Jacques Rivette

Who is Jacques Rivette?

Jacques Rivette is a French film director, screenwriter and film critic. His best-known films include Celine and Julie Go Boating, La Belle Noiseuse and the rare thirteen-hour Out 1.

He was a member of the French New Wave, a group that included François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol, who all began their careers as film critics at Cahiers du Cinéma in the 1950s and gained international recognition as film directors in the 1960s. As a film critic, he expressed his admiration for popular American cinema, especially genre directors such as Robert Aldrich, Otto Preminger, Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Tashlin. As a film director, he is known for using extended running times and loose narratives to explore the symbiosis and clash between reality and imagination. His films often combine the paranoid and conspiratorial crime stories of films by Louis Feuillade and Fritz Lang with the more carefree characters of the films of Jean Renoir and Howard Hawks.