So,
Out 1 . So you thought
Sátántangó was just too short, too mainstream, dumbed down for the instant gratification generation? Have I got a movie for you!
Out 1 , all thirteen hours of it, is one of those great white whale films that were not really
seen until recently, only
hinted at by the people who knew what is what. There was allegedly a screening of it in 1971 in Le Havre, once. Then another in 1991, then a few more in 2006 and 2007. Now you can buy the damn thing on DVD/Blu and watch it just like that.
Wherever it is going,
Out 1 takes its time to get there. In the first four or five hours, there doesn’t seem to be any connection or coherence among the four main plotlines. The camera spends ten, fifteen or thirty minutes exploring a scene, most of which are about two avant-garde theatre groups spending their time on endless rehearsals of two Aeschylus plays. One of them goes into meticulous focused detail about every sound and gesture, while the other tries to approach its subject through never-ending rounds of radical freeform improvisation.
This takes up the majority of the first episodes (
Out 1 is now available in a form recut into eight episodes of 70 to 110 minutes), which I swear are there to weed out the weak. There are also two parallel series of random incidents where two unrelated con artists, a deaf-mute accordion player named Colin and a petty thief named Frédérique swindle random Parisians out of their money. After a while, while the action doesn’t get any more lively, Stockholm syndrome, or perhaps sunk cost fallacy sets in, and the characters start to get rounded out enough to become interesting to follow.
Then, the film starts to have a plot, maybe, although it could just as well be an imagined set of connections projected onto its surface by the characters or the viewer. There are hints of a secretive conspiracy of thirteen powerful people pulling the strings in the background, not so much there as somehow
coalescing out of paranoid fantasies, oblique hints, awkward bits of silence and curious omissions.
Out 1 is not a movie about paranoia; rather, it is a movie that
is paranoia. There are things in it that may or may not be significant, and the characters may or may not be connected in ways that weren’t on screen at the beginning. But the major questions remain unanswered; the main characters invested in the central plotline, Frédérique and Colin, briefly cross paths in one scene somewhere in the middle, but never connect, or see each other again.
Then, as some of the pieces
seem to fall in their place,
Out 1 takes a comfortable left turn and goes off into mindfuck territory. Was that really…?
Are they, or are they not? Did she really do that? What the hell did
those things signify? It is not entirely pleasant, not entirely sure what it is trying to say, and may be described a bit like Nyarlathotep slowly but meticulously devouring the second half of the plot, if it really was a plot at all. It is certainly
something , even if not necessarily pleasant, or even fully coherent. It is just there with a vague sense of sadness and feeling of
wrong about it, like a beached great white whale.
And that is
Out 1 in a nutshell.
Rating:
What the fuck out of
-0 .
Would recommend to unaccompanied minors:
only ones you don’t like .
Goes well with:
gin-tonic,bell-bottoms, iron rations
Would, if could:
Frédérique definitely, Marie or Lili yes, Sarah get the fuck away from me, whatever you are!
Codexian?
and
territory
Out 1 (1971) by Jacques Rivette, starring pretty much everyone from the French New Wave and then some. 12 hours and 53 minutes, in colour.
Pix or it didn't happen:
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