Along with Jean-Luc Godard, Francois Truffaut, Claude Chabrol and JacquesRivette, all former film critics, he helped pioneer an informal film movement that turned traditional notions of narrative and style on their head.
JacquesRivette made his first feature with little funding and great difficulty between 1958 and 1960 and refracted his struggles into its plot, which combines the paranoid tension of the American film noir and the austere lyricism of the modern theatre.