Limited Insight
It is very easy to produce generalisations. Often it is the best way to stop
understanding; abstractions like custom barriers preventing the free trade in
impressions and facts…
The style and content of Rivette’s film has less to do with sexuality than with the then recent tradition of the 1960s New Waves, both in the movies and in literature; where, particularly in France and America, there developed a corpus of self-referential fiction, which used the forms of art as material. To interpret this film it is thus necessary to understand these contemporary artistic developments, rather rely on some dubious feminist theorising.
Julia Lesage… [in a]
pioneering analysis of female characters in Jacques Rivette’s Céline and Julie Go Boating… shows that the abandonment of the classic story based
on male-female distinctions produces new and previously unimaginable narrative
mutations….(The
Cinema Book, edited by Pam Cook
& Mieke Bernink)
I simply don’t see it.
As I argued in
a previous post this film is an attempt to recreate both the dream and love
worlds of two people infatuated with each other. It could as easily have been done with a man and a woman;
although the details would have changed.
Indeed, it has been done, using different cinematic and narrative
techniques, in Godard’s Pierrot
le Fou. A film that the same book regards as conservative(!) in its
views about gender.
The style and content of Rivette’s film has less to do with sexuality than with the then recent tradition of the 1960s New Waves, both in the movies and in literature; where, particularly in France and America, there developed a corpus of self-referential fiction, which used the forms of art as material. To interpret this film it is thus necessary to understand these contemporary artistic developments, rather rely on some dubious feminist theorising.
This is not to say that the choice of two female characters
doesn’t give the director certain freedoms in plot construction and
presentation. The two women
lovers, and we also see this in Mulholland
Drive, allows for a greater technical
flexibility in exploring the emotional reactions which are common to both
sexes. Thus it would be very hard
to convincingly show the mixing up and merging of a male and female lover, as
Rivette does here. Although in a
completely different way, Toshio Matsumoto gets around this problem by using
transvestites in another Sixties classic, Funeral Parade of Roses.i Another movie that captures the feel of
the times, and which also uses the techniques and ideas of particularly the
French New Wave. It is also
another movie that the critics would like to reduce solely to sexual politics.
That is, although highlighting how lesbian characters can be
useful technical devices, Lesage’s analysis ultimately fails, because it wants
to make too big a generalisation on an important but small insight. It is like trying to build The Gherkin
on two square foot of land.
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