Out 1

Two theatre companies in Paris are rehearsing Aeschylus. In the same city a beggar named Colin, who pretends to be deaf, and a con artist named Frédérique are moving around. By separate routes both come upon traces of the same thing: a secret group called the Thirteen. Whether the group exists or two people are constructing a conspiracy on their own, the film never says. Jacques Rivette directs. It runs twelve hours and forty minutes, among the longest fiction films ever made. It was finished in 1971 and could not be shown. It played once that year to an invited audience; television would not take it and no distributor was found. Rivette then prepared a four hour version, Out 1: Spectre. The complete version was not properly released until 1990 and was restored years later. The method is largely improvisation. Rivette supplied situations rather than a script; the rehearsals are real rehearsals and the conversations are real conversations. The camera waits and the actors build their own scenes. Jean-Pierre Léaud, Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Michael Lonsdale and Bernadette Lafont are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers curious about experimental cinema, long form, and the most radical end of the French New Wave. Who it is not for: it really is twelve hours, the scenes are deliberately extended, and the film answers none of its own questions.