the soundtrack missing), then, af- ter Rivette had made some alter- ations (notably cutting a 10m sequence shot in the final episode showing Jean-Pierre Léaud’s char- acter reduced to a state of hyste- ria) in 1990, finally appeared on French television, with a 25 fps running time of 742m. This ver- sion has also been shown on German and Italian television; unusually, given the tendency to rely on dubbing in these coun- tries, both screenings were sub- titled. I first encountered this long version when it appeared on Germany’s 3 Sat in the mid-’90s (at the time, I had a satellite dish which picked up a number of German channels), and found that, despite my almost non-ex- istent French and German, I could follow it pretty well (the presence of several dialogueless scenes, particularly in the first episode, was obviously helpful). I was already a big Rivette fan, but it quickly became apparent that I was watching not only this director’s masterpiece, but one of the finest films ever made. OUT 1 begins by intercutting the activities of four initially un- connected characters or clusters of characters: two separate the- ater groups rehearsing experi- mental productions of plays by Aeschylus; and two isolated lon- ers—seemingly mute beggar Colin (Léaud), and cynical hus- tler Frédérique (Juliet Berto). For more than three hours, the film refuses to suggest any narrative link between these strands, al- lowing us to more fully consider what is being implied themati- cally by the juxtaposition of communal and solitary activities (the irony being that Colin— who is only pretending to be mute—and Frédérique are just as much “performers” as those individuals engaged in more tra- ditionally theatrical projects). Then, towards the end of part
two, Colin (who might be seen as a fantasist dreaming the en- tire plot into existence) begins receiving mysterious messages containing excerpts from Balzac’s HISTOIRE DES TREIZE and Lewis Carroll’s THE HUNTING OF THE SNARK; he “decodes” these texts (by a process which is com- pletely illogical), and discovers that they suggest the existence of a Balzacian “conspiracy of thir- teen” involving members of the theater groups. But the story which has started to emerge will never achieve fruition: as in Jean-Luc Godard’s similarly titled ONE PLUS ONE, none of the activities depicted can move beyond the rehearsal stage, the conspiracy, Colin’s efforts to penetrate it, and the planned productions of Aeschylus all be- ing doomed to failure. The re- sult is perhaps cinema’s richest exploration of narrative, taking Rivette’s favorite theme, the overlap between political con- spiracy and theater, and pursu- ing it to the point of madness. For narrative in this modernist masterpiece is a purely negative force, incapable of being resolved on its own terms, leaving noth- ing but destruction in its wake. OUT 1 has long been virtually inaccessible to English-speaking audiences—though a 16mm print screened during recent Rivette retrospectives in New York and London was apparently accompa- nied by translators who used a computer to type out translations of each line as it was delivered onscreen—leaving its admirers dreaming of the day when a prop- erly subtitled transfer would be re- leased on DVD. Since those companies responsible for distrib- uting world cinema are clearly busy undertaking such vital tasks as ensuring we have access to the entire oeuvre of Patrice Leconte, it has fallen to cinephiles more con- cerned with art than commerce to
rescue OUT 1 from undeserved ob- scurity. The transfer available for download on Karagarga (where it originated), eMule and The Pirate Bay is taken from a version broad- cast (in the correct 1.33:1 ratio) during 1999 by the Italian channel RAI, whose logo is onscreen throughout. Given that the source is a series of VHS recordings, the quality is acceptable, though some tape damage is evident, there are a few brief sound dropouts, and the end credits of episode one have been truncated. The English sub- titles, contained in files which must be downloaded separately, are quite adequate, though there is a tendency to leave certain lines and (especially during the rehearsal scenes) passages of dialogue untranslated. At moments such as this, viewers may well be grate- ful for the presence of non-re- movable Italian subtitles! The spellings are mostly British (or Australian), though the occa- sional appearance of American spellings is explained by the fact that these subtitles were the re- sult of a collective effort on the part of several Karagarga mem- bers—a group project which, ironically, has proved far more successful than any of those encountered in the film itself. It is surely evidence of how widely cinema is still considered a second-rate art that one of its supreme masterpieces has been denied to British and American audiences; if a similar situation existed where literature was con- cerned, we would only be able to read English translations of Proust’s À LA RECHERCHE DU TEMPS PERDU in the form of clandestinely circulated photo- copies. Yet one can hardly resist a wry smile upon discovering that OUT 1, a work obsessively fo- cused on conspiracies, has finally achieved widespread distribution thanks to what might described as an internet “conspiracy.”
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