Rivette, the Night Watchman

Jacques Rivette, le veilleur

France

1990

125 Min

Color

French

Currently 4.5/5 Stars.
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PROD Janine Bazin, André S. Labarthe

CAST Jacques Rivette, Serge Daney, Bulle Ogier, Jean Babilée, Jean-François Stévenin, Claire Denis

This film of interviews with the film director Jacques Rivette was produced in collaboration with Serge Daney, film critic from “Cahiers du cinéma”, then of “Liberation”. In the course of their conversations, the two speakers discuss Rivette’s career, his relationships with the other film makers of the new wave, his use of “mise en scene” and his working with actors. —IMDb

Director

Claire Denis

A provocative director whose films offer richly textured, contemplative examinations of cross-cultural tensions and alienation, Claire Denis is one of French cinema’s most distinctive and humanistic storytellers. A prolific filmmaker who is more concerned with the drive of her characters rather than the plot that weaves them together, she has been dubbed by one critic as one of the only current French directors who “has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary France.”

Born in Paris on April 21, 1948, Denis, the daughter of a civil servant, was raised in a series of African countries until she was 14, when her family returned to France. She learned about filmmaking as an assistant to a number of notable directors, including Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire), Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law), and Costa-Gavras (Hanna K.). She made her directorial and screenwriting debut in 1988 with Chocolat, a lush exploration… read more

A provocative director whose films offer richly textured, contemplative examinations of cross-cultural tensions and alienation, Claire Denis is one of French cinema’s most distinctive and humanistic storytellers. A prolific filmmaker who is more concerned with the drive of her characters rather than the plot that weaves them together, she has been dubbed by one critic as one of the only current French directors who “has been able to reconcile the lyricism of French cinema with the impulse to capture the often harsh face of contemporary France.”

Born in Paris on April 21, 1948, Denis, the daughter of a civil servant, was raised in a series of African countries until she was 14, when her family returned to France. She learned about filmmaking as an assistant to a number of notable directors, including Wim Wenders (Wings of Desire), Jim Jarmusch (Down by Law), and Costa-Gavras (Hanna K.). She made her directorial and screenwriting debut in 1988 with Chocolat, a lush exploration of colonial life and emotional conflicts in 1950s West Africa as viewed through the eyes of a young French girl. The film, which was inspired by Denis’ own experiences in Africa and those of working amongst the stark Southwest landscapes of Paris, Texas, proved to be a very auspicious debut, screening at Cannes that year and earning both a Golden Palm nomination and a César nomination for Best New Director.

Denis followed her debut the next year with Man No Run, a documentary about Les Têtes Brulées (“the Flaming Heads”), a Cameroon band on their first French tour. She then made S’en fout la mort (No Fear, No Die, 1990), a story about two black men, one from Africa and one from the Caribbean, living on the fringes of French society. Like her previous films, it gave specific focus to cultural displacement and racial conflict, themes that would be further explored in J’ai Pas Sommeil (I Can’t Sleep, 1994). Set in a multi-ethnic Parisian neighborhood, the film looked at the various tensions – cultural, familial, and otherwise – at work among various immigrants, including a Lithuanian actress and an expatriate Caribbean family harboring a serial killer. Denis, who occasionally directs for television, next embarked on U.S. Go Home (1994) one part of Tous les Garçons et les Filles de Leur Age, a made-for-TV series depicting the adolescence of nine well-known directors. Denis’ section chronicled 24 hours in the lives of three teenagers trying to lose their virginity in the mid-‘60s. It marked the director’s first collaboration with Grégoire Colin, a young actor whom Denis would also employ in Nénette et Boni and Beau Travail.

The former film, made in 1996, was another coming-of-age drama that centered on the relationship between a lovelorn young man (Colin) and his rebellious, pregnant 15-year-old sister (Alice Houri). It received an enthusiastic international reception and a number of film festival honors, and it was one of the director’s most successful films to date. She followed it three years later with Beau Travail, a military drama based loosely on Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor. The film garnered a warm reception, with a number of critics commenting on Denis’ ability to capture the gorgeously ascetic physical setting of her story, as well as her success in replacing Melville’s verbosity with a silence that communicated volumes. –AMG

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Serge Daney

Serge Daney (June 4, 1944, Paris – June 12, 1992) was an influential French movie critic who went on from writing film reviews to developing a “television criticism” and onto building a personal theory of the image. Although highly regarded in French and European film criticism circles, his work remains little known to English-speaking audiences, largely because it has not been consistently translated.

At the Voltaire High School in Paris, Daney received his first film teachings from Henri Agel, one of the most respected critics of the time. With two high school friends, Louis Skorecki and Claude Dépêche, he founded a short-lived film magazine called Visages du cinéma which only saw two editions, on Howard Hawks (containing Daney’s first published text – a review of Rio Bravo called “An Adult Art”) and on Otto Preminger.

In 1964, Daney joined the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma with a series of interviews of American film directors (notably Howard… read more

Serge Daney (June 4, 1944, Paris – June 12, 1992) was an influential French movie critic who went on from writing film reviews to developing a “television criticism” and onto building a personal theory of the image. Although highly regarded in French and European film criticism circles, his work remains little known to English-speaking audiences, largely because it has not been consistently translated.

At the Voltaire High School in Paris, Daney received his first film teachings from Henri Agel, one of the most respected critics of the time. With two high school friends, Louis Skorecki and Claude Dépêche, he founded a short-lived film magazine called Visages du cinéma which only saw two editions, on Howard Hawks (containing Daney’s first published text – a review of Rio Bravo called “An Adult Art”) and on Otto Preminger.

In 1964, Daney joined the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma with a series of interviews of American film directors (notably Howard Hawks, Leo McCarey, Josef von Sternberg and Jerry Lewis) conducted with Jean Louis Noames (aka Louis Skorecki) during a trip to Hollywood. He writes regularly for the magazine which was moving on from its "yellow cover” beginnings (the time of André Bazin, François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette – roughly 1951-1959) and was about to enter a period of heavy theoretical debates and radical political engagement after 1968.

Between 1968 and 1971, Daney also makes a series of travels to India, Morocco and Africa and starts lecturing cinema at the Censier University (Paris III). After _Cahiers_’ failure to create a “Revolutionary Cultural Front”, Daney took the responsibility of the magazine in 1973, supported by Serge Toubiana. Together, they operated a “return to cinema” for the magazine and also invited thinkers from outside the field of cinema: Michel Foucault, Jacques Rancière and Gilles Deleuze.

In 1981, Daney left Cahiers for the French daily newspaper Libération, to which he had contributed occasionally since its creation in 1973. Writing first about cinema, his focus turns more and more towards television. In 1987, for a hundred days, he wrote daily about French television in a column called “The wage of the channel hopper”. From 1988 to 1991, he wrote a column on how films look when they are shown on television. He also wrote small pamphlets increasingly critical of television programs before he abandoned writing about television altogether in 1991, after a critical analysis of the television coverage of the Gulf War.

Daney went on to found the quarterly film magazine Trafic in which he wrote four pieces before dying of AIDS in June 1992.

Daney’s general theory of the moving image became highly influential for the conception of 1997’s documenta X, the tenth installment of the world’s most important exhibition for contemporary art besides the Venice Biennale. The curator of documenta X, Catherine David, and her most important intellectual collaborator, Jean-François Chevrier, sought to integrate film and television into a show that was meant to deliver a critical investigation of the contemporary state of the image, and found in Daney’s writings one of their guidelines.

Daney had other passions such as tennis and bullfights. —Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

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