When will the revolution arrive? It has been here a good while, friend, but the thing is: it is both obscurantist and vaguely (maybe more than vaguely) occultist, this accounting for how it persists and does so largely unnoticed. How long has it been going on? Since before Agamemnon, surely. When we start to scrutinize closely we cannot help but begin to see the rhizomes of genealogy and correspondence, their embedded geology. You can field a fact-find anywhere. Consider the name of the boutique operated by Bulle Ogier’s character in Jacques Rivette's Out 1: L’angle du hasard (The Crossroads of Chance). Last week marked the ultimate culmination of my dream project as a film programmer, this being the Calgary Cinematheque Jaques Rivette Masters Series. Regular readers already know this. I have had occasion to quip that we closed the series with Paranoia Week, this involving a screening of Paris nous appartient (1961) on Monday and one of Le pont du Nord (1981) on Thursday. Some folks are liable to harbour limited or limiting notions of what paranoia is or makes available, so I was sure, in my public introductions to those two films, to quote (paraphrase, really) respected eminences in the field: Thomas Pynchon, who I invoked in my intro to Paris nous appartient respective of his assertion that paranoia can be a comfort and even a quasi-religion, far preferable to “anti-paranoia,” a condition “where nothing is connected to anything," which "not many of us can bear for long”; and Robert Anton Wilson, noted wit and theorizer of quantum psychology, who I invoked before Le pont du Nord on account of his having urged us to “view the world as a conspiracy run by a very closely-knit group of nearly omnipotent people,” and to “think of those people as yourself and your friends.” The paranoid strain in Rivette is of course not limited to the two features we screened at the Globe Cinema last week. It surely begins with his feature debut, Paris nous appartient, yes, but then it continues very clearly through such masterpieces as L'amour fou (1969), both versions of Out 1, especially the twelve-hour Out 1, noli me tangere (1971), Le pont du Nord, and later, in variant form, such films as Haut bas fragile (1995) and Secret défense (1998). We might legitimately say of the paranoid strain in Rivette that it is “quasi-religious” and that it involves the imaginative hijacking of the paranoid mindset, supposition of a cosmically vast conspiracy of friends, such that the paranoid mindset betrays its availability to and for emancipatory projects. In her book-length study on Rivette for the University of Illinois Press, scholar Mary M. Wiles pinpoints the specific ways in which all this business is essentially already in play insofar as pertains to that debut narrative feature. “In its concurrent classical and cold war conspiracy scenarios, the film draws an implicit parallel between antiquity and the contemporary world, between theater and cinema, between the dramaturge and the film director, and in this way re-presents the quotidian world of postwar Paris with the force of ancient ritual.” Wiles opposes “the subcultural, communal student ethos of the Théâtre National Populaire” with “threat of co-option by capitalist speculators,” extensive of a system of control “no longer visible or identifiable.” The geopolitical context is already eminently paranoid—Paris nous appartient is released two years before Pynchon’s V—but it is precisely the theatrical adoption of ancient ritual in the paranoid geopolitical context that presents itself as the launchpad for new/old mythologies and countercultural praxis. Because Rivette believed devotedly in cinema as an “impure art” assimilating elements of all those to have preceded it, Wiles has much ground to cover when it comes to the numerous influences on any given Rivette film, which will tend to come from popular cinema, theatre, literature, music, operatic dramaturgy, painting, the plastic arts, radical politics, anthropology, et cetera. Though her study is fairly exhaustive, two glaring omissions stood out to me when I read Wiles’s book. Though she mentions the influence of early French serials (on Paris nous appartient especially), she eschews direct mention of the films of Louis Feuillade. Likewise, she makes only passing mention of the Situationists and May ’68. The latter exclusion is a little difficult to comprehend. It did not seem to me possible to present Paris nous appartient and Le pont du Nord to audiences without establishing them as collaborative cinematic works which exist on opposite sides of a provisional line demarcated by May ’68. Those famous May ’68 graffito aphorisms—“take your desires for reality,” “under the paving stones the beach,” “it’s forbidden to forbid”—are already very much the stuff of Rivette’s poetical group interventions. It also bears noting that there is a historical correspondence between the birth of the nouvelle vague and that of the Situationist International, the latter movement more or less coalescing around unofficial figureheads Guy Debord and Michèle Bernstein, who were married in 1954 and founded the movement, so to speak, in 1957, the same year as the release of Francois Truffaut’s short Les mistons, starring Gérard Blain and Bernadette Lafont, and the year after Rivette’s first short, Le coup du berger. Around the time Rivette is mired in efforts to complete the protracted production and post-production of Paris nous appartient, Michèle Bernstein publishes two louche youth culture novels in an effort to raise funds for her and her husband and their burgeoning movement. In a 2008 Semiotext(e) edition of 1960’s All the King's Horses, the first of these two novels, Odile Passot addresses, in her Afterword, the influence of Marcel Carné's 1942 film Les visiteurs du soir and how in Bernstein's novels Paris becomes a kind of Medieval forest. This not only sounds a lot like what is going on in Rivette’s films, it is in fact a principle with a vivid genealogy. To transform the urban environment by way of a kind of ambulatory group necromancy is what we would these days call “psychogeography.” The Situationists called it “derivé,” and before them, in the 1930s, the Surrealists, under the leadership of syndicate boss André Breton, indexed the same practices using the term “disponibilité.” In the 19th century the psychogeographer was simply called a “flâneur" or “boulevardier.” Rivette’s films very often seem to comprise above all a salubrious combination of psychogeography, archaic (usually explicitly matriarchal) myth/ritual, and the geopolitics of a paranoid and oblique post-atomic age. Extending too much credence to the especially paranoid nature of the post-war landscape is probably inadvisable. Here is a nice point to come back to the serials of Louis Feuillade, sort of like the Netflix of nineteen-teens Paris, and especially 1915’s Les vampires, released in instalments the same year that brought us Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation, though, running in its compiled entirety at seven hours, it is three hours and forty-five minutes longer. The second of the three most prized of Feuillade's serials—sandwiched between Fantômas (1913) and Judex (1916)—the ten episodes of Les vampires feature shifting identities (adopted or abandoned like so much costumery), massive criminal conspiracies, beheadings and executions, necromancy and cryptography. And, uh, parkour. A characteristic title card at the opening of episode seven, “Satanas”: “Enslaved by the hypnotic gaze of the bandit Moréno, and later made his mistress, Irma Vep has assassinated the phony Count de Kerlor, Grand Master of the Vampires.” Keeping with the vertiginous slippages and rearrangements of the series, the subsequent episode will rapidly make mincemeat of most of these assertions. For a time we will be asked to consider the possibility that Satanas is the actual Grand Master of the Vampires. By the end of the tenth and final episode? As critic and essayist Luc Sante contends, respective of Rivette’s Paris nous appartient rather than the Feuillade, which the summation would suit equally well: “you will not arrive at a decipherable code.” A large part of why Les vampires was so iconic for the Dadaists, then the Surrealists and many who subsequently followed, has to do with the bewitching presence of the chameleonic and wildly anarchic persona of the great Musidora, who stars as cat-burgling super-villain Irma Vep. A recent edition from Atlas Press of scene-making opportunist Louis Aragon’s not-very-good 1921 roman à clef Anicet or the Panorama: A Dadaist Novel features an image on its cover of Musidora, succubus of the id, licensed out for a bit of foppish fan fiction. Louis Aragon was born near the end of the 19th century, in 1897. Musidora was born in 1889, a little over a month after Nietzsche goes mad in Turin, thereafter spending the final decade of the 19th century insensate and incontinent at his mother’s house, finally dying in August of 1900. If the nineteen-teens and the 1960s were paranoid and crazy, they don’t have much on fin de siècle Paris, with its anarchist bombs going off in cafes on the regular and its various lunatic personalities the likes of Alfred Jarry, Léon Genonceaux, and François Claudius Koenigstein, A.K.A. Ravachol, the anarchist bomber executed by the state in 1892. I like to imagine a version of Fritz Lang’s The Testament of Dr. Mabuse in which Nietzsche is the Mabuse figure, and we keep cutting back to him, drooling and essentially comatose, as all manner of heinous Feuillade-grade madness erupts hither and thither across the European Continent, the intimation being that the non compos mentis philosopher is orchestrating all of this sordid business from somewhere deep in his sinister and inscrutable psychic recesses. It might make a better novel than film, and I suppose we can only lament that Paul West is no longer around to give it the old college try. We know Thomas Pynchon must have had Louis Feuillade and Les vampires in mind when he was writing Against the Day, a wonderful 2006 novel whose opening section would appear to perhaps make the all too credible case that the 20th century properly commences with the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which is also featured in Michael Almereyda's new film Tesla. Nikola Telsa and Sigmund Freud were both born in 1856. Henri Bergson was born three years later. Alfred Jarry, father of ‘pataphysics, studied under Bergson, and you can detect the influence very distinctly in 1897’s Days and Nights, Jarry’s first novel. In Michael Almeryeda’s 2018 documentary short The Lonedale Operator, the title appropriated from a D. W. Griffith, the film’s subject, the great poet John Ashbery, discusses his immersion in the serials of Louis Feuillade when he, Ashbery, was a temporary Parisian in the mid-to-late-50s, a habitué of the Cinémathèque Française. Between 1961 and 1962, Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, and Harry Mathews were involved in creating and disseminating a short-lived literary journal called Locus Solus, named after the 1914 novel by Raymond Roussel. If we think of Joyce, Proust, and Kafka as the preeminent fathers of literary modernism, it has long been my contention that we do ourselves a disservice, as leaving out Jarry and Roussel is altogether unconscionable. I feel like I was myself remiss in neglecting, when I read it a year ago this month, to link (until immediately after having read it) Mathews’ 2004 novel My Life in CIA to the emancipatory ludic paranoia in the films of Jacques Rivette. When I read, in October of 2018, the third-ever edition of Joseph McElroy’s gigantic Women and Men, originally published in 1987 and a signed-by-the-author copy of which I purchased directly from its most recent publisher, Dzanc, I could not help but notice parallels with Rivette’s Out 1, noli me tangere, which I had only recently been able to view for the first time; both the McElroy and the Rivette are uncommonly long works that are urban, paranoid, and concerned with the domain of the conspiratorial—network narratives featuring a male and a female protagonist who almost completely fail (in McElroy's novel completely fail) to directly interact, with the theatre groups of Out 1 finding their equivalent in Women and Men in the form of the production of a fantastically odd sub-sub-Verdian Hamlet opera. Out 1 features a monumental performance from incandescent Rivette regular Juliet Berto. On the periphery of Feuillade's Les vampires hovers a mysterious personage named Juliette Berteaux, who an insert shot tells us lives at 3 rue Tourette, Paris, 11. What are we to make of all this? Evidence of a permanent sate of transtemporal revolution? Why not a religion? Have others not coalesced out of (or around) far less?
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