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So surprise, surprise, from the very first frame: that art nouveau lettering in the titles and credits. Where’s it coming from, what’s it all about? Nothing I’d read gave even the slightest clue. Lots of literary speculations on antecedents and influences (Henry James, Lewis Carroll, etc). But right up front there’s an actual visual motif—it’s a MOOOVIE, after all—and nobody’s ever bothered to notice, as far as I can check on the Internet. (Though if we’re back to rummaging through paper-based archives, musty old libraries of forgotten information, then all bets are off.)
But that art nouveau thing: it saturates the film, or at least the “contemporary” half of it—which is arguably less contemporary than the chamber drama it surrounds, the Jamesian story within a story (30s period in my view, from the deco stylizations, though per Jonathan Rosenbaum, with corroboration from Rivette himself, it actually references 50s Hollywood). It almost seems an homage, if not to Parisian nouveau exactly, then to the Montmartrean belle epoque, which in practice amounts to the same thing: curvilinear fonts and letterings, period streetscapes captured in the verite tracks and pans (including an incredible “ghost” house where the 30s/50s tale unwinds: all that variegated brick, like something out of Raimondo D’Aronco), ornamental graphics in a kid’s picture book. Everything is of a piece, inflected by default-styling nouveau. What’s odd to me, though, is Rivette’s choice of typeface for the intertitles et al: apparently Boecklin standard, a Swiss-German font rather than a specifically French one. You have to wonder why an ostensible period homagist didn’t opt for, let’s say, Metropolitain, typographic brainchild of axiomatic French nouveau designer Hector Guimard, whose architectural masterwork was—well, of course!—the Paris Metro.
