris, whose ramparts have been fallen for a long time now, but everyone acts like they’re still there.
DANEY & NARBONI: This theme of the citadel is certainly there in the films of Ruiz which recently have begun to deal with it more and more, but under a theoretical guise, under the direction of someone who has a great familiarity with theology and who always poses the question of point of view, in the way in which power is bred. But with you, it’s the citadel of the point of view, perhaps, of the people who are already inside of it...?
RIVETTE: It’s never the point of view of power, that’s for sure! As the only time there are tiny approaches toward people who gaze outward from the side of power is in Out 1, with the characters of [Jacques] Doniol-Valcroze and Françoise Fabian, who still remain internecine intermediaries, and who aren’t portrayed in a very serious light. That too, I wouldn’t have been able to do any other way. I always feel incapable, it’s probably a handicap, of showing a character of power in a serious light. But in order to do this, maybe you have to do what Jean-Marie [Straub] does: go looking for Corneille, Schönberg, or Brecht!
•••
DANEY & NARBONI: It’s true, if you take the filmmakers of the Nouvelle Vague, that they all had this moment of withdrawal: La Chambre verte [The Green Room, 1978] by Truffaut; Ici et ailleurs [Here and Elsewhere, Jean-Luc Godard and Anne-Marie Miéville, 1974], Numéro 2 [Number 2, Jean-Luc Godard, 1976], Godard sleeping on top of his editing table; Rohmer making historical films, yourself making mythological films.
RIVETTE: I’m telling you, it was Giscard!... I think that, without exaggerating anything, by the end of ’74 there was a very strong feeling, that all of us more or less experienced, of a collective vacuum, and the desire to try to remake ourselves, to close ourselves off from ourselves and those who were close to us.
DANEY & NARBONI: Do you think you’ve managed to escape it now?
RIVETTE: I think so, yes! But maybe since we’re going to come back to this a few months from now, let’s wait for the counter-shock of the elections. And then again, also, maybe the cinema is an outdated medium. It’s very possible. The distribution of cinema, such as it exists, in any case, gives one the impression that we’ve arrived at a breaking point: the way in which films are consumed, are circulated, are viewed, also figure into it. And, just take music, where everything is now refined, digital recording systems, etc., it’s as though there’s some hesitation among monied interests to make the jump towards an approaching future, because it’s too strong a shift from the current marketplace. I think that’s where cinema is at, as well. Which is where this impression of being stuck in a rut comes from. Almost every filmmaker of the last ten years has spent their time in a rut; good or bad, with more or less talent, but during these ten years there hasn’t been a change on the horizon, or anywhere, to my knowledge. As though it were a general shut-down... waiting for the messiah, for the apocalypse, call it whatever you want! And we continue filling time waiting, because we live on, we get by, years pass...
DANEY & NARBONI: In France, or more generally speaking?
RIVETTE: I have the impression that this is an almost global phenomenon... Yes. Giscard isn’t in power by chance, after all! It’s a European phenomenon, in any case. But we’re not going to launch into the philosophy of history!... This isn’t only related to politics, it also reflects the fact that, after ten years, every filmmaker feels that the way in which films are made – and this is as much to do with the technical method as the method of distribution – is in suspension... And this is a very strong feeling that I’ve had ever since L’Amour fou as we already did it with Out 1, very prematurely, in a thirteen-hour-long perspective, thinking of a kind of eventual televised serial, along with parallel, utopian, or even inaccessible possibilities of distribution, but already, even so, thinking of something else. It happened that, effectively, now, there’s still no possible means of distribution for this type of enterprise; that, or they remain very unsatisfying; same for Jean-Luc’s [five-hour long] Le Tour de France [France/tour/détour/deux/enfants, or France/Tour/Return/Two/Children, Jean-Luc Godard, 1977], or, in another way, Syberberg’s [seven-hour long] Hitler [Hitler, ein Film aus Deutschland, or Hitler: A Film from Germany, 1977] – there are lots of examples...
•••
DANEY & NARBONI: [In a previous interview with the Cahiers] you put forward a certain number of ideas very much within the sensibility of the era: the idea of the obstacle as opposed to the spectacle; the abject in cinema; the rejection of the auteur, the erasure of the auteur...
RIVETTE: I’ve always agreed with this idea of erasing the auteur. Maybe not erasing, but still... I keep thinking that a film is more interesting if aspects of it are handled by different people. There are of course exceptions to this – Bresson, and a couple others. But all the same, the entire American cinema, and the major part of Western cinema, is never one sole individual – it’s not a writer at his work table nor a painter before his canvas; I think something happens by way of a connection between a person who is the director and the actors, and also the principal technicians when they know how to play their part. Of course there’s always someone who has to take the responsibility of the [spoken in English] “last cut”, and not only that. In fact, there are two responsibilities on a film: the one is: “it gets started”, and the other is: “it gets finished”. There obviously has to be someone who says: “we’re starting”, and who brings other people together by way of a project that’s supposed to happen; and another who says: “we’re wrapping up, we’re through, that’s the way it is, done, we’re making the release-print, this is the way people are going to see it”. It’s not necessarily the same person who says both of these things. What happens within the French cinema system, more often than not, nine times out of ten, is it’s the filmmaker who makes the initial proposal, and who decides when it’s finished. But everything in between these two things, I think it’s more interesting if there’s an opening, even if this opening is a tactical one, if it’s a manoeuvre. This is what bothers me a little in recent American films, like The Deer Hunter [Michael Cimino, 1978] or Raging Bull [Martin Scorsese, 1980] – it’s the fact that they’re centripetal, self-sufficient. It’s even more striking in De Niro and all the American actors of his generation; it’s evident in a film like The Dogs of War [John Irvin, 1980], a film which vacillates its entire run-time between being a banal mercenary film and the second-coming of The Deer Hunter, in which, in turn, Walken totally wants to be a new De Niro; it’s evident that [De Niro] was the key figure throughout the entire film, that the project was probably built around him, that he’s the one who prepared his character all on his own for six months, seeing as De Niro was most likely the one who laid down the law – at least that’s the impression one comes away with – who influenced all the decisions on the set. De Niro pulls this off because there’s no-one to get in the way, thanks to his rapport with Scorsese, and yet the result is that this generation of actors – not just De Niro or Walken, but also Stallone, etc. – can now only play the roles of men who are obsessed, paranoid. And likewise, Scorsese, and Coppola, can no longer direct this. Even so, it’s a little disturbing; an enormous limitation of subjects, compared to all the possible and eventual human relationships out there. All this because there are still power struggles. I for one continue in theory, and as much as I’m able to do in practise, to stand against power struggles. Of course, everyone knows quite well, bearing that discourse in mind, that there’s an element of hypocrisy, an element of cowardice, an element of obvious degradation, and that the attitude that this cultivates on my part during the shoot is often very difficult for the actors and the technicians to deal with: that is, refusing to hold on – not always, but sometimes – to the place that, in the end, should be mine alone. And standing around waiting for something to come from one side or the other, and sometimes it comes, other times it doesn’t, of course... What I’m describing is the method by which I make films, and this method, as always, creates subjects; one might see a thematic throughline here after the fact, but I believe that it’s always the outcome of a way of shooting which is purely physical.
DANEY & NARBONI: Yes. And still one senses that you’re closer to Altman or Cassavetes. By the fact that you allow a certain margin within your acting?...
RIVETTE: Yes. One which is always rigged and booby-trapped! But it’s true, I like this feeling!... You really get the sense in Altman and Cassavetes that they’re not trying to be demiurges. Maybe what I like the most in Altman is precisely the messy side, which shocks people, even if it’s not always graceful – far from it – and which gives this impression that something’s happening, something’s coming closer, which hasn’t been anticipated; and which comes about because a certain number of people found themselves brought together by certain circumstances, as though by accident. The feeling also that everyone would have been different if there were other people involved – the opposite of pre-established and interchangeable “roles”.
And indeed, in the extraordinarily rigid system of American cinema, Altman and Cassavetes are practically the only ones to have tried doing this in the last ten years. When you know how difficult it is within the European system, you can only imagine the enormity of the difficulties that they must encounter...
DANEY & NARBONI: [And Robert] Kramer?
RIVETTE: Yes. But, without wanting to take anything away from his merits, Kramer had the advantage of his marginality...
The text is excerpted from Cahiers du cinéma no. 327, September 1981. Translated by Craig Keller.
