Rivette and Straub

Background on two directors

In the 1960s Jean-Luc Godard, established himself as a seminal influence on film, by being the first director to make cinema itself his subject. For him, a thing exists because a lens (camera or eye) can be trained on it. His films are the birth pangs of an approach which says art doesn't mirror life — life is art. The recent work of two major developers of this approach will be screened in the current festival. (I must admit at the outset to having seen only two of Rivette's films and none of Straub's; much of what follows has been gleaned from sources listed below.) Jacques Rivette: b1928; onetime critic of the Cahiers du Cinema group; seven features since 1960; recent released work L'Amour Fou (68), Out One/Spectre (73), Celine and Julie Go Boating (74), Duelle/Twhylight (76).

Rivette's latest film is a contemporary version of a non-existent myth. This apparently simple fact is an excellent paradigm of his work, for Rivette has been the first filmmaker credited with inventing everything. "Celine and Julie" has been called for this reason "the most important film since "Citizen Kane", the film which has best discovered the future of cinema. Those remarks were made a year before "Duelle". As Rivette's films have apparently been each more adventurous and exciting than the last, it is not unreasonable to suppose the process has continued.

Certainly the idea of a non-existent myth suggests this. In four of the first five films a play has been in rehearsal. The interplay of 'screen reality' and 'fiction' would therefore seem to be a major concern. Maybe for most other directors, not for Rivette.

In "L'Amour Fou" the female lead in the film rejects the lead role in the play her husband is directing. Alone in their apartment she finds she now lacks the order end creative involvement which had given her life purpose. Life, she finds, stems from art because art had been the essential sanity of her life. The 'fiction' (the play) had been the reality.

Rivette's plays-in-progress never reach performance. Although this means his characters never have a chance to 'succeed', to create an end product, they do retain their powers of choice, freedom and development.

"Celine and Julie" takes these structures/themes even further. There is no play; instead the exploits of two women who visit a mysterious house several times by turns. Each plays the same role of a maid in a macabre, slightly advancing story involving two other women vying for the love of a man who has sworn to his now deceased wife he will not remarry while their child lives. The maid has to stop the women killing the child. When whichever of the first pair it is leaves the house she can remember nothing, but by eating a piece of candy she finds on her tongue the scene is played out before her.

From this much it might seem that events in the house function as a kind of fictional counterpoint to the reality of the outside world. However events outside are no less mysterious than those inside. Both Celine and Julie are given to fantasy (one is into the Tarot, the other is a magician). The candy functions rather as a link between two fictional worlds. The two enter the house together and abduct the child. Thinking they have saved her they go for a boat ride, only to find the house's inmates gliding past the other way.

Such a summary cannot possibly do the film justice, which is directly to the point. Because "Celine and Julie" defines all its own terms it is not, finally, subject to external analysis. There is no proper logical storyline or meaning to be exposed. The associations a viewer can make are labyrinthine in their dimensions. Rivette has said that what you see is " there for you it's your film." Not that we may be wrong in what we extract from the work, for he has established a structure from which we understand, and in a sense even create our own films.

The presence of the house's inmates in the outside world suggests that even if reality is thought to exist it is controlled by fiction. Analogically, and because our participation is asked, "Rivette's films declare the readiness of cinema to replace rather than represent life."

An unreleased 13-hour film ("Out One") was begun with no concept of its final shape. It contains, as if to warn us, two sorts of investigators. One is obsessed with unravelling all the cryptic clues concerning the existence of a secret society, and gets practically nowhere. The other dismisses as elaborate games the group's complexities, and suffers chronic boredom as a result. The group exists but may not be active. We must approach Rivette's work from a position somewhere between these two extremes.

Like the ever-rehearsing plays, these films are usually long. They are "the unstable coinage of communication or experience," subjected to a refractory process which commingles all their elements, drawing us into the totally filmic experience. (" Out One" had cut from it "Out one/Spectre," the latter word being French for 'spectrum'). They are structured, but none has a single structure.

"Celine and Julie's" original title is "Celine et Julie vont en bateau". There is a play on 'Monter en bateau', which is to tell someone a complicated story and have them believe you; and on 'Aller en bateau', which is to be caught up in a story you're being told. "Cinema", says Rivette, "is designed to capture the unexpected."

What is the point of all this? one might ask. The answer is existential. The characters of "L'Amour Fou" are poised looking into the void. Art, although paradoxes do exist, is the only means they have to stay out of it. Rivette's other films are apparently similarly concerned with existential horror. "Celine and Julie" however, offers the best resolution of all. The process of creation has always been, for Rivette, man's saving grace. In this latter film the process is absolutely intoxicating, for the director, for the actors (who share the writing and structuring in most of Rivette's work), and for us. Those moments it contains are subsumed in the comedic mode. On top of everything else the final scene suggests is the idea that choice, and with it freedom, have been totally extended. 'Fictionalisation', the process of giving something significance becomes the very essence of life. Hence the eventual use of a non-existent myth.

"Duelle/Twhylight" concerns the efforts of two goddesses who compete to possess a fabulous diamond called the Fairy Godmother. This diamond gives its owner the power to stay on earth longer than the appointed forty days. On one level it is a mock 30s detective thriller, on another an analogy to the film world, where the goddesses (like moviestars) want to become human and the mortals (like fans) identify with them on screen, where the diamond is film itself. Once again, the name provides clues to its complexity. 'Duelle' is the feminine form of a masculine word. Twhylight', the English title, moves from the idea of dusk, through 'why twilight', to just 'why', to 'why light' and finally to light, or dawn. The goddesses, it must be added, are of the Sun and Moon.

"Duelle" is a "myth-in-progress constructed moment by moment by a variety of auteurs out of a diversity of sources-organised by one individual who allows for elements of chance ( an impoverished pianist) as well as control (scripted dialogue) to dictate the terms of that organisation."

Myth is a way of looking at the world, of fulfilling our demand for order in it. Paraphrasing a critic, it would seem Rivette's world is too unstable for such a procedure; the myth of "Duelle" refers ahead to truths existing beyond the reality (or lack of it) in the film, rather than being based on something gone before. "Duelle" reactivates our belief in myth but refuses to satisfy our demands of it.

Rivette has been compared to Lewis Carroll, Borges, Thomas Pynchon and Ornette Coleman. For my money, "Celine and Julie" is not unlike "Waiting for Godot", if you can imagine Vladimir and Estragon sincerely transcending their situation by humour and fulfilment through action. Rivette's importance to film may also prove to be not unlike Beckett's to theatre.

Jean-Marie Straub: b1933 in Lorraine; early work in Paris under Abel Gance, Renoir, Rivette, Astruc and Bresson; married his collaborator Daniele Huillet; ten years in Munich associated with the new German cinema group; now living in Italy. Four features and three shorts since 1963; latest film "Moses and Aaron" (75).

"Films," says Straub, "must have their roots in documentary. Only when each element of the film is true, correct, can one then rise above documentary to aim at something higher." Even when he uses the work of another artist as his starting point he treats it as "documentary raw material." "Moses and Aaron" is faithful to the Schoenburg opera even down to the stage directions. Yet although he "reasserts reality and hopes only to record it," Straub's films stand completely by themselves, to be approached in their own filmic terms. The visuals of this latest work do not "compete with the music, or even 'express' it," each stands in equal relationship to the other. The Vising higher is what counts.

He uses no professional actors, and insists his casts speak in monotones. Sound, be it words or music, is treated as an objective element of film. Meaning is created not by psychological study, but through a kind of distancing which does not allow us emotional involvement, forcing us to consider the materialist situations of the characters. Lack of adornment, in the use of direct sound, bare walls, minimal camera movement, is the 'realistic' base.

Straub has defined cinema as "the application of space to time." Rhythm is the key to his work allowing us to consider each shot, each scene as an autonomous whole yet propelling us forward to the next. Elliptical time jumps deliberately obscure the narrative, so that by responding to me fundamental compositional elements of light, shape, movement and sound we ourselves participate in putting everything together. (Similarities with Rivette — notably the requirements placed or the viewer — and direct contrasts — austerity vs, richness, non-acting vs. love of performance both abound).

The initial idea for making "Moses and Aaron dates back to 1959, when Straub and Oaniele Huillet saw the opera in Berlin end were totally opposed to the staging. Straub calls himself a Marxist yet sees Schoenburg's opera as anti-Marxist, although not non-Marxist. "It seems clear to me," he said before shooting, "that the opera is about the dialectical relationships between Moses and Aaron, but only on the first level. In [unclear: tl] end it will be a Mm on Moses and Aaron in [unclear: relation] ship to the chorus, the people...I want the [unclear: singers] to sing as they act, to sing in the desert; in [unclear: other] words to do the opera in the most materialistic [unclear: w] possible."

That first level dialectic is between the Idea (Moses) and the People (Aaron). Moses is the [unclear: ma] with the vision of purity, of truth, which he [unclear: cannot] communicate; Aaron is his voice. Moses leads the people into the wilderness, Aaron looks after them.

Schoenburg never completed his twelve-tone masterpiece. Final triumph of abstract thought over inadequate image may have proved inexpressible; the strength of the work is not its philosophical outcome but the vibrant musical power of the [unclear: ce ectic].

Straub and Huillet have created from it "a film in which every cut, every framing, every camera movement counts for so much, a film whose expressive terseness and rich economy of means recalls a seminal modern poet like T.S. Eliot."

The festival booklet contains more details on "Moses and Aaron" and "Duelle." Rivette and Straub owe their significance to the totally filmic beauty and expression of their work. In the end they frustrate the analyst and richly reward the viewer.

—Simon Wilson