A French director who isn’t in a hurry

FRENCH director Jacques Rivette, whom the UCLA Film & Television Archive is feting with a retrospective beginning Saturday, was once asked why his features were so long. “He said something interesting in ‘Jacques Rivette, the Night Watchman,’ the documentary we are showing,” says programmer David Pendleton.

“He feels that time no longer has the same density that it did in the days of the classic cinema. In Frank Capra’s ‘It Happened One Night,’ in 90 minutes they go from Miami to New York, and the newspaperman falls in love with an heiress. He says that today it would take twice that long to tell the same story with the same impact -- because of the technological and social changes in the world.”

Pendleton says there is a method to Rivette’s leisurely pacing. His films start slowly, introducing viewers to “this strange new world, and it takes a while to get your bearings. The characters and the story have to sink in. At one point, you get hooked and you follow the development, the unfolding of his world with its own rhythms.”

Now 77, Rivette began his directing career with the French New Wave filmmakers, who included Francois Truffaut, Louis Malle, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and Jean-Luc Godard. A native of Rouen, he came to Paris in 1949 and quickly joined this group of young cinephiles, who started as critics at the Cahiers du Cinema, where they championed the work of such Hollywood filmmakers as Howard Hawks, Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Otto Preminger. Rivette eventually became editor of the influential magazine.

His first feature as a director, “Paris Belongs to Us,” was released in 1960. Produced by Truffaut and Chabrol, “Paris,” which screens Oct. 5, was shot on a shoestring budget over a couple of years. An enigmatic tale of a young woman’s embracing of the Left Bank’s bohemian world, “Paris” also reveals the themes Rivette has returned to over the past four decades: reality and fantasy, mystery, paranoia.

“He makes narrative films, but you can also consider him an experimental filmmaker,” says Pendleton. “There was a period in his career from the late ‘60s through the early ‘70s where he was interested in experimenting with film narrative and film acting. That is why he made a 13-hour film, ‘Out 1.’ ” But in the same period, Pendleton notes, he directed the accessible “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” which opens the festival Saturday.

During his heavily experimental period, Rivette encouraged his actors to improvise.

But his method changed in 1984, when he teamed for the first time with collaborator Pascal Bonitzer on the film “Love on the Ground,” screening Oct. 9, which stars Geraldine Chaplin and Jane Birkin as stage actresses who find themselves in a real-life love triangle at a playwright’s chateau.

“The way he works with Pascal -- and they usually write in partnership with a third person -- their story is mapped out in advance, but the actors don’t necessarily know the whole story,” says Pendleton. “The dialogue is written as the film is being shot. The actors don’t receive the dialogue until the day of shooting. So things can shift subtly to respond to what is happening on the set. It goes back to Rivette’s fascination with the interrelationship of fantasy and reality.”

Female protagonists always play an important role in his films: Anna Karina as a feisty young woman forced into a claustrophobic convent in 1965’s “The Nun”; Geraldine Chaplin, Bernadette Lafont and Kika Markham in 1976’s female pirate revenge tale “Nor’West”; Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier in 1974’s “Celine and Julie.”

Pendleton wanted the festival to showcase a lot of the director’s older films as well as Rivette’s more contemporary works, which haven’t been seen much on the big screen in the U.S.

The retrospective concludes Oct. 28 with the director’s latest film, 2003’s “The Story of Marie and Julien,” which never was distributed theatrically in the U.S.

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The films of Jacques Rivette

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

When: Saturday through Oct. 28

Price: $5 to $7

Contact: (310) 206-FILM or www.cinema.ucla.edu.

Schedule

Saturday: “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” 7:30 p.m.

Oct. 5: “Paris Belongs to Us,”

7:30 p.m.

Oct. 7: “The Nun,” 7:30 p.m.

Oct. 9: “Love on the Ground,”

“Jacques Rivette, the Night Watchman,” 7 p.m.

Oct. 12: “Secret Defense,” 7:30 p.m.

Oct. 15: “Duelle,” “Nor’West,” 7 p.m.

Oct. 23: “Up/Down/Fragile,” 7 p.m.

Oct. 28: “The Story of Marie and Julien,” 7:30 p.m.