Jacques Rivette

Jacques Rivette, born in 1928, French avant-garde motion-picture director, a member of the group of filmmakers who in the 1950s launched the nouvelle vague (new wave) movement, which rejected the polished impersonal style of commercial cinema. Born in Rouen, France, Rivette worked during the 1950s as a film critic for the influential journal Cahiers du Cinéma (Cinema Notebooks), where he and other leading members of the nouvelle vague, including French directors François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, called for an independent approach to filmmaking in which the director had exclusive artistic control.

Rivette made the transition from film critic to filmmaker by working as an assistant to French directors Jacques Becker and Jean Renoir. His first full-length film as a director, Paris nous appartient (Paris Belongs to Us, 1960), radically departed from the conventions of commercial cinema by using disjointed narratives and improvised performances. His second film, Suzanne Simonin, la réligieuse de Denis Diderot (The Nun, 1965), followed a more orthodox plot and style.

Subsequent films by Rivette continued to challenge traditional standards of the motion-picture industry. For example, Out One (1971), a film he made for French television, is nearly 13 hours long, features improvised performances, and deliberately resists interpretation. It was never broadcast, however, an abridged four-hour version entitled Out One: Spectre (Out One: Specter, 1972) was released in theaters . Rivette's other motion pictures include Céline et Julie vont en bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974) and La Belle noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker, 1991), a critically acclaimed story of an artist and his model.