WRITING : 2005 : JACQUES RIVETTE

Gone Boating

Michael Ned Holte

Jacques Rivette's 1974 film Céline and Julie Go Boating begins, more or less, where it will end: summertime, Montmarte, Paris, in a sparsely populated park. Julie, played by Dominique Labourier, is sitting on a bench, reading from the Practical Treatise of Magic, concentrating. Then, we hear it before we see it: Julie draws a circle in the dirt with the heavy heel of her pump.

Leaves tremble in the breeze. Céline, played by Juliet Berto, enters the screen from frame right, like magic. She drags her way across the park with palpable gravity, as if in slow motion, wearing a long, limp green boa. Céline's sunglasses fall to the ground. Julie hoots to get her attention, fails, picks up the sunglasses, and chases after Céline.

A cat-and-mouse game ensues with Julie chasing Céline out of the park, across the streets of Paris, through a crowded street market, up a tram. Shoes are removed in the middle of this. The mouse is not afraid. In fact, it could be the mouse playing the cat. Like a cartoon, the cat and mouse will chase each other again and again, in silly circles. Needing one another, becoming one another.        

Most of the time it started like this.

***

Julie is a librarian; Céline is a magicienne. Julie reads Tarot cards and Céline describes adventures that seem drawn from all the books in the Library of Babel.

Are Céline and Julie strangers who meet by chance, or friends who are playing a game in which they pretend to meet by chance? Are they lovers, each other's imagined friend, or complex aspects of one another? The last of these possibilities is suggested by the abundance of bad puns, which are like words reflected in a fun-house mirror. When Julie says 'forget-me-nots,' for example, Céline replies with 'forest of knots?'

In the beginning of the film, we could assume that Céline is conjured into existence by Julie's recited spell. Later in the film, Céline is seated at a café with a group of friends who are incredulous about her tale of a new wealthy, redheaded, American friend. Céline's story is fantastic—Julie is not American or wealthy—and for a moment at least one is asked to wonder if Julie is wholly a product of Céline's imagination.

At two crucial points in the film, one protagonist takes on the role of the other, however imperfectly. Play-acting is the perfect term, because acting is doubled...twice.

Juliet Berto as Céline as Julie; Dominique Labourier as Julie as Céline.

Reflecting each other. Being each other.

Céline plays Julie to meet Julie's childhood lover Guilou (Philippe Clévenot) in the park. Guilou is unaware of the switch, and the well-mannered courtship routine slips away into outrageous, Mannerist theatricality—imagine a scene from a Hollywood musical directed by Brecht or Ionesco—and Guilou is destroyed, along with his romantic fantasy.

Later, Julie takes the place of Céline at the Vaudeville theatre. She wears Céline's charming magicienne outfit, but cannot summon Céline's seductive, if distant, stage performance. The magic act quickly falls apart into a slapstick routine in which Julie insults the male audience (she calls them 'Cosmic Twilight Pimps') and exits, stage left, leaving the spotlight to illuminate an empty stage.            

Another possibility is suggested in the opening title sequence of the film, where Rivette, in a curious act of doubling, supplies a second title: Phantom Ladies Over Paris. Are we to believe the protagonists Céline and Julie are both spirits acting out a parallel 'reality' overlapping the reality presented on screen?

In the end, all of these possibilities remain just that. Rivette provides no convincing answers, but rather positions the active imaginations—or hallucinations—of his characters as a reflection of the audience's collective imagination. As spectators, we go into the theater willing to suspend disbelief and activate our imagination as we behold 'movie magic.' Less frequently are the characters given the same task as the audience: when Céline and Julie go boating, we go boating too.                

***

In The Imaginary Signifier (1977) Christian Metz claims that the cinematic image, though a real index of something in the world, apprehended by the camera, and given over to the very real perception of the viewer, is 'always-already imaginary':                 

What is characteristic of the cinema is not the imaginary it may happen to represent, but the imaginary it is from the start, the imaginary that constitutes it as a signifier (the two are not unrelated; it is so well able to represent it because it is it; however it is it even when it no longer represents it). The (possible) reduplication inaugurating the intention of fiction is preceded in the cinema by a first reduplication, always-already achieved, which inaugurates the signifier. The imaginary, by definition, combines within it a certain presence and a certain absence. In the cinema it is not just the fictional signified, if there is one, that it is thus made present in the mode of absence, it is from the outset a signifier.

Thus, the cinema, 'more perceptual' than certain arts according to the list of its sensory registers, is also 'less perceptual' than others once the status of these perceptions is envisioned rather than their number or diversity; for its perceptions are all in a sense 'false.' Or rather, the activity of perception which it involves is real (the cinema is not a phantasy), but the perceived is not really the object, it is its shade, its phantom, it double, its replica in a new kind of mirror.

Rivette seems to anticipate Metz's definition of the cinematic imaginary by implicating the viewer in the fictional process. We watch Céline and Julie through the looking glass of cinema, falling into their narrative, just as they fall into another narrative that plays out before their eyes, as if on a screen. They stare at us with rapt attention, sometimes horrified, sometimes amused, giggling. Their screen is our screen too, a two-way mirror. Though never verbally articulated in the film, a potent play-on-words emerges in the etymological proximity of 'specter' (from the Latin specere, to look at) and 'spectator' (from spectare, to watch).

Céline and Julie take turns visiting a mansion at 7 bis rue du nadir aux Pommes—a house that may or may not be haunted. A strange, dark melodrama is taking place inside the house, and the tragic events that transpire seem to be looped, repeating day after day. Our protagonists report to each other on the events they witness, respectively, as if trying to recall the plot of a movie. Each woman leaves the house groggy and shaken, with an imperfect memory of what she has just witnessed. When they emerge from the house, they find magic candy in their mouths. As they tell the story to one another, gaps emerge in the characters' memories, and the fragmentary events play out before our eyes as the story unfolds in fits and starts.   

Later, they ingest the candy in order to review the events that transpire in the mansion, and enter the looping narrative. Playing maids, Céline and Julie discover a rather inert love triangle between Sophie (Marie-France Pisier), Camille (a translucent Bulle Olgier), and the widower Olivier (Barbet Schroeder)—who may or may not be ghosts. As their investigation continues, it appears that Olivier's daughter Madlyn (Nathalie Asnar) is about to be murdered at the hands of one of the characters in the house. Céline and Julie conspire to rescue Madlyn—not only from the house, but from the cyclical narrative in which she is trapped.

Céline and Julie rescue Madlyn—and eventually they actually do go boating, with Madlyn in tow. By removing Madlyn from the narrative, Céline and Julie also rescue Sophie, Camille, and Olivier—who float by in another boat—from their repetitive fate.

***

Jacques Rivette, as director of the film, is less auteur than stage manager. I don't mean this as an insult. The strength of Céline and Julie Go Boating, at least in part, derives from Rivette's adept casting and the game improvisation of his actors. Though Rivette predetermined a loose structure for the film, there was no script, and storytelling credit is shared with the actors in the film.

Jean-Luc Godard has suggested that every film is a document of its actors, and Rivette's film is then, to some degree, a document of his actors' improvised performances. Godard's claim refracts Metz's statement about the always-already imaginary of cinema, but the two notions are not in complete contradiction. Both notions are at work—and at play—in Céline and Julie Go Boating, intertwining. The film documents the improvised fabulations of Juliet Berto and Dominique Labourier that shadow the fictional tale conjured by the protagonists Céline and Julie. This becomes more convoluted as Céline and Julie swallow magic candy and begin to occupy a place as characters in this fictional film-within-a-film, dissolving from one reality to another, or...from one imaginary to another. Take your pick.

Who can say for sure if hallucinations are real?

***

Despite his close relationship to the journal Cahiers du Cinema and therefore the New Wave tradition of Godard, Truffaut, Rohmer, and Chabrol, Rivette's film feels less 'new' than those of his peers. The radicality of Celine and Julie Go Boating resides in the director's apparent faith in the primitive magic of cinema to put a spell on its audience by recovering and re-animating moving images in the dark. Call it old wave.

Never retreating from his medium's origins in the 'cinema of attractions,' Rivette's film returns to the stage—specifically the stage of Vaudeville—and flaunts its blatant theatricality for its spectators: Céline and Julie and us.  

Think of the film as a spectacular love letter to Méliès, cinema's first magician.    

Think of the film editor as a magician with the organizational skills of a librarian.

If the cinema image is the imaginary signifier described by Metz, cinema editing is the movie magic that allows impossible connections—or disconnections—in time and space, defying physics, logic...'reality.' Rivette and his editor Nicole Lubtchansky use the infinitely small, infinite dense cut that separates two shots to knit time and space—in the manner of Classic Hollywood continuity editing—but also to defy space and time by creating rabbit holes from which it might be possible to escape the world of continuity altogether.

Several times in the film, these rabbit holes are quite literally suggested by short insertions of black leader separating two seemingly identical shots, as if—unexpectedly—the projector were stopped for a brief moment to rewind the film so that we might re-view a few frames in order to capture the slightest gesture. Rivette's play between continuity and discontinuity might also be the play between a hazily imagined 'reality' and a reality too fragmentary to imagine.

Despite the overall lightheartedness of the film, the cuts from one shot to another are sometimes violent—like a shock—as Céline and Julie take turns attempting to fabricate a coherent story. Following one trip fueled by magic candy, an exasperated Céline sighs, 'It's full of holes. I don't know. It's like Swiss cheese.' She is referring to the story of the house at 7 bis rue du nadir aux Pommes and, of course, the film that passes before our eyes.     

If Céline and Julie Go Boating is fragmented, it is also—paradoxically—an elegantly constructed, circuitous, and perhaps porous model of time: a cosmology of rabbit holes and Swiss cheese.

***

The films ends, as I said early on, more or less where it begins, but this time Céline is sitting on the park bench. Julie enters the scene from frame right, in a terrible hurry. A book, the Practical Treatise of Magic, falls out of Julie's bag and lands on the ground. Céline calls out to Julie, who doesn't hear her or pretends not to hear her. Céline grabs the book and chases after Julie.

The magic circle inscribed on the ground in the beginning of the film takes the form of a Möbius strip as the film closes in on itself, with Céline and Julie on opposite sides, racing toward one another through the complexity of time and space. The game begins again.    

But, the next morning...

Catalogue essay published on the occassion of the exhibition Celine and Julie Go Boating, Anna Helwing Gallery, Los Angeles, July 9 through August 13, 2005.

WRITING : 2005 : JACQUES RIVETTE