Director Jacques Rivette’s Out 1: Noli me tangere, from 1971, will see its first-ever theatrical release this November in New York.Everett Collection
The most anticipated movie of the year is from 1971. It's called Out 1: Noli me tangere, and among cineastes it's long been regarded as something of a holy grail – coveted but maddeningly out of reach. However, the lost epic is poised to reappear.
This November, at the BAMcinématek in New York, Out 1 will enjoy its first-ever theatrical engagement, in a newly restored and digitized form, before travelling to rep houses across the United States. At the end of the tour it will arrive on home video – as an elaborate collector's edition DVD/Blu-ray box set, courtesy of Carlotta Films – for the first time in North America.
On Twitter a chorus of praise greeted the news when it emerged by way of press release earlier this month, as cinephiles responded with the astonished thrill of a UFO sighting. For some the excitement lies in finding an old favourite refurbished and returned to splendour, it having previously been seen, if at all, in dire condition. For others a long-held joy could finally be shared: The ultimate recherche curio is about to reach the masses. But for most the announcement of Out 1's resurrection is notable for only the question it poses: What exactly is Out 1?
This paragon of vaunted obscurity has a curious past. The film is the work of Jacques Rivette, a former critic for the Cahiers du Cinéma in France in the 1950s and a founding member of the same nouvelle vague that produced François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Out 1 was devised for French television but turned down by the network. Its final cut was screened just once – in Paris, in 1971 – and thereafter languished for decades unseen. Over the years it has surfaced sporadically: As a special presentation at the International Film Festival Rotterdam in the late eighties, on cable in Europe once or twice in the nineties, as much-discussed one-off showings in New York and Vancouver. The only recourse the eager have had of late is a bootleg available for illegal download online.
Shot on 16 mm in and around Paris in the spring of 1970, Out 1 is divided into eight episodes that together span 773 minutes – a running time that helps account for both its notoriety and the aversion of distributors. Jordan Cronk, who writes a column on repertory cinema for the Hollywood Reporter, says much of the film's importance "is tied up in how long it is," equal parts burden and boon. "Out 1 is obscure because of its length," he says. "No distributor ever wanted to touch it. Even just screening it is a big task: It's nearly 13 hours long." But that's also central to its attraction. "It's an event. Part of the appeal is sharing a communal experience with other cinephiles – and that's an appeal that will last."
Peter Labuza, a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California and critic with Variety, adds that Out 1's enduring allure has a great deal to do with the mystery surrounding it. "Jacques Rivette is a name that's thrown around a lot, but most people have not seen a Jacques Rivette film," he says. "Who even is this filmmaker that we're talking about? It's a name that we don't really know much about and that's the fascination." Labuza feels that while many people have "forgotten Rivette's name because his movies are so hard to find," efforts such as this theatrical revival will make it possible for us "to recognize him as one of the truly great figures of cinema."
A sort of oblique conspiracy thriller, Out 1 concerns Parisian theatre troupes, a deaf mute busker (the legendary Jean-Pierre Léaud), an unseen cabal of world-ruling leaders and the intrigue that tenuously binds them. But it's Rivette's approach to form rather than the details of the story he tells that distinguishes the film. "Rivette allowed his actors to create their own characters," Labuza says. "It was mainly improvised, and the result is always very engaging and in your face." Cronk agrees. "It got into the improvisational style before it was popular," he says.
Jonathan Rosenbaum, long-time critic for the Chicago Reader, was one of Out 1's earliest and most vocal advocates. But its "status as a touchstone," he wrote in 1996, "rests almost exclusively on its unavailability."
"When the uncut Out 1 was screened in Rotterdam in 1989," he says, "only a handful of spectators showed any interest in viewing it, either in its entirety or piecemeal." He remains baffled that such a "pleasurable, evocative, enduring, multifaceted and incontestably beautiful" film should nevertheless "remain so resolutely marginal – unseen, unavailable and virtually written out of most film histories except for occasional guest appearances as the vaguest of reference points."
Its return to theatres is a chance for the masterwork to be properly relished. It's also, as Labuza says, an occasion to understand a phenomenon. "When I finally watched Out 1 I realized how little I actually knew about the film besides the fact that it's 13 hours long and hard to see," Labuza says. "But it's also a really great movie, and I think that's something that gets lost. It's this amazing film that you kind of get lost in." For nearly 45 years that's been a revelation reserved for the few. Not come November. "Now we can all share this together."