ninecurses Over the years, I have read so many articles on Out 1, and have seen so many stills from it, that I felt as though I'd already seen the movie. Out 1 already existed for me in such a big way, that finally watching it could only lead to disappointment. Sadly, this was the case. As great as Out 1's legend is, for me it never comes together. It's all promise unfulfilled.There are Holy Grail movies: Films written and talked about in reverential tones, yet largely unavailable to the public. Until recently, "Out 1" was one of these, and having lived with its legend for many years, I was giddy the day it showed up on Netflix. An eight-part film totaling about 13 hours? I was binge-ready! Unfortunately, it took only about half way thru the first segment for my enthusiasm to wane.But oh is it ever ambitious, and almost every concept and character that we are introduced to is inherently interesting. One example is in how two different acting troupes work toward discovery in the play that each is planning to put on - It seems to be a great metaphor for this very film - but their rehearsal scenes go on (and on), and there are so many of them. 10, 20, even 30 minute (!!) scenes of actors writhing around on dirty theater floors? I love the slower pace of foreign films, but it was just too much.The acting? Jean-Pierre Leaud, who I usually find fascinating, here just annoys the crap out of me. The rest of a very large cast, many of whom were big in French cinema, may or may not be doing good work. With long, rambling scenes inside of the film's overall loose structure, I actually couldn't tell. Rivette usually has one camera going, and he just lets it roll. Even his veteran actors at times seem lost.If being loose and letting things "just play out" was what Rivette was going for, I think that he could have made his point in less than 13 hours. Considering how much love Out 1 continues to get, perhaps it's just me who is missing out. Yet I can't help think that he not only let his actors down, but that he let his viewers down, too.I'll leave it to other reviewers to get into The Thirteen, Balzac, Lewis Carroll, conspiracies, paranoia, etc. It IS all very fascinating to read about.Having read (and heard) so much over the years, about both the film and its legend, it felt as though I had already seen the movie. I could recall its characters, style, and elements with clarity. Unfortunately, having now seen it, that movie has been erased from my memory. I should have stuck with the legend. Sadly, the "Out 1" of my mind no longer exists.

jon1410 Shooting in 16 mm in the late 60s-the norm in the TV industry-was an attempt to take film closer to the Real, which Rivette and Godard were doing. In L'amour fou(1969) Rivette 16 mm represents the footage shot by a TV crew documenting the rehearsal process where a group of actors rehearse Shakespeare's Pericles. In Out1 the 16 mm format was not a tool designed to document the work of the actors, but was dictated by the mode of production of the film, commissioned in serial form by French state TV, but when the executives saw the 8-episode, 743 minutes of the finished product, they rejected it. Rivette edited a 255 minute version of the film, Out 1 :Spectre, which had a modest commercial run. The original version, Out 1 : Noli me tang ere became almost invisible, apart from a screening in Le Havre in 1971. Rivette used theatre rehearsals as a structuring device, as in his breakthrough film Paris nous appartient ( 1961)-as much a paranoid portrait of Paris in its time as Out1 had been 10 years later.But he became embarrassed by conventional scripting and made the more free form,unscripted L'amour fou, this opened up his work to improvisation and greater length,with a bare bones scenario.Rivette shot Out 1 after the collapse of the social uprising of May 1968,when a series of strikes by Parisian student unions resulted in a full blown confrontation with the military. The radical hope to change a conservative society ended meekly with De Gaulle's party consolidating power. Out 1 taps into this post-'68 amalgam of malaise, disillusionment and distrust in grand social movements.Paris is turned into disconnected individual groups hermetically sealed off from each other. In Out 1 he wrote an outline blueprint to get funding, but allowed the actors their heads in having them improvise after having chosen their characters themselves.There are two theatre groups rehearsing two Greek plays, 7 Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound, which provide a backbone- a defiance against authority- around which the other diffracted narratives gravitate. One troupe headed by Thomas(Michael Lonsdale) who leads his group through a series of psychosomatic exercises(breathing, improvising,touching,exploring, free-associating about different versions of the text), the other headed by Lili( Michele Moretti) more interested in forms of choral practise and dance, both attempting to recreate the unselfconscious play of children. We later understand they formerly lived together but split up due to differences of method.Thomas appears in the course of the film as both mastermind and victim of his "alternate lifestyle", alternating between several women, dressing down in slacks, T-shirts and Afghan jackets as a bohemian,yet associating with friends from the upper crust( businessmen,lawyers etc.) with whom he may be involved in another game-the hidden plot inspired by Balzac's Histoire des Trieze in which 13 individuals form a secret society to achieve power. Yet he has a spectacular breakdown late in the film,when internal strife within the group forces him to give up the production of Prometheus,when he seeks shelter in a sea-side house owned by a group of friends. He lies in the sand crying and laughing, giving an uninhibited improvised performance. Something of "the Real" is captured in the most artificial sequences of all-rehearsals in enclosed space, where through improvisation the actors are asked to enact their fantasies. The rehearsal scenes are filmed in extremely long shots, capturing facial expressions,drops of sweat, body movements of the actors.For Rivette, narrative cinema is a documentary on the actors. These groups are bonded by ideals of communal togetherness. Intersecting with the lives of the theatre groups and their elusive "13 friends"( do they exist or not or are they vaguer groupings?) are two perfect outsiders existing in the margins, Colin( Jean-Pierre Leaud) and Frederique( Juliet Berto). Colin panhandles in cafés pretending to be a deaf mute, Frederique uses cons to obtain or steal money( or valuable letters) from men. If all the characters are lost these are adrift and loners. Colin is a detective of signs of the secret 13.This leads him to The Corner of Chance a boutique run by Pauline(Bulle Ogier) with whom he falls madly in love. But she has another life and maybe a member of the 13 with a different name, has children, lives in a big house with a nanny and a mysterious husband she never sees. There are class differences. There are moments of high comedy in the pranks and pratfalls of these grifters. Frederique bumps into Renaud, an outsider who stole a lottery win from Lili's group after pretending to be one of them,leading to its dissolution, and they get together briefly and tragically.The two outsiders attempts to get to know the nature of the conspiracy ultimately fail. The Balzacian plot was a MacGuffin, a child's fantasy, a game in which to get caught up. The conspiracy they're all involved in may be their own creation, their projection of an oppressive regime that's all powerful and all knowing, maybe it's all them, they're looking for something to battle against. This is a total immersion in an experience. What you'll certainly take away from this film is the idea of the long take lasting 13 minutes, amazing live street sequences, graffiti and posters, the bohemian modes of dress, a memoir of a time when politics was mainly about philosophy, the way myths are used to understand reality, and the Noli me tang ere theme, the elusiveness of the Real, you get so sucked into this Promethean vat of inspiration and all its characters that perfectly captures a time and place forever. Like Proust's A La Recherche we dip into the sensibility and hang the sense. Rivette lives .This led on to Celine and Julie go boating.

Zbigniew_Krycsiwiki Here is another film, similar to 1924's la Roue, where narrative structure is not only ignored, but largely obliterated in this 13 hours-long character study, acting study, process study - and film is all the more better for it.On one hand, Out 1 is minimalist (in settings and surroundings) . On one other hand, however, it is elaborate and sprawling (I am referring, obviously, to its massive run-time.)Film spends several hours drawing us, in cinema verite fashion, into the characters' meandering, directionless lives, through conversations filmed in mirrors, and stationary cameras in backseats filming conversations during car rides, lengthy sequences of two theatrical troupes rehearsing Classical stories, and, most amusingly, small kids and curious passersby follow cast and crew during filming.Fiction eventually begins to overtake this pseudo-documentary, as the young man initially referred to in the film's credits as "le jeune sourd-muet" (the young deaf-mute) becomes known as Colin, and his harmonica-playing deaf-mute act is revealed to be just that, an act. He is revealed to be a bit of a conman, a poetic, philosophical con-man (who believes there is a real life secret society known as The Thirteen) much like Frederic is revealed to be a con-woman, stealing correspondence to try to blackmail and extort money from their writers, (and who might have really discovered evidence of the existence of The Thirteen) Neither is who they appear to be- they each have a face to show, and a face to hide. Curiously, despite being prominently featured characters, Colin and Frederic share only one scene together. Even more curious are Pierre and Igor, two major characters in the plot who are never shown at all, either together or by themselves.Interesting colour composition, especially in episodes 4 and 5; Frederic, in white, on a dark green rug, in front of red tapestry hung on the wall behind her, as she begins to wonder about the mysterious Thirteen she has learned of, as the plot (sort of) kicks in; black suit on deep red sofa against pale white wall, simple composition successfully made chaotic by chess board and chess pieces in front of him. Rooftop conversations overlooking Paris and the Seine river ; the city itself and its buildings and its streets become a character in its own right.But, is there really anything to the Balzac-inspired Thirteen, are they real and trying to control all of Paris, or is this just a search for some purpose (unravelling this mystery) in their meandering lives?We, the audience, try to understand the crisscrossing and tangled narratives and characters, much the same as Colin tries to understand the Thirteen. We are trying to unravel a mystery to. But it is almost of no matter if The Thirteen exists or not, just dive into the characters' lives for the duration of its thirteen hours runtime. This is not plot- or character-driven, it is process- driven. The process of filmmaking,

ametaphysicalshark More than anything else watching "Out 1, noli me tangere" was a completely unique and, as much as I hate the use of the word in relation to film, revelatory experience. For most of my life I have involuntarily dwelt on what I perceived as 'imperfections' in any book, film, television series, or album I was particularly interested in, and completely ignored the argument that the whole, the ultimate experience, overpowers any flaws to the point that they don't matter. By no means is "Out 1" a 'perfect' film by conventional standards, boom mics are visible, random passers-by in Paris stare with bewilderment at Rivette and his actors, some scenes (in my estimation) go on far too long, specifically the 'acting exercises', which are beautiful and fascinating at times and indulgent nonsense at their worst. At least, that's what I thought while watching the film. Looking back at "Out 1" as a complete work of art it is a triumph of style, of aesthetic, of humor, of storytelling and of acting, and the end product is, in its own unique way, 'perfect'. "Out 1" has an intimidating reputation, and most reviewers fail to point out that it is largely unwarranted. Most people know it as an outrageously long (it is nearly thirteen hours in length) hardcore art film. That is not true. "Out 1" was planned as a television series for French state TV, which refused to air it resulting in it being shown once, theatrically, over two days in 1971 and then disappearing for 18 years. It is, in intent, as much a conventional theatrical film as Dennis Potter's "The Singing Detective" or "I, Claudius". This is not in any way diminishing its status, in fact, it should encourage more people to see the film knowing that it was intentionally split into eight easily digestible episodes and flows like a great miniseries.Also, while the film has sections of impenetrability, and is ultimately confusing here and there, it does have a mostly linear and easy-to-follow storyline, at least for the attentive, intelligent viewer. It's also an incredibly entertaining storyline, and while I'm not going to describe it here, I'll just quote from Rosenbaum's review of the film, which does a nice job of summing up the main plot: "Then gradually, as in a vast novelistic fresco, more crisscrossing intrigues emerge -- some of which include a lawyer (Francoise Fabian), another member of Lili's group (Hermine Karagheuz), and a hippie boutique owner (Bulle Ogier) with a dual identity who provides the name for episode six, "From Pauline to Emilie," all by herself -- until all strands are intertwined. Eventually Frederique steals a batch of letters that point her in the direction of the same mystery Colin is investigating: a clandestine group of 13 people from different sectors of French society who, inspired by Balzac's Histoire des Treize (gracefully explained here by Eric Rohmer, in the role of a literary scholar), have come together to control Paris. Or perhaps the group has never existed as anything but a plan, one abandoned after the failed French revolution of 1968. Colin and Frederique have different reasons for their pursuits -- his are intellectual, hers are mercenary; their paths cross only once, and very briefly at that." There is more to the film, certainly, much more, but that is the main driving force of the story.The film also destroyed any ideas I had about 'efficiency' in storytelling. "Out 1" takes as much time as it needs to tell its story, and unfolds slowly over eight episodes, exploring each and every one of its characters in great detail and leading to a climax that's both believable and satisfying within the realm of the film, but also frustrating not in a conventionally anti-climactic fashion, but in the way the end of a story within your own actual life often feels. I do firmly believe that the viewer should not attempt to watch the film in one long stretch, as the ability to reflect on each episode (which are, on average, around 90 minutes long, and are as full of detail and depth as many great feature films) was an essential part of just how much I ended up enjoying "Out 1". It is lengthy, sure, but it is unbelievably enjoyable viewing, mostly thanks to the fantastic enigma at the center of the film as well as its brilliant sense of humor. I'm sure Rivette enthusiasts will stop reading this once I say it, but I can absolutely see the Coen brothers (albeit the Coens in "Barton Fink" mode rather than "Burn After Reading" mode) making a much shorter version of this film and doing a great job of it. The characters, the humor, and the mystery are all there.Nearly all of the characters in this film are great, but Colin and Frederique are possibly my two favorite characters in all of cinema. I won't say much about them here, but they are among the best-defined and most interesting characters I've seen, and even without the strength of the rest of the film would have been enough to keep it interesting. I'm not sure how much of this film was improvised, but I understand that quite a lot of it was, which is really a testament to the skill of the cast and also the director, whose long takes and subtle direction are as fascinating and beautiful as the performances and story. "Out 1" is a fascinating enigma of a film, one which takes the viewer on a fascinating, enigmatic journey filled with hilarity, tragedy, and mystery, as well as a healthy dose of adventure. "Out 1" defies labels, defies genre categorization, and remains completely unpredictable throughout (even its final shot is surprising, and brilliant). This is most definitely a masterpiece.