Jacques Rivette Makes a Jean Cocteau Movie

     Jacques Rivette's first film, Aux quatre coins (At the Four Corners), a short from 1949, has the air of mystery present in all of his work.  Here are two men, two women--two pairs of lovers--a beach, the sea, a house, gestures, repeated images of characters putting their heads back to be kissed but also in a submissive pose suggesting encroaching violence.  

     Violence, its threat mainly, carries throughout the twenty minute silent film.  In the first scene one of the men sits on a couch, a woman enters the room and slaps his face twice. He moves his head, facing the ceiling, the scene ending with his head bowing.

     Heads in the foreground with activity in the background comprise many images.  The stylization recalls Sergei Eisenstein's habit of placing actors in positions, making them participate as compositional elements of a shot.  Eisenstein's unfinished Que viva Mexico! (1932) demonstrates this technique a great deal.  When John Ford saw Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible, Part I, he criticized the director's use of actors, complaining, "They're like puppets."

     Rivette, in Aux quatre coins, appears to be imparting story (as anti-Hollywood narrative as it is) by having his performers act within a person-scape made of human actions.  His style, a nod I assume to the films of Jean Cocteau, embraces gestures made by his four characters as they kiss, walk together, threaten each other, walk separately along narrow lanes shadowed by walls in streets of a sunny silent city.

     The film's silence adds much to its enigma.  Some may judge such a mysterious film to lack any real meaning.  I find the challenge of attaching my eyes to such a work of cinema to be invigorating.  The lack of explanation can be refreshing.  Moods, lighting, moments of flashing violence, of intense passion, and two shots with the men fully on top (though clothed) of their women, make for a realistic depiction of how lovers' bodies interact, rather than the sanitized fantasy of couples never sharing a bed, as in Hollywood films of 1949.

     The four people in this film seem to play together, love together, but a volcanic violence prepares to surface; indeed, erupting at the end in a scene where the actual acts causing death aren't even shown directly.  It is as if cause of death can be attributed to the technique of film editing, making it thus an exercise in filming a group dynamic, like in a play, the dramatic medium so often explored by Jacques Rivette in many of his later and far more sophisticated movies.

Vic Neptune