Themes and style in the works of Jacques Rivette

He made twenty-nine films, including L'amour fou (1969), Out 1 (1971), Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), and La Belle Noiseuse (1991).

His frequent combination of conspiratorial crime stories and carefree characters has led him to be compared to Louis Feuillade, Howard Hawks, and Jean Renoir.

Parolini said that for Love on the Ground they wrote "a biographical sheet for each of the characters and a list of numbered scenes providing a course of action, mostly related to the shooting schedule".

"[7] While interviewing Renoir, Rivette was inspired by his subject's relationship with the actors on set and his willingness to allow them to improvise (creating a higher form of realism).

"[10] Antoine de Baecque said, "His articles are often the most carefully thought out, and provide the most elegant formulation of some of the Cahiers' fundamental beliefs regarding cinema."

Douglas Morrey wrote, "Rivette's articles on films are both verbose and incisive, at the same time carefully worked-out analyses and blunt statements of adoration.

[12] He was highly critical of established qualité française directors such as Claude Autant-Lara, Henri-Georges Clouzot and René Clément, writing that they were afraid to take risks and were corrupted by money.

[14] He was also influenced by Truffaut's auteur theory and his 1954 article, "A Certain Trend of French Cinema", which criticized the artificial theatricality and staged appearance of many films.

Jacques Aumont said that Rivette used theater and its portrayal to achieve "a true realism" in films,[16] and Wiles calls his theatricality "an implicit response to Bazin".

[23] The themes and tone of Noroit were a partial homage to Cocteau's work on Pelléas et Mélisande;[24] Duelle makes direct references to Blood of a Poet and Les Chevaliers de la Table ronde,[25] and Celine and Julie Go Boating was influenced by Orphée[26] He worked with a number of actors (Jeanne Balibar, Emmanuelle Béart, Juliet Berto, Jane Birkin, Sandrine Bonnaire, Sergio Castellitto, Geraldine Chaplin, Laurence Côte, Marianne Denicourt, Nicole Garcia, Anna Karina, André Marcon, Bulle Ogier, Michel Piccoli, Jerzy Radziwilowicz and Nathalie Richard) on multiple films.

[28] Rivette liked long takes because "they're more enjoyable to do, [and] the actors like them better",[29] but Paris Belongs to Us had fast-paced editing and an average shot length of twelve seconds.

According to Dave Kehr, "With Mr. Lubtchansky present, he would run through the scene several times, and then consult with his cinematographer to choose the camera angles and lighting schemes he believed most appropriate to the material".

Kehr described Lubtchansky's work in Le Pont du Nord as "fluid, sunny images" and The Duchess of Langeais as having a "dark, heavy, almost Germanic manner".

[31] David Thomson wrote that Rivette "always preferred a camera style that has the best of two of his gods — the detachment and flow of Renoir, with the classical form and control of Fritz Lang".

The Lincoln Center wrote that their films both included "secrets, conspiracies, and paranoia; women in trouble; the supernatural manifesting itself within the everyday; the nature of performance and the stage as an arena for transformation; the uncanny sense of narrative as a puzzle without a solution, a force with a life of its own.

"[42] Rivette said that he admired John Cassavetes,[29] Robert Altman and Alan Rudolph for their rapport with actors,[43] and Peter Brook's theatrical work inspired him early in his career.

He praised Rossellini's Europa 51, Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter, Lynch's Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me and Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers and Showgirls: "It has great sincerity and the script is very honest, guileless".