4v291o

this is chess.

*Gesamtkunstwerk.

An overdue appraisal of a film I didn't actually rewatch. Not really a reappraisal for that matter, my memories are two years old (circa 2018). I was prompted to write a few thoughts because of another Rivette film recommended as a starting point, la bande des quatre. It's often d as an accessible synthesis of Rivette's preoccupations, his prowess, his maturity– a film that's neither a favorite nor one I like as much as this one. But, suddenly... I'm uncertain. These are films that revel in unreconciled components, substratum concerns, threats, and disparities in convention. La bande des quatre certainly was masterful in memory so I promised myself a glance at the restoration. But what began as a vow of brevity was almost immediately broken by transfixion– by the plump meaning of every proposed conversation, the ripe colors, the characters– a film whose greatest success is that (in wolflike fashion) it seemed to have failed at capturing the entirety of its characters' lives. As if Rivette had fashioned a documentary instead of a film and conned our expectations.

It's an autumnal picture (and I feel this one is too) but one constellated by furnaces because the cold that bleeds through serves as connective tissue– the brisk, shallow walk of autumn between home and classes, between an exciting rendez-vous and an art gallery. And despite the warmth of companionship or, more metaphysically, certain spaces, there is an opposing externality that is maliciously cold, ambiguous and almost sentient in the film (most apparent in its depictions of subways). The riggings of miscommunication, pullied and levered as both artifice and revelation, are then lovingly tangled on the stage and countless layers of richness are near impossible to deny. It's ripe fruit for the taking.

Where does that film connect to this one? Maybe that October incantation of warmth: I can always the final exchange of dialogue in this film and the embers it pokes. The film is subdued and the way it ends has no arrogance or the high ambition to floor anyone. It's a gentle poeticism. I just the gradual reappraisals of the film afterwards, principally as I walked, cold, outside in the night, between furnaces. The catharsis is glacial, its movement at once slow, imperceptible to the eye, but also majestic as if displacing an entire body of water in its wake. The truth of the matter is that what is here displaced is rather conserved. The rules here are entirely truthful unto themselves as nothing is lost in the trade off of water for ice. But here, I would rather invert the natural order of consolidation, as, at the end, a puddle remains. Love is a bleeding thaw.

This film was initially meant to be a part of a cycle of films Rivette made in the 70s – Scènes de la vie parallèle– and Rivette actually started filming this initial iteration, a variation on the convention of the love story, with Albert Finney in 1975 before experiencing a nervous breakdown, effectively ending the film's production as well as Rivette's productivity for the following 5 years during which the maligned and haphazard Merry-Go-Round was birthed to cap the cycle. The cycle (omitting this last film) represented Rivette's post Celine and Julie hangover, a multivolume treatise on fantasy and genre. Duelle was my personal entry point into Rivette's oeuvre, a film so indebted to Cocteau, that, despite many of its aesthetic and visual feats I couldn't connect. I found it to be too derivative and, as well, this juncture in Rivette's career to be a vast experimentation that did not feel marked by his signature touch. But here, in the apparition of 1975, in the love story he sought to make but instead collapsed, the love that was made then unmade, here nearly 30 years later Rivette recreated and undid the image of a lost film. Yet my memories have made and unmade the experience of this film as he must have in those 30 years. I'm not sure if it's better than la bande des quatre anymore. I think, however, I'll wait to rewatch it with its inevitable restoration. In all eventuality, as with many of Rivette's films, it will only yield further fruit. If not this year, then next...

Is there a connection (in my mind) between the physical component of naturalism (blushing greens and a small tussle of breeze) and the hallucinatory? Rivette first pronounced this betrayal of background with his mise en scene, a world as alive or breathless as the life apportioned to its spaces. So, sometimes I’m often betrayed by an intoxication of equal measure to the surreal when it comes to witnessing the minor notes of, say, the subdued nature appended to, the repression and anxiety yielded from ... a simple forest walk. Perhaps it was always a hallucination born out of this green thicket that haunted my emotional imperative. This film is not surreal, not at all. But I wish it was.

and of all these memories all else forgotten, fanned into flame.

–are these perennials
the same flowers that were planted then?

Gesamtkunstwerk!

I want your birth, I want your mettle.

I want you yet,
of heart half settled

God’s Tumble, if that's what this misread retreat was meant to be, warbled as if possessed by some fugitive spirit. And these displaced feelings, stoked within us, pit themselves against the rotund disposition of the rabbits undertow. All gathered, shivering and frightened, beneath the crooked bushtail of a lost hare. There, a webbed toadstool.

I think I fumbled sliding this VHS in: my teeth chattered too much, the tape lolled out like a tongue. My jaw certainly wasn’t large enough to house it. But I gave it a lick and the tolling bells (humming once too often for my own eyes to take refuge in) rung from within the worn tapes. My breath was grand and haughty and the fireflies took wing round us as the tapes whirred and whirred with increased frenzy before a rickety frame. I nearly hit the satisfaction that the fire provided. Yet I sank with the swamped figures again.

• Pride and Prejudice
• Yearning

• The Pillow Book
• The Last Days of Disco
• Crossing Delancey
• Down with Love
• Turn Every Page - The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb

• Yokohama Kaidashi Kikou
• Gosenzo-sama Banbanzai!
• Jin-Roh: The Wolf Brigade
• FLCL
• Urusei Yatsura: Beautiful Dreamer
• Space Runaway Ideon: Be Invoked
• Space Runaway Ideon
• Paranoia Agent
• Texhnolyze
• The Tatami Galaxy

...plus 37 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.

mythos, folktales, legends, mythology, lore, divinities, fables

• The Wishing Tree
• Kummatty
• Silvestre
• The Immortal Story
• Duelle
• Orpheus
• Penda's Fen
• Trails
• Nazareno Cruz and the Wolf
• Macario

...plus 106 more. View the full list on Letterboxd.