Rivette

Frenhofer (Michel Piccoli) is a once famous artist - still of great renown, but he has been unable to paint anything of significance for a number of years. A young artist Nicolas (David Bursztein) and his girlfriend Marianne (Emmanuelle Béart) visit the artist at his country mansion in the South of France and a certain tension develops between Frenhofer and Marianne. Frenhofer believes that she could help him complete his great unfinished masterpiece – La Belle Noiseuse. The idea causes inevitable tensions and friction between Frenhofer and his wife Liz (Jane Birkin) and between Marianne and Nicolas. Each have to ask how far they will go to allow the creation of a work of art. Will they go as far as allowing The Beautiful Troublemaker to destroy their own lives and ambitions?

Rivette's rarely seen yet biggest commercial hit, is an exhilarating combination of the themes oftheatricality, paranoia and la vie parisienne, all wrapped up in an extended and entrancing examination of the nature of filmmaking, and film-watching.

This book examines the theoretical affiliations between the most notable proponent of literary realism, Honoré de Balzac, and two understated but key representatives of the French New Wave, Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette. It argues that their film criticism, which gradually led to the establishment of a common aesthetic vision of cinema (the “politique des auteurs”), owes more to Balzac and the nineteenth-century novel than to any intellectual trend of the immediate post-war period.