It’s absolutely amazing to me how guys like Jacques Rivette, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard — all of whom are in their 70’s and 80’s, and major players in world cinema — are still cranking out movies at a regular and energetic pace. These guys are unstoppable. And this week, Jacques Rivette’s new movie, “The Duchess of Langeais,” is getting its New York debut.

The New York Times has got a thorough and very entertaining appreciation of Rivette, written by film critic Dennis Lim and titled “An Uncertain Je Ne Sais Quoi.” In it, Lim rightly points out that, among all the French moviemakers who came out of the New Wave, Rivette is probably the least appreciated and understood.

My feeling is that Rivette’s artistic-philosophical themes never quite connected with audiences in the same emotional-visceral way Truffaut’s sentimentality or Godard’s politicking did, or, likewise, Rohmer’s (slightly kinky) deviant romances, or Chabrol’s thrillers. Lim spells it all out quite well, and also elaborates on just how amazing, important, enlightening, and hypnotic Rivette’s movies really are — they’re immersive experiences in exactly the way he describes, as if the characters are conjuring up the stories as we watch them, or the viewer is conjuring them up by the act of watching. It’s truly a magical experience.

And that brings me to the great tragedy here, which is that filmmakers even as well-esteemed as Rivette (and so, so many others) — unless they get the full-on Criterion treatment — just get shoved aside in the helter skelter of the theatrical and home video marketplace. Only a few of his movies are available on Netflix, and Amazon prices to buy them are running in the $35-$45 range — not exactly friendly enough to entice a Rivette newbie.

The good news for the moment is that I discovered that Jaman has THREE of Rivette’s movies. Mind you, none of the guy’s movies (with the exception of “La Belle Noiseusse”) is that well-known, so this is the perfect opportunity to get a taste of this man’s brand of cinema, and familiarize yourself with a major filmmaker with DVD quality viewing that won’t set back the wallets of bohemian cinephiles the world over.

Here are the trailers to Jaman’s Rivette collection: “Secret Defense,” “Gang of Four,” and “Wuthering Heights” to give you a head-start on your Rivette discoveries. Check them out:

Wuthering Heights:
Wuthering Heights

Gang of Four:
Gang of Four

Secret Defense:
Secret Defense

Here’s hoping that online cinema makes the world a friendlier place for underserved artists like Rivette, Satyajit Ray, and their younger generations of proteges.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 17th, 2008 at 3:00 pm and is filed under Trailers, Bloggers, News, Filmmakers!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.