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Le Divertissement (1952) Jacques Rivette

“The entertainment can change its settings, but its order will remain, and the same rules impose themselves immediately,” dryly observes a title card in the third film, Le divertissement. Rather than the radical change from first to second film, Le divertissement plays as a variation on its predecessor. Where Le quadrille was a game of social stasis, Rivette’s 1952 short is the play of social mobility—quite literally. A young Parisienne is introduced in a flurry of title cards revealing her obscure and poetic thought process over dodging the love of a beau. After this prologue, we follow the short-haired brunette to a party among friends that goes from backyard garden to Paris rooftops as she’s casually pursued and pawed over by most of the group’s men while the women take turns escorting her from one corner of the party to the other. “Cards and cigarettes counterbalance the fear of love,” we’re informed by the titles, which provide not dialogue for this third silent short, but rather the erudite psychological expansion of 19th century literature—such as a title that accuses our heroine of “the pride of solitude.” The initial explanations, which mainly serve to amplify this wanderer's hide-and-seek among her set, disappear until the final moments. Meanwhile, we watch the young woman flit or be taken here and there, dodging commitment, rebuffing advances and maintaining discreet secrecy over her personal desires. The cards reappear at the fleeting denouement, where chance and action meet serendipitously: “As one game ends another was about to start.” And here we were thinking that with Jacques Rivette’s death earlier this year our chance to play was over! But indeed, with these restorations, new games are afoot.

Daniel Kasman

We discover in these three early films how the filmmaker gradually mastered the art of mise-en-scène and editing. Filmed in Parisian parks and on a terrace, LE DIVERTISSEMENT foreshadows the labyrinthine walks that would be a part of Rivette’s cinema, in which the characters look for, follow and find each other like in a romantic scavenger hunt. The intertitles of LE DIVERTISSEMENT and LE QUADRILLE anticipate the Rivette’s tone and singular poetry.

Hervé Pichard

In the summer of 1952, Rivette filmed Le divertissement, another 16 mm production, which its cameraman Charles Bitsch described as “a Rohmeresque Marivaudage between young men and
women,” foreshadowing scenes in more recent films such as La bande des quatre (Frappat, Secret 98).

Mary M. Miles