Out 1

Out 1
2015 French re-release poster
Directed by
Screenplay by
  • Jacques Rivette
  • Suzanne Schiffman
Based onHistory of the Thirteen
by Honoré de Balzac
Produced byStéphane Tchalgadjieff
Starring
CinematographyPierre-William Glenn
Edited byNicole Lubtchansky
Music byJean-Pierre Drouet
Distributed bySunshine Productions
Release date
  • 9 October 1971 (1971-10-09)
Running time
773 minutes
CountryFrance
LanguageFrench

Out 1, also referred to as Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, is a 1971 French film 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 shorter version of the film 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 version is clearly 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 received 13 votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, resulting in a final ranking of 127th.[1]

  1. ^ "Votes for OUT 1 (1990)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 1 January 2017. Retrieved 1 January 2017.

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