BRAIN CANDY Dominique Labourier, left, and Juliet Berto prepare for the unreal in Céline and Julie Go Boating.

“I like film to be an adventure,” Jacques Rivette, now 78, once said, “for those who make it and for those who see it.” One of the architects of the French New Wave, Rivette has made wondrously challenging movies, multilayered ruminations on liberty, time, chance and fantasy. Notoriously lengthy, Rivette’s films amply reward the spectators’ patience, giving us the opportunity to observe the beauty of fiction pushed to the extreme. Yet the problem, at least for American audiences, has been actually seeing Rivette’s films, few of which have ever had a theatrical release in this country. Adventurous cinemagoers have had their prayers answered: The Museum of the Moving Image is presenting the first complete Rivette retrospective in the U.S., including Out 1, his 12-and-a-half–hour magnum opus from 1971.

Rivette’s films explore many themes: performance, theatricality, the creative process, conspiracy. More than any other of the quintet of Cahiers du Cinéma–critics-turned-filmmakers (who also include Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol), Rivette focuses on women—not just on female protagonists but on the lives of women removed from men. His second feature, The Nun (1965), somewhat anomalous in the Rivette oeuvre for its conventional structure, made the director a cause célèbre; the film was initially banned in France for its anticlericalism. Based on Denis Diderot’s 1760 novel, The Nun chronicles the life of Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina), a young woman with neither a dowry nor a vocation, who is forced by her parents to enter a convent. Horrifically claustrophobic, Rivette’s film is a profound treatise on freedom: “I ask to be free because I did not give up my liberty voluntarily,” Suzanne says to her cruel mother superior.

Almost 30 years later, Rivette would return to the period-set epic with the astounding Joan the Maid (1994), with Sandrine Bonnaire giving an achingly complex performance as Joan of Arc. Four hours long, Rivette’s film, unlike other treatments by Carl Dreyer, Otto Preminger and Robert Bresson (which focus on Joan’s trial), follows the teenage warrior’s many triumphs, setbacks, doubts and anguish as she leads her countrymen into battle.

But it’s the titular heroines in Rivette’s delirious masterpiece Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) who are the apotheosis of his remarkable women. Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian, is immediately entranced by magician Céline (Juliet Berto). Together they play a recurring role in a bizarre melodrama occurring inside a mysterious house. Loosely based on two short stories by Henry James, Céline and Julie also exhibits traces of Proust, Carroll and Borges— not to mention Hitchcock and the serials of Louis Feuillade. Above all, the film is a paean to the fantasies and derring-do of its heroines.

Céline and Julie is also one of the many films Rivette developed in collaboration with his actors. Bulle Ogier, who not only acted in and coscripted Céline and Julie but has worked with the director on several of his more experimental films, has fond memories of the process. Reached at her home in Paris, Ogier, 67, recalls: “My experience with Jacques has been extremely rich because it’s been that of an actor-creator. Each movie was a great adventure because the films were created as he was making them. Sometimes he had only a few pages [of script] and then he built on them with the actors as he was shooting.” Ogier’s adventures with Rivette continue: She finished making Ne touchez pas la hache with him last spring.

Nathalie Richard, who’s acted in three Rivette films—including costarring with Ogier in Gang of Four (1988), playing a drama disciple with shady connections—also praises Rivette’s collaborative process. “Jacques is so curious about everything,” Richard, 42, says on the phone from Paris. “You’re really discovering the movie when you’re doing it. Jacques keeps his mystery, because I think he has an idea from the beginning, but he doesn’t talk about it very much. We discover his idea after we see the movie.”

In Claire Denis’s 1990 portrait, Jacques Rivette: The Night Watchman, the diffident, wiry auteur expertly parries the questions of French film critic Serge Daney. Yet his cool, calm responses turn almost rapturous when he discusses the closing shot of a film he had recently seen, Patricia Mazuy’s Peaux de Vaches (1988). Wonderment, exhilaration, bafflement: All await those who make the journey to Astoria for this once-in-a-lifetime event.

“The Complete Jacques Rivette” runs November 10–December 31 at the Museum of the Moving Image.