Jacques Rivette

An Elusive All-Day Film and the Bug-Eyed Few Who Have Seen It
By DENNIS LIM

IF there is a movie equivalent of reading Proust or watching the "Ring" cycle — of committing to an artwork of overwhelming proportions that promises to repay accordingly — it's likely to be found in the films of the French New Wave veteran Jacques Rivette. In a 50-year career Mr. Rivette, a master of the marathon running time, has never made a feature under two hours. (Three or four is more typical.) And in the annals of monumental cinema — a category that includes Andy Warhol's avant-garde provocations, Marcel Ophuls's patient portraiture and Bela Tarr's long-take miserablism — there are few objects more sacred than Mr. Rivette's 12 1/2-hour "Out 1: Noli Me Tangere."

Shot in the spring of 1970, this fabled colossus owes its stature not just to its immodest duration but also to its rarity. Commissioned and then rejected by French television, the film had its premiere on Sept. 9 and 10, 1971, at the Maison de la Culture in Le Havre before receding into obscurity. Hoping to salvage a version for theatrical release, Mr. Rivette, now 78, whittled down his eight-episode, 760-minute serial into a 255-minute alternate cut, which he called "Out 1: Spectre."

"Spectre" has been difficult but not impossible to see. "Noli Me Tangere," meanwhile, has become a true phantom film whose reputation rests on its unattainability. Its title (Latin for "touch me not") seems to predict its fate: an apt one, given that many of Mr. Rivette's films are predicated on obsessive and perhaps futile quests.

This cinephile's holy grail slipped into sight earlier this year when the National Film Theater in London announced a sweeping Rivette retrospective. Its centerpiece was a screening of "Out 1: Noli Me Tangere" on April 22 and 23. (Anthology Film Archives in Manhattan, by coincidence, chose the same weekend to give "Out 1: Spectre" its first New York screening in decades.)

So just how rare is the original "Out 1"? The National Film Theater program claimed it had been "unseen since its one and only screening in Le Havre." David Thomson, in his Biographical Dictionary of Film, notes that it was "never shown properly without mechanical breakdown." The critic Jonathan Rosenbaum reported a sighting at the 1989 Rotterdam Film Festival, where 45 minutes of its soundtrack was missing. Mr. Rosenbaum said that Mr. Rivette cut 10 minutes from the film after Rotterdam. That 750-minute version quietly surfaced at a few European festivals and on French cable television, then disappeared again.

It seems certain, at any rate, that the recent London screening was the film's first presentation with English subtitles. It was, in other words, a big enough deal to inspire a pilgrimage (whose numbers included this writer). With a hushed anticipation, more than 100 of the faithful filed into a darkened room on an incongruously sunny London morning, ready for the long haul. The spectacle that unfolded over two days was, as advertised, unique in movies: an adventure and a hallucination. As time elapses, the viewer succumbs to waves of delight and disorientation, exhaustion and exhilaration.

Among other things, "Out 1" concerns the parallel efforts of two theater companies to put on Aeschylus plays ("Prometheus Bound" and "Seven Against Thebes"). Two oddball loners (Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto) separately circle the groups. Characters change names and reveal secret identities. Living Theaterish rehearsals go on for ages. Connective tissue fills in, only to fall away. Mr. Léaud's character is the thickening mystery's self-appointed detective, fixated on cryptic messages about a 13-member secret society, a subplot that Mr. Rivette borrowed from the Balzac suite of novellas "History of the Thirteen."

Building on his improvisational experiments of "L'Amour Fou" (1968), Mr. Rivette worked without a script, relying instead on a diagram that mapped the junctures at which members of his large ensemble cast would intersect. The actors came up with their dialogue; the only thing Mr. Rivette actually wrote were the enigmatic notes Mr. Léaud's character receives. In a 1999 interview Mr. Léaud described the director's methods as "vampiric."

"Out 1" uses documentary techniques — uninflected observation, unscripted situations — not to capture reality but to generate fiction. For Mr. Rivette, narratives — or, more precisely, our hunger for them — can be dangerous. In his best-loved film, "Céline and Julie Go Boating" (1974), a giddy parable on the pleasures and perils of storytelling, the heroines are literally thrust into a haunted house of fiction.

Mr. Rivette's fondness for shadowy conspiracies and paranoid fantasies, which owes a debt to Balzac and the sinister daydreams of the silent-era serialist Louis Feuillade, dates to his first feature, "Paris Belongs to Us" (1960). With "Out 1" he found the perfect match of form and content, an outsize canvas for a narrative too vast to apprehend. In a 1973 interview Mr. Rivette described the film's creep from quasi-documentary to drama in ominous terms: the fiction "swallows everything up and finally auto-destructs."

Mr. Rivette and Jean-Luc Godard were the two major French filmmakers most visibly galvanized by the student riots of May 1968. While Mr. Godard grew overt in his militancy, Mr. Rivette set about on a subtler but no less anarchic course. Much of his 70's work stems from a radical impulse toward destruction and renewal.

The director Claire Denis, who worked with Mr. Rivette in the mid 70's and later made a documentary about him, spent an afternoon on the set of "Out 1" as a student. "Everything was political then," she said in a telephone interview. "Making the film was political. So was watching it." She has fond if somewhat dim memories of the legendary 1971 screening. "It was like an acid experience," she said. "Everyone was more or less stoned."

"Out 1" now seems a relic of a bohemian heyday, a time when you could spend your days rehearsing ancient Greek plays or making 12-hour films. But even in 1970 that hazy idyll was already fading. The film takes its shape, as Mr. Rosenbaum has noted, from "the successive building and shattering of utopian dreams." An epic meditation on the relationship between the individual and the collective, "Out 1" devotes its second half to fracture and dissolution. But it's not a depressing film, perhaps because its implicit pessimism is refuted by its very existence. Experiential in the extreme, "Out 1" cannot help transforming the solitary act of moviegoing into a communal one.

New Yorkers looking to dive in will not have to wait long. "Noli Me Tangere" is set to make its United States debut at the Museum of the Moving Image's Rivette retrospective in November. By way of warm up, Anthology concludes its small Rivette series this weekend with the 70's rarities "Noroît," "Duelle" and "Merry-Go-Round."

Mr. Rivette is still a vital and unpredictable force. The feature he's currently shooting, "Don't Touch the Axe," bears a titular resemblance to "Noli Me Tangere" and will apparently revisit Balzac's "History of the Thirteen." Does this represent a closing of the circle? An expansion of the master plan? If there's one thing we know from Mr. Rivette's films, it's that the big picture will remain just outside our grasp.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company

spending so much time with the lead actors - leaud, bulle ogier, juliet berto, the absolutely superb michael lonsdale - builds a completely different level of recognition/empathy/reflection than one normally experiences w/ narrative cinema of 'conventional' length - and at the end we were left with an incredible, inexplicable and unexpected feeling of loss (I actually heard someone behind say "is that all there is?" at the end!), so much so that i had to return for the 'shorter' (4 and a half hour) Out One: Spectre, where the narrative is re-arranged, re-shaped and re-directed - a fascinating lesson in the relatively arbitrary nature of narrative film construction

all in all, a life-changing experience

the 13 hour print, divided into 8 segments, had a 1990 copyright date but was already pretty fucked/shagged (tho' not quite as bad as the disintegrating print of L'Amour Fou the BFI used - now there's a film in URGENT need of restoration) - however Out One:Spectre was a nice-looking non-grainy restoration, the better to see the sadness in juliet berto's eyes+smile

la belle noiseuse has been on terrestrial tv a cpl of times - lotsa nudity in that! - and BBC 2 once screened an early 80s Rivette called L'Amour Par Terre (not one of my faves, despite the great geraldine chaplin being in it) - C4 may even have shown Celine and Julie back in the 'glory days'.

Artificial Eye have released a few of the later Rivettes on DVD

C4 also had TWO Godard seasons back in the 80s/90s - one of them was esp. good for those hard to find documentaries/polemics that JLG was making after La Chinoise, as well as the awesome Histoire Cinema series - but again, DVD is yr best bet these days

http://www.cahiersducinema.com/IMG/gif/LAMOURFOU.gif

Wiki lists his movies and ile has a few mentions, just wanted some recommendations of anything that might be available.

It's funny, Rivette's working method/choices/events-staged before camera all seem to suggest 'democracy-in-action' - he's very interested in community-gangs-groups, and Out One is like the last gasp of post-68 collective dreaming - but by all accounts he's quite a strong-willed auteur (which I guess you wld need to be to get these monsters made...)

Seeing the full Out One remains my cultural highlight of the year, any year

Gotta say I'm quite interested in the theatrical traditons (or experimental theatre) that have worked themselves into his movies (something touched on the discussion in the DVD extra). But these are all questions for another time..

Also I see Film Four are showing 'Celine and Julie..' as their late late movie on tuesday.

http://movingimage.us/site/screenings/mainpage/rivette.html

"box dinner available" for Out 1! Lots of coffee I hope.

what means this?

i watched Celine and Julie the other night on film4. much funnier second time round, also it was surprisingly suited to TV viewing because you don't have to give it 100% of your attention.

I generally love Sandrine Bonnaire, so I just reserved Joan the Maid at the library.

what i love about celine and julie is that no matter how long Rivette is stretching the whole thing out for it's never so long that he won't throw in another leghty, pointless and just plain funny digression. coming up for the three hour mark there's a needless plot development which involves the sweets running out and C&J having to steal a book from the library so that they can make up a potion. for some reason they have to steal the book wearing wetsuits, balaclavas and rollerskates (hott). the other night this struck me as the funniest thing ever whereas first time round i just found it frustrating. what changed?

http://onfilm.chicagoreader.com/movies/capsules/15195_PARIS_BELONGS_TO_US

the bfi dvd looks good, has some of his shorts on it.

"Having recently seen the long Out 1 subtitled in English for the first time at the Vancouver International Film Festival, I can only reiterate how invaluable it would be to have both versions on DVD. Rivette devoted the better part of a year to editing Spectre, striving to make it as different from the long version as possible, and the ways that the same shots often have radically different meanings and functions in the two versions are an important part of what makes this magnum opus so fascinating. But it can’t shake off its legend and become a legitimate part of film history until we can see both versions.
Maybe this is a function of the risks of innovative art—to be ignored by the more traditional critics as if it never existed. That’s presumably how Keith Reader could recently publish a supposedly authoritative piece about Jean-Pierre Léaud’s career in Sight and Sound without mentioning Out 1—even though, thanks to Geoff Andrew, both versions had recently screened at London’s National Film Theatre. (Needless to say, Moullet’s A Girl is a Gun goes unmentioned as well.) This isn’t very far from the David Denby school of canon restriction that tidily limits the span of existing works to whatever Denby has seen. When Denby recently wrote, “The great study of an Iraq vet, in either documentary or fictional form, has yet to be made,” he was essentially reassuring the New Yorker’s readers that they didn’t have to think about anything apart from what he was reviewing—including a film as great as The War Tapes (now available on DVD). Or did he actually mean he’d been tracking and viewing all the undistributed videos about returning veterans in order to arrive at his considered judgment?"

It's a shame, I think, that the BFI chose Paris... to restore, rather than L'Amour Fou - the former may be the more 'seminal new wave document' blahdiblah but the latter is pure uncut Rivette, the real gd hard stuff

Anyone seen his new one? Probably catch it on sunday..

Saw it when I visited London just after Xmas - its a real chamber piece ("restrained" is how my companion neatly put it) and i'm afraid i started snoozing abt 20 minutes in. Apart from the Joan of Arc two-parter - which is surprisingly action-packed, relatively speaking, for a Rivette movie - I'm not that big a fan of Rivette's historical pieces, tbh - they are very exacting exercises in framing/tableaux/ritual/spectacle/costume, but don't have the same necromantic thrill as the best of his 'modern-day' movies. Don't Touch The Axe has no music and is verrrrry slow in terms of both narrative exposition and movement into/within the mise-en-scene. Aspects of it reminded me of late Rossellini, Dreyer, Bresson - deliberately so on Rivette's part, I'm sure.

Three new Region 2 Rivette DVDs: GANG OF FOUR is especially welcome

http://www.dvdtimes.co.uk/content.php?contentid=66945

you gotta salute their bravery.

i saw 'paris nous appartient' on the weekend; it was awesome.

the one time I saw PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT, the print burnt up in the projector!

dayum. you don't get that with dvd, really, though when i saw 'muriel' there was some kind of glitch that made the sound go out of sync...

yeah, DVD glitches are v. interesting, as are digital broadcasts where the signal breaks up and pixilates - a whole new way of seeing the image deformed - is there a visual equivalent of the Oval/Yasunao Tone CD glitch aesthetic/practice?

the one time I saw PARIS NOUS APPARTIENT, the print burnt up in the projector!

-- Ward Fowler, Monday, 18 February 2008 19:31 (58 minutes ago) Link

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Ward I saw this, I agree that its more of a chamber piece/slow burner. Kind of closed you in, but far more palatable than a BBC costume drama (those clocks of his), which isn't saying much, I know.

"Don't Touch The Axe has no music and is verrrrry slow in terms of both narrative exposition and movement into/within the mise-en-scene."

I remember that there was a bit of music? Don't the main characters discuss a quality belonging to a partic piece played in the film.

Must track 'Gang of Four'.

Happy 80th birthday.

hb, JR.

Saw 'Secret Defense' last week on yer cheapo VHS! Someone sort me out 'L'Amour Fou' plz!

Booked a ticket for Merry go round. Have ppl here seen it?

Yes! Watched it some years ago and remember liking it. It’s a unique one in that remember this constant feeling of it being unmoored and barely held together.

Sounds really interesting.

Coming to Criterion Channel in three days.

This was good though ICA forgot to switch on subs and of wasn't noticed properly till half hour in as the first portion is effectively in English.

The person introducing it made some remarks on the problems the film had but you wouldn't know it too much from watching the film cold.

Might see his musical.

https://www.ica.art/films/rivette-haut-bas-fragile

one of his best!

the 35mm screening of hurlevant was a revelation after seeing the flat dvd scan

Had to give up on L’amour Fou. Love his work on occasion (Duelle, La Belle Noiseuse), but this one was frankly inept.

although i wouldn’t name it as one of my favourites there are moments with bulle ogier where he is catching lightning which seems to be the discovery of everything great to come

i watched la belle noiseuse for the first time a couple of weeks ago, pretty amazing stuff. i read that it was a very strenuous filming experience for emmanuelle beart, which makes sense

I love it. I'm afraid of watching it again for fear of ruining my first impression.

Inept is def not a word I would use for L'Amour Fou.

Just learned recently that Out 1, like Berlin Alexanderplatz, is a tv show, and not actually a film with a scary long running time.

Out 1 on a streaming service near you ASAP

L'Amour Fou is like top 3 Rivette.

Alas, I couldn't finish Love on the Ground a couple weeks ago.

L'Amour Fou is great

I can see not liking it but it never gave me the impression Rivette wasn't achieving what he set out to do.

out 1, although split into chapters, is absolutely long film and not a tv show like berlin alexanderplatz

Delighted to have been able to catch a one off theatrical screening of Céline and Julie Go Boating last night -- the program host joked that maybe they'd go for Out 1 one of these days. (Which, if they started at 8 am or so, I could manage.)

TIFF showed Out 1: noli me tangere in two six-hour slots over a weekend; as long as you don't watch anything between the two screenings I can't imagine anyone describing this as an adulterated viewing experience.