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OUT 1

Jacques Rivette France, 1971
The Baffler
Today, Rivette’s counterculture epic is easily accessed via home video, but on the occasion of a one-off 2006 screening at the Museum of the Moving Image it had scarcely been seen in eons, and those who were there to watch and to eat the drab box lunch remain forever bonded by the experience, as though we’d together done hard time.
July 26, 2019
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The word is casual. The world, too. In Jacques Rivette's seminally bizarre, alluringly demanding twelve-hour-plus opus Out 1 (1971), listless Parisians float into one another's lives as if they live in an incestuously tiny village. They come, they go, they never quite collide. They drift: their stories, if they can be called that, don't so much intertwine with dramatic intricacy as overlap prettily like translucent jellyfish.
April 25, 2016
One of the charms of the film is its 16mm matter-of-factness and the rather faded minestrone of its colours. Not to mention the quite determined way in which ‘action' is dealt with gradually or at a calm distance, to avoid undue excitement.
February 1, 2016
If Noli me tangere purposefully neglects the conventions of exposition, Spectre is downright reckless... While Noli invites us to witness a melancholy madness that is the hangover of the Sixties, Spectre leaves us no choice but to experience it firsthand. It is the Out we are inside. Yet both films display a radical faith in the viewer, whether by asking us to be patient or to fill in the gaps. For those willing ot go along, the dividends are endless.
January 4, 2016
More successfully than the now countless others that have tried, Jacques Rivette's Out 1 is a film that eludes succinct description. Every level of the film's text, and every moment in the history of the film, has been animated by an adamant preference for circulation over transmission, flow over fixity. In order to make use of the film's enormous power, we should reject every instantiation of this preference with an equal insistence.
December 9, 2015
BFI
Structurally indebted to the early silent serials and inspired by Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine, it is a freewheeling, multi-stranded epic, loosely involving a secret society operating in Paris following the failed revolution of 1968. Screenings have been exceptionally rare, adding to the film's mystique. It is a singular experience, undoubtedly demanding, but hugely rewarding.
November 23, 2015
The contingent, the unforeseeable and uncontrollable, is a privileged element in much 20th-century experimental art—in music and painting as much as in film and literature—and Out 1 honors it to the maximum. But giving actors their head as much as Rivette does here brings a particular urgency to the idea of fictional characters controlling their own fates: here, the characters genuinely emerge as a result of the performances evolving in particular ways.
November 12, 2015
Hoping for a conventionally satisfying payoff is a waste of time, but so is assuming this is a mere work of pretentious buffoonery, whose creator brandishes its great length like a jam-band playing at a crappy music festival. Its staggering runtime may be there to trick you, but not like a gimmick would; the "trick" in this film is the trick on which all of cinema is based. It will return your filmic expectations to zero, detoxifying any "accumulated errors."
November 6, 2015
This is the most thoroughly and authentically paranoid movie ever made, its overtones of conspiracy and cryptic meaning so pronounced that they extend the borders of fiction out into the real world; a viewer may exit the theater, but they don't really exit Out 1 for a solid week after.
November 5, 2015
Having long awaited Rivette's film myself, I wish I could report that it's a nearly lost and newly rediscovered masterwork... 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.
November 5, 2015
Rivette would go on to make fuller-bodied novel-to-screen transpositions, but Out 1, occasionally tedious but in the main totally entrancing, turns out to be the adaptation to end all adaptations, a sort-of Balzacian narrative about the charmed quality of texts themselves. Taking a good long look at various group dynamics, the film lays bare the way that what we read changes, often arbitrarily and often not, the way we read each other.
November 4, 2015
The mere achievement of finally seeing it paled beside the fact that this unwieldy, near-plotless monstre sacré of a film turned out to be so captivating, so formally fascinating, and so damned watchable, that the breaks between each of the eight episodes that comprise the film were unwelcome, and I actively resented being sent home on Saturday night to await the next day's final installments. I was immersed in it, and did not want to be ejected.
November 4, 2015