Jacques Rivette

Short Biography

Jacques Rivette (born 1 March 1928) is a French film director and film critic most commonly associated with the French New Wave and Cahiers du Cinéma. He has made twenty-eight films, including Le Coup de Berger, Paris Belongs to Us, L'amour fou, Out 1, Celine and Julie Go Boating, Le Pont du Nord, La Belle Noiseuse and Va savoir. Rivette, inspired by Jean Cocteau to become a filmmaker, shot his first short film at age twenty. He moved to Paris to pursue his career, frequenting Henri Langlois' Cinémathèque Française and other ciné-clubs; there, he met François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol and other future members of the New Wave. Rivette began writing film criticism, and was hired by André Bazin for Cahiers du Cinéma in 1953. He expressed a critical admiration for American films, especially for those by genre directors such as John Ford, Alfred Hitchcock and Nicholas Ray, and was deeply critical of mainstream French cinema. Rivette's articles, admired by his peers, were considered the magazine's most aggressive and best-written. He continued making short films, including Le Coup de Berger (often cited as the first New Wave film), and Truffaut credited Rivette with developing the movement.