ICA is closed from the 30 May – 3 June inclusive.
20 February - 1 June 2025
Long Takes
"He was riding on a mystery, he was surfing on a certain kind of fragility, which was the moment of the take..." — Jean-François Stévenin
"The day when curiosity disappears there's nothing left but to lie down and wait for our last breath. I believe that curiosity is the one thing which makes us move, which makes us act, in all areas of life." — Jacques Rivette
From the day of his arrival in Paris from Rouen in 1949, curiosity, its mysteries, and the actions and coincidences it can produce, have to some degree been the divining light of Jacques Rivette's cinema. After all that first day in Paris would lead him to meeting a future collaborator in Suzanne Schiffman and, quite by chance, take him to the Latin Quarter Film Club, ran by the then Maurice Scherer (later Éric Rohmer) for a screening of a rare original cut of Robert Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.
Within the coming weeks and months Rivette would meet the likes of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and André Bazin, and in the following years become a defining figure of not just French cinema, but cinema at large, both as a critic and filmmaker, as a part of Cahiers du Cinéma and the Nouvelle Vague.
As Serge Daney draws out at the beginning of his conversation with Rivette in Claire Denis' documentary Jacques Rivette, le veilleur, Rivette's cinema is one of bodies and gestures, rather than faces or fragmentation. Rivette himself said that when looking through the camera's lens 'I always have the tendency to move back...because the face alone makes me want to see the hands, and when I see the hands, I want to see the body'. It is this spirit of curiosity that proves most revealing, not just Rivette's own curiosity, but his commitment to evoking curiosity in the viewer.
Rivette's cinema is one of mystery, conspiracy and above all fiction, and it is this commitment to fiction and its structures, whether adhered to or upended, that makes his work such a joy to wrestle with. In the worlds of Jacques Rivette, there are always plots to unravel, intentions to intimate and games to be played.
The ICA is delighted to pay tribute to one of cinema's most singular artists and to present the first major retrospective of Jacques Rivette's work in the UK in more than eighteen years.
This comprehensive retrospective will include new restorations of rarely seen works, screenings on 35mm, as well as special guests and invited speakers.
Long Takes
"He was riding on a mystery, he was surfing on a certain kind of fragility, which was the moment of the take..." — Jean-François Stévenin
"The day when curiosity disappears there's nothing left but to lie down and wait for our last breath. I believe that curiosity is the one thing which makes us move, which makes us act, in all areas of life." — Jacques Rivette
From the day of his arrival in Paris from Rouen in 1949, curiosity, its mysteries, and the actions and coincidences it can produce, have to some degree been the divining light of Jacques Rivette's cinema. After all that first day in Paris would lead him to meeting a future collaborator in Suzanne Schiffman and, quite by chance, take him to the Latin Quarter Film Club, ran by the then Maurice Scherer (later Éric Rohmer) for a screening of a rare original cut of Robert Bresson's Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne.
Within the coming weeks and months Rivette would meet the likes of François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard and André Bazin, and in the following years become a defining figure of not just French cinema, but cinema at large, both as a critic and filmmaker, as a part of Cahiers du Cinéma and the Nouvelle Vague.
As Serge Daney draws out at the beginning of his conversation with Rivette in Claire Denis' documentary Jacques Rivette, le veilleur, Rivette's cinema is one of bodies and gestures, rather than faces or fragmentation. Rivette himself said that when looking through the camera's lens 'I always have the tendency to move back...because the face alone makes me want to see the hands, and when I see the hands, I want to see the body'. It is this spirit of curiosity that proves most revealing, not just Rivette's own curiosity, but his commitment to evoking curiosity in the viewer.
Rivette's cinema is one of mystery, conspiracy and above all fiction, and it is this commitment to fiction and its structures, whether adhered to or upended, that makes his work such a joy to wrestle with. In the worlds of Jacques Rivette, there are always plots to unravel, intentions to intimate and games to be played.
The ICA is delighted to pay tribute to one of cinema's most singular artists and to present the first major retrospective of Jacques Rivette's work in the UK in more than eighteen years.
This comprehensive retrospective will include new restorations of rarely seen works, screenings on 35mm, as well as special guests and invited speakers.
Programme
Thursday 20 February, 6.30pm
Opening Night
Paris nous appartient on 35mm
Anne arrives in Paris to study, but quickly finds herself enwrapped in the lives of a loose-knit group of bohemians and the mysterious death of their friend. A detective story by way of Shakespeare's Pericles, Jacques Rivette's sublime debut feature is a labyrinth of conspiracies, deception and cold-war paranoia.
Saturday 22 February, 3.30pm
La Religieuse
Initially banned by the Information Ministry in France after outcry from the Catholic community, Jacques Rivette's second feature, an adaptation of Diderot's famous novel, follows the life of a young woman (Anna Karina) who is forced, against her will, to take vows as a nun.
Thursday 27 February, 8pm
La chienne
Between the making of La Religieuse and L'amour fou, Rivette directed a three part documentary on the great Jean Renoir. The experience would prove profoundly impactful, particularly on his work with actors. One of the many films Rivette revisited was Jean Renoir's La chienne, a bitter tale of amour fou which marked a watershed in the storied collaboration between the filmmaker and actor Michael Simon.
Sunday 2 March, 1pm
L'amour fou (4K Restoration)
Shot in a dazzling mixture of 35mm and 16mm film stocks, Jacques Rivette's hypnotic and long unavailable study of tempestuous love is one of the filmmakers most radical works.
Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 March, 12.30pm
Out 1: Noli me tangere
Drawing inspiration from both the silent serials of Louis Feuillade and Balzac's mammoth La Comédie humaine, Jacques Rivette's freewheeling epic, often referred to as cinemas "holy grail", is an all-consuming conspiratorial odyssey through the remnants of post-68 Paris.
Sunday 16 March, 12.30pm
Out 1: Spectre
Jacques Rivette's fragmentary rescrambling of the epic Out 1, is rather appropriately a ghostly companion to its progenitor and a singular work all its own. A film both haunted by its past and an arresting evolution of it.
Monday 17 March, 6.30pm
Monday for Members
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
A key inspiration for Céline and Julie Go Boating, Howard Hawk's classic musical is a glorious technicolor tale of friendship centred on the transatlantic exploits of two lounge-singers played by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Screening exclusively for ICA Members.
Sunday 23 March, 2pm
Céline and Julie Go Boating on 35mm
Jacques Rivette's joyously madcap tale of a librarian and a magician whose chance encounter leads them into a strange Henry James inspired melodrama, is an entrancing examination of the nature of filmmaking and watching.
Thursday 27 March, 6.30pm
Duelle
Drawing inspiration from both the writing of Gérard de Nerval and classic film noirs, Jacques Rivette's tale of two warring Goddesses awakened on the shadowy rain swept streets of 1970s Paris, is both an astounding feat of generic interpolation and an enthralling exploration of fate and mortality.
Saturday 29 March, 5.15pm
Orphée
Jean Cocteau's second interpretation of the Orpheus myth is a peerless work of visual poetry whose echoes reverberate through Rivette's oeuvre – from the labyrinthine streets of Paris to the marrying of the modern and the fantastical.
Sunday 30 March, 4pm
Noroît
Inspired by Cyril Tourneur's Jacobean drama The Revenger's Tragedy, the third part of Jacques Rivette's Scènes de la vie parallèle is a balletic tale of revenge, centred upon Morag's (Geraldine Chaplin) quest to avenge the death of her brother at the hands of Giulia (Bernadette Lafont), the leader of a band of pirates.
Thursday 3 April, 8.15pm
Merry-Go-Round
Despite its somewhat beleaguered production and a less than rapturous reception from critics upon its release, Jacques Rivette's final film of the 1970s is a perfect distillation of the paranoia, conspiracy and mystery that defined much of his work during the previous two decades.
Sunday 6 April, 4.30pm
Le Pont du Nord
The city of Paris becomes a labyrinthine board game, as a chance encounter between a claustrophobic ex-con (Bulle Ogier) and a leather-clad young woman (Pascale Ogier) quickly embroils them both in a sinister underworld conspiracy.
Tuesday 8 April, 8pm
L'amour par terre
Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin star as actresses recruited by an enigmatic playwright (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) to star in a new work, but as rehearsals begin in his grand mansion, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. A beguiling and haunting exploration of the mysteries of love and art.
Saturday 12 April, 4.30pm
Angel Face
Closing out a landmark cycle of noir's that began with Laura, Otto Preminger's tale of an ambulance driver drawn into the orbit of a wealthy young woman is one of the filmmakers most enigmatic works. In his essay L'Essential, Rivette argued that the film was a skeleton key for understanding Preminger's work at large and his belief in mise en scène.
Sunday 13 April, 5.15pm
Hurlevent on 35mm
Brutal and despairing, Jacques Rivette's radical reinterpretation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights transposes its tale of love and revenge from the English countryside to a Chateau in 1930s France.
Thursday 17 April, 8pm
La Bande des quatre (4K Restoration)
Performance takes centre stage in this tale of four aspiring actresses, studying under the tutelage of a famed tutor, who find themselves embroiled in an increasingly menacing off-stage drama.
Wednesday 23 April, 8.30pm
Jacques Rivette, le veilleur
Unfolding as a series of interconnected conversations between Rivette and legendary writer and critic Serge Daney, Claire Denis' documentary, produced for Cinéma, de notre temps, is a wonderfully intimate invitation into the work, life and philosophy of a singular artist.
Saturday 26 April, 2.30pm
Viaggio in Italia
The subject of one of Jacques Rivette's most famous essays for Cahiers du cinéma, Roberto Rossellini's tale of marital strife in the Neapolitan countryside is a groundbreaking work of modernism and a heartbreaking anatomy of a relationship.
Sunday 27 April, 2pm
La Belle Noiseuse (4K Restoration)
Freely inspired by Balzac's novella Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu and featuring outstanding performances from Michael Piccoli, Emmanuelle Béart and Jane Birkin, Rivette's exploration of the artistic process and the at times tempestuous relationship between artist and model is a profoundly moving examination of creative obsession.
Saturday 3 May, 4pm
Jeanne la pucelle: Les Batailles (4K Restoration)
For the first instalment of his ambitious yet restrained two-part study of Jeanne d'Arc, Jacques Rivette surveys the revelatory period where Jeanne met with royalty, joined the army, and led the French into battle against the English.
Sunday 4 May, 4pm
Jeanne la pucelle: Les Prisons (4K Restoration)
Rooted in the poetics and quotidian details of daily life, the second part of Rivette's diptych on the life of Jeanne d'Arc, traces every step on the road to Jeanne’s saintly fate, from her waning influence in the courts to her imprisonment and death.
Tuesday 13 May, 8pm
Haut bas fragile (4K Restoration)
Inspired by MGM’s low budget musicals of the 1950s, Rivette crafts an all-singing all-dancing sojourn through a sweltering Parisian summer in this captivating story of love, friendship and liberation.
Sunday 18 May, 4pm
Secret défense (4K Restoration)
Jacques Rivette's contemporary interpretation of the Greek tragedy Elektra is a taut and elegant thriller of filial revenge imbued with an ascetic fatalism and anchored by outstanding performances by Sandrine Bonnaire and Jerzy Radziwilowicz.
Sunday 25 May, 3.30pm
Va savoir+ (4K Restoration)
A film about memory, identity and the joy and confusion of searching, Rivette combines Pirandello with an almost screwball comedy sensibility in this effortlessly breezy roundelay of intersecting lives and loves.
Thursday 29 May, 8pm
Histoire de Marie et Julien on 35mm
A solitary clockmaker finds his nefarious attempts at blackmail sidetracked by the appearance of a mysterious woman who bears a striking resemblance to a former lover. Rivette returns to his Scènes de la vie parallèle cycle with this sublime and moving work about time, memory and love.
Saturday 31 May, 4pm
Ne touchez pas la hache on 35mm
An incisive exploration of the social mores of courtship and the maddening nature of desire, Jacques Rivette's adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's novella La Duchesse de Langeais is a biting chamber drama of selfish passions and competing agendas.
Sunday 1 June, 4pm
Closing Night
36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
An Italian traveler finds himself drawn into the world of a travelling circus after a chance encounter on a mountain roadside. Jacques Rivette's swan song is a deceptively slight return to one of his most beloved obsessions — the interplay between life and performance.
Thursday 20 February, 6.30pm
Opening Night
Paris nous appartient on 35mm
Anne arrives in Paris to study, but quickly finds herself enwrapped in the lives of a loose-knit group of bohemians and the mysterious death of their friend. A detective story by way of Shakespeare's Pericles, Jacques Rivette's sublime debut feature is a labyrinth of conspiracies, deception and cold-war paranoia.
Saturday 22 February, 3.30pm
La Religieuse
Initially banned by the Information Ministry in France after outcry from the Catholic community, Jacques Rivette's second feature, an adaptation of Diderot's famous novel, follows the life of a young woman (Anna Karina) who is forced, against her will, to take vows as a nun.
Thursday 27 February, 8pm
La chienne
Between the making of La Religieuse and L'amour fou, Rivette directed a three part documentary on the great Jean Renoir. The experience would prove profoundly impactful, particularly on his work with actors. One of the many films Rivette revisited was Jean Renoir's La chienne, a bitter tale of amour fou which marked a watershed in the storied collaboration between the filmmaker and actor Michael Simon.
Sunday 2 March, 1pm
L'amour fou (4K Restoration)
Shot in a dazzling mixture of 35mm and 16mm film stocks, Jacques Rivette's hypnotic and long unavailable study of tempestuous love is one of the filmmakers most radical works.
Saturday 8 and Sunday 9 March, 12.30pm
Out 1: Noli me tangere
Drawing inspiration from both the silent serials of Louis Feuillade and Balzac's mammoth La Comédie humaine, Jacques Rivette's freewheeling epic, often referred to as cinemas "holy grail", is an all-consuming conspiratorial odyssey through the remnants of post-68 Paris.
Sunday 16 March, 12.30pm
Out 1: Spectre
Jacques Rivette's fragmentary rescrambling of the epic Out 1, is rather appropriately a ghostly companion to its progenitor and a singular work all its own. A film both haunted by its past and an arresting evolution of it.
Monday 17 March, 6.30pm
Monday for Members
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
A key inspiration for Céline and Julie Go Boating, Howard Hawk's classic musical is a glorious technicolor tale of friendship centred on the transatlantic exploits of two lounge-singers played by Marilyn Monroe and Jane Russell. Screening exclusively for ICA Members.
Sunday 23 March, 2pm
Céline and Julie Go Boating on 35mm
Jacques Rivette's joyously madcap tale of a librarian and a magician whose chance encounter leads them into a strange Henry James inspired melodrama, is an entrancing examination of the nature of filmmaking and watching.
Thursday 27 March, 6.30pm
Duelle
Drawing inspiration from both the writing of Gérard de Nerval and classic film noirs, Jacques Rivette's tale of two warring Goddesses awakened on the shadowy rain swept streets of 1970s Paris, is both an astounding feat of generic interpolation and an enthralling exploration of fate and mortality.
Saturday 29 March, 5.15pm
Orphée
Jean Cocteau's second interpretation of the Orpheus myth is a peerless work of visual poetry whose echoes reverberate through Rivette's oeuvre – from the labyrinthine streets of Paris to the marrying of the modern and the fantastical.
Sunday 30 March, 4pm
Noroît
Inspired by Cyril Tourneur's Jacobean drama The Revenger's Tragedy, the third part of Jacques Rivette's Scènes de la vie parallèle is a balletic tale of revenge, centred upon Morag's (Geraldine Chaplin) quest to avenge the death of her brother at the hands of Giulia (Bernadette Lafont), the leader of a band of pirates.
Thursday 3 April, 8.15pm
Merry-Go-Round
Despite its somewhat beleaguered production and a less than rapturous reception from critics upon its release, Jacques Rivette's final film of the 1970s is a perfect distillation of the paranoia, conspiracy and mystery that defined much of his work during the previous two decades.
Sunday 6 April, 4.30pm
Le Pont du Nord
The city of Paris becomes a labyrinthine board game, as a chance encounter between a claustrophobic ex-con (Bulle Ogier) and a leather-clad young woman (Pascale Ogier) quickly embroils them both in a sinister underworld conspiracy.
Tuesday 8 April, 8pm
L'amour par terre
Jane Birkin and Geraldine Chaplin star as actresses recruited by an enigmatic playwright (Jean-Pierre Kalfon) to star in a new work, but as rehearsals begin in his grand mansion, the lines between performance and reality begin to blur. A beguiling and haunting exploration of the mysteries of love and art.
Saturday 12 April, 4.30pm
Angel Face
Closing out a landmark cycle of noir's that began with Laura, Otto Preminger's tale of an ambulance driver drawn into the orbit of a wealthy young woman is one of the filmmakers most enigmatic works. In his essay L'Essential, Rivette argued that the film was a skeleton key for understanding Preminger's work at large and his belief in mise en scène.
Sunday 13 April, 5.15pm
Hurlevent on 35mm
Brutal and despairing, Jacques Rivette's radical reinterpretation of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights transposes its tale of love and revenge from the English countryside to a Chateau in 1930s France.
Thursday 17 April, 8pm
La Bande des quatre (4K Restoration)
Performance takes centre stage in this tale of four aspiring actresses, studying under the tutelage of a famed tutor, who find themselves embroiled in an increasingly menacing off-stage drama.
Wednesday 23 April, 8.30pm
Jacques Rivette, le veilleur
Unfolding as a series of interconnected conversations between Rivette and legendary writer and critic Serge Daney, Claire Denis' documentary, produced for Cinéma, de notre temps, is a wonderfully intimate invitation into the work, life and philosophy of a singular artist.
Saturday 26 April, 2.30pm
Viaggio in Italia
The subject of one of Jacques Rivette's most famous essays for Cahiers du cinéma, Roberto Rossellini's tale of marital strife in the Neapolitan countryside is a groundbreaking work of modernism and a heartbreaking anatomy of a relationship.
Sunday 27 April, 2pm
La Belle Noiseuse (4K Restoration)
Freely inspired by Balzac's novella Le Chef-d'œuvre inconnu and featuring outstanding performances from Michael Piccoli, Emmanuelle Béart and Jane Birkin, Rivette's exploration of the artistic process and the at times tempestuous relationship between artist and model is a profoundly moving examination of creative obsession.
Saturday 3 May, 4pm
Jeanne la pucelle: Les Batailles (4K Restoration)
For the first instalment of his ambitious yet restrained two-part study of Jeanne d'Arc, Jacques Rivette surveys the revelatory period where Jeanne met with royalty, joined the army, and led the French into battle against the English.
Sunday 4 May, 4pm
Jeanne la pucelle: Les Prisons (4K Restoration)
Rooted in the poetics and quotidian details of daily life, the second part of Rivette's diptych on the life of Jeanne d'Arc, traces every step on the road to Jeanne’s saintly fate, from her waning influence in the courts to her imprisonment and death.
Tuesday 13 May, 8pm
Haut bas fragile (4K Restoration)
Inspired by MGM’s low budget musicals of the 1950s, Rivette crafts an all-singing all-dancing sojourn through a sweltering Parisian summer in this captivating story of love, friendship and liberation.
Sunday 18 May, 4pm
Secret défense (4K Restoration)
Jacques Rivette's contemporary interpretation of the Greek tragedy Elektra is a taut and elegant thriller of filial revenge imbued with an ascetic fatalism and anchored by outstanding performances by Sandrine Bonnaire and Jerzy Radziwilowicz.
Sunday 25 May, 3.30pm
Va savoir+ (4K Restoration)
A film about memory, identity and the joy and confusion of searching, Rivette combines Pirandello with an almost screwball comedy sensibility in this effortlessly breezy roundelay of intersecting lives and loves.
Thursday 29 May, 8pm
Histoire de Marie et Julien on 35mm
A solitary clockmaker finds his nefarious attempts at blackmail sidetracked by the appearance of a mysterious woman who bears a striking resemblance to a former lover. Rivette returns to his Scènes de la vie parallèle cycle with this sublime and moving work about time, memory and love.
Saturday 31 May, 4pm
Ne touchez pas la hache on 35mm
An incisive exploration of the social mores of courtship and the maddening nature of desire, Jacques Rivette's adaptation of Honoré de Balzac's novella La Duchesse de Langeais is a biting chamber drama of selfish passions and competing agendas.
Sunday 1 June, 4pm
Closing Night
36 vues du Pic Saint-Loup
An Italian traveler finds himself drawn into the world of a travelling circus after a chance encounter on a mountain roadside. Jacques Rivette's swan song is a deceptively slight return to one of his most beloved obsessions — the interplay between life and performance.
no. 236848.