Was Alain Resnais really a nouvelle vague filmmaker? Perhaps the distinction lacks any useful significance, but conflating Resnais with Godard or Truffaut disregards important differences between them. Artistically Resnais was heavily influenced by Proust, Modernist fine arts, and his nouvelle roman friends. We can see his documentaries and feature films as attempts to incorporate these aesthetic and and political trends into cinema. We should thus consider understanding Resnais as making films in what Bazin classifies as the illusionist art tradition. The early films of Godard and Truffaut were instead in the realist tradition. Influenced almost entirely by other filmmakers in history, they directed films as a reaction to the popular and supposedly “awful” French films made after WWII. Further, there are striking formal and aesthetic differences between the staging and gloss found within the early features of Resnais and the neo-realist look of the concurrent Truffaut and Godard features. Are these differences enough to warrant Resnais’s exclusion from the nouvelle vague? I say yes.

We seem to also disagree on Rivette’s stamp on 36 Views from the Pic Saint-Loup. Yes, aesthetically late Rivette films are a pleasure to sit through but we should attribute most of what you define as ‘spatial texture’ to the cinematography as all films shot by the Lubchanskys (or others like Harris Savides or Eric Gautier to name a few) share in this look. Similarly, the sound design and camera movement that you mention are equally prevalent in other contemporary art-house cinema. I also disagree with your assessment of Rivette’s thematic tropes to be “performance as identity, mysteries that must be unraveled, sheer joy from using performance as play.” This non-descript and empty list of topics misses his films’ attention to the act of narrative construction, which his overt focus on secrets, fantasy, and theater help to support. His better films like Pont du Nord or La Belle Noiseuse emphasize both the characters’ and the audience’s suspension of disbelief as the film unfolds. His weaker films, like 36 Views or Hurlevent, lack this type of ludic interaction. Yes there’s probably a reason to enjoy watching any film, but 36 Views offers very little of Rivette’s stamp for what makes him a terrific filmmaker. But I agree, far from an abortion.