Rivette's challenging, intellectually inquiring, uncompromisingly long films are probably the most under-appreciated among the works of this outstanding group, but he managed to build up an impressive and consistent oeuvre over 50 years.

Ironically, for a director so steeped in cinema, theatre dominates much of his work, one of his principal themes being the play-within-a-film. The creative process rather than the finished product was what interested him, a theme that he explored in his first feature, Paris Nous Appartient (Paris Belongs to Us, 1960), in which a group of amateur actors come together in a deserted Paris in summer to stage a performance of Shakespeare's Pericles. Because of a lack of funds, it was made over a period of years – using borrowed equipment, bits and pieces of film stock and the spare time of his performers – and reflects the struggles of creation against all odds. Its austere style builds up an atmosphere of doom, as deaths occur and there is a fear of a conspiracy. Paris is a constant background to his films; it is seen as realistically as possible but fantastic things take place there.

His films broke with traditional production methods, having virtually no shooting script and capturing the freshness of their genesis. In L'Amour Fou (1969) a theatre group prepares to stage Racine's Andromaque while being filmed by a TV team. More than four hours long, the film – shot in both 35mm and 16mm – was developed from improvisations with the actors and technicians. In Out 1 (1971), two plays by Aeschylus are being rehearsed separately by a man and a woman who used to live together. The film originally ran for 12 hours 40 minutes, but was cut down to around a third of that length as Out 1: Spectre (1973). Rivette claimed that the extreme length was integral to its meaning and texture. Very few of his films last less than two and a half hours. As they do not seek to reach any conclusion, they could continue for ever.

Rivette, the son of a pharmacist, was born in Rouen, where he attended the lycée. Before going to Paris in 1949, aged 21, he had already completed a 20-minute silent film in 16mm called Aux Quatre Coins (In All Four Corners). He hoped to study at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques in Paris, but was not accepted, so began his own cinematic education by immersing himself in films screened at the Cinémathèque Française. It was there that he met Godard, Rohmer and Chabrol.

In 1950, he became involved with the Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin and contributed articles to its bulletin, the Gazette du Cinéma, edited by Rohmer. Rivette's friendship with Rohmer led him to the new film journal Cahiers du Cinéma. Rivette's writings at Cahiers primarily concerned the US cinema of the 1940s and 50s, and he championed Howard Hawks, John Ford and Nicholas Ray.

His first film in 35mm was Le Coup du Berger (Fool's Mate, 1956), a 28-minute comedy following the fate of a mink coat passed through a series of unfaithful lovers. Co-scripted by Chabrol, in whose apartment it was shot, it featured Godard and Truffaut in small parts. Paris Nous Appartient emerged four years later, coming in on the crest of the New Wave. His second feature, La Religieuse (The Nun, 1965), taken from a 1760 novel by Diderot, was briefly banned in France on grounds of anti-clericism, although it was shown in Cannes in the interim. The story deals with Suzanne Simonin (Anna Karina), forced to enter a convent where she is subjected to semi-starvation and beatings, as well as the lesbian attentions of the mother superior.

Directed with austere detachment and an authentic sense of claustrophobia and pain, it suggests that the corruption and cruelty lurking behind the facade of religion is a metaphor for the world at large.

If La Religieuse was probably Rivette's most conventional film, his most accessible was Céline et Julie Vont en Bateau (Céline and Julie Go Boating, 1974), a brilliantly comic meditation on the nature of fiction. Two girls, a magician and a librarian, meet in Montmartre and get involved in an endless theatrical melodrama being played out in a suburban house. Their efforts to alter the course of the drama are as fruitless as the audience's wish to influence the characters in a film they are watching.

The film began a cycle of films which Rivette called his "house of fiction" – an enigmatic film-making style influenced by the work of the silent director Louis Feuillade and involving improvisation, ellipsis and considerable narrative experimentation.

In 1976, he made Duelle, a film noir, and Noroît, a pirate adventure, back to back as part of an ambitious four-part project, Scènes de la Vie Parallèle. The intention of the series, as Rivette explained, was "to invent a new approach to film acting, where speech, pared down to essential phrases, precise formulas, would play the role of poetic punctuation". The idea was to create four different films with a running subplot involving a mythical war between goddesses of the Sun (Bulle Ogier) and the Moon (Juliet Berto), fighting for possession of a mysterious jewel. He began the third, L'Histoire de Marie et Julien (The Story of Marie and Julien) with Albert Finney and Leslie Caron, but three days into shooting suffered a nervous breakdown which brought the project to an end. He finally shot it 27 years later with Emmanuelle Béart and Jerzy Radziwiłowicz as the mysterious woman and the clockmaker in the title roles. The 2003 film, with its thin line between dream and reality, retained the surreal atmosphere of Rivette's films of the 70s.

Both L'Amour par Terre (Love on the Ground, 1984) and La Bande des Quatre (The Gang of Four, 1988) continued the interplay between theatre and life. In the former, two foreign actors (Geraldine Chaplin and Jane Birkin) are requested by a rich and enigmatic playwright to appear in a special play he has written for a single performance at his chateau. The latter explores the way in which women relate to one another through an all-female theatre group rehearsing Marivaux's La Double Inconstance, which is disrupted by a mysterious man. Rivette's exploration of the act of creation reached its apex in La Belle Noiseuse (The Beautiful Troublemaker, 1991), which captured with painful lucidity the anguish of an artist (Michel Piccoli) struggling to express himself on canvas, and the brutal interaction between the artist and his model (Béart). The four-hour film, inspired by Balzac's short story Le Chef-d'œuvre Inconnu (The Unknown Masterpiece), won the Grand Prix at the Cannes film festival. It was also released at half its length as La Belle Noiseuse: Divertimento, proving that Rivette needed the length for extra depth.

In 1994, Rivette directed Jeanne la Pucelle, a two-part, six-hour version of the Joan of Arc tale, which had already been much filmed, most notably by Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson and Otto Preminger. Rivette's Joan (starring the remarkable Sandrine Bonnaire) was firmly rooted in reality, focusing more on the political and social aspects than the spiritual.

Va Savoir (2000) continued Rivette's fascination with the theatrical: the leading characters are an actor and a director who are working on a performance of Pirandello's Come Tu Mi Vuoi (As You Desire Me). This is Rivette at his most mature, using the themes of the play to mirror the complexities of the characters in the film. Rivette returned to 19th-century literature, more than 20 years after his very loose adaptation of Wuthering Heights (Hurlevent, 1985), with Ne Touchez Pas la Hache (Don't Touch the Axe, 2007), a faithful version of Balzac's La Duchesse de Langeais, a novel on erotic obsession. In 36 Vues du Pic Saint Loup (Around a Small Mountain, 2009), his last film, Rivette revisited the theme of "all the world's a stage", this time following a travelling circus. The bittersweet romance, about the passing of time, has the air of a valediction.

Many years ago, I would regularly bump into the ascetic Rivette, at the height of his fame, eating frugally at a cheap Parisian self-service restaurant in the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Normally, it was before or after his seeing a film, which he would animatedly discuss. He was an inveterate cinéphile all his life. Rivette, who had been suffering from Alzheimer's disease, recently married Véronique, his companion for the past decade, who survives him.

Ronald Bergan

http://www.theguardian.com/film/2016/jan/29/jacques-rivette