Out 1: Spectre

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.'