Rivetted

Long films are not my cup of tea. I like my films to clock in at the 90 minute mark which is perhaps unusual in someone brought up in a pre-Internet era and in a country where films are rarely less than 3 hours. So I approached Jacques Rivette's L'Amour Fou (Mad Love) with some trepidation. 252 minutes is of course not that much for Rivette given that the Out 1 screening seemed to stretch through the day. I did watch all 252 minutes but it was a very long film and not easy watching at all, even more so because the cinema it was held in was prone to amplify the simplest of noises like someone shifting in their chair. Rivette's work has been reviewed by every serious critic so the bare bones of the film - the length, the exploration of the creative process by way of theatre rehearsals of Racine's Andromache and its bleeding into personal life, the use of different film gauges for different sections of the film, the parallel story of the disintegrating relationship of the theatre director and his actress wife (and the rumour that the trashing the apartment scene was inspired by Godard and Anna Karina) and the excellent performances from Kalfon and Bulle Ogier are all well known. I can, many months later, still remember most of the movie which I don't think has very much to do with my own powers of concentration. Rivette's film is unusual in that it is cinema as an intellectual exploration which one usually finds only in literature. A book rarely translates well into film because it has an internal life, ideas and juxtapositions which cannot readily find its way into the film. Yet Rivette's work is the cinematic equivalent of a book - it isn't just visual story-telling or even a "pure cinema" of images but an exploration of an infinite number of ideas by way of a film. I mentioned in a previous post that watching a film at a cinematheque is infinitely better than a DVD viewing at home. But Rivette's work is an exception - like a book it must be an engagement between just the viewer and the work, you need to go back to certain sections to understand it better, you need to re-view sections to savour them, you need to revisit so you can derive fresh meaning from what you see. All of this is impossible if one is allowed only a single, sustained viewing. I would put Rivette's work in my top ten list any day and would have really liked to have seen the rest of his work. Till his work is on DVD, L'Amour Fou will have to suffice.