Film

Out 1: Spectre (1972)

Director: Jacques Rivette

Movie review

From Time Out Film Guide

Jacques Rivette's grandest and boldest experiment to date (based on Balzac's L'Histore des Treize) enrages some spectators because it gives them so much to cope with: 255 minutes of improvisation by at least half of the best New Wave actors, edited and arranged so that sometimes it's telling a complex mystery story - about thirteen conspirators, two theatre groups, and a couple of crazed outsiders - while the rest of the time it's telling a realistic story about the same people that deliberately makes no sense at all. Not so much a digest of Rivette's legendary 12-hour version (hardly ever screened, its title is Out 1: Noli Me Tangere) as a ghost and a reworking of some of the same material ('a critique', Rivette himself says), it's a challenging and terrifying journey for all who can bear with it. As Richard Roud put it: 'Cinema will never be the same, and neither will I.'

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