Jacques Rivette was a French director born in Rouen, among the most formally adventurous and least commercially accommodating filmmakers of the French New Wave. Paris Belongs to Us, his debut, and the thirteen-hour Out 1 established his fascination with conspiracy, performance, and duration, ideas he distilled into the more accessible Céline and Julie Go Boating, a playful blend of fantasy and detective fiction. The Nun brought him into direct conflict with French censors, while La Belle Noiseuse, a four-hour study of an artist and his model, became one of his most acclaimed later works. A former Cahiers du Cinéma critic like Truffaut and Godard, Rivette remained cinema's foremost investigator of the blurred line between fiction, rehearsal, and reality. Read more