Although I don't worship Rivette, I do love "Celine and Julie" and "Va Savoir" (which is my favorite of his), and
this Thomson piece in the Guardianis pretty good.
"...great art, great cinema, may still be achieved by directors who - along with their obsession with the form of film - are every bit as interested in theatre, painting, music and the novel. Let us suppose, for the sake of argument, that there could be a tradition of film-making in which it is fatuous to separate the work being studied from those other media. Are we prepared to tolerate this, without stooping to such crude insults as "too literary, too stagey, too painterly, too operatic - too difficult"? Then, consider that this tradition embraces much of the work of Jean Renoir, Kenji Mizoguchi, Max Ophüls, Michelangelo Antonioni, Robert Bresson, Ingmar Bergman, and the subject of this essay, a man who deserves to be considered among the greatest living and working film directors, no matter how he might shrink from the description. I am talking about Jacques Rivette."
― TRG (TRG), Saturday, 15 April 2006 14:43 (eighteen years ago) link
Twice, wow, you obviously didn't do much else. I didn't have a chance to see it once but have always been curious.
― TRG (TRG), Monday, 24 April 2006 13:40 (seventeen years ago) link
I am going to try to do
Spectre when it's at the NFT next month, but unfortunately it may be a difficult one logistically, due to a relentless work schedule involving much travel back and forth. Oh well, at least I did the big one, I guess...
― Treize, Monday, 24 April 2006 14:18 (seventeen years ago) link
four years pass...
five years pass...
so did anyone else see the restoration of Noli Me Tangere going around right now? I just got back from the screening and I feel like I've been run over by a steamroller. I ended up watching it the way I watched Playtime - i.e. I quit trying to follow a plot and instead just started allowing my eyes to wander around the screen soaking up the details and doing my best to catch as many Aeschylus references as I can manage and picking my heart up off the floor whenever Juliet Berto popped up on screen. and I really love the way it was programmed - Cinefamily would run an episode (typically somewhere between 1.5 and 2 hrs in length), break to pee, play the next one, break for a potluck reception, then back in for the last two episodes of the day; repeat the next day.
really excited for the Arrow set allegedly coming out in a few weeks (it's R2, but there's a R1 reissue coming a little after the year rolls over [although it doesn't include the two other Rivettes that come with the Arrow set]); it sounds like the definitive home release of this movie so I would jump on it while the option's available.
― grinding like a jolly elf (jamescobo), Monday, 16 November 2015 06:20 (eight years ago) link