Rivette Revisited
June 9, 2007 - June 26, 2007
We revisit the work of Jacques Rivette with three films that were unavailable for our retrospective last winter, including the extraordinary Out 1, a "cinephile's holy grail" (Dennis Lim, New York Times) that has been screened in its entirety only a handful of times since its doomed premiere in 1971. (After the twelve-and-a-half-hour film was rejected by French television, Rivette whittled it down to a four-and-a-quarter-hour version titled Out 1: Spectre, which has been almost but not quite as hard to see as the original.) This presentation is a chance to experience a truly legendary work, followed by two films that further expand our understanding of Rivette's cinema of rehearsals and reversals.
Saturday, June 9, 2007
2:00 p.m. Out 1, Episodes 1–4
Special admission: $16, general; $10, BAM/PFA members, students, and seniors. Rivette's legendary, extraordinarily rare epic involves a pair of theater companies rehearsing Aeschylus plays and Jean-Pierre Léaud as self-appointed detective in a deepening mystery. "In the annals of monumental cinema . . . there are few objects more sacred than Rivette's 12 1/2-hour Out 1. [It is a] spectacle . . . unique in movies: an adventure and a hallucination." Episodes 1–4: approx. 6 1/2 hours plus 1-hour dinner break.
Sunday, June 10, 2007
2:00 p.m. Out 1, Episodes 5–8
Special admission: $16, general; $10, BAM/PFA members, students, and seniors. Please see June 9. Episodes 5–8: approx. 6 hours plus 1-hour dinner break.
Sunday, June 17, 2007
3:00 p.m. L’amour fou
"One of the great French films of the 1960s [depicts] the doomed yet passionate relationship between a director (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) and his actress wife (Bulle Ogier). . . . The oscillation between love and madness, passion and mistrust, builds to several terrifying and awesome climaxes in which the distinctions between life and theater, reality and fiction, become virtually irrelevant. . . . This film captures the dreams and desperation of the sixties like few others, and you emerge from it changed."—Chicago Reader
Tuesday, June 26, 2007
7:00 p.m. The Gang of Four
As in so many of Rivette’s films, performance and life are interwoven in a metaphysical mystery. “A gracefully fluent and deceptively simple work, nearly three hours long but consistently engrossing. . . . Bulle Ogier’s performance during the rehearsal scenes is a marvel of timing, controlled interiority, and sheer craft.”—Village Voice
Curated at PFA by Kathy Geritz.
This series is made possible with the support of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the U.S., and the Consulate General of France, San Francisco. For their invaluable assistance, we wish to extend our appreciation to Delphine Selles and François Leloup-Collet, French Cultural Services; David Schwartz and Livia Bloom, Museum of the Moving Image; Julie Pearce and Waltraud Loges, National Film Theatre; and the Vancouver International Film Festival.
