Richard Brody who is an astute critic of the French New Wave writes about Rivette's Out 1 which is a nearly 13 hour film made in 1970. Though Brody contends it's not a masterwork, there is an immense amount to admire in this bold film including the acting and the typically convoluted plot. But I'm amaze what a thrilling viewing experience it still is today 50 years later-its rare to see a piece of cinema that was made in the 70's and feel surprised and amazed at its flow and direction. Anyway, Brody provides his cogent thoughts in the New Yorker:
Having long awaited Rivette’s film myself, I wish I could report that it’s a nearly lost and newly rediscovered masterwork. Through the scope of its ambitions and the compressed power of the life experience that “Out 1” unleashes, it nearly surpasses aesthetics to become a mighty natural monument in the creative landscape, a lofty and awe-inspiring peak in the landscape of directorial adventure. But it’s not a masterwork. The ecstatic drive at its core is only rarely realized. Its fury for cinema rarely finds its images. Its love of performance often does its performers no favors. Nonetheless, “Out 1” is a work of genius by a genius whose ultimate failure here, in this madly ambitious project, is his very subject. The movie’s failure isn’t just a result—it would appear to be an intention. Its subject is unfulfilled artistic ambition, the effort to change the world of art and then the personal and artistic wreckage that results.
The underlying passions of “Out 1” are Rivette’s formative experiences as one of the young critics, soon to be young filmmakers, who became known as the New Wave, as well as the events of May, 1968, and the ferment of visionary groups and productions that followed. I think that there’s also another conspiratorial moment embedded in the background—the machinations of the mid-nineteen-sixties, when power at Cahiers du Cinéma, the magazine that thrust those critics into prominence, was wrested from Eric Rohmer and conferred upon Rivette.
“Out 1” is filled with the tangles of group dynamics and nostalgia for a time of concerted action undertaken by group members whose mutual loyalty and fierce commitment went beyond mere friendship to a sort of fanatical, cultlike devotion. It’s also filled with doubt about the actual impact of such groups, the vague intentions and confused methods that follow on those commitments, the violent distortions that those commitments can yield, and the fear of the destructive energies unleashed by the stretching and breaking of group ties. It’s a warm film about paranoia, an amiable one about calamity, an optimistic one about catastrophe. The movie’s confrontation with failure, its own path toward failure, may be its greatest legacy.
One of its theatre companies, led by Lili (Michèle Moretti), is working on “Seven Against Thebes” in a mode of intricate modernism, using highly stylized and tightly conducted vocal exercises, precisely choreographed dances, and acrobatically timed entrances and exits to dig deep into the text of the play. The goal is to wrest the play from naturalism and restore the Apollonian formalistic exultation, the primordial aestheticized and ritualistic strangeness of classical tragedy. The other troupe, led by Thomas (Michael Lonsdale), is working on “Prometheus Bound,” but hardly touches the text, engaging instead in psychodramatic acting exercises involving the laying on of hands, trust exercises (remaining passive during extensive and potentially dangerous manipulations of the body), primal histrionics involving writhing and shrieking, toe-biting and paint-smearing, or merely staring for extended times, breaking down barriers and forms in search of the Dionysian, corybantic essence of classical tragedy.
There are two playful outsiders, lighthearted grifters, who are unknown to each other. Frédérique (Juliet Berto) lives in a garret apartment, subsisting on petty theft, which she eventually raises to the more brazen and lucrative level of blackmail—and which, unwittingly, targets several of Thomas’s friends and benefactors. (She also plays, on her own, with an old-fashioned pistol that she pulls from her handbag; it will, of course, eventually go off.) Colin (Jean-Pierre Léaud) lives in a room rented from a formal and proper landlady. He makes his living pretending to be a deaf-mute, wandering from café to café and playing the harmonica in patrons’ faces until they give him a coin.
Colin is a sort of freelance philosophical energumen, who, upon receiving several cryptic typed messages, makes them the subject of an obsessive study. Posting them on his wall and analyzing them cryptographically on his blackboard, Colin connects one of them, from Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark,” to Balzac’s “The Thirteen,” about a secret society. He then becomes obsessed with the idea of a secret society and speculates on its members (including, possibly, himself). Pretending to be a journalist, he insinuates himself into a storefront group self-producing a magazine, and then into Thomas’s theatre troupe. Along the way, he also begins a relationship with the magazine’s impresario, Pauline (Bulle Ogier), who is the estranged wife of one of Frédérique’s targets and Thomas’s friends.
The paranoid ties among money, power, and art. The ties among the apparently clear intentions of practical, active individuals and the shadowy hints of secret conspiracies that serve as their true motives. The ties between the aesthetically appealing and grandly alluring face of the cityscape and the prismatic, mystical secrets that it conceals. These elaborate fantasies of metaphysical connections and nefarious cabals provide the film’s grand narrative power. Rivette’s audacity of scale—the creation of a film that exists in the time frame of the reading of an ample novel—renders it almost indescribable, inasmuch as the summary of its actions hardly approaches the experience of watching the film. The panoply of side characters and seemingly peripheral events and, for that matter, the very passing of time itself while the plot unfolds are central and irreducible elements of “Out 1.”
Yet the film’s unstrung looseness belies the rigidity of its story. “Out 1” comprises long, meandering scenes of rehearsals and theatrical exercises, and the dialogue often follows a long and sinuous path that brushes by nodal points of the plot en route to incidental destinations. The course of events creates the plot not in any strongly sequential way but by bubbles that rise to the surface intermittently, plot crumbs that are dropped but don’t so much yield a path to follow as a map of the territory that’s covered. The changes that occur, and that yield something like a drama, occur with an environmental gradualness punctuated by spasms of sudden, decisive, irreparable actions.
The rigidity of that map contrasts with the extreme fluidity of the scenes that it designates and of the way that they’re filmed. Many of the scenes are made with a handheld camera that follows the action, documentary-style, in sync with the virtually limitless freedom with which the actors perform the scenes. Even if it weren’t common knowledge that the dialogue and the action were improvised, limited solely by the main points that the actors had to bring out in each scene, the freedom of movement and the gradual evolution of the dialogue would appear not scripted and not dictated but invented, discovered by the actors, whom the camera operator, Pierre-William Glenn, was obligated to follow.
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