Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Out 1
1990 · Jacques Rivette · Out 1 on Sightlines
A man is working the café tables on a Paris afternoon in the spring of 1970, taking coins from people who look away as they give. He doesn't speak. Whether he can't is another question. Somebody leaves a folded slip of paper with him, and the words on it seem to point at something: a group, a design, thirteen people who might be arranging the world from behind it. He takes it home and starts working on it. That is the engine of a thirteen-hour film. One scrap of paper, and a man who decides it means something.
Jacques Rivette shot Out 1 in six weeks, largely improvised, with two theater collectives rehearsing Aeschylus at exhaustive real-time length while two hustlers worked the streets — Jean-Pierre Léaud's panhandler, Juliet Berto's small-time operator. It screened once, as a work print, in Le Havre in 1971, and then it was gone. For forty-four years it was cinema's most storied missing film, alive in a shortened cut and in rumor, until restoration made the full Noli Me Tangere visible again in 2015.
Rivette's invention is simple to say and was very hard to do. He let the fiction precipitate out of the documentary. He did not write a conspiracy and then shoot it. He shot people at length doing real things, and allowed a story to condense out of that material the way weather forms out of air that was already in the room. The plot arrives late, arrives partially, and never entirely arrives.
This is where Deleuze stops being decoration and becomes a tool. In classical cinema a character perceives a situation, is pressed by it, acts, and the act changes the situation. Deleuze calls the whole system the movement-image, and its dominant form the action-image: perception flows into response with nothing left over. After the war that circuit breaks, and Deleuze lists the symptoms with unusual concreteness. Out 1 has all of them, as if Rivette were working from the list. A dispersive situation: no protagonist, just a scatter of people whose connection to one another is itself the open question. Weak links: the strands brush against each other and slide apart, causality gone slack. The balade, the stroll — two hustlers crossing Paris on trips that transform nothing and nobody.
Then the one that matters most here, which Deleuze calls the condemnation of the plot. In French, complot means conspiracy; English "plot" happens to carry both senses. His argument is that when narrative can no longer hold a world together, the world does not become innocent. It becomes suspicious. A diffuse plot-behind-the-plot moves in to occupy the place where the organizing plot used to be. The Thirteen, lifted from Balzac, is exactly that: a design that would make everything legible, proposed by a piece of paper, never confirmed, never quite refuted.
Without that frame Out 1 looks like an enormous shaggy-dog story, thirteen hours spent arriving at nothing. With it, the not-arriving is the subject, and it is precise rather than coy. The film is about the conspiracy-shaped hole May '68 left in Paris, the way a generation briefly convinced that history had become readable kept groping for a hidden design that would make its defeat make sense. Deleuze has a name for that politics: a people is missing. Modern political cinema, he says, can no longer show a collective subject acting. It can only show the vacancy where one should be, and the stories people generate to fill it. Out 1 is thirteen hours of people trying to constitute a group. The theater troupes are failing at the same thing, more slowly.
The Thirteen never appear, and cannot. They belong to what Deleuze calls the absolute out-of-field: not the next room, not the street outside, but a beyond with no location in space. Feuillade's Vampires had an out-of-field you could walk to. Lang's Mabuse saturates a city that is nonetheless mapped. Rivette kept the saturating design and deleted the address.
What fills the hours is bodies. The Aeschylus rehearsals run at close to their real length: breathing, repetition, a group assembling one sound out of nothing while you watch. Deleuze calls this a cinema of the body, the posture held long enough to become the film's actual event rather than a vehicle for its plot. And a rehearsal is his gest in the purest form available to cinema — an attitude that lays bare a social and theatrical relation instead of illustrating one. Watch who waits for whom. Watch who is embarrassed, who takes charge. Aeschylus is the pretext under which a group finds out what kind of group it is. These are also, in the plainest sense, stretches of dead time. Nothing advances. The film is completely alive.
That duration is what makes the paranoia work. Because the minutes are visibly real, in the Rouchian tradition where people perform versions of themselves for a camera that provoked them into it, we extend credit to everything else on screen. Deleuze calls this the powers of the false, and he means it admiringly. Not lying: the deliberate undecidability of true and false, used as a way of making something. Both street characters are frauds by trade, and both are also readers, decipherers, manufacturers of sense out of scraps. Deleuze's figure for that is the forger, who does not discover a truth but produces one and then lives inside it, and fabulation, catching people in the act of legending themselves. In Out 1 nothing separates a clue from a coincidence except somebody's need. The rehearsal room works like a seed crystal dropped into the solution of documentary Paris; a fiction grows around it, and you can watch it grow.
The debts are specific. Feuillade gave Rivette the serial's episodic shape, a Balzacian secret society, and conspiracy treated as urban texture unspooling through unadorned real streets. Lang gave the single criminal intelligence saturating a whole city. Renoir, the master Rivette named as his own, gave the deep-staged blocking that lets a dozen overlapping actors share a long take without anyone directing traffic. Rouch gave the method. Cassavetes' Shadows gave the proof that scenes generated by actors out of behavioral truth could carry a film with no fixed script. Warhol's Empire gave the permission for the clock: real elapsed time, repetition, even boredom, as the subject rather than the cost. Cross Feuillade's engine with Warhol's clock and you have Out 1.
Downstream is harder to trace honestly, because the film was not there to be copied. One projection in 1971 and then legend; its influence traveled for decades as an idea of a film rather than a film. The whole thing only came back in 2015, which means its real descendants may still be ahead of it. Worth asking, now that thirteen hours of anything is an ordinary weekend: has serial viewing finally made Out 1 legible, or has it only made the length legible and not what the length is for?
What it did to the art is this. It showed that narrative can be a sediment instead of a plan, that a rehearsal is a legitimate subject and not a making-of, and that the time-image can be sustained at industrial scale without turning into an endurance stunt. Next time, don't watch to find out whether the Thirteen exist. Watch the moment somebody decides they do. That decision, made again and again by different people in different rooms, is the film.
Concepts in play
- condemnation of the plot — Stray messages suggest the Thirteen, a secret society possibly binding everyone together, 'or possibly not' — a diffuse plot-behind-the-plot occupying the place where an organizing plot used to be.
- dispersive situation — Two theater collectives plus two solitary street hustlers working separate cons, with no protagonist and no guaranteed connection between the four strands.
- weak links — The troupes' rehearsals and the two hustlers' street work touch only through stray messages; causality across the eight-part structure stays slack throughout.
- the balade / trip form — Léaud's panhandler and Berto's hustler wander the Parisian streets hustling for cash on trips that transform neither them nor the city.
- absolute out-of-field — The Thirteen never appear and cannot be located anywhere in the filmed city, unlike Feuillade's reachable criminal spaces or Lang's mapped Mabuse metropolis.
- powers of the false — The conspiracy is left structurally undecidable — the film is 'about the conspiracy-shaped hole May '68 left,' with the secret society as a possibility the documentary duration makes credible without ever confirming.
- the forger — Both street protagonists are con artists by trade — a panhandler and a small-time hustler working the populace — who double as the film's decipherers of the Balzacian clues.
- fabulation / legending — The Rouchian method inherited from Chronicle of a Summer: provoked, camera-aware improvisation in which real people perform versions of themselves.
- a people is missing — The film's subject is a scattered post-'68 generation groping for a hidden design that would make its defeat legible; two collectives and one phantom society all fail to constitute a group.
- cinema of the body — The Aeschylus rehearsals run at exhaustive, real-time length, so that breathing, repetition and collective physical work become the film's events rather than its background.
- the gest — Rehearsal as attitude: the troupes' work on Aeschylus exposes the social and theatrical relations inside each group rather than illustrating the tragedy.
- temps mort — A thirteen-hour serial whose durational aesthetic descends from Empire, where real elapsed time, repetition and boredom are the actual subject.
- crystal in formation (seed) — 'Rivette lets fiction condense slowly out of documentary duration, like weather forming' — the rehearsal room functions as the seed around which the fiction crystallizes.