Forever and a Day

Spending a weekend with the world's longest film.

by Sam Adams

There are movies that are hard to see, and then there are those so rare that their very being falls into doubt. Virtually unseen since its 1971 debut, Jacques Rivette's Out 1 was a cinematic chimera, hailed as a lost masterpiece, but so dauntingly inaccessible it might as well not exist.

The chief reason for Out 1's vanishing act is its extraordinary length: some 12 1/2 hours, divided into eight episodes. But at Astoria's Museum of the Moving Image last weekend, the faithful gathered undaunted, perhaps even energized, by the prospect of watching a movie no one in their right mind would want to see. Spread over two days, the screening took on the feel of a film festival, albeit one devoted to a single film; critics, programmers and freelance cinephiles flew in from as far as Chicago, brushing up on Out 1's source texts (Aeschylus, Balzac, Lewis Carroll) during the breaks.

Fittingly, Out 1 devotes a good chunk of its length to such ad hoc happenings. Of its four or five major narrative strands, two concern experimental theater groups whose rehearsals take the form of amorphous, unstructured be-ins. Although each is preparing a different Aeschylus play, their chosen texts play no more than a cursory role. One group, led by Michèle Moretti's Lili, treats the words as music, altering pitch and shifting tempo with no regard for meaning. The other, led by Michael Lonsdale's Thomas, attacks language from the opposite direction. Nearly half of the first 90-minute episode is devoted to a lengthy exercise in which his troupe rolls around on the floor, uttering guttural grunts and moans that only gradually resolve themselves into sounds, and then letters, and finally into a line from the play. "It's always words that are difficult," he concludes as the troupe light up their post-rehearsal cigarettes.

If Out 1 can be said to have a central theme, it's just that: the difficulty, and perhaps the arbitrariness, of coaxing meaning from the inchoate stuff of life. The movie does, eventually, develop something like a plot, in which a series of cryptic notes puts a young con artist (Jean-Pierre Léaud) on the trail of a mysterious secret society called The Thirteen. (There's also, for good measure, another con artist, played by Juliet Berto, who stumbles onto the existence of a different clandestine cabal, one of the movie's many mirror images.) But as Léaud's investigative techniques grow more absurd — at one point, he stops at an intersection, reads a random passage aloud, and concludes, for no apparent reason, "To the left!" — the very idea of plot starts to feel like a contrivance, an arbitrary intrusion into the real world.

Out 1's length may be daunting, but it is never gruelling (just to put things in perspective, it's shorter than a season of Lost, and makes at least as much sense). And its longueurs serve a purpose, forcing the audience to live in the moment rather than anticipate the next turn or revelation. That's not to say that every instant is infused with purpose. Frequently digressive, and conditioned by Rivette's belief that bad performances could be as revealing as good ones, the movie is studded with go-nowhere improvisations, fluffed lines, midscene giggles and outright dead ends. At one point, we suffer through an interminably shouty improv by Lonsdale's group, only to have him conclude that it was "very muddled." (He couldn't have figured that out 10 minutes ago?) But as the hours roll on, conventional distinctions start to unravel. Although a bad improv may be no fun to watch, it's enlightening if the object of scrutiny is not the play but the people performing it. We may not know more about Aeschylus, but we do know more about the precarious balance of Lonsdale's troupe.

As Out 1 moves into its second half, the notion of The Thirteen takes on greater weight. What might have seemed a figment of Léaud's imagination emerges as a nebulous conspiracy that involves, in one way or another, most of the characters we've already met, as well as a few who are thrown into the mix later on, notably Juliet Berto's comely conspirator. But Rivette warns us early on not to expect too much resolution. Appearing as a scholar specializing in Balzac, whose novels contain references to another, earlier, Thirteen, Eric Rohmer says that Balzac's sccret society usually "intervene to clean up the plot." In other words, even before we're sure that the movie's Thirteen even exists, we've been set up to view them as a naked deus ex machina, a prediction that pays off in spades.

I NEED DIRECTION: Bulle Ogier in Out 1's hall of mirrors.

At MMI, the breaks between episodes were filled with furious exchanges of notes — "Was that someone from Lili's troupe who handed him the first note?"; "Are Pauline and Emilie the same person?" — but attempting to unravel the movie's mysteries ultimately reduces you to the level of Léaud's character, furiously trying to extract significance from random bits of cultural detritus. (If you must know, the answer is yes to both.) Although Rivette builds the film to a satisfying, if harrowing, conclusion, he can't resist squeezing in a brief gag before the closing credits, a playful jab at anyone who thinks he's finally got the whole thing figured out.

According to MMI curator David Schwartz, last weekend's sold-out event brought the grand total of Out 1's public screenings to six, three of which have been held in the last seven months. Could this once-unseeable movie be edging closer to availability? The Museum has scheduled another screening for March 3-4, and Rivette's shorter, reordered version, Out 1: Spectre (a piddling four hours) will be part of International House's Rivette retrospective in January. Perhaps the conspiracy to keep it hidden is winding down, or maybe it never existed.

(sam@citypaper.net)