THE GANG OF FOUR
With Bulle Ogier, Benoit Regent, Laurence Cote, Fejria Deliba, Bernadette Giraud, Ines de Medeiros, and Nathalie Richard.
With Axel Jodorowsky, Blanca Guerra, Guy Stockwell, Thelma Tixou, Sabrina Dennison, Adan Jodorowsky, and Faviola Elenka Tapia.
The formal explorations carried out from The Nun, his second feature, through Noroit (1976), his eighth, represent one of the most thrilling sustained adventures in modern cinema. Each chapter in the adventure is a self- conscious heightening of one or more of the basic pleasures of movies, each set in relief by a different process: combining elements of fiction and documentary (L’amour fou); getting the actors to invent their own characters and improvise their own lines (both versions of Out 1) or collaborate on the script (Celine and Julie Go Boating) or share the screen with improvising musicians (Noroit).
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I would argue that of all the Cahiers du Cinema critics who became filmmakers Rivette is, after Godard, the most important–more interesting and compelling than Francois Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, or Claude Chabrol, although his works are much less known than theirs. But I have to confess to a certain ambivalence about The Gang of Four. As a virtual anthology of Rivettean themes and patterns, it represents the first case of outright repetition in his career, and suggests that after three decades he has finally worked his way back to a more “classical” or conventional style of direction, like that of his first feature, Paris Belongs to Us. He’s obviously gained a great deal of mastery as a director in the meantime, but lost some spirit of adventure. The Gang of Four, one of his most accessible movies, can be an excellent introduction to his work as a whole; but it’s less impressive if you already know that work.
Contemporary obsessive filmmakers tend to be marginal rather than mainstream figures–Chantal Akerman, Kenneth Anger, Robert Bresson, Leos Carax, John Cassavetes, Georges Franju, Mark Rappaport, Jacques Rivette, Andrej Tarkovsky–or else mainstream in a peculiarly closeted and secretive way, like Stanley Kubrick, Jerry Lewis, and Elaine May. Sad to say, Carax–whose career is currently at a standstill after only two features (Boy Meets Girl and Bad Blood)–is the only one in the above list under 40, and there are plenty of reasons to fear that this kind of filmmaking may be on the verge of extinction. (The main institutions in support of marginal cinema in this country, from the Village Voice to the NEA, are currently in the process of withdrawing or at least minimizing their support.)
