Although Francois Truffaut has written that the New Wave began "thanks to Rivette," the films of this masterful French director are not well known. Rivette, like his CAHIERS DU CINEMA colleagues Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Eric Rohmer, did graduate to filmmaking but, like Rohmer, was something of a late bloomer as a director. He made two shorts ("Aux quatre coins" 1949 and "Le Quadrille" 1950, starring Jean-Luc Godard); in the mid-1950s he served as an assistant to Jean Renoir and Jacques Becker; and in 1958 he was, along with Chabrol, the first of the five to begin
