PicoBlog

What follows is an introduction I was asked to give for Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 (1971) in February 2016 at The Cinematheque in Vancouver occasioned by the film’s restoration and long anticipated commercial release. By coincidence, the screening took place one week after Rivette’s death. I had been unable to see the film despite years of wishing to and although I was offered a screener to watch ahead of the screening, I could not pass up the opportunity to see it first on the big screen along with everyone else.

I was initially offered a screener to watch Out 1, which, like most of the people in this room, I had never seen. I thought about it and, possibly selfishly, decided against watching it at home. Like most cinephiles, I heard whispers about Jacques Rivette’s opus in the early days of my film exploration, and it seemed wrong to watch it anywhere but in a cinema. Out 1 was this holy grail, one of those esoteric masterpieces at the fringe of the film world that was just out of reach. Especially in the first stage of my cinephilia, marathon watches of long films by auteurs I was just getting to know where particular points of pleasure and accomplishment such as Fassbinder’s Berlin Alexanderplatz or Bela Tarr’s Satantango. But Out 1 couldn’t be seen. I could only read about it, which made it feel even further away from me and all the more alluring.

Rivette’s films have hardly ever abided by conventional running times. His only film less than two hours long was his final one, Around a Small Mountain from 2009, which due to health issues he needed help completing. They often run well over three hours, but Out 1’s nearly 13 puts it well ahead as the longest. Shot in 1970, the film, was initially considered for TV but was rejected by French State television. It had a premiere in Le Havre and all but disappeared afterwards. Rivette then made a truncated version that runs one third as long under the title Out 1: Spectre, which has been a little easier to see over the years, but is not so much an abridged version as it is an entirely different film made out of the same footage.

Out 1 was seemingly lost to the abyss, but never forgotten. Impassioned critics never lost sight of it, even as it became something like a mirage in the distance, an oasis we may never arrive at. Truffaut said film lovers are sick people, and I fully endorse this view. Whatever that instinct is in us to see everything, to naively be on top of cinema even as it inevitably remains on top of us, it’s this sense of completism. The seeking out of badges of honour from our most daring movie-going adventures. Perhaps enabled by the fact that cinema is relatively young, that a century of an artform that is highly consumable feels like it is something manageable, that cinema can be conquered. But as I’m sure Out 1 will prove over these next few days, seeing isn’t conquering. There are documented screenings of Out 1. It screened in 1989 in Rotterdam and Berlin, but as soon as Out 1 would surface for such a momentary glimpse, it would retreat back into the abyss of lost films. One might even wonder if it ever appeared at all.

It wasn’t until 2006 in London that a complete, subtitled version finally emerged. And then not long after, thanks to Mark Peranson and VIFF, Out 1 had its unlikely North American premiere 45 years after it was completed right here in Vancouver. I was still in high school watching Tarantino and Kubrick at that point and had never heard the name “Rivette”. It screened twice, once before the festival, and once during, introduced by Jonathan Rosenbaum.

Now I can’t speak to the specifics of Out 1, but I can touch on Rivette’s singular approach to making movies. His cinema is one of games and puzzles, with players instead of characters, where the viewer is one too. Even with the same spectator, the games can be played again, with variations each time. Creating intricate worlds complete unto themselves, Rivette, it could be said is one of the great purveyors of make-believe, hardly what could be said of his French new wave contemporaries. Rivette’s formalist puzzles twist and bend and expand not just within their stories, but within the very way they are put together. No New Wave director eliminated the line between form and content like Rivette, and no new wave director’s cinema seemed to arrive so fully formed from the very first film. Paris Belongs to Us, shot in 1959 released in ’61 after The 400 Blows and Breathless took the cinema world by storm, is relaxed, confident, and content, and already finds Rivette fluent in the language he would build on his entire career. In contrast to the deconstructive Godard and the sentimental Truffaut, Rivette had an altogether singular vision, one that seems to respond to a secret world of conspiracy the rest of us cannot perceive, a secret world that if you look closely at his films, you may begin to recognize around you everyday. Geography is essential in his films. Pay attention to how he creates a labyrinth out of Paris, how he connects and disconnects real spaces. Many have referred to his films as board games but the critic B. Kite may have articulated it best when he referred to the Paris in Rivette’s films as a pinball machine, and one can feel the characters bouncing around, trapped, in danger, helpless. His work is difficult but playful and ultimately it is up to the viewer to play along, to be the piece that completes the puzzle.

Sadly, Rivette passed away just last week. It wasn’t a shock. He was known to be in poor health for several years. But it’s an immense loss. Few filmmakers remain so engaged with the world of cinema their whole lives. While Godard & Truffaut left Cahiers Du Cinema when their film careers took off, Rivette stayed on as editor, & until late in life retained his cinephilia. In a 1998 interview, it was Rivette who suggested that Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls was a misunderstood masterpiece, prompting its reappraisal that has taken place in recent years. He was an adventurous movie lover & one of the greatest film critics.

As for Out 1, I’ll have to let it speak for itself but be prepared to meet it halfway, & if like me you’ll be sticking around over the next few days, it may be helpful to jot down some notes about the characters and their relationships to keep track. Made without a script, Rivette had the actors develop their own characters, instead supplying a complex diagram that showed how all the characters in the film were connected and when they would intersect in the structure. Made on the heels of the 1968 student riots, Rosenbaum describes it as “an epic meditation on the dialectic between various collective endeavors and activities and situations growing out of solitude and alienation”, as way of reflecting on the French left during the late 60s. Like nearly all of Rivette’s films, Out 1 revolves around theatre. For Rivette, theater was a forum through which to explore how his characters perceive themselves, present themselves, and how they interact with the world around them. The stage is a place to find answers to the questions the outside world poses. Delueze wrote about three circles in Rivettes work consisting of our roles, our attitudes and postures, and our masks. Theatre was a way for Rivette to investigate the dynamic of these three circles.

The full title of the film, Out 1: Noli Me Tangere comes from the latin of “do not touch me”, which Jesus remarked to Mary Magdalene after the resurrection. The title seems especially appropriate now, in the absence of Rivette, and the presence of this once lost film.

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