The Face Knife

On the margins/in revisions/where we both first made our livings/in an alcove/full of sawdust/there a new light shone upon us
Although many prominent film critics (and Face Knife favorites) such as David Thomson and Jonathan Rosenbaum count Jacques Rivette among the “masters” of cinema, Rivette’s films, particularly those of the 60s and 70s, are difficult to see, being barely if at all available on video, and that’s not even touching the quasi-mythic Out One: Noli Me Tangere, which was perhaps the most famous film maudit before its recent resurrection. Rosenbaum, in the review linked above, compares Rivette’s ouerve to that of Thomas Pynchon in terms of shared themes and pre-occupations, but while I was watching Paris the author I repeatedly flashed back to was William Gaddis, and his debut novel The Recognitions. In all likelihood it was the bohemian party that launches the protagonist (if one could call her that - she’s more of a dogged stumbler) on the “quest” that passes for the plot that reminded me of a similar, hilarious though sometimes harrowing scene in Gaddis, but I think the resonances go even deeper.

Girish posted today about Manny Farber’s infamous “White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art” , and although in Negative Space there is no extended treatment of Rivette he is often name-checked and praised in the highest terms as someone who is creating “termite” art. Even more so than the dudes mentioned above, I hold Manny Farber in high esteem not only because I think he’s a rad stylist but also because the dude’s a pretty excellent painter (there was a great Franklin Bruno article about him in The Believer a few years back, before I even started writing about film or even really watching it), like the two main things on my self-actualization wishlist.

It’s sort of odd to think of Rivette or Gaddis as being on the termite side of the line, as both have almost exclusively created work where duration is the key word. Somewhere along the line, duration or length has come to signify “masterpiece art,” where as I would say that Rivette and Gaddis (and I have not near exhausted either’s body of work) are not producers of masterpieces. Each of their works is a chunk of a larger work, or a probe launched at related concerns, and it certainly not a hermeticly sealed universe unto itself.

Termite art is all about the porousness of certain boundaries (to crib from another influence), and although Paris Nous Appartient is nearly claustrophobic (made more so because the bootleg DVD I watched resembled an over-inked screenprint) in its evocation of a system of connections that exists right below our every day lives the narrative is constantly offering other ways to opt out, even though the pull of oppressive order is almost inexorable. The orphans, atheists and nomads who create and populate Termite art may end up fucked-up and doomed, but at least they end up there because they have explicitly rejected the burden of changing art or changing the world. It can make for a frustrating viewing experience and I’d imagine a sore back and not a few worn welcomes, but when the quotidien feels like a trap it’s good to be reminded that there are options if you only know where to look.

But let’s hope there will still be places to look in the future. The final paragraph of Gaddis’s novel, and epitaph of sorts for one of his fictional alter-egos, a composer who perishes in an organ-driven church collapse, could equally apply to Rivette: “…most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoke of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played.”

the Museum of the Moving Image will allegedly hold a Rivette retrospective in November, with a screening of Out One: Noli Me Tangere. Anthology Film Archives just concluded a mini-retro, of which I was unlucky enough to catch only one, Noro?t.

The “title” for this entry is a lyric from The Mendoza Line’s “Catch a Collapsing Star”