"When you see the films of certain young directors, you get the impression that film history begins for them around 1980"
About this Quote
Rivette’s jab lands because it’s delivered with the calm of a cinephile who’s already done the homework and is tired of watching others fake it. He’s not accusing “certain young directors” of ignorance in the neutral, library sense; he’s indicting a posture: a way of making movies as if cinema sprang fully formed from the post-New Hollywood, VHS-era churn, and the first wave of MTV grammar. The line is funny because it’s specific. “Around 1980” isn’t just a date, it’s a border checkpoint: on one side, a century of invention in framing, staging, montage, sound, and narrative risk; on the other, a narrower canon mediated by broadcast, videocassettes, and increasingly industrialized taste.
The subtext is a warning about cultural amnesia disguised as confidence. Rivette, a pillar of the French New Wave and a critic-turned-director, came up in a tradition that treated film history as an active toolkit. To him, you don’t cite Renoir or Mizoguchi to be classy; you steal from them to stay alive. So when a new generation behaves as if cinema begins with the aesthetics they grew up consuming, it reads like a refusal of lineage and, more damningly, a refusal of possibility. If you don’t know what’s been tried, you can’t know what you’re repeating.
Context matters: this is an old argument in a medium that reinvents its own past every time technology shifts. Rivette is naming the moment when access (home video, television, later cable) expands while memory paradoxically shrinks to whatever is easiest to rewatch, quote, and market.
The subtext is a warning about cultural amnesia disguised as confidence. Rivette, a pillar of the French New Wave and a critic-turned-director, came up in a tradition that treated film history as an active toolkit. To him, you don’t cite Renoir or Mizoguchi to be classy; you steal from them to stay alive. So when a new generation behaves as if cinema begins with the aesthetics they grew up consuming, it reads like a refusal of lineage and, more damningly, a refusal of possibility. If you don’t know what’s been tried, you can’t know what you’re repeating.
Context matters: this is an old argument in a medium that reinvents its own past every time technology shifts. Rivette is naming the moment when access (home video, television, later cable) expands while memory paradoxically shrinks to whatever is easiest to rewatch, quote, and market.
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| Topic | Movie |
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