“It’s not just that the film holds up to repeat viewings,” the critic Dennis Lim wrote in The New York Times in 2012, when a new print of “Céline and Julie” was shown at Film Forum in Manhattan, but that “its very point is its seemingly infinite repeatability, its mysterious capacity to surprise both first-time viewers and those who know it as well as a magician reciting an incantation.”

Mr. Rivette was born on March 1, 1928, in Rouen, where his father was a pharmacist. He became fascinated by movies as a child and as a teenager founded a local film society. He made his first film, a short called “Aux Quatre Coins,” in 1949, the same year he left for Paris to study at the Sorbonne.

His course work soon took a back seat to screenings at the Cinémathèque Française, where he met another young enthusiast and future filmmaker, Eric Rohmer. The two founded a magazine, La Gazette du Cinéma, which collapsed after five issues. They then joined the staff of Cahiers du Cinéma, where they fell in with a like-minded group of passionate cinephiles including Mr. Truffaut, Mr. Godard and Claude Chabrol.

For Cahiers, Mr. Rivette wrote influential appraisals of the work of Hollywood studio directors like Howard Hawks and Fritz Lang, who were considered at the time to be commercial filmmakers of no artistic interest. And he helped found the radically revisionist school of criticism that became known in English as auteurism. He and his fellow Young Turks wrote articles attacking the traditional French cinema while working on one another’s short film projects and looking for ways to break into feature filmmaking.

In 1957, Mr. Rivette began work on a long film called “Paris Belongs to Us,” which displayed many of the elements that would be part of his mature style: a meandering and frequently neglected narrative line based on a character’s discovery of a vast, ungraspable conspiracy; a group of actors observed in rehearsal (here for a production of Shakespeare’s “Pericles”); a documentary appreciation of the city of Paris; and a start-and-stop rhythm, created by the collision of stylized, scripted material and the real-world contingencies of improvisation and location shooting.