certainly looking forward to seeing the North American premiere of Out 1: Noli me tangere...may need to dig out that Balzac first...
"Never before seen in North America and only screened once previously with English subtitles-at the British Film Institute this past April-Jacques Rivette's legendary phantom film has finally been let out of the vaults. If you'd like to tackle this epic in sections, Out 1 will screen again in its entirety at the Vancity Theatre during the Vancouver International Film Festival on September 30 and October 1, introduced at that time by film critic and Rivette expert Jonathan Rosenbaum. See the VIFF program guide for details. "A movie equivalent of reading Proust or watching the Ring cycle...In the annals of monumental cinema 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. [It will screen at a Pacific Cinematheque Rivette retrospective in March.] 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... Among other things, Out 1 concerns the parallel efforts of two theater companies to put on Aeschylus plays. Two oddball loners (Jean-Pierre Leaud 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. Leaud'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. Leaud's character receives...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.'" -Dennis Lim, The New York Times"
