New 2K Restoration of Jacques Rivette's Out 1 Heading to Cinemas and Blu-ray
via blu-ray.com
French label Carlotta Films and Carlotta Films U.S. will screen a new 2K restoration of Jacques Rivette's Out 1 (1971), starring Michèle Moretti, Hermine Karagheuz, Karen Puig, Jean-Pierre Léaud, and Michael Lonsdale. The new 2K restoration will also be released on Blu-ray in France and the U.S. in Q4.
Paris, April 1970. Two theatre groups each rehearse avant-garde adaptations of plays by Aeschylus. A young deaf-mute begs for change in cafés while playing the harmonica. A young woman seduces men in order to rob them. As a conspiracy begins to be uncovered, the protagonists' stories start to intertwine… Crowned with success after L'Amour Fou, Jacques Rivette throws himself into a film project "without any time limitation" and films a group of actors in an almost constant state of improvisation as they interact with and move through the cafés, the streets, and the apartments of Paris. Equally inspired by Honoré de Balzac's History of the Thirteen and Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark, as he was by the serials of Louis Feuillade, OUT 1 is a unique snapshot of post-May 1968 society, when the utopian dreams of a new era give way to a general malaise.
AN INVISIBLE FILM FOR OVER 40 YEARS
When Jacques Rivette and his producer, Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, began the OUT 1 project, they did not set a time limit on the work. The final cut, divided into eight episodes, is 12 hours 30 minutes long and the ORTF (the national agency charged with providing public radio and television in France) refused to buy it, afraid of the extraordinary and unclassifiable nature of the film. OUT 1 was shown in its full working version in a projection, which is now considered a legendary event, at the Havre in September 1971, but was shown neither in theaters nor television. Jacques Rivette spent the entirety of 1972 on editing another version of the film, reducing the running time to just over 4 hours. This cut of the film, called OUT 1 : Spectre, which proposes a different vision from the original film, was released in French cinemas in 1974.
The public had to wait until 1989 for the long version to finally be shown in its integrality at the Festival of Rotterdam, followed by various other European festivals, and finally on French and German television in the early 1990's. From that point on, the original film is called OUT 1 : Noli Me Tangere, and has a slightly different cut from the version shown in 1971. After this, Jacques Rivette's monumental oeuvre virtually disappeared from the silver screen.
OUT 1 has remained particularly rare and almost invisible in its integral version since its creation. Restored in 2015, OUT 1 : Noli Me Tangere and OUT 1 : Spectre are finally available in 2K!
