Rivette's cinema is the opposite of Herzog's Heart of Glass (1976), where the actors are hypnotised; Rivette educates and excites his actors into a kind of conscious dream-state which enables him to film the Unconscious. Whereas Herzog is only able to give us his own unconscious, which seems to be rather boringly monomaniacal. So the self-interview idea is more logical than you think. Rivette has brought the element of chance, the unpredictability of the open form, into the contemporary cinema. And Rosenbaum's book is certainly Rivette-like in its emphasis on mammoth Cahiers (or La Nouvelle Critique) interviews, with early (and spookily Christian-formalist) Rivette studies of Rossellini and Lang served up as case history delicacies for the reader-analyst. It's therefore necessary to introduce what's normally left out of a book review. For example, several months ago, on a bench near the rowboat lake in Central Park, Bernadette Lafont told me that Rivette is like 'a searchlight illuminating the depths of the unconscious,' and that acting in his films is like 'becoming a puzzle that can't be assembled properly until the film has been shot'. Isn't that more important than trying to make nonjudgments about Rosenbaum's brilliant nonbook?

You could call it a battle between the politics of fantasy and the fantasy of politics -- Rossellini-Godard versus Rivette-Truffaut. But I think Rosenbaum's approach is limited by the post-auteurist residue that clings to his style like seaweed on a shimmering wave. At the same time, he's opened up his theories to the aleatory principle in Rivette. By providing the translations of the interviews on L'Amour fou and Out, he starts off the book by plunging us into Rivette's praxis at the time he was making the interviews, after having finished the films. The ideal reader should begin to comprehend that no theory can encompass what Rivette was into at the time. It's got about as much relevance to film theory as a walk along the lake in Central Park, or the reading of a Celtic legend about a blood-red jewel. The principles Rivette is exploring are far removed from lit-crit or auteurist concerns. He's a little like Roquentin in Sartre's Nausea. Rivette has abandoned the Cartesian complexities of cinema-speech as it has been probed and schematised by the Cahiers critics and their followers and, like Godard, has entered into a world of mysterious palpitations amidst the emergence of the quotidian. In a word, materialism. Godard and Rivette are the great, dialectically-opposed offspring of Rossellini's quest for a cinematic materialism: Godard, with his mad passion for logic and revolutionary clarity; Rivette, acolyte of the Dark Gods of the Unconscious. One could say that Out 1: Spectre is the right brain of modern cinema and that Numéro Deux (1975) is the left brain. It's also true that the black-and-white photographs in Spectre are Godardian, just as the sequence with the old man in Numéro Deux is influenced by Rivette. Rosenbaum gives this dialectic a tantalising intimacy by including (as a footnote in the biofilmography) Paul Gégauff's notorious account of the psychotic breakup of Godard and Karina -- the apparent inspiration for L'Amour fou. (1)

I think the autobiography of Barthes would make a great film. Or a film about the sexual fantasies of a Cahiers critic. Such a film has, in fact, been made: Luc Moullet's Anatomy of a Relationship (1976), where the Cahiers-type is haunted by fantasies of film cans rolling giddily into sewer openings...

The problem I have with Brecht is that he was too... pure. It's a kind of heroism that we shouldn't ask from Rivette. How do you relate the allegorical simplicity of The Caucasian Chalk Circle to the German S&M-leather underground that links Lang to Rivette (and to Godard, against his will). The closest thing to the 'pure' Brecht in the cinema today is probably Padre, Padrone (1977). But there are other Brechts. There is the perspectival-ontological Brecht of La Règle du jeu (1939), Not Reconciled (1965) and The Age of the Medici. There is the mystical-ecological Brecht of Two or Three Things I Know About Her (1967) and subsequent Godard. And there is the psychoanalytic Brecht of Buñuel, Fellini, Rivette and In the Realm of the Senses (1976), where the 'castrative' close-up is Epic Theatre on the level of the final waterfall sequence in Johnny Guitar (1954). And I should mention the last section of the Out interview, where Rivette talks about 'this ecstasy of the spectator's... this idea of a game, of pleasure, is also found in Renoir, it's found in Rouch, it's found in Godard... the whole last part of [Brecht's essay] "A Little Organum for the Theatre" is concerned with this...' But it's true that Rivette, like Nick Ray, understands very little about Marxism. Neither does Rouch (who made a film in New York recently (2) on which I was privileged to serve as the grip). However, Rouch's idea of the director as 'a dancing Socrates' is certainly Brechtian -- by way of shamanism. When I asked Rouch about this he said, 'I got the idea from Nietzsche. This "dancing Socrates" is very rare in the West. But in Africa I met people like this all over the place...'. Perhaps Rouch's 'master madmen' are the prophets of a new Marxism...

Who's Rivette? It's raining outside the windows, a crazy friend just called me long-distance from an abandoned farm in the wilds of British Columbia, the sound of the rain reminds me of the ocean, the ocean reminds me of Noroît, Noroît reminds me of Bernadette Lafont, which causes me to think of the mountains where she was born. Bernadette said that Rivette is Mao and his films are a Cultural Revolution. Why? Because Rivette has returned to what Rouch calls 'the lost Dionysiac traditions of Greek Tragedy.' Rivette's experiments with his actors, his 'beautiful animals', represent an attack on that ultimate gold nugget of bourgeois society: the solitary ego. The fiction that so few learn to escape. And Rivette's films help us learn the way to escape. It is simply understanding that each of us is many people. In us, Langian gods and goddesses coexist with the Joycean mutterings that Rossellini's Voyage in Italy (1953) was the first to chart.