| Out 1 | |
|---|---|
 2015 French re-release poster | |
| Directed by |
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| Screenplay by |
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| Based on | History of the Thirteen by Honoré de Balzac |
| Produced by | Stéphane Tchalgadjieff |
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Pierre-William Glenn |
| Edited by | Nicole Lubtchansky |
| Music by | Jean-Pierre Drouet |
| Distributed by | Sunshine Productions |
Release date |
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Running time | 773 minutes |
| Country | France |
| Language | French |
Out 1, also referred to as Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, is a 1971 French mystery film written and directed by Jacques Rivette and Suzanne Schiffman. It is indebted to Honoré de Balzac's La Comédie humaine, particularly the History of the Thirteen collection (1833–35). Known for its length of nearly 13 hours, the film is divided into eight parts of approximately 90–100 minutes each.
The vast length of Out 1 allows Rivette and Schiffman, like Balzac, to construct multiple loosely connected characters with independent stories whose subplots weave amongst each other and continually uncover new characters with their own subplots. A truncated 4½-hour version exists, and its Spectre subtitle was chosen for the name's ambiguous and various indistinct meanings, while the Noli me tangere ("touch me not") subtitle for the original cut is clearly a reference to it being the full-length film as intended by Rivette.
The film's experimentation with parallel subplots was influenced by André Cayatte's two-part Anatomy of a Marriage (1964), while the use of expansive screen time was first toyed with by Rivette in L'amour fou (1969). The parallel narrative structure has since been used in many other notable films, including Krzysztof Kieślowski's Dekalog and Lucas Belvaux's Trilogie, which includes Un couple épatant, Cavale and Après la vie, to name a few. Each part begins with a title in the form of "from person to person" (usually indicating the first and last characters seen in each episode), followed by a handful of black and white still photos recapitulating the scenes of the prior episode, then concluded by showing the final minute or so (in black and white) of the last episode before cutting into the new episode itself (which is entirely in color).
Out 1 has won consistent critical acclaim since its release, and further received 13 votes in the 2012 Sight & Sound critics' poll of the greatest films ever made, resulting in a final ranking of 127th.[1]
- ^ "Votes for OUT 1 (1990)". British Film Institute. Archived from the original on 1 January 2017. Retrieved 1 January 2017.