For Continuing Debate

				Contact \| Subscribe \| Site Map
			HOME \| CONTENTS \| CONTRIBUTE \| ARCHIVE

Current Editorial

	Some Questions about the Indian Art Market discusses some issues pertaining to India's booming art market today and reflects on its reliability to the investor in art. Read

Letter to the Editor

	A sharply critical response to the review of Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss in the first issue of Phalanx and also a reply to this criticism from the reviewer. Read

Open Page

	Reclaiming the Present for Colonialism Since the lecture finds itself exhibited on the Reserve Bank of India's web page, this piece reflects on Meghnad Desai's First P. R. Brahmananda Memorial Lecture delivered on September 20, 2004 at Mumbai, in which the economist attempts to draw similarities between the economic growth of India during the last 40 years of the 19th century and the neo-liberal era following 1991. Read *Development and Accounting Malpractice* This is a reaction to a key argument offered those (especially industrialists) favoring large scale development of 'backward states' who appear to be riding on an accounting malpractice. Read

Review

	The Age of Shiva: A Novel by Manil Suri Read

Articles list of Issue

	Coffee as a Global Commodity Read

	A Study of the Finances of Karnataka After 2000 Read

	The Choices Involved in the Nuclear Deal Read

	Pluto: A Human Comedy Read

	In Search Of A Family Doctor Read

	The World as Narrative Read

	Things fall apart: The cinematic rendition of the agrarian landscape in Kerala Read

	uses and ab uses: Baudrillard, simulacra and America Read

	A Novelist on 'Writing the Self' Read

Home > Contents > Article: MK Raghavendra

The World as Narrative
Jacques Rivette at Eighty

MK Raghavendra

Print this article

A refrain heard today pertains to the responsibilities of the artist to 'humankind'. This demand (especially by institutions like prize awarding bodies) has seen experimentation diminishing in literature and cinema. Though 'humanism' serves any cause on behalf of which it is enlisted, it is the filmmakers with 'humanist' preoccupations - rather than those taking, formally or thematically, more unusual paths - whose work is valorized. Jacques Rivette, the greatest but perhaps the most unsung filmmaker of the French New Wave, is not known widely today (though he continues to work) perhaps because his preoccupations, not being 'humanist', are difficult to describe and categorize. This is an attempt to talk about Rivette's work to those unfamiliar with it on the occasion of his eightieth birthday.

For someone fascinated by Jacques Rivette, the critical writing yielded by his films is always disappointing.

While the films themselves never fail to be intriguing, reviews/ critical essays rarely engage with Rivette's apparent intent - 'apparent' because the filmmaker's purpose is hardly ever clear. While there are a huge number of ways in which cinema can be written about, the cinephile taken up avidly with a single filmmaker's oeuvre feels obliged, when examining different experiences, to identify the single thread bringing them together. In the case of Rivette's films this is an exceptionally difficult task not only because of the bewildering variety in his subjects but also because of the apparent absence of a governing thematic concern. 'Solitude and togetherness' (1) may feature as conditions in which his protagonists are placed but they do not mark his films out more than they do those of many other filmmakers. It is also difficult to demonstrate that these themes unite exercises as different as Paris Belongs to Us (1960) and The Story of Marie and Julien (2003). 'Theory down' interpretations of Rivette's films are also not satisfying because the filmmaker's work is too distinctive for it to benefit from the kind of interpretation that the more quotidian films are usefully subjected to. For instance, the fact that women are sometimes at the center of his stories can become the basis of a feminist reading but such a reading will not tell us much about what Rivette's films exclusively offer. Similarly, if our interest is in Rivette's preoccupations - and they are more singular than allowed for - La Belle Noiseuse's (1991) position in his oeuvre is more pertinent than its place in the history of films about painters and painting.

Two features stand out in the films of Jacques Rivette and the first can perhaps be understood in relation to a remark made by Samuel Beckett about the virtues of a work legible on its own terms but completely inscrutable on any other. What this means is not entirely certain but it could pertain to the need for art to transcend (or render irrelevant) the context in which it is produced. Rivette's films, of course, are not the easiest films to explain, but their legibility is not determined by our knowledge of their historical circumstances or the filmmaker's background. They are intellectually very demanding but all they appear to demand is intelligent engagement. Rivette's films are peppered with references to quotes from literature and/or various other films but it would appear that sense can be made of his films without deep knowledge of the literature and cinema that his works invoke. In this respect, he may be compared to Jorge Luis Borges whose fictions can be understood by readers who do not share his erudition. Jacques Rivette has other resemblances to Borges as well and comparisons will be made in the course of this essay.

The second feature about Rivette's films is the way in which they have gradually become more 'accessible'. Rivette has made a substantially larger number of films in the latter part of his career and films like La Belle Noiseuse and Secret Défense (1998) seem quite straightforward in relation to L'Amour fou (1969) and Paris Belongs to Us. The later films seem intended for a wider appeal than the early ones but it can be argued that the early films were made when there was clearly a different relationship between the filmmaker and the spectator. The nearly adversarial responses invited by filmmakers like Godard and Rivette in the sixties may not be possible today, when films need to virtually woo the spectator. Rivette is perhaps able to be more prolific today because Secret Défense passes for a simple (though 'overlong') thriller to spectators not inclined to grapple with its complexity. The Story of Marie and Julien may even be enjoyed as a romance from the same category as Jerry Zucker's Ghost (1990). Rivette's later films may appear slight to those unfamiliar with his oeuvre but this 'slight' appearance may be an escape provided to the indolent spectator by a more relenting (although not less exact) artist than the one of Paris Belongs to Us. Rivette is arguably the greatest artist working in cinema today but this will not be evident to audiences familiar only with his recent films, which are perhaps difficult to interpret without the knowledge of his early work.

The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate - through an inquiry into their motifs - that Rivette has been consistent in his films. In order to show this I propose to examine four films made over a period of more than four decades, with the films chosen from different genres - a strange film about a conspiracy (Paris Belongs to Us), a fantasy (Céline and Julie Go Boating -- 1974), a revenge thriller (Secret Défense) and a romantic ghost story (The Story of Marie and Julien). This examination will, hopefully, interest the reader to whom Rivette's work is unfamiliar - at least enough to seek his films out and submit to their intellectual demands.

Paris Belongs to Us (1960)

Paris Belongs to Us (Paris Nous Appartient) is a film about a group of young people in Paris in the late fifties who appear to be embroiled in different ways in a worldwide conspiracy of some sort. Anne is a literature student and Pierre, her elder brother takes her to a party where she meets Philip Kaufman, an expatriate American escaping McCarthyism, and Gerard Lenz, a theatre director who is with a mysterious woman named Terry. The talk at the party is about the apparent suicide of their friend Juan, a Spanish activist who had recently broken up with Terry. Philip warns Anne that the forces that killed Juan will soon do the same to Gerard, who is trying, without financial backing, to stage Shakespeare's Pericles. Also discussed is a missing guitar recording by Juan, which Gerard wants for Pericles. Anne takes a part in the play to help Gerard, and to try to discover about Juan.

The information may not be entirely pertinent to the thrust of Paris Belongs to Us

but the film was made at the height of the cold war and the title suggests the staking of claims upon the same space by ideologies in conflict. The group of young people in the film is split down the middle and there is little doubt about which group Rivette is with - those broadly describable as 'anti-Fascist'. Still, his concerns do not appear 'political' and while his protagonists are apparently reacting to a political stimulus of some sort, the film is silent about the stimulus itself; the villains feared so much by the group are allowed to remain mysterious. In fact, the film could as well be about political paranoia as about political intrigue and the grotesque pencil drawings on Phillip Kaufman's walls announce this clearly.

Making clear sense of Paris Belongs to Us is undoubtedly a difficult task but a method is to seek out a line or two of crucial dialogue (2) Although the film is about a group of young people, Rivette's attention is largely taken up by the relationship between two of them - Anne and Gerard Lenz. Apart from their getting more attention than the others, the two also appear to be the only normal persons - not beset by fears and conducting themselves calmly. Gerard is apparently under threat but, unlike Terry and Phillip, his behavior does not suggest it. If Anne is young and innocent and placed in the analogous position of the spectator because she is unraveling the story, Gerard Lenz, because of his artistic/philosophical preoccupations, may be the receptacle of the films conceptual meaning. It is always appropriate to verbalize the concerns of the film through characters not in a condition of excitement because only then would the conceptual meaning be received undistorted, and only these two characters appear to suit the requirement. Since Gerard is preoccupied with Pericles it can also be argued that the production would be the likely place to conceal clues to the film's meaning and his remarks about it are therefore significant.

In describing Pericles to Anne, Gerard indicates that the play is patchy and appears to even lack teleology. It is his endeavor, he says, to bring the disparate threads together and reveal its hidden purpose. It can be argued that this description of Pericles applies roughly to the world of the film as well. This political world is a mysterious one but there appear to be two broad 'narratives' struggling for its control, one being liberal democratic and the other, right-wing and Fascist. What I mean by 'narrative' needs explaining and, to illustrate my meaning, the Darwinian model for evolution and the Biblical account of creation can be usefully viewed as narratives competing for control over the history of life on the planet. If this is conceded, we could say that the characters in Paris Belongs to Us have variously thrown their lot with two dominant narratives (each one corresponding to a political affiliation) struggling for control over the world - as emblemized by Paris. We could say that the film is about the political world having become so impenetrable that one must believe in a 'narrative' regardless of how bizarre it might appear. For someone subscribing to liberal-democratic principles and outraged by Cold War rhetoric, a mysterious worldwide Fascist conspiracy was perhaps the most alluring grand-narrative around 1960.

Another clue inserted conspicuously into the second half of Paris Belongs to Us is a segment from Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927) entitled 'Babel' and pertaining to the story related by Lang's heroine Maria. As the reader may know the segment is a variation of the episode from the Old Testament and pertains to the workers having lost contact with the planners, working to no purpose and, in their fury, eventually destroying the tower. The chasm between the workers and the planners in 'Babel' may correspond to the one between the characters of Paris Belongs to Us and the shadowy authors of worldwide conflicts. It can be argued that the greater the chasm between the planners of vast enterprises and their movers, the more the need for the lowly movers to generate narratives. Kafka's The Great Wall of China, for instance, while also invoking Babel, demonstrates how the disparity between planners and movers generates narratives to explain the enterprise of the Great Wall.

A key motif in Paris Belongs to Us pertains to Juan's guitar composition, which occupies approximately the same position in the film as Frenhofer's painting 'La Belle Noiseuse' occupies in the 1991 film. That film is about a retired painter struggling to regain his touch while painting a nude, and being successful only when he recovers an inspired but unfinished masterwork of his own and paints over it. If the act in La Belle Noiseuse is like using a ritual ingredient to impart magical qualities to a representation, Gerard Lenz's obsession with using Juan's guitar composition for his own production of Pericles carries the same urgency. Juan was the first victim of the political reality (perhaps) allegorized by Lenz's production, and sanctification by an element of the represented reality could render the enactment powerful. The sanctifying is as a nail from the original cross might a passion play - and it testifies to an underlying belief in the prevalence of the real over art.

Another story with which Rivette's film has an interesting relationship is Borges' The Lottery in Babylon. That story is about the institution of a lottery to provide excitement to citizens of Babylon and about its gradual investment with omnipotence so that the benefits from it can be universal. Over time the lottery begins to work so secretly that even its existence is disputed. This is how the story concludes: "That silent functioning, comparable to God's, gives rise to all sorts of conjectures. One abominably insinuates that the (lottery) has not existed. and that the. disorder of our lives is purely hereditary, traditional. Another judges it eternal and teaches that it will last until the last night, when the last god annihilates the world. Another declares that the (lottery) is omnipotent, but that it only has influence in tiny things: in a bird's call, in the shadings of rust, in the half dreams of dawn. Another, no less vile, reasons that it is indifferent to affirm or deny the reality of the shadowy (lottery), because Babylon is nothing else than an infinite game of chance." The conspiracy in Paris Belongs to Us perhaps occupies the same position as the lottery in Borges' story. Both are 'narratives of omnipotence' in which human agencies progressively usurp reality. Rivette's film, of course, does not conclude with the triumph of the conspiracy but the space of the narrative abruptly opens out to nature - birds flying across a body of water - and the implications are perhaps the same as the lottery gaining influence over 'tiny things'. The narrative will encompass even the smallest aspects of reality.

Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974)

The second of the four selected films is as playful as Paris Belongs to Us is somber, but it still has a discernible relationship with the earlier film. Céline and Julie Go Boating (Céline et Julie vont en bateau) is a fantasy about two girls - a librarian and an amateur magician - who find themselves mysteriously caught up in the destinies of the residents of a house on one of Paris' quieter streets. Céline claims to have worked as a nanny at the house, about which both of them are curious, and a cyclical pattern emerges. Céline or Julie enters the house and emerges later, having forgotten whatever transpired during her stay but with a sweet in her mouth. They soon understand that sucking the sweet brings back fragmented memories of the events and we witness happenings that seem arbitrary at first but begin falling into place when they are recollected in different permutations after each subsequent visit. Gradually, we recognize that what is happening at the house is a recurring narrative of some sort and this 'Story' also becomes clear to Céline and Julie.

The Story (3) involves a widowed man and two women, both of whom seek to become his wife.

The difficulty is that the man has a little daughter by his deceased first wife, who extracted a promise from him - for the sake of their daughter - that he would never marry again. Each of the two women is now intent on removing this impediment by killing the little girl. Since the unfolding of the Story is a cyclical occurrence, the girl is being murdered over and over, with Céline or Julie participating passively (as the nanny) in the constant unfolding. The nanny's role in the Story is predetermined and although the girls wish to rescue the child, this is impossible. The solution they finally hit upon is a supernatural one devised by the amateur magician. The two find the means to enter the Story together and the same potion that frees them from the shackles of the Story will also be fed to the little girl to extricate her from it. The two girls now enter in the Story together and, there being a role for only one nanny, the other is invisible to the man and the two women. After some comic encounters between the free and facetious 'nannies' and the three characters, who conduct themselves as always because they are constrained by the Story, the little girl is duly extricated and brought back into 'Reality'. The next morning Céline and Julie discover that what transpired was not a dream because the girl is still with them.

Rivette's film concludes on a strange note because, in the penultimate sequence, Céline and Julie take the little girl boating and discover, to their surprise, that the man and the two women are on the lake as well, although their motions are not those of real people but stiff, as though frozen. The final sequence of the film begins like the opening one - one girl spotting the other one in Paris and following her when she drops various accessories as she hurries along (4) Only this time, the roles of the two girls are interchanged, Céline sitting on a park bench and Julie the girl who keeps dropping her possessions.

What Céline and Julie Go Boating is about has never been explained but there are clues suggesting that it is about reading a story, or perhaps spectatorship in cinema. The film is longer than Paris Belongs to Us and much slower and the reason is partly that Rivette introduces large real time segments, when nothing of dramatic significance happens but the camera is catching 'tiny things' - a cat stalking a bird or the wind in the trees. In contrast, the happenings in the 'house' are all filmed theatre and Rivette, through this strategy, is evidently making a distinction between reality - as physically experienced - and a text that is perceived, understood and interpreted. The device of the sweets, I propose, is employed to separate the assimilation of the fictional data in the story and the 'making sense' of it.

Making sense of a narrative is a process following its reading - largely immediate although not necessarily so. If the happenings in the house constitute a 'story' - and not simply a narrative - because of their completeness, their teleology and the intentionality in their assembly, recollecting them by sucking on the sweet corresponds to 'narrativity' or the active construction of the story by the reader/ spectator from the fictional data available (5) Similarly, the occurrences outside the 'house', the segments dealing with Céline and Julie are also less of a 'story'. They have the appearance of a recounting that is not unified by an expressive purpose and the real time segments deliberately weaken their teleology (6)

To understand more about Céline and Julie Go Boating it may be appropriate to examine how it connects to Paris Belongs to Us. The earlier film, as I suggested, can be equally about paranoia as about a political conspiracy and, significantly, 'narrativity' has been described as a benign form of paranoia. The reader of a narrative (through identification/ empathy) willingly assumes he is in the grip of processes outside of himself, designed to do things to him that he will be powerless to resist. The instant that narrativity ceases is also the moment when life outside the narrative resumes for the reader/ spectator (7) The 'paranoia' exhibited by some characters of Paris Belongs to Us, in a sense, arises out of their narrativitous urge. Philip Kaufman and Terry interpret the actual world as they might a text and find themselves permanently trapped in processes outside their control, processes they are powerless to resist. Céline and Julie, in contrast, undergo only intermittent spells of narrativity and 'life outside the narrative' resumes after the interludes. But Rivette makes us understand that 'life' and the 'story' are not discrete because Céline and Julie remove the little girl from the coils of the story and bring her into their world, only to discover that the borders of the story have been expanded to include them.

It is difficult to interpret the closing segment of Céline and Julie Go Boating but there also is a suggestion that the cyclical character of the story of the man and the two women overwhelms their reality when the first episode of the film is repeated in the last segment. To draw another parallel with Borges, the conclusion is perhaps like the World becoming 'Tlön' in the fantastic story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, i.e. reality contaminated by fiction (8) To phrase this differently, the world is factual (the real time segments and the attention to physical detail are evidence of this assertion) but we comprehend it only as narrative, as a kind of fiction. Is it not feasible, then, that the fiction we make of the world will eventually corrupt it?

Secret Défense (1998)

The third of the four films is actually a retelling of the story of Electra with the narrative rearranged as a revenge thriller. Melodramas and tragedies contain the same story material as whodunits and crime thrillers - heightened emotions, violence and moral polarization. The Russian formalist term 'fabula' (the story) represents the imaginary construct created progressively and retroactively as we interact with the text. The 'syuzhet' (the plot) is the actual arrangement of the fabula in the narrative. The syuzhet is a blow by blow recounting of the story as the film or the piece of fiction would render it. A detective thriller yields a fabula beginning with the planning of the murder and concluding with the criminal being brought to book. The syuzhet (the narrative as told) conceals parts of the fabula to create 'suspense' and sharpen the impact of the text upon the reader (9). Secret Défense therefore begins with Sylvie who works as a scientist being visited by her brother Paul, who brings disturbing evidence that their father, who they imagined killed in a railway accident when Sylvie was little, was pushed to his death by his deputy Walser, who now occupies his position as the head of a strategic, military-related enterprise.

Since Paul has convincing evidence of Walser's involvement and intends to kill him,

Sylvie herself sees it fit to visit her father's supposed murderer. The rest of the film follows with Sylvie accidentally killing Walser's young secretary Veronique and Walser himself helping and sheltering her thereafter. Sylvie also meets her mother Geneviève who lives nearby and it comes out that there is more to the story than meets the eye. Geneviève and Walser plotted together and killed Sylvie's father on a train because he had used Sylvie's older sister to further his own ambitions, an act leading to the young girl's suicide.

The relationship between Secret Défense and the tale of Electra is evident from this recounting because Orestes, with Electra's help, killed his mother Clytemnestra and her lover Aegisthus for having murdered their father Agamemnon. Agamemnon had earlier sacrificed his daughter Iphigenia to the god Artemis, so that the wind would start up and they might sail to Troy. But the resemblance stops here because neither Geneviève nor Walser dies; it is Sylvie who is killed accidentally after her initiatives bring nothing but misfortune.

If Secret Défense is simply considered as a revenge thriller there is no excusing its length - it is 170 minutes long. Viewers often complain about the interminable train rides (10) because Rivette includes real time segments on the Metro both in Paris and outside that appear to have little dramatic potential. A careful viewing nonetheless makes is clear that the train rides, the attention to everyday life as it is lived is crucial to the film. To provide the reader with an instance, Sylvie decides to eliminate Walser and gets herself a gun. She has, however, only a fuzzy notion of how a murder is done and acquires two pairs of dark glasses before boarding the train, perhaps as a gesture towards subterfuge. This next part of the film - running to fifteen minutes - is taken up with Sylvie on her way to Walser, her discomfort at the prospect of becoming an assassin. Where amateur killers in crime films, though beset by moral qualms, slip easily into such roles, Rivette focuses on how incongruous ordinary people might feel in dramatic roles alien to their banal, everyday routines. In Sylvie's case, she and Paul have apparently decided upon killing Walser although they don't even recollect their father clearly. They choose the course perhaps because they can think of no other. They have few ties with their mother, who lives alone, and discussing the issue with her is not considered. In Walser's country estate, a space once occupied by her family, Sylvie encounters Veronique to whom disturbed women pointing guns is as unfamiliar an occurrence as any and the predictable happens; it is Walser who conceals Veronique's corpse to save Sylvie.

While Rivette lavishes much more attention on the ordinary (yet fascinating) details of everyday life in Secret Défense than in the other two films, his purpose also remains more elusive. A complaint voiced about the film is the triteness of the plot and there is perhaps a clue actually concealed in this. The information that Sylvie's father virtually sold his 14-year-old daughter Elizabeth to secure a defense contract is not one designed to make the spectator gasp and this is compounded by the absence of particulars. Where a clever thriller might have played up the emotional angle and furnished details to make it plausible, Rivette refuses to do any such thing. I would like to argue that the final revelation is akin to one of Hitchcock's 'Macguffins', i.e. a plot device that motivates the characters, but has little actual relevance to the story. The device in Secret Défense, while bringing the narrative to closure, perhaps means nothing in itself. It is appropriate here to examine the actual segment in the film in which the information about Elizabeth is given to the spectator.

This segment, perhaps the most brilliant in the film, shows a short train journey undertaken by Sylvie and her mother together. Geneviève has already been told by Walser that Sylvie and Paul are seeking to avenge their father and Geneviève evidently has knowledge about her husband's death, information not yet divulged to her daughter. Instead of the sequence brimming over with the excitement of the dramatic information to be revealed, Rivette shifts the emphasis deliberately to the disparity between mother and daughter. It is as though the two women have little to communicate to each other. Much of the segment is taken up by the two looking at the passing landscape in silence. When the subject does come around to her husband's murder and Elizabeth as the reason, Geneviève is reluctant to talk about it. "Imagine the worst and you will be right," she says perfunctorily and the final revelation is hardly more illuminating. Sylvie also shows less persistence than a comparable character in a successful thriller might have. The two women part at the spot from where their father traveled to his death but they are neither anxious to meet nor inclined to discus their shared past again.

This segment, apt to disappoint those looking for a dramatic finale, makes it apparent that the thriller format of Secret Défense is actually misleading, that the film is not pitched at this level of excitement. The only way of interpreting the segment is that it points to the impossibility of 'knowing'. It is not simply that some secrets are not divulged but that it is impossible to wrench open truths about the world. This is not unrelated, I propose, to the inability of the protagonists of Paris Belongs to Us to know the truth about the conspiracy although, in the case of Secret Défense, the unknowable pertains only to an old happening. A key absence in Secret Défense is perhaps the process by which two law abiding people like Paul and Sylvie decide that liquidating Walser is the necessary step for them. If, unlike Paul, Sylvie is a fair person and seeks to understand more before condemning Walser, it is significant that the only satisfaction she gets is from an almost fruitless railway journey. If thriller aficionados are dissatisfied with the 'silly plot' (11), I suggest that whatever Geneviève has to divulge about the past stands eroded to a bare plot outline.

Most adaptations of epics and tragedies in which the original characters are transplanted into the modern world tend to feed upon the prestige associated with the original. O'Neil's Mourning Becomes Electra, for instance, virtually claims the stature of Agamemnon and Electra for its protagonists. Rivette is more modest in his claims and Sylvie, Paul and Walser are, by all reckoning, small people. Rivette, I propose, simply chose the plot of Electra as something so familiar that it would even be clichéd (12) When Sylvie listens to a narrative about a crucial occurrence of several years ago, one likely to result in the most extreme decision of her life, all she apparently hears is a clichéd plot outline. This, I would argue, is an even stronger statement about 'knowledge' than the one in Paris Belongs to Us.

Whatever has been said about Rivette may make the filmmaker to seem too dryly schematic while, in actual fact, a film like Secret Défense is permeated by a deep melancholy. Contrary to what my arguments may have suggested Rivette is not using his films to demonstrate the validity of a philosophical thesis about knowledge in the contemporary world. Such a design on the filmmaker's part would, I propose, even have made him a lesser artist. Rivette is preoccupied with the possibilities of human lives but his preoccupations are those of a storyteller. Secret Défense is a melancholy experience because it is about people profoundly agitated by circumstances but who cannot act with certainty - because they are denied the comfort of knowing.

The Story of Marie and Julien (2003)

In The Story of Marie and Julien (Histoire de Marie et Julien) Julien is a clock smith living alone with his cat. Marie is the girl he met at a party about a year ago, when the two were attracted to each other. Unfortunately, Marie was in a relationship with another man at the time and Julien was with another woman. But their respective relationships have since broken up and each of them is now alone. The two meet accidentally just after Julien has been dreaming about Marie.

The Story of Marie and Julien contains two separate - though interwoven - narratives and the first is about the Julien and Marie,

with Marie stepping in and out of Julien's life. Marie has a strange presence and she seems obsessed with rearranging a room in Julien's residence, she lapses in interludes of complete withdrawal and she is afflicted by a strange inability to feel. Julien enquires after her whenever she leaves without notice and things come to light. Marie, it becomes evident, is really a ghost. Marie hanged herself after a terrible squabble with her erstwhile lover Simon. So vengeful had the girl been that she arranged circumstances for Simon to be blamed but Simon was himself killed soon after, in a road mishap. The dead Marie exists now with only the memory of the hanging and the ghost's obsessive purpose is to rearrange the furniture in Julien's attic to resemble the space of her death - and hang herself all over again, though that is impossible.

While the principal story - about Julien and Marie - engages the senses overwhelmingly and also relies on the real time interludes characterizing the other films discussed, Rivette is almost perfunctory in the second story, making its purpose seem merely the facilitation of the first. In this second story Julien is blackmailing a woman ('Madame X') engaged in the selling of fake Chinese silk. It comes out that this woman had a younger sister Adrienne, also a suicide, and her ghost now haunts the older woman whom she hated and tried to frame for murder, like Marie did Simon. The purpose of the second story, it seems to me, is to define the limbo in which ghosts are placed and therefore assist us in understanding Marie. The two dead girls, for instance, have conversations through which we learn about Marie's emotional condition and this could not have been communicated otherwise. If this purpose to the second story is conceded, it will be appropriate to interpret only the first one.

The ghost story proceeds according to conventions that need to be understood before going ahead with the interpretation. One of these stipulates that ghosthood is a condition that all dead people cannot attain. Only a human being who dies in a dark emotional condition - or had an obsessive, unfulfilled desire - becomes a ghost. A recurring motif in the ghost story, for instance, is the dead person seeking retribution who haunts a space or an individual. The Story of Marie and Julien follows the convention because both ghosts in the film are not only of people who took their own lives but who also died when overcome by deep rancor. Where it differs from other ghost films is in its defining the conventions openly - through the story of Adrienne and Julien's blackmailing of Madame X.

Rivette's two ghosts are best understood as lives reduced to a purpose/teleology (13) because the sole memory that remains with each of them is the moment of her suicide and the emotions associated with it. While all ghosts are given obsessions in stories, most obsessions in ghost stories are linked to incomplete tasks. In Marie's case Simon is dead and her task is therefore complete. Her ghost is, unlike other ghosts, reliving the moment of reckoning again and again and there is therefore a suggestion that Marie's ghost is locked into a cyclical narrative. If the motif of life reduced to bare narrative makes the film resemble Secret Défense the rigid cyclical narrative makes it comparable to Céline and Julie Go Boating.

The dialogue in The Story of Marie and Julien emphasizes the chasm between Marie and Julien more than once. At the simplest level this can be understood as that between Marie's ghostliness and Julien's corporeality but the physical intimacy between the two downplays this difference. There is, however, another key aspect to the film which also finds an equivalent in Secret Défense - the physical attention to the everyday, the real time interludes complete with minutely detailed background sounds. There are long, deeply affecting segments in The Story of Marie and Julien in which Julien works on his clocks while Marie either sleeps on a couch or stares into space, as though lost. When Marie exerts herself it is only to arrange the circumstances of her next death, at which she works obsessively. Drawing upon my observations about Céline and Julie Go Boating (which suggests a division between the world and a text) Julien and Marie find an analogous correspondence in life as physically experienced and life narrativized and/or reduced to teleology.

Conclusion

It is tempting to see The Story of Marie and Julien as 'more than a ghost story' because of our discomfort with art that makes no claim to prophecy or to a profound moral purpose. But unlike many other ghosts in cinema that are essentially manifestations of other issues (14), Marie is really a ghost. Rivette is an unusual artist in as much as the huge ambition in what he attempts as a storyteller appears belied by the modest claims he makes for himself as a moralist. We live in times when the persuasive power of artists is smaller than ever but demands for their commitment - to causes other than their vocations - are louder and shriller. Artistic endeavor (if it must be honest) should perhaps be skeptical of moral ends, if only because the artist has had so little moral influence upon the world. A characteristic that separates the first two films discussed from the later two is that the earlier films have concerns that are more evidently formal while the later films engage more strongly with the world of the senses and with living. To Rivette the world is apparently more important than cinema, and unlike many other filmmakers who confuse the distinction between their worlds and the world, his films have always proceeded from the position that the two are different. Therein reside, perhaps, both his modesty and his greatness.

Notes:

1.	Jonathan Rosenbaum, Ragged but Right (1996) on Up Down Fragile. See http://www.dvdbeaver.com/rivette/OK/raggedbutright.html (Back to Main Story)
2.	The literal meaning includes a conceptual component or 'point' to the story constructed by the spectator. She/he seeks out explicit clues of various sorts, assuming that the film 'intentionally' indicates how this is to be read. A verbal indication could usually furnish such a clue as in The Wizard of Oz in which 'There's no place like home' is crucial. See David Bordwell, Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989, pp8-9. (Back to Main Story)
3.	This story within the story is adapted from two stories by Henry James - The Romance of Certain Old Clothes and The Other House. (Back to Main Story)
4.	This has been seen to echo to the behavior of the White Rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. (Back to Main Story)
5.	5. Robert Scholes, Narration and Narrativity in Film, from Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, pp 392-393. (Back to Main Story)
6.	It would, of course, be absurd to assert that this part of the Rivette's film is not governed by intentionality and that it is not a 'story'. The argument is that the melodrama within the house is a 'story' in a stronger sense than the one about Céline and Julie. (Back to Main Story)
7.	Robert Scholes, Narration and Narrativity in Film, from Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen (eds.) Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, Third Edition, pp396-7. (Back to Main Story)
8.	The story is about a massive conspiracy of intellectuals to imagine (and thereby create) a world: Tlön. In due course the narrator encounters increasingly substantive artifacts of Tlön and by the end of the story, the Earth is Tlön. The cyclical narrative is also a recurring motif in Borges' fiction - e.g. The Secret Miracle (Back to Main Story)
9.	David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film, London: Methuen, 1985, p 70.(Back to Main Story)
10.	For instance see http://www.imdb.com. User comments for Secret Défense (1998), Philippe Laissue from Switzerland, 'A Perfect Waste of Time', posted 11th November 2004. (Back to Main Story)
11.	http://www.imdb.com, User comments for Secret Défense, jéwé from Alkmaar, Netherlands, posted 29th December, 2000 (Back to Main Story)
12.	The plot, as we learn it, is about a highly-placed man, a 'monster of ambition', who sacrifices his young daughter to further his ambitions and is, in turn, murdered by his wife and her lover. (Back to Main Story)
13.	'A girl who dies at twenty-one is at every moment of her life someone who dies at twenty-one,' writes Borges. This is perhaps even truer of someone who kills herself. (Back to Main Story)
14.	Banquo's ghost is, for instance, a manifestation of Macbeth's conscience. Similarly the ghost of the princess in Mizoguchi's Ugetsu (1953) gives shape to the potter's aspirations. (Back to Main Story)

M.K.Raghavendra is the Founder-Editor of Phalanx

Courtesy: sensesofcinema.com
Courtesy: reverseshot.com
Courtesy: jigsawlounge.co.uk
Courtesy: sensesofcinema.com
Courtesy: sensesofcinema.com

Print this article

Top