Jacques Rivette’s absorbing long films come to I-House

Bulle and Pascal Ogier star in Jacques Rivette’s “Le Pont du Nord.”
Credit: The Film Desk

There are filmmakers who made longer films than Jacques Rivette, but few who have made as many incredibly long films. Rivette’s record is 1971’s “Out 1,” which runs some 15 ½ hours. (It was originally intended for TV, but no station would take on such an experimental project.) Comparatively, the three films in I-House’s weekend Rivette retro are on the short side. “L’Amour Fou,” his 1968 chronicle of a crumbling marriage (inspired by Jean-Luc Godard and Anna Karina), runs four dense hours.

His most famous work, 1974’s “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” goes for 3 ½, and only a fraction of it at the end features boating. The recently restored “Le Pont Du Nord” — with real-life mom and daughter Bulle and Pascale Ogier loosely investigating a mystery — is a relative quickie at just over two hours. Each brims over with playfulness, sucking willing viewers into their shape-shifting structures. They’re long, but emerging from them after it’s easy to wish they’d never end.

Jacques Rivette
Friday, Sept. 6 and Saturday, Sept. 7
International House
3701 Chestnut St.