A retrospective of the career of French director Jacques Rivette has been unspooling at New York's Museum of the Moving Image since mid November. Several of the director's most ambitious and least known film gems are yet to be screened, as the series continues through the month of December. Intrepid film lovers should run, not walk, to this rare and wonderful series of a true cinema original.

Rivette was a one-man film revolution. A critic for the influential film magazine Cahiers du Cinema, a founding member of France's Nouvelle Vague film movement, and a prolific artist who made films in every imaginable genre, Jacques Rivette was a singular atist and one of France's great film treasures. Bucking commercial trends, Rivette's films are abundant in length but also abundant in mystery, tension and reflections on the human spirit.

Still to be screened in the Rivette retrospective are such gems as MERRY-GO-ROUND (1983), a rare screening of this elaborate mystery twister, starring Warhol superstar Joe Dallesandro and LAST TANGO IN PARIS femme fatale Maria Schneider. The film screens today at 3:00pm.

Also screening today is the fascinating DIVERTIMENTO (1991), a redux version of his four-hour film LA BELLE NOISEUSE. This reshaped and recut version, also starring French superstars Michel Piccoli and Emmanuelle Béart, is a meditation on the obsession and transcendence of art.

On Sunday, the Museum will present a rare screening of the 4 1/2 hour television film OUT 1: SPECTRE (1973). An intense tale of two rival theater companies, the film features an ensemble cast of French legends, including Truffaut regular Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Pierre Baillot, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Françoise Fabian.

Another Sunday treat is the presentation of THE GANG OF FOUR (1989), the filmmaker's femme fest with a quartet of outstanding leading ladies, including Bulle Ogier, Inês de Medeiros, Bernadette Giraud and Nathalie Richard. Four women studying theater under a renowned director must deal with a mysterious stranger as well the pressures of working and living under the same roof.

Films to be screened later this month include: SECRET DEFENSE (1998), a Hitchcockian thriller that stars Sandrine Bonnaire as a woman who sets out to solve the mysterious death of her father; THE STORY OF MARIE AND JULIEN (2003), a quietly mysterious film that is part romantic drama and part vampire movie, starring the exquisite Emmanuelle Béart; and VA SAVOIR (2001), perhaps the director's most commercially successful film, a roundelay with six characters falling in and out of love, that stars Jeanne Balibar, Sergio Castellitto and Marianne Basler.

The Museum of the Moving Image is located on the site of the largest, busiest, and most significant motion picture and television production facility between London and Hollywood, the Astoria Studio in Astoria, Queens. Built in 1920 across the East River from midtown Manhattan, the studio was Paramount Studio's East Coast production facility, and, in the 1930s, a site for independent film production. Transformed into a US Army photographic center during World War II, the site fell into disrepair when the Army left in 1971. The Museum has revitalized the building, and the adjoining neighborhood, as an essential New York museum devoted to the study and exhibition of film and media arts.

For a complete schedule and information on the Museum's exhibition and screening events, log on to their official website: Museum of the Moving Image


Sandy Mandelberger
Film New York Editor