Considered by Jacques Rivette as ‘practice films’, these early images offer us a view of the beginning of his artistic journey. Aux quatre coins includes an original device that immediately sets itself apart from any other classic narrative form. When he made Le Quadrille, co-scripted with Jean-Luc Godard, Rivette wrote a letter to the New York distributor Brandon Films saying, “it is rather diffcult for me to say in a few words what I was trying to do; the original intention was to make a film without a screenplay, demonstrating that the ‘story’ is not of fundamental value to cinema and that pure actions, without referring to any anecdote, are just as interesting on their own as they are when connected to a plot that forces them to be mere steps of its development: the act of smoking is thus just as important as killing a man in a thriller movie”. We also discover in these three films how the filmmaker gradually mastered the art of mise-en-scène and editing. Filmed in Parisian parks and on a terrace, Le Divertissement foreshadows the labyrinthine walks that would be a part of Rivette’s cinema, in which the characters look for, follow and find each other like in a romantic scavenger hunt.
These first experiments were silent films. The intertitles of Le Divertissement and Le Quadrille anticipate the filmmaker’s tone and singular poetry. Aux quatre coins does not have any intertitles but black images between a few shots. Jacques Rivette offers the viewer intriguing visual forms, encouraging him to imagine his own story.
Filmed at 16 frames per second on black and white 16mm reversal film, the three movies are especially fragile. Aux quatre coins and Le Divertissement have survived on their original medium, but with splices between every shot and therefore must be handled with extreme care. The master of Le Quadrille still cannot be found, and the second generation print is the only one available. Despite its non-existent distribution, there are many scratches most likely due to crude handling and sporadic screenings (at the time Le Quadrille was screened at Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin). The restoration strove to preserve the original form of the films, highlighting the fragility and analogical origin of the elements found.

Hervé Pichard