News

When French New Wave icon Jacques Rivette passed away earlier this year, the outpour of admiration from the film community was deafening, with obituaries flooding the internet and retrospectives quickly taking shape at film centers across the country. It has been almost a year since Rivette’s death, but luckily he’ll continue to thrive on the big screen well into 2017 and beyond. Film distributor Cohen Media Group has acquired 10 features by Rivette for restoration and release under the Cohen Film Collection banner. Variety first reported the news.

Read More: Tributes to French New Wave Master Jacques Rivette, Dead at 87

The 10 features included in the deal are all from Rivette’s career from 1984 and after. The titles include: “Love on the Ground” (1984), “Wuthering Heights” (1985), “The Gang of Four” (1989), “The Beautiful Troublemaker” (1991), “Divertimento” (1992), the two-part Joan of Arc biopic “Joan the Maiden: Part 1 – The Battles” (1994) and “Joan the Maiden: Part 2 – The Prisons” (1994), “Up,...

"Le vieux Paris s’en va!"1

—Rallying cry, late 1800s

"Old Paris is no more (the form of a city

Changes more quickly, alas! than the human heart)"

—Charles Baudelaire, “Le Cygne,” Fleurs du mal

Paris s’en va. Paris goes away. Paris disappears.

Two women lying next to each other on a bench, wake up. A hard cut to a shot of one of the women approaching a newspaper stand on a Parisian street. She scans the rack of postcards and chooses five with a picture of the Arc de Triomphe. The characters played by Bulle and Pascale Ogier in Jacques Rivette’s Le Pont du Nord (1981) could be described as that classic French type, the flâneur, “masking under multiple impressions the void” felt within and around themselves.2 In Paris s’en va (1981), these unnamed characters appear more like spirits, ghosts awoken from a centuries-long slumber by the expansive...