Out 1 (1971)

Directed by

Suzanne Schiffman, Jacques Rivette

Genre

drama film

Country

France

Runtime

12h 56m

Rated

NR

Rating

7.1 of 10 from 62 voters

Elsewhere

IMDb

How it feels

This 13-hour French film follows many loosely connected characters in Paris whose separate stories gradually intertwine. The narrative unfolds through lengthy episodes and cryptic interactions, inspired by Balzac's novels.

sprawlingcontemplativeintricateelusiveslow-burnunsettlingcerebralimmersive

What happens

Out 1, also referred to as Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, is a 1971 French experimental mystery film written and directed by Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman. It is indebted to Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine, particularly the History of the Thirteen collection (1833–35). Known for its length of nearly 13 hours, the film is divided into eight parts of approximately 90–100 minutes each. The vast length of Out 1 allows Rivette and Schiffman, like Balzac, to construct multiple loosely connected characters with independent stories whose subplots weave amongst each other and continually uncover new characters with their own subplots. A truncated 4½-hour version exists, and its Spectre subtitle was chosen for the name's ambiguous and various indistinct meanings, while the Noli me tangere ("touch me not") subtitle for the original cut is a reference to it being the full-length film as intended by Rivette. The film's experimentation with parallel subplots was influenced by André Cayatte's two-part Anatomy of a Marriage (1964), while the use of expansive screen time was first toyed with by Rivette in L'amour fou (1969). The parallel narrative structure has since been used in many other notable films, including Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog and Lucas Belvaux's Trilogie, which includes Un couple épatant, Cavale and Après la vie, to name a few. Each part begins with a title in the form of "from person to person" (usually indicating the first and last characters seen in each episode), followed by a handful of black and white still photos recapitulating the scenes of the prior episode, then concluded by showing the final minute or so (in black and white) of the last episode before cutting into the new episode itself (which is entirely in color). Out 1 has won consistent critical acclaim since its release, and further received 13 votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, resulting in a final ranking of 127th, and 17 votes in the 2022 critics' poll, resulting in a final ranking of 169th. (from Wikipedia, CC BY-SA)

Trailer

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