There were festival screenings at Berlin and Rotterdam, but not until 2004. So, over the years, it was very hard to see Out 1. But that didn’t work either and was easily disdained as frivolous by purists. In fact, commercial heads got together to edit it down to a mere four-and-a-half hours as 1973’s Out 1: Spectre (the ghost of itself). The director hoped it would play on theatre screens. Rivette could have seen this in advance even if his quite vivid cast hardly appreciated the scale of the enterprise as they shot it in just six weeks.
It just seems long if you’re contemplating a movie. But in terms of sidereal time, or if you’re waiting to die, it’s not really so long. Twelve-and-a-half hours could be a long time, too long, if you are waiting to go to the bathroom. After all, 12½ hours is a long time – isn’t it? I ask because some of us do sleep that long, while others can sit looking out of the window for half a day and decide that nothing much has happened.
It has never had what used to be called a ‘release’ just because distributors, exhibitors and audiences (those stock pieces in the old board game, The Movies) decided that it wasn’t possible, or reasonable, or manageable. It’s enough that we can’t often have Out 1.Īs readers of Sight & Sound, do you know what Out 1 is, or wanted to be? It is a movie, made by Jacques Rivette, lasting 12½ hours, whenever it plays. It was also just a week after Disney World opened in Orlando, Florida – Out 1 could have been a showstopper if it had played there. That’s a long time ago, and it was days after a cyclone in the Bay of Bengal that killed 10,000 people – or, to be more precise, about 10,000 people. Still, it has never been an easy or straightforward film and it barely made its first projection in public, in Le Havre, on 9 October 1971. Not to mention the quite determined way in which ‘action’ is dealt with gradually or at a calm distance, to avoid undue excitement. One of the charms of the film is its 16mm matter-of-factness and the rather faded minestrone of its colours. I was flying to Tromsø, to see Out 1 in the northernmost screening that strange venture has ever had. But you can’t always see what you want, or be sure that you’ve seen it. You say that aircraft windows cannot be made of Perspex? I’m sure you’re right, just as I still don’t understand what causes Northern Lights after vain nocturnes above the Arctic Circle searching for them. So Norway was gloom already, and travellers studied the Perspex windows for the green glimmer of Northern Lights. Crossing the North Sea, the grey evening shroud of ocean turned into what seemed like a special effect, some trembling gelid slate-stone mass. On the plane going north from Gatwick, we rapidly entered negative light.
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