If I may, there is an interesting bit about
Le Quadrille in Richard Brody's new book about Godard. Some of it is already up at Order of the Exile, some other infos - such as the names of the actors - were new to me. Rivette's quotes seem to be taken from the author's own interviews with him. Pretty cool stuff for people who are as interested in Rivette trivia as I am.
"In the summer of 1950, Truffaut made plans to shoot a 16mm film, but the project was unrealized. At the time, however, Rivette, tried his hand at another 16mm project with a title reminiscent of that of his earlier
Aux Quatre Coins. "Godard saw to the production of my film,
Quadrille," Rivette later recalled. "He was also the producer: he put up the money for the 16mm black and white reversible film." Explaining Godard's ability to do so, Rivette added: "Nobody had any money; he had a little bit more." Though Godard got a little money from his family, he admitted that the money that went into Rivette's film came from stealing and selling books from his grandfather Monod's "Valérianum", his collection of first, private, and rare editions by Paul Valéry. The film featured four actors: two women, Liliane Litvin and Anne-Marie Cazalis; one of the two men was Godard. According to Rivette, "It ran forty minutes and absolutely nothing happens. It's just four people sitting around a table, looking at each other." Suzanne Schiffman recalled, "At a given moment a guy slapped a girl and he walked out." The film was shown at the CCQL, where, according to Rivette, "After ten minutes, people started to leave, and at the end, the only ones who stayed were Jean-Luc and a girl."
In a "16mm Chronicle," published in the November 1950 issue of La Gazette du cinéma - the last before the publication folded due to poor sales - Godard reproached Henri Langlois of the Cinémathèque for failing to program Rivette's film. He praised the film as "an homage to the Lubitsch of
Lady Windermere's Fan," but did not mention his own participation in the film, behind and before the camera, or his friendship with its director.
The avant-gardism of Rivette's work arose from the Latin Quarter milieu that he frequented along with Godard. Asked whether the film was a surrealist provocation, Rivette later said, "No, Lettrist." As he explained, "The Lettrists were the successors to the surrealists and the precursors of the Situationists," and he added that the leader of the Lettrists, Isidore Isou, told him that the film was "ingenious." p. 19/20
Oh and ... *gasp*! IMDb announces an Untitled Jacques Rivette Project for 2009.
No doubt, a lesson to regularly back-up one's hard-drive and/or to make regular sacrifices to the gods/goddesses (I suppose Mercury would've been the right one in this case).
