Theatricality and French Cinema : the Films of Jacques Rivette
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THEATRICALITY AND FRENCH CINEMA: THE FILMS OF JACQUES RIVETTE By MARY M. WILES A DISSERTATION PRESENTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF THE UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY UNIVERSITY OF FLORIDA 2002 Copyright 2002 by Mary M. Wiles ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have come to fruition without the concern and support of many people. I wish to express my sincerest thanks to my advisor, Maureen Turim, whose intellectual guidance and firm belief in this project made its completion possible. Any intellectual rigor that this project possesses is due to her vigilance. Her exhaustive knowledge of French theater, continental film and literary theory, and film history' provided the touchstone of this project; her open and receptive spirit allowed me the freedom to stage my own ideas. Her constant presence in my life as a feminist, a film scholar, and a most demanding editor was critical to my personal and professional growth. I would also like to thank the members of my supervisory committee, who contributed to the development of this dissertation in numerous w'ays: Robert Ray for his dynamic teaching style in his course, “Taylorism, Metaphysics, and the Movies,” and for his scholarly advice, which has been of great help in my professional growth; Scott Nygren for his acute intelligence and warm encouragement; Susan Hegeman for her untiring support and constructive comments; and finally, Nora Alter, whose knowledge of theories of theater gave me fresh insight and imbued me with a new energy at the final stage of the dissertation. I would like to thank those scholars outside my committee who have also inspired and enriched this dissertation: Rose Theresa and Jeongwon Joe for giving me their feedback on my writings and contributing their crucial insights on the interrelation between cinema and opera; Susan Hayward for her editorial comments and for iii contributing her expert knowledge of French cinema; Rosemarie Scullion for her passionate interest in French feminist theory and literature; and Steven Ungar for his personal and intellectual friendship. I wish to express my gratitude to Michel Marie for making the resources of the film archives at Universite de Paris III available to me and for assisting me in my research in Paris. I wish to thank Francois Ravidat, Yolanda Broad, and Chris De Santis for assisting me with the translation of Noroit and Out 1. I would like to thank the dedicated librarians John Van Hook and Frank Di Trolio at the University of Florida whose research skills and persistence enabled me to access the many articles, books, and films necessary to my work on Rivette. I would also like to thank my colleagues at Florida Atlantic University, Susan Reilly, Mike Budd, and Eric Freedman, whose patience, moral support, and technological backup increased my resolve during the final stage of the dissertation. I am privileged to have had friends and family members whose engaging discussions and generous participation in my life made the completion of this dissertation a possibility and, occasionally, a pleasure. I am especially grateful to Tom Cohen and Patrick Brennan for responding to my early drafts; Christophe Gallier for assisting me in my research in France; Martyn Back whose unwavering friendship has always been a source of strength; Georgia Gurrieri who has been my constant friend, traveling companion, and role model since my introduction to film studies at the University of Iowa; and Susan Marie Birkenstock, Denise Cummings, and Carolyn Smith for their emotional support and feminist perspective. I would like to thank my parents, C. Preston Wiles and Mary McCallum Wiles, for their generosity and love without which I could not have completed this project. Finally, my warmest thanks to Jacques Rivette for IV taking the time to speak with me during one summer afternoon at Cafe de la Bastille. v TABLE OF CONTENTS page ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii ABSTRACT viii CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION 1 2 AN INVESTIGATION OF THEATRICALITY: POSTWAR PARIS AND PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT 22 From Pericles prince de Tyr to Paris nous appartient 22 , From Shakespeare to Sartrean Situationist Theater 25 Postwar Crisis: Between Brecht and Cultic Theatricality 27 Sartrean Countermystification 35 Retaking Paris: A Shifting Historical Referent 38 From boulevard du Crime to Balzac 42 Musical Echoes 50 Notes 53 3 THE THEATRICAL TABLEAUX OF LA RELIGIEUSE: THE CONTEMPLATIVE MOMENT OF PRE-MAY 1968 57 The Paradox of the Rivettian Actor 59 From Stage to Screen 62 The Heritage of Cahiers du Cinema 68 Theatrical Scene and Pictorial Tableaux 77 From Japanese Cinema to Theater 100 De-contextualizing the Tableaux: The Rhetorical Moment of Pre-May ’68 112 Notes 1 13 4 AESCHYLUS, ARTAUD, AND THE ABSURD: THE POST-68 REVERIE OF OUT 1: NOLIME TANGERE 117 A: Aeschylus 121 A: Artaud 122 C: Chorus 128 vi 1 C: Complot/Conspiracy 131 G: Grotowski 134 I: Improvisation 139 I: Ionesco 143 S: Serial 155 Notes 162 5 FROM TOURNEUR TO MAETERLINCK AND DEBUSSY: SOUNDING OUT THE OPERATIC IN NOROIT. 166 The Revenger’s Tragedy. Theatrical Adaptation 170 From Maeterlinck to Debussy. Pelleas et Melisande 177 Duplicitous Staging: The Revenger ’s Tragedy and Pelleas et Melisande 193 From German and French Opera to Cinema 202 Notes 207 6 MOVING BACKSTAGE: FROM TAXI-DANCE HALL TO DEPRESSION MUSICAL IN HAUTBAS FRAGILE 21 From the New Wave to the Nineties 212 The Dance Aesthetic: From Taxi-dance Halls to the Backstage Musical 215 From the Fairground Format to the Happening 234 Notes 244 7 SUMMARY AND CONCLUSIONS 247 WORKS CITED 257 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 272 vii Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy THEATRICALITY AND FRENCH CINEMA: THE FILMS OF JACQUES RIVETTE By Mary Wiles December 2002 Chair: Maureen Turim Major Department: English Cinema spent its earlier years distinguishing itself from theater . The work of radical filmmaker Jacques Rivette paradoxically achieves renewal through reference to different forms of theatricality. This dissertation takes issue with the type of film criticism that locates the theatricality of Rivette’ s films as their determining flaw, measuring his work solely against the Zeitgeist of the New Wave movement, which prized spontaneity and freedom from theatrical convention. This study argues for his centrality, both as a leading figure of the postwar French avant-garde and as a filmmaker whose work anticipated the postmodernist celebration of pleasure and the performative. This research re-envisions the stylistic concerns of his cinema through the prism of theater aesthetics. Each chapter examines a different aspect of this single aesthetic impulse. Chapter 2 concentrates on the connection between the New Wave classic Paris nous appartient (1958-60) and the postwar existentialist theater of Jean-Paul Sartre. Chapter 3 focuses on the succes a scandale La Religieuse (1965-66), the banned vm Diderot adaptation. Diderotian dramaturgy and Enlightenment pictorialism converge in the film with the scenography of No and Kabuki theater to produce a mode of active contemplation, characteristic of pre-May ’68. Chapter 4 concentrates on the thirteen- hour Out 1: Noli me tangere (1970-71), where Rivette adopts an apocalyptic performance style based on French avant-garde theater aesthetics and Eastern European and American experimental theater of the 1960s. Chapter 5 discusses Noroit (1976) as participating in a distinct trend in French cinema that rethinks tenets of political modernism through the prism of opera and opera aesthetics. Noroit 's operatic style, which is indebted to the fantastic dimension of composer Claude Debussy’s modernist opera Pelleas et Melisande, represents Rivette’s response to the accelerated crisis in the realm of representation in the wake of May ‘68. Chapter 6 shows how in Haut basfragile (1995) Rivette fuses the performance aesthetic of the Happening with the American film musical and New York taxi-dance hall traditions to produce the abstract pleasure associated with early cinema and an avant-garde performance aesthetic. This dissertation puts into perspective the remarkable metamorphosis of Rivette’s work from the New Wave to the Nineties. IX CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Roland Barthes locates Baudelairien theatricality as wholly independent of theatrical realization properly speaking, envisioning it as “present in the germ of the work” ( Critical Essays 26). Can “theatricality” as a potential presence in a non-theatrical work be understood in cinema? May we discuss the migration of certain qualities inherently theatrical from the stage to the screen? Elizabeth Bums would respond that inherently theatrical traits are nonexistent, arguing in Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life that theatricality resides in interpretation, that it is a mode of perception (13). In “Performing Theory,” Maria Brewer concurs, defining theatricality as the term through which “interpretation, explicitly or not, designates and frames its own practice as performance” (2). In this dissertation, I focus on what I call “theatricality,” a politics of style that encompasses the manner in which the codes of theater, including gestural, iconic, and linguistic, are evident in profilmic texts. I use the world of theater as a contextual and theoretical framework in my discussion of Rivette, and thus, the term “theatricality” necessarily defines my own mode of