Drucker wrote:
There is a mindset to get in when watching a Rivette film, and that's what makes them "difficult", not the length.
I like this observation a lot. I remember a similar conversation about "difficulty" came up in the Arrow thread and I continue to have a hard time understanding Rivette as "difficult."
Indeed, what does it mean to say that a film or filmmaker is difficult? Perhaps films that are so densely allusive that they require a good deal of "outside" knowledge before viewing? Rivette is nothing like this, though. While there are allusions to film genres or even specific filmmakers, these are just fun little extras that are by no means required in order to enjoy the films. There is nothing to "get" in Rivette; everything is pretty much on the surface. The pleasure of Rivette is in the experience: the surrender to the flow of his wacky narratives and characters.
It seems to me that the discourse of difficulty presumes an idea of mastery. Certain films are easy to master while others are more difficult. This also implies a centralized meaning that it is the task of the viewer to reveal. Ironically, Rivette's narratives allegorize this kind of hermeneutic with their various conspiracies. Rivettes's films are, at the level of surface content, rejections of precisely the search for meaning that I think undergirds the entire discourse of difficulty!
So, to return to Drucker's quite incisive observation above, I would argue that one's enjoyment of Rivette is in large part determined by whether or not one thinks about film in terms of "uncovering a meaning" or in terms of an experience. The latter is the mindset that Rivette requires.
I think it is important that this not be misunderstood as a kind of elitism, either, as through only a "select few" are worthy of Rivette. That is nonsense. Another thing the discourse of difficulty does is to make cinephilia into a kind of video game: level 1 is contemporary Hollywood, level 2 is Kubrick and Scorsese, level 3 is Truffaut and Kurosawa, and then eventually you can "beat" enough of the levels to reach the heights of Rivette, Akerman, and Straub/Huillet. The result is that people want to prove their high level by making sure they like all the appropriate filmmakers. Worse, people who don't like Rivette get defensive, as if they think their cinephilia is being called into question. This is all absurd, of course, but I sense this subtext in conversations about difficulty.