Dangerous Games: Jacques Rivette × 4
Screening Dates
  • March 9 (Saturday) 1:00
  • March 17 (Sunday) 1:00
New Restoration

“In many ways this is Ogier’s richest, finest performance, and Kalfon keeps pace with her every step of the way … This film captures the dreams and desperation of the ​‘60s like few others, and you emerge from it changed; it’s a life experience as much as a film experience.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

After a life-changing experience shadowing Jean Renoir for a three-part documentary, Jacques Rivette made L’amour fou, his first film to test a working method of intense, close collaboration with actors, which would lay the groundwork for all his subsequent features. Named after a book by key surrealist André Breton, the film, unscripted yet scrupulously designed, begins by opening a Pandora’s box. At the first rehearsal of a new production of Jean Racine’s Andromaque, Claire (Bulle Ogier), set to play the central role of Hermione under the direction of her partner Sebastien (Jean-Pierre Kalfon), leaves. What follows is a romantic and artistic collapse advanced as a daring game of duelling, transferrable energies. L’amour fou passes through a range of alternating states (film formats, power dynamics, sound collages) to arrive at simultaneous exhaustion and breakthrough. It’s a boundary-pushing film about passions and relations written in blood and water—total honesty and total fabrication.

In French with English subtitles

L’amour fou will be presented with an intermission. Both screenings will be introduced by Programming Associate Michael Scoular.

“Rivette remains unshakeably faithful to his obsession with obsession, analyzing and exploring themes which receive their completest, most shattering treatment in L’amour fou, a film which confronts the magnificent obsession of life itself: a time to love and a time to die.”

Tom Milne, Sight and Sound
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