Jacques Rivette / 雅克·里维特 · 1974
Céline and Julie Go Boating
Céline et Julie vont en bateau
A Paris chase loosens ordinary action; sweets then send the women into a repeatedly staged house story. They move from spectators and doubles to participants who rewrite the plot and rescue the child; bodies, play, and repetition fabricate another route through reality.
Film details
- Original title
- Céline et Julie vont en bateau
- Director
- Jacques Rivette / 雅克·里维特
- Year
- 1974
- Region
- France
Film analysis: how shots organize concepts
Wandering, sweets, and replay let spectators enter fiction and alter it, making fantasy an action that produces real relations.
- 01Everyday routes loosen
Dropped objects, pursuit, disguise, and chance meetings turn Parisian action into playful wandering.
Goals cease to govern perception; bodies acquire improvisational connectivity. - 02Sweets open the repeated scene
After the sweet is ingested, the house story replays in fragments, and the women alternate as spectators and doubles.
The sweet becomes a bodily threshold between actual everyday life and virtual drama. - 03Spectators rewrite fiction
The women enter the house together, interrupt the scripted death, and rescue the child.
Fabulation no longer repeats the story; it produces a new real relation.
Close-reading questions
- 01From the park chase to exchanging clothes, jobs, and homes, how do Céline and Julie use bodily imitation and role relay to undo the fixed boundary between two identities?
- 02Each sweet returns them to the house, where the same family murder drama replays in fragments and variations; how do these repetitions make fiction a temporal layer that can be remembered, compared, and rewritten?
- 03When the pair finally enter the house together and rescue Madlyn, how do spectators' bodies cross a screen-like boundary and directly alter a fiction that previously could only repeat?
Analysis and scene sources
Shots and scenes
Primary texts, scholarship, and locators
Theory coordinate: Cinema 2, Minnesota 1989, ch. 1, p. 11; ch. 8, p. 200
- 01Cinema 2: The Time-Image
Authoritative source for the standard translation, translators, ISBN, and publication date.
Open the atlas source record →
This film in books and research
《缠绕的诗学：德勒兹思维方法研究》 · Atlas extension
Céline and Julie Go Boating
Film relation: Site extension: sweets, the house, and repeated performance turn Alice-like learning through signs into a cinematic apparatus.
Shot question: What difference is added on each re-entry into the house, and how does it change the two viewers?
Viewing gateways and editions
- Criterion Collectioncriterion.comOpen film page ↗
- Source type
- Distributor or streaming platform