Time & Perspective Quote by Jacques Rivette

A confession disguised as a shrug, Rivette’s line is less about David Lynch than about the slow violence of taste maturing under pressure. Coming from a director forged in the French New Wave’s debates about what cinema should be, “I took a long time” reads like an admission of initial resistance: Lynch’s dream-logic, his soap-opera surfaces, his willful refusal to explain himself can look, at first pass, like provocation or mere oddity. Rivette is signaling that he once had the “wrong” toolkit.

The intent is generous and slightly self-incriminating. Appreciation here isn’t passive liking; it’s a learned mode of attention. Rivette’s own cinema trains viewers to accept duration, ambiguity, and off-screen mystery as the point, not the obstacle. That he still needed time to “get” Lynch suggests Lynch isn’t simply surreal; he’s operating with a different emotional grammar, one where sincerity and parody coexist in the same shot and where mood outranks plot without abandoning narrative entirely.

Subtext: critics and filmmakers often posture as instant authorities, as if the best art arrives already legible. Rivette quietly punctures that performance. He also hints at a broader cultural lag: European cinephile traditions, with their prestige codes, weren’t always ready to take seriously an American artist who smuggled avant-garde dread through genre, television, and pop music textures.

Context matters: by the time Lynch’s reputation hardened into canon, the early confusion had become part of the story. Rivette’s delayed appreciation is a reminder that the canon isn’t a verdict; it’s a relationship, revised over years, as our eyes catch up to what the work was doing all along.