Spectres: The Cinema of Jacques Rivette

“The idea was that each shot had its own duration, its tempo, its ‘color’ (that is, its tone), its intensity, and its level of play. . . . The original idea of La religieuse was a play on words: making a ‘cellular’ film, because it was about cells full of nuns.”
—Jacques Rivette

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.

Often referred to as a modernist filmmaker, Jacques Rivette's La Religieuse is often seen as an outlier in the early part of his oeuvre due to the "classicism" of both its linear narrative and its formal construction. However, as Jonathan Rosenbaum writes, perhaps the most instructive approach is to see it as 'a dialectic–between classicism and modernism, past and present, outside and inside, freedom and confinement, decoupage (a relatively predetermined, rigidified form) and mise en scene (a relatively dynamic, variable form).'