Jacques Rivette, a French director who began his career as a critic like fellow French New Wave colleagues and made unconventional and challenging work revered by film scholars, died at 87 on Friday at his home in Paris.
French culture Minister Fleur Pellerin called Rivette a filmmaker "of intimacy and loving impatience," confirming his death on Twitter. Martine Marignac, Rivette's long-time producer, said the filmmaker battled Alzheimer's disease, according to The New York Times.
His most famous - and many say his finest- work, 1974's "Celine and Julie Go Boating," runs 192 minutes, while one of his more widely distributed was a later film, "La Belle Noiseuse" (1991), which is four hours long. Demanding running times was typical for Rivette, who explored the limits of conventional movie storytelling with an examination on the relationship between life and art.
Born Pierre Louis Rivette in Rouen, he arrived in Paris in 1949 to study film with future New Wave colleagues such as Jean-Luc Godard and Éric Rohmer. He'd later join Andre Bazin's magazine "Les Cahiers du Cinema" as a critic before branching out into filmmaking, according to Variety.
Rivette's feature debut, "Paris Belongs to Us" (1961), was financed through his associations while writing for the Cahiers magazine, becoming one of the first of its critics to shoot a feature. "Paris," like some of his earlier shorts, had a dense and enigmatic plot, which became a hallmark of his films.
"The news of Jacques Rivette's passing is a reminder that so much time has passed since that remarkable moment in the late '50s and early '60s when so many directors were redrawing the boundaries of cinema," Martin Scorsese said today. "Rivette was one of them. He was the most experimental of the French New Wave directors, probably the least known in those early years," he said, according to Deadline.
"Rivette was a fascinating artist, and it's strange to think that he's gone," said Scorsese. "Because if you came of age when I did, the New Wave still seems new. I suppose it always will."