So if you know one fact about Out 1, it’s probably that it’s nearly thirteen hours long, which is a fact generally presented in a way to make it sound freakish and outlandish. Thirteen hours for a movie! It’s impossible, unheard of, absurd!

It’s also not really true. I mean, it is thirteen hours, but it’s not a movie. Out 1 was conceived by Rivette, and is presented on streaming services today, as a miniseries of eight episodes (though it was never shown on French TV as he’d hoped). And a TV miniseries of that length isn’t particularly notable at all. Twin Peaks: The Return is 17 hours; The Underground Railroad is 10 hours. This just slots neatly in the middle of those other prestige shows.

So yeah, Out 1 doesn’t deserve its reputation as being this interminable, hyper-experimental, outlandish thing… for that reason. But you might want to keep those adjectives in your back pocket for some other reasons.

I’ll warn you right now that I’m going to spoil the plot of this, to the extent that’s a thing you can do; so if you want to see it fresh, stop reading and go watch it. And if it seems weird that I’m giving spoiler warnings on a 1971 movie, turns out the release history here is really complicated[1]: It was shown once in 1971, in an unfinished form. It was shown again in 1989, in a more finished form. But it wasn’t until 1990 that it was shown in its current “final” form at a few more theatres. Even then, it was nearly impossible to see, and it wasn’t until 2004 that it was shown more broadly, for generous definitions of “broadly.” And it only got a digital restoration that made it available on disc and streaming in 2015. So unless you’re an extremely dedicated cinephile, you’ve only actually had a decade to see this.[2]

All right, so now that we’re in spoiler town, I’m going to give away the big secret of the film: It presents itself — very slowly, eventually; this doesn’t really start until four hours into the movie — as being about a conspiracy, this secret group called the Thirteen about whom we get mysterious hints. And over the course of the show, we learn more about the members of this group, and see them interact with each other. But all these hints never really cohere into anything; by the end, we learn that the Thirteen was just kind of this idea for a group that mostly petered out, and that all the puzzle bits that seemed to be such big clues at this grand conspiracy were just a lark by one of the more eccentric members.

The secret is that there’s no secret, and to the extent the film has a point, it’s watching people struggle to create meaning where there is none — whether it’s the characters digging into the mystery of the Thirteen, or you the viewer trying to put all these clues together. (There’s an argument to be made that this attempt at creating meaning from nothing is, in a thematic echo of the “main plot,” the goal of the two experimental acting troupes whose rehearsals we spend most of the running time actually watching, both of which break apart before they ever even get close to performing anything.)

This sounds interesting and relevant to our times — what was QAnon if not the desperate attempt to assemble conspiratorial meaning out of the meaningless, after all? And there’s definitely room for someone to make a good movie dealing with those themes (arguably the Coen Brothers have).

But Rivette’s movie is frustrating for reasons that go beyond its intentional thematic frustration. It’s not even the endless scenes of acting exercises that are the problem (though I submit those are not as interesting as Rivette seems to believe they are).

The big problem for me is that the movie is improvised, and it feels it. Rivette was interviewed in 1974, and he talks at length about how frustrating and limiting he found the traditional process of writing a script and shooting the script to be. So in order to preserve his freedom during the creation of the movie, he dispensed with all but the broad outlines of a script, and gave his actors license to create their characters and to improvise their dialogue.

I went looking for this interview because it strongly felt like this might have been the case. There’s a particular rhythm to improvised scenes, where conversation meanders formlessly, and you get emotional intensity without any real reason for it. It’s not a very satisfying feeling, and you definitely get that here: A lot of these scenes feel not dissimilar to the fictional acting rehearsals.

While the individual scenes more or less work — their improv-driven vagueness plausibly heightens the feeling that there’s a conspiracy going on — they don’t work together. It’s nearly impossible to construct an interiority for characters that will explain why they act this way in one scene, and then that way in the scene that follows. There’s no motivation that makes sense, and often no logical or emotional throughline at all. They’re just disconnected scenes. They don’t mean anything when put together.

And maybe that’s part of Rivette’s point, too, that all meaning is constructed and fiction is a lie, and you shouldn’t come to movies looking for coherence. Nothing in that interview suggests it, though, and I think at a certain point you can be too generous in treating real weaknesses as secret strengths.

So yeah, I don’t think this movie is ultimately successful. And while it is interesting in a lot of ways, is it thirteen hours’ worth of interesting? … Well, I have to admit that I initially wrote that question as a rhetorical one, and was about to give it a flat “no” answer, but I think the more honest answer is that it depends on what you’re comparing it to. Compared to the previous half dozen movies on this list all put together? Yeah, that really is an easy no. Watch six excellent two-hour movies instead! But compared to the typical streaming miniseries? I’d much rather watch this than a couple of D+ MCU shows, and it’s not close. So there’s something here.

Still, that’s a weak recommendation at best. Despite its virtues, this just doesn’t hang together fully enough to justify this kind of time investment. If you want to see Rivette’s aesthetic in a more successful instantiation, watch Céline and Julie Go Boating instead. And if you end up super-loving that movie, well, maybe come back and give this one a go despite my opinion. After all, there are 17 critics who think this is one of the ten best movies they’ve ever seen, and they’re all a lot more knowledgeable than I am.

  1. It’s actually even more complicated than that. There’s also a four-hour short version of this that was more widely available and more widely shown; but it’s known as Out 1: Spectre, and isn’t the work we’re talking about here. ↩︎

  2. I think both parts of this — its 2015 restoration and wide availability, and its earlier unavailability — are key to its placement on this 2022 list. Getting a reputation as an impossible-to-see grail movie, to pique everyone’s interest and get them thinking of it as a Significant Film, and then getting wide availability so people can actually see it and vote for it, is the kind of pattern that can get you some Great Movies love. ↩︎