Le Quadrille (1950) Jacques Rivette

Описание: Le Quadrille (1950) Jacques Rivette

a certain hypnotic, obsessional quality as, for some forty minutes, it attempted to show what happens when nothing happens by observing, in strict objectivity, behavior in a dentist's waiting-room. No plot, no dialogue; simply the play of silence, covert glances, magazines nervously skimmed, cigarettes furtively lit, as strangers casually thrown together try to come to terms with each other with nothing to come to terms about. Called Quadrille, the film achieved a minor succes de scandale when the half of the audience still present at the end almost came to blows in passionate disagreement. It wasn't until years later that light dawned as to the name of the director and leading actor: respectively, Jacques Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard.

Tom Milne

By comparison to his image-dense and remarkably showy first film, Rivette's second, Le quadrille, co-written with Jean-Luc Godard who also acts—or more precisely, hams—observes a precise restraint, spareness and simplicity. It begins with a quote of a letter to Stendhal, complaining of dull parties during which one wants to eat the available ice cream and scram, and the following forty minutes are essentially made entirely of three young men and two young women idly sitting in a parlor failing to say or do anything. Where Au quartre coins let the young director’s imagination have free reign, Le quadrille forces discipline and details: we watch young adults of 1950 in the idle stupor of social boredom, stretched beyond dramatic plausibility until each gesture of fidget or habit becomes either a major event, a documentary observation, or, perversely, another kind of playacting—the obvious result of the filmmakers’ request of an actor to fiddle with one’s hair, play with a cigarette, adjust one’s suit, do nothing or perform torpidity. Jonathan Rosenbaum memorably wrote that by the time of Rivette’s legendary 1971 serial feature Out 1 “it might be said that actors had taken over Rivette’s cinema during the shooting stage — a freedom underwritten by the radical premise that anything and everything an actor does is potentially interesting,” and we can see in Le quadrille this interest in immersive appreciation of performance. It is of a kind with Out 1’s notoriously challenging first episode, which is dedicated to watching actors practicing their craft. The cinematic metaphysics, so strong in Au quarte coins, are more primal here: What so holds these men and women in unspoken, impassive thrall? One actress, blonde hair frizzed out, sits in a trance like Gerda Maurus incapacitated in Fritz Lang's Spies. Godard, meanwhile, fusses about as if practicing bits for bar room gags, and we get to see his beautifully soft eyes, later so often hidden behind sunglasses. The five youths form an arrangement, tacitly agreed upon and eventually broken, to wait to be called to a more exciting game.

Daniel Kasman

Though Godard got a little money from his family, he admitted that the money that went into Rivette’s film came from stealing and selling books from his grandfather Monod’s “Valérianum”. The film featured four actors: two women and two men, one of them Godard. According to Rivette, “It ran 40 minutes and nothing happens. It’s just four people sitting around a table, looking at each other. After ten minutes, people started to leave, and at the end, the only ones who stayed were Jean-Luc and a girl.”

Richard Brody

Rivette recalls that in the early 1950s they met every day at Cahiers and collaborated on each other’s 16 mm productions. In 1950, Godard produced and acted in Rivette’s second short 16 mm film, Le quadrille, which was subsequently projected at successive screenings at the Latin Quarter ciné-club .

Mary M. Miles