接触1971

随手写。看上去是洪常秀拍了一部村上春树写剧本的《回转企鹅罐》，同时加入了大量先锋即兴戏剧（🤯😍）和林奇元素……特别喜欢这个梦幻组合。从第五集开始——就像《罐》中从第十二集开始世界（男权）秩序的逻辑和连续性逐步崩塌瓦解，这种二部结构、以及结尾部分与前文在质地上被强调的差异，都是很有番剧性的特征——声音首先开始从秩序中抽离（排练时的海浪声，后来某些场景中环境音效频繁的消失），接着是人物（Quentin意义不明的出走行为），最后是图像本身：到最后一集，整个影像都几乎成为了某种降神会的器具。一个小例子：对着镜子的那段镜头多么像是直接来自于在镜中直视我们的Sarah自己的视角，这个怪异的摄影把戏因为间或插入的短暂黑屏——仿佛Sarah在眨眼，因为画面中的她从来不闭上眼睛——而更加逼真；然而接着几分钟后摄像机缓缓离开镜子，转向床上的Émilie，于是我们有了一种非常不舒服的感觉，仿佛在我们和电影*之间*有什么东西出了问题，出现了某种投影的差错，在原来坚固的事物周围产生了幽灵。也许可以说，里维特所痴迷并在作品中不断追求的就是这样的幽灵，事物在意义的边界和转角处投下的阴影，图像侧面的隐蔽空间中闪光留下的残像。当然，里维特作品的问题也通常出在这里；那些像凝结核般悄悄聚集着所有晶体的非理性点——我想到了Frédérique拿着枪喊的最后一声“转过来！”，还有Colin的口琴——很容易变得虚弱，就像几年后的《决斗》中那样；事实上，人们很容易会得出结论，认为里维特是影视界的故弄玄虚之王。大概这也是对的。但是除了这一点，我们可以注意到——套用日本传统能剧理论中的术语——还有“花”（hana）存在于此，它是这样的一种美好，在穷尽了一切技巧和可能性之后仍然长存，就像花朵的样子总是永恒不变，但无论来自哪里的人们也都会一再停下欣赏，直到永远。它存在于所有漫长镜头的角落，所有细节微小的游戏性和物质性中。里维特给予了这些人物细节一种舒展的地位，几乎可以称为民主：属于一切物的民主；尽管，这种民主在最后并不能取得胜利，而是被忧郁——时代的忧郁，时间精灵（《赛琳与朱莉出航记》？）的忧郁——所击碎，余下只是自由的幻影。 A-（纯属个人偏好）

我在电影院看它的时候我才知道我是可以主动放弃一切思考的，自我意识就像暂停一样没有任何反馈和流动。意识从第一部分开始涣散直到消失不见，一切都是那么和平和美好，睁着眼睛但是好像又什么都没看，张着嘴也只能感受到呼吸，一切都在发生，影片在播放，但是我的意识好像和影院融为了一体，感受一切在周遭发生，但好像又没发生，像一束光透过介质没有痕迹。直到下午倒数第二幕我实在是撑不住打了退堂鼓。对不起，我只是个垃圾，我没文化我有罪。

最近失眠得厉害，在思考人类的意识究竟是什么，为什么晚上会活跃和兴奋，又回想起这部电影，可惜它太难得了不怎么有机会看，不然可能会再去一次。

发表于《电影手册》第716期，2015年11月号

作者：Hélène Frappat

翻译：TWY

包含《出局》剧透，慎入

译者注：所有《出局》中角色的名字会保留其法语原名，但会翻译其扮演者的名字，原文作者大多数情况使用的是演员名字指代角色。

In and Out

在我们生命伊始，那里有遗忘。一个秋日下午，让-皮埃尔·利奥德致电于我，希望我能给他讲一段回忆。不是我的记忆，而是他的。我们在蒙帕纳斯的一家咖啡店见面，那曾经是我父母年轻时常待的地方，彼时的他们过着如《出局》（Out 1, 1971）里的生物一样，极度无所事事的日子，自然让我想起了这位演员扮演的角色。传递别人的记忆要容易得多，在Sélect的密室中，利奥德认真细数Colin生活中的片断：装聋作哑的口风琴演奏家，一位正在展开调查的侦探，手中装备着巴尔扎克与路易斯·卡罗，为他在这个割裂的城市中指点方向——一个荒凉地漫步着的人生。

不过，对于这位在1969年到1970年间把持着《出局》的钥匙的人而言，有一段记忆是没有缺失的。当我撰写的关于雅克·里维特的书在戛纳发布时，我们曾长时间地就这位悄悄笼罩着《出局》全片的幽灵而畅谈，就他在影片序列中的每一次缺席而呼喊着，就如Colin暴力地甩着电话亭的场景，他在电话里与他父亲争吵（利奥德记不得这段了），只是为了一张…… 媒体证。

这个幽灵正是我们现代意识的频谱，自从18世纪起，它破解了我们婴孩时期无声的字词，并补足了让每个人得以讲述自身存在的词语。让-雅克·卢梭，这位给自己保留了多个假名的哲学家，就应该让利奥德扮演，假设里维特与编剧让·格吕约尔（Jean Gruault）合作的这部未竟之作没有被68年五月的革 命所打乱。1967年，基于制片人乔治·德·包瑞德（Georges de Beauregard）的一个想法，里维特曾梦想去“改编”卢梭的《忏悔录》，形式上则从其最终之作（《作为让-雅克的审判者的卢梭》和《一个孤独漫步者的遐想》）开始一直闪回到过去。如果是这样，利奥德则可以化身为年轻时期的卢梭，查尔斯·丹纳则可以扮演最后的卢梭。

纵观电影史上任何一部卢梭式的寓言，我一直到14年后，在约翰·卡朋特的《外星恋》（Starman, 1984）中才找到《出局》的延伸——一个系谱。对于《出局》而言，换言之，对于里维特的导演手法而言，首先要问的问题则是：“如何开始？”

我们，一部电影和其观众的联合（用里维特式的言语来说即是：一部被观众所看的电影；谁在观看；谁在拍摄）。那么一位电影人要如何开始电影？在他的血液中，在他第一时间无声的手势中，在他最原始的儿戏中：戏剧。《出局》以两组演员开场。但两个剧团各自的导演（迈克尔·朗斯代尔，米歇尔·莫莱蒂）都不明白自己要如何开始：从文本出发（埃斯库罗斯）？当排练愈演愈烈，演员们似乎越发无法进入到《被缚的普罗米修斯》或者《七将攻忒拜》的情境中。从词语开始？“一直都是词语的祸。” 于是演员们开始拆解字词，反复吟唱着字母表。从序言开始？缺少文本，“未能处在语言表达状态”的演员，尝试用身体，并非任何角色的身体，他们自己的身体，或是以一个集体为单位的身体，开始慢行着，有时害怕，有时喜悦，有时奔跑。从身体的原生状开始？在《出局》中，他们实验尖叫、动物痉挛、催眠，很快异化为一出滑稽戏。

我们应当能够支配自己。那是人类历史的开端，那宏大的历史，那些孩子们在书籍上读到的历史。基于巴尔扎克和他最后的小说——《近代史的另一面》（L'Envers de l'histoire contemporaine，正如大师侯麦在第三集中的阐释段落中所言，少了它我们便无法理解《人间喜剧》），《出局》选择将持有其秘密的钥匙赠予两位“出局”（out）的孩子，两个喜爱听故事和讲故事的人，两个故事大王，两个偷窃癖者，两个迷失之人。两个人。

《出局》中这种卢梭式的选择是辩证的。里维特选择了迷失者来对抗那些雇佣他们的人，那些世界的主人在一个个巨大公寓模型里，成天酝酿空洞之词。群体或者阴谋集团的领导者：朗斯代尔、（弗兰西丝）法比安、（雅克）多尼奥-瓦克罗兹、让·布伊兹，他们都假装能了解自己：中产阶级的化装。在卢梭的旁边，不像他身边的沙龙贵族对穿长袍的亚美尼亚人报以鄙夷一样，里维特选择站在了“坏人”的一边。“世界上有两类人：骗子和被骗的。” 你永远是那个被骗的。看看你穿的衣服。这种帝国主义式的谴责由弗兰西丝·法比安在巴黎的天台上发出，告知朱丽叶·贝尔托，她这种（坏）男孩的伪装是失败的，即便不确定她的地位、她的阶级、她的性别：一个赤裸的无产者。

什么是辩证法？在第六集中，Frédérique（朱丽叶·贝尔托）穿着一身蹩脚的男装造型，在咖啡店的露台跟Warok（让·布伊兹）搭话：“我能问您一个问题吗？您认为在如今，还能不能辩证？” 辩证法是一套密码，正如纸钞在手之间流通时的沙沙声。“你想要权力，或者你想要金钱。有了金钱，你便有了权力。有了权力？那你便有了金钱！这就是辩证！我们要往上而不是往下。”

里维特的调度能让任意女演员化身为一颗行星，那么究竟是何种原因导致了Frédérique女扮男装的失败呢？卢梭语：“我在此向你下跪，请求你把这个男人变为一个女人：虐待我，欺骗我…” 因为不管是成为一位男孩，还是成为一个男人，或是一个成年人，三者之间没有任何区别。“这不是真的！我才不是个鸵鸟，我才不想被称作鸵鸟，” Frédérique哭喊着，卸下伪装变回了小女孩，那个她从没能摆脱的形象。擦干眼泪吧，Frédérique，快玩去。别忘了女王给爱丽丝上的那一课：玩耍不是为了成为鸵鸟。游戏是关于生死的。

那么，如此一来，出局的两个孩子，在辩证失败者的集中营里，改变着身份（“我是佚名”）、家庭、性别、咖啡店，却没法放弃他们居住的洞穴般的“仆人间”，他们纸张遍地的住所：书籍页面、加密信息、偷窃的信件、和贩卖故事得来的那些纸钞。

而在街对面，一群大人们则无法继续相信那些令儿时的他们入迷的寓言。“孩子长大成人了！”（《席琳与朱莉出航记》）小女孩不再是一整颗行星。那个优秀的孩子变成了否决的大人，他假装不去利用那些定义了他（社会）地位的权力和暴力。这便是Thomas（朗斯代尔），他徒劳无功地试图去重新找回那些儿时所想的魔法力量：“一个孩子才不会说：’你怎么不直接说那是架飞机？’” 以及那位巴尔扎克专家，竟不愿相信巴尔扎克笔下的事物曾真实存在，反而试图劝告其学生去遵守秩序，去分清楚真实世界和文字世界，说到：“你对真实世界的无知程度正如你拙劣的语法拼写一样糟糕。”

可是那个小女孩又为何要关心字是否拼对呢？正如爱丽丝和Frédérique，她们可有着比掌握语言逻辑更重要的事要做，正如“矮胖子”（Humpty Dumpty）精准总结的那样：“当我使用一个词语，那它就表达了我想说的… 不多也不少。问题在于谁是主人，仅此而已。”

谁是主人？（戏剧的、阴谋论的、故事的、电影的）作者？还是孩子？孩子对权力无动于衷，只要知道时间紧迫，夜幕会降临，游戏会结束，然后呢，小女孩儿就去做了。“你必须要去做，而只有你相信了，它才会成功。”（在这部不相信机遇存在，认为其只能在相遇中产生拐角处的电影中，作为“天外救星”的巴贝特·施罗德说出了这句话。）

《出局》恰好处于机遇的拐角处（l’angle du hasard），这指的是那个由大人的否决（导演里维特，假装自己不是影片的作者）和孩子的创造（小女孩里维特，她充满快乐与恐惧地和其同事们参与着电影的创作）相接而成的角。卢梭语：“作者这个职业令我抓狂，它催生的尴尬境地是令我想要放弃它的缘由之一。”

这是另一种辩证法，只有当一个人不再扮演另一个人的时候才剩下的，重要的、真正的辩证法，是以血与泪为结局的辩证法。《出局》选择了虚假的死亡：Frédérique男式衬衫上的那滩假血——当她刚刚遇到真爱，便在片中戏剧性地被谋杀。真与假，事实与谎言：这出辩证法用戏剧的武器在《出局》中展开，古老的面具重新浮出水面。

一个人（personne），在最初（“在词源上”，巴尔扎克专家会这么说），是一副面具。在《出局》的舞台上有谁？角色（persona）与人（personne）。在剧院的戏台上，在巴黎的屋顶上，在咖啡店的露台上，在河岸，在奥斯曼（Haussmannian）式的公寓里，在诺曼式豪宅外的海滩上，假面落地：作为否决者和操纵者的男人（朗斯代尔）失声痛哭，女导演（莫莱蒂）不再想要为所应为；多情的背叛终于令她（布鲁·欧吉尔）解除威胁般的注视；律师（法比安）梦见自己对判决失去控制，如她光滑的头发。假面纷纷卸下，大人们不再假装相信自己作为大人的角色。“我是佚名。” 大人的背后是面具；在面具后，没人能给出答案。伟大的导演离开剧场，走向了沙滩。很快，在另一部电影中——里维特理应开拍《出局2》（Out 2），这项任务还得交给观众完成，在那里会有沙滩城堡被搭建，陪伴的则是失去了身份的大人们，如今她们再一次成为了人（personne）：一位女仆，一个女人，一颗行星。

在那个世界，那部电影中，我们的记忆将被共享。在咖啡店的桌前，记忆如一则则寓言般被交换，而正是如此，就算大人的世界充满灾难，孩子终将生存下来。

E1

大段落歇斯底里的临场编排；即兴演绎与进入捕捉；参与释放与调和控制；侵入性的排演intro（二元），偏执、游离和独处。

E2

文本围读；关于“十三”的谜面初现；排练剪接和“跳出肉体的灵魂视点”；令人几近昏睡的车厢对白（想起I’m Thinking of Ending Things的冰冷触感）。

E3

体验渐入佳境；The Deaf & Dumb开口说话；更丰富而明媚的外景，喜剧和暴力的刺激元素。

E4

角色关系和时空开始产生联结；“十三人组织”浮出水面；新成员的注入却为为剧团带来疏离感；弗雷德里克的狩猎触及到地下组织的丝网。

E5

两则别致的屋顶对谈，女人识破女人的伎俩； 柯林对宝琳的欲动，宝琳却因伊戈尔的旧信勾走心思；大起却又随即大落的七将剧团，突破瓶颈的普罗米修斯（或应以体悟舞台剧的方式去理解肢体与嘶吼）；自然的触发明显优先于逻辑的框定。

E6

巴黎切割，城景游戏，被察觉的记录者角色；分裂的七将剧团，莉莉向海湾逃离，昆廷开始无主无尽的徘徊；街角咖啡店里随心所欲的哲学探讨，收纳消逝时光的酒杯和烟灰缸；托马斯的浓情流露和亲密相拥；关于皮埃尔的传奇，普罗米修斯被点燃，柯林以“神秘暗喻带”闯入地下纽带，又带着被回绝的无尽思念重新上路，一个人成为一支队伍。（个人最爱之章节）

E7

教科书式、实验性的即兴表演迎来爆发，所剥离出的“局外人”视点在被强调；鲜血与尖刃，爱情与谎言，“红皇后”的“高塔”与“白国王”的“宝藏”；普罗米修斯被肢解，“十三人”组织同样历经着分裂重组；柯林会前往终点拯救“公主”吗？（为什么他们说着加密语言？）谁又将在终章迎来“出局”？

E8

旅途的终点，情绪的高点；艾米丽于房间中超现实化镜式自省的处理堪称全片表现力的峰值；托马斯以普罗米修斯的姿态独自倒在沙滩上在夕阳下迎接落幕，昆廷和玛丽沦落成大都市的拼图；露茜同沃克探讨理想化神秘组织的幽灵，留下精英式的企盼和旁观；柯林在不得“入局”后重归“聋哑”的虚无，弗雷德里克则“情不自禁”地探向命运深渊；导者（作者）兴许为掌控着一切的皮埃尔，那么缺位的观者或即从未露面的伊戈尔？

剧透慎入

如何结束一部长达12个半小时，拥有多条故事线的群戏影片？最胆怯者会把房间打扫到基本干净，看似离开房间，实则悄咪咪地躲在门后，并刻意留下一些面包屑吸引好奇的猫咪（电视台/流媒体，以及久留至此的观众们）来“续订”；境界高些的，则做同样的事情，但立刻宣布金盆洗手，而我们会相信他们，于是一部伟大的作品，在这像是终点而又非终点的地方停止，恰到好处又回味无穷；再有野心大者，会彻底扭转铺垫好的形式与命题，并打破现实，绽放抽象的烟花来盛大地谢幕；而雅克·里维特的《出局：禁止接触》的结尾呢？前所未见，以后也未必有人再敢尝试。

此时影片已经播到最后一集，一切看似都已结束，重大的悬念被揭开，该回到原点的则回到原点，一些我们不该知道的，也早早不再露面，留下一名绝望的男子在南法的海滩前，面向落日余晖作着最后的表演——他嘶吼着，如此地疲惫不堪，四肢歪歪扭扭地摇摆在沙子之上。这虽然不只是他的故事，但看上去，最后的谢幕留给了他，一个四平八稳的合理收尾，朗斯代尔的情感也反射着我们观看的疲惫，造型上也足够好看。但就当他消失在海平面前，一阵来自纯粹电影的激荡，无声的轰鸣——《火车进站》在1895年将咖啡厅里的观众吓得四散而逃，而里维特即将再做一次，但更简单，更惊人，最起码，对于我们这些刚刚经历了那些影像与表演的疯狂的观众而言（我做作地用了里维特所谓的“我们”，就像罗宾·伍德说的那样，里维特的疯狂粉丝是个小群体）。事情通常是这样的：

我们看到一个“似曾相识”的影像，我这么说，但只是因为我们在几小时（或者更久，考虑到观看的方式，但不管怎么说，还是长于一部相对“正常”时长的电影）前才见过她：穿着紫色的某剧院成员Marie站在一座金色的女神像前，她转过头去。这个镜头来自第六集。在当时，她应该正在寻找一个神秘人物，剧团被此人的到来彻底搅乱了节奏，随后鸽子开始在巴黎的几大片区里寻找。就是在这座金色的女神像前，她转过头去，似乎是看到了什么，可能什么也没有，但无论如何，她再给自己一次找到他的机会。然后片尾演职员表开始出现，《出局：禁止接触》到此结束。时间似乎凝固了。坐在黑暗中，我们问：“然后呢？”

首先是一种夹杂着震惊与失望等等其它情绪的混合物。失望于里维特竟敢用一个重复的镜头来结束一部巨作。这个偷懒的家伙！而震惊，好让我们把观影时早早准备好的影评腹稿统统在脑内燃烧殆尽。一瞬间，我们得重新开始。但这个“结局”的天才显然不言而喻，因为我们必须重新开始，或者说，一切从未真正结束。正如塞尔日·达内说的那样，在这里里维特创造的，就是时间！就像《席琳和朱莉出航记》里的那句：“但，第二天早晨......”

我必须承认，在那个晚上选择打开《出局》第一集开始观看前，我对它几乎没有一点了解。当然，此时我已经看过几部里维特了，但一直还是不敢碰这部集大成之作。有时候，我会随意地，极不严肃地打开一部电影，然后随便看几分钟。但那天我并没有停一下，那么，究竟发生了什么？里维特的电影对我做了什么？

在影片的第一集第十分钟开始有一场差不多四十分钟长的“戏剧排练”，但虽说只是一场在某个简陋的排练室近似“习作”的片段，却是一种源自天外的东西。已经很难完完全全地回想起我是如何撑过那些疯狂的场面了，但唯一可以肯定的是：1.我不是老老实实坐着看完它的；2.不可能再出现第二次这样的场面了。可能是呆在家里自己看的优势，随着银幕上的演员的抽搐和叫喊：一种无以言状的结合了高潮、犬吠、密语以及一系列完全动物化的恐怖声音，我意识到我的身体不禁地发生物理扭曲，和影片中那些扭曲的人体一起运动，正如片中的六七人围住那个橘红色的人体模型并实施邪教般的朝拜和涂抹，而很快他们围抱在一起，尖叫着进行着某种催眠术。在他们终于褪下了演员的姿态后，我发现我和他们一样，达到了一种神奇的放空状态，这既是出自于我的疲倦，也是出自电影的疲倦：16毫米的手持摄影机不断地靠近，推后，时而处于观察者的状态，时而一步跨出去加入了他们的舞蹈。我发现我首次做到了如此这般和电影中的状态同步，而当一切消停下来，我也和他们一样，长呼一口气，哈哈大笑起来，如果我能穿越银幕（也许我已经做到了），我会好好和他们拍个掌。

总的来说，如果我们经历一场旅程是为了首先看到旅程的末尾，随后再重塑整个过程，那么在“排练”终结时那种如释重负的极致放空便是最好的证明。至于重塑，我在部分重看了这一段（为何只是部分？那是因为我已经无力再复制那次的体验了，虽然耳机里依旧放着它的声音）以后或许破解了一些秘密。或许整个中邪似的魔法生成自整个场景的“第一幕”：演员之间的镜像（mirroring）。在排练开始时，演员们两人一组面向对方，以极为缓慢的速度模仿着各自的动作，那么如果电影也希望和与观者一同执行这样的镜像？孩子总喜欢模仿，模仿是他们的天性，一种幼稚的模仿欲望被这些影像和声音所激活。而随着片段的时长越来越变得令人难以忍受，或许参与其中才是唯一的解脱之路。最起码于我而言电影的效果是这样，这也和摄影机那种忽远忽近的运动有关。

用文字来还原自己对这样的一部作品的感受，最困难的可能便是维持理性思考的同时保留那种原始纯粹的对作品的感知，而要从整体上破解《出局》的脉络，首先要认识到的便是整部作品从根本上的随机性，这和观影者的状态可谓不谋而合，观看它和解析它是一种同样难以预测的形态。里维特在《疯狂的爱情》，他的首部强调即兴创作的作品后，1970年和一众演员们（正如我前面形容的，这帮演员个个是奇才：戏剧上的、肢体上的、语言上的）拍摄了约三十个小时的即兴内容，并以巴尔扎克小说集《十三人的故事》序言中关于一个巴黎的地下神秘组织为引子，连接成了一部十二个半小时分八集放映的巨作。

一口气看完整部《出局》大概是不现实的，除非你能找到一场无间断的电影院放映，但在大多数情况下，或许更好的观看方式是像读一本长篇小说一样分段来看。我花了五天看了全片，其中最后一天一口气看完了最后三集。我不清楚一口气看完整部影片会是什么样的体验，但这5天几乎马拉松式的观影下来，能感受到的便是这群角色和这部电影同呼吸的过程。里维特在影片中制造松散的流动，以及即兴发挥带来的不规则的事件联系需要观众直接活在影片其中，而影片无时无刻也不在控制着观众自己。

而后来我们开始慢慢了解到的这个所谓的“13”组织，也正是这样的一个团体，一个从1968年的硝烟中走出来试图要改变世界的理想主义乌托邦。而这一天，Colin突然被几个人塞了一些神秘的纸条，上面写着一些无厘头的诗句，正式为观众缓慢地打开了《出局》中的世界。无厘头！自然，里维特的天才则在于在利用即兴创造事件的同时维持一个整体的结构，他与副导演苏珊·席夫曼制作了一整套系统来记录拍摄时所有三十三位演员的互动所产生的剧情走向，并在摄制中创造“路线”，最终创造出了《出局》的四条故事的整体。四条线平行进行，并逐渐产生交集，生成新的线索、事件与新的故事线。然而，这些场景的呈现却毋庸置疑地被神秘化，甚至撕裂化，产生了变异。观众几乎没有办法预知场景的始终，而在第一集上述的诡异“舞蹈”中，里维特则看似随机地抛入一些Colin的画面，我们看到利奥德如演默片喜剧一般，独自在家机械化地制作着他的卡片，他持着印章的手臂如同被电脑控制的机械臂一样敲打着印泥，然后敲打着蓝色的卡片，发出咚咚的声音。Colin制作这些卡片，是作为“命运的声音”分发给巴黎街头咖啡馆的人们以换取1法郎，而当有人拒绝给钱时，“聋哑人”Colin会吹着口琴骚扰他们，这影史上最佳的“配乐”就是这么诞生的——另一种即兴发挥，另一种不稳定。另一个场景更为直接地与里维特的剪辑产生了平行效应：在接下来的某个场景中，我们更加详细地看到Colin制作其“命运卡片”的内容：他从书柜中取出一本随机的书，并从中随机地撕下一叠纸，并随机分发到每张卡片里——Colin的“技法”，这种随机的信息撕裂和里维特贯穿全片的剪辑思路堪称异曲同工。这也正像是Thomas排练的戏剧，几乎要把人的身体给分离开来。同时，我们也意识到本片的四条故事线中，两条是群体的，而另外两条则是个人的。在群体中，里维特突然切入到个人这个举动，从Thomas宽大的排练室，到Colin狭小安静的房间，或者突然又来到Frédérique走在大街上......空气突然安静下来，也可能突然沸腾。观看它几乎如时空穿越时陷入了一个无规则的漩涡中，在各种16毫米胶片制造的混沌时空之间闪过。

影片制作的时间是1971年（电影中的时间设定为1970年），也就是说距离1968年5月的巴黎学生运动也就仅仅过去了两年。而也就是在这么短短的时间内，我们就从戈达尔1967年的《中国姑娘》（同样有贝尔托和利奥德两人出演）里带着莽撞理想的“革命青年”，沦落到变成里维特这里，像Frédérique这样望着天花板发呆的浪人。再者则像Colin一样，唯一能做的便是创造一些毫无意义的机械动作（我们美妙的“命运卡片”）和子虚乌有的爱情幻想来维持生活的假象；他在街上大声疾呼着连他自己都无法破译的密语，但听上去又如同某种宣言：“CREW!（团队）”但奇迹般地，他不缺乏追随者——摄影机无意中捕捉到了几个奔跑着的男孩尾随在利奥德四周，这个《四百击》中的传奇少年曾经也是他们。至于两个剧团，他们能做的也就是表演罢了，甚至没有观众。此时，作为一个2020年的年轻人，我意识到这样的转变甚至无需一次所谓的大革命就能发生。

随着自己逐渐写不出东西，并对着一些《出局》的片段发了整整一小时的呆，我突然意识到了为什么影片会如此感人。这一切不都写在贝尔托饰演的Frédérique，无所事事地掏出包里的那支左轮手枪后，在自己那个简陋的“女仆间”里发呆的样子么？此时，演职员表字幕随着黑屏弹了出来——电影的第一集突然宣告结束。在加缪的小说《局外人》中，主角莫梭在街上散步，有这样一串并排写在一块的文字：“足球队员庆祝着他们的胜利。两辆小轿车从路上驶过。”这为何不是某种蒙太奇，展现了两件性质完全不同的事物可以在一个特定的视角下变成平等的存在，也就是在莫梭，一个相信万物皆荒谬的人的身上，足球队庆祝胜利的欢呼雀跃和路上开过的两辆车并没有任何实质上的区别。而对于影片中的Frédérique，则是镜头开始时望向巴黎城，随即旋转着看向坐在床垫上的她，一座城市和一个人瞬间也到达了平行状态。

没想写什么长篇分析，只是实在写不下了放这里，就当看短评。

电影是四条故事线，两条戏剧团线（其中一个剧团和一个叫13的神秘组织有关）和两条追查神秘组织的单人“侦探”线。最后四条线交织在一起全部走向理想的破灭与虚无。

电影视听最大的亮点的目的都是为了让人感到「真实」（当然也不一定，我后面会细说，先说完这个思路）。具体技法包括：①粗糙影像。这个没什么好说的；②极其缓慢的电影节奏与独立发展、缓慢汇合的subplot。四条线一开始各自独立发展而且每条线发展到一半就切来切去，而且一条线切走后往往这条线后面的发展不会过多交代。这使得观众一开始无法搞清楚到底在发生什么。电影两小时后故事线才开始交汇，四五个小时后观众才逐渐感受到故事主线。电影之所以搞这么散这么去戏剧化/冗长，是为了既能制造真实感（通过冗长/去戏剧化的节奏）又能制造悬疑/神秘感（通过很散的subplot和subplot之间关联性的缓慢升高）；③两个戏剧团编排戏剧时里维特大量使用推拉等长镜头。长镜头与「真实感」的关系，无需多言；④大量即兴表演以及捕捉街头群众反应，比如那段很有名的Colin在街上不断大喊、两个小孩跟着他，就是完全的即兴表演+捕捉街头群众反应。这类做法当然也是为了增加真实感，毕竟这些演员“自己演自己所想”会比别人人工给他们设计怎么表演来的更自然，而且直接捕捉街头群众反应比群众演员来的更真实更少人工设计感；⑤画面内看到摄影机和录音师、镜头出现裂纹、倒放声音、死时的假血等“穿帮”也是为了让电影显得更真实。

个人认为的问题：

1、要么节奏全程冗长式，要么全程紧凑式，电影却是前面冗长后面相对紧凑，甚至越来越紧凑，节奏有断层；

2、电影故事是假的，所以里维特的那些“穿帮”设计更像是揭示了故事本身的虚假与人为设计，而不是通过揭示真相反映了真实感，而这种「虚假与人为设计」的揭示与电影其他视听技法试图营造的「真实感」多少有些违和。

当然，也许还有另一种思路，那就是整部电影并不是为了渲染「真实」，而是为了渲染某种「虚实相交的奇幻魔力」，或者说是「神秘感」（「虚实相交的奇幻魔力」只是这种神秘感的一部分）。从这个角度看，上面很多视听因素的目的都可以重新解释：缓慢汇合的subplot是《朱莉与塞琳出航记》那种去目标化叙事的变体，但目的殊途同归皆指向的是「神秘感」，即兴表演也是指向的这种神秘感；那些戏剧团编排戏剧的片段也是营造了这种虚（戏剧）实（电影故事）相交的魔幻气氛；粗糙影像则也类似在《朱莉与塞琳出航记》中那样通过与“虚假”片段（戏剧编排片段、“穿帮”片段）的并置营造介于真与假之间的神秘魔力。

然而问题是，这些“穿帮”片段的出现实际上直接宣布了所有电影故事都是假的，甚至直接否定了粗糙影像的纪实质感（因为粗糙影像也因为“穿帮”而被揭露了是假的、具有人工性的）。因此，一旦任何一个“穿帮”片段出现，观众就会意识到接下来的电影故事（以及在重刷时全篇的电影故事）的虚假性，这就导致之后所有的非“穿帮”片段（包括戏中戏片段——这在观感上直接变成了假与假相交，而非真与假）都丧失了虚实相交的魔力，变成了观感上从头假到尾的一个个段落。

原标题：Out 1 and its double

首次发行于Carlotta的美版《出局》蓝光碟套装

[Ornette Coleman's Free Jazz] causes earache the first time through, especially for those new to Coleman’s music. The second time, its cacophony lessens and its complex balances and counter-balances begin to take effect. The third time, layer upon layer of pleasing configurations — rhythmic, melodic, contrapuntal, tonal — becomes visible. The fourth or fifth listening, one swims readily along, about ten feet down, breathing the music like air.

– Whitney Balliett, “Abstract,” in Dinosaurs in the Morning

If there is something comforting — religious, if you want — about paranoia, there is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition not many of us can bear for long.

– Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow

In the spring of 1970, Jacques Rivette shot about thirty hours of improvisation with over three dozen actors in 16mm. Out of this massive and extremely open-ended material emerged two films, both of which contrive to subvert the traditional moviegoing experience at its roots. Out 1, lasting twelve hours and forty minutes, structured as an eight-part serial, originally subtitled Noli me tangere, that was designed for but refused by French television, was screened publicly only once (at Le Havre, 9-10 September 1971), still in workprint form. Seventeen and a half years later, at the Rotterdam Film Festival in February 1989, a somewhat re-edited but nearly finished print was screened over several days for a much smaller audience, including myself, and then in the early 90s, a version that had apparently been re-edited somewhat further by Rivette (including the deletion of a lengthy sequence featuring Jean-Pierre Léaud in the final episode), was shown at a few film festivals and on French and German television, and this version, to the best of my knowledge, is the one being presented here.

As I recall, no more than about five viewers in Rotterdam cared to watch the serial in its entirety in 1989, and very few others turned up even to sample it. But such are the conundrums of shifting fashion that when the Museum of the Moving Image in New York’s Queens screened the serial over a weekend in late 2006, tickets were sold out well in advance, and the entire event was rescheduled the following March to accommodate the others who wanted to see it. (In this case, an appreciative article in the Sunday New York Times by Dennis Lim clearly helped.)

Out 1: Spectre, which Rivette spent the better part of a year editing out of the first film — running 255 minutes, or roughly a third as long, and structured to include an intermission halfway through (as was Rivette’s previous feature, the 252-minute L’amour fou in 1968) — was released in Paris in early 1974, and to the best of my knowledge, is the same version that is included in this release.

I

The organizing principle adopted by Rivette in shooting the raw material of both films was the notion of a complot (plot, conspiracy) derived from Balzac’s Histoire des treize, where thirteen individuals occupying different sectors of French society form a secret alliance to consolidate their power. Consciously setting out to make a critique of the conspiratorial zeitgeist of his first feature, Paris Nous Appartient, Rivette also used this principle to arrange meetings and confrontations between his actors, each of whom was invited to invent and improvise his or her own character in relation to the overall intrigue. The only writing done as preparation came from Rivette’s codirector Suzanne Schiffmann, who helped to prepare and plot the separate encounters, and from Rivette himself when he wrote three separate coded messages intercepted by one of the characters that allude to the complot and the “13”.

Paradoxically, if one can get past the relative tedium of the theatrical exercises, Out 1 might be the most accessible and entertaining of all of Rivette’s works, with the possible exception of Céline at Julie vont en bateau — quite unlike Spectre, which probably qualifies as his most difficult film. (Arguably, these three films feature Rivette’s most inventive and pleasurable uses of color.) But because of its initial rejection by French state television and its subsequent lack of availability, its reputation has assumed legendary proportions, inflating notions of its alleged difficulty due to the length of its combined episodes (which few viewers would ever think of applying to other TV serials and miniseries, especially those in English). Soon after a pirated version of the serial as it was shown on Italian TV turned up on the Internet, furnished with English subtitles provided by amateur fans, English critic Brad Stevens was moved to write the following in Video Watchdog: “It is surely evidence of how widely cinema is still considered a second-rate art that one of its supreme masterpieces has been denied to British and American audiences; if a similar situation existed where literature was concerned, we would only be able to read English translations of Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the form of clandestinely circulated photocopies. Yet one can hardly resist a wry smile upon discovering that Out 1, a work obsessively focused on conspiracies, has finally achieved widespread distribution thanks to what might described as an Internet ‘conspiracy’.”

It should be noted that repeated viewings of Out 1 and Spectre help to clarify not their ”plots” but their separate formal organizations. The analogy suggested above between Rivette and Coleman is far more relevant, however, to the notion of performance. Much like Coleman’s thirty-eight-minute venture into group improvisation with seven other musicians, Out 1‘s surface is dictated by accommodations, combinations, and clashes brought about by contrasting styles of “playing.” The textures run the gamut from the purely cinematic skills of Jean-Pierre Léaud (Colin) and Juliet Berto (Frédérique) to the stage-bound techniques of Françoise Fabian (Lucie); from the relative nervousness of Michel Lonsdale (Thomas) and Michele Moretti (Lili) to the relative placidity of Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (Etienne) and Jean Boise (Warok); from the reticence of Bulle Ogier (Pauline/Emilie) to the garrulity of Bernadette Lafont (Sarah). Most radical of all is the supposition that “everything” an actor does is interesting, effectively abolishing the premise one can discriminate in a conventional manner between “good” and “bad” performances, which is always predicated on some fixed notion of the real.

For Coleman as for Rivette, the thematic material is kept to a minimum and mainly used as an expedient — a launching pad to propel each solo player into a “statement” of his own that elicits responses from the others. Apart from the brief ensemble passages written by Coleman, there is no composer behind Free Jazz, hence no composition; the primary role of Coleman as leader is to assemble players and establish a point of departure for their improvising.

Rivette’s role in both versions of Out 1 is similar, with the crucial difference that he edited and rearranged the material afterward, assembling shots as well as players. And the assembly is one that works against the notion of continuity: sustained meaning, the province of an auteur, is deliberately withheld — from the audience as well as the actors. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that the “13″ in both versions of Out 1 never reveals itself as anything more than a chimera. It eventually becomes evident that the complot is a pipe dream that never got off the ground, an idea once discussed among thirteen individuals that apparently went no further. Aside from the efforts of certain characters (mainly Thomas and Lucie) to keep its real or hypothetical existence hidden, and the attempts or threats of others (Colin, Frédérique, Pauline/Emilie) to “expose” it, the “13″ never once assumes a recognizable shape — in the dialogue or on the screen.

Both films begin by pretending to tell us four separate stories at once—although the beginning of the first and longer version could perhaps also be described, with greater accuracy, as presenting us with four separate and alternating blocks of documentary material with no narrative connection between them. We watch two theatre groups rehearsing plays attributed to Aeschylus—Seven Against Thebes (directed by Lili) and Prometheus Bound (directed by Thomas), and also observe Colin and Frédérique — two rather crazed and curious loners, each of whom contrives to extract money from strangers in cafés. (Colin hands out cards declaring that he’s a deaf-mute, and plays aggressively and atonally on his harmonica whenever someone hesitates to give him money; Frédérique, when she isn’t hanging out with her gay friend Michel [played by her real-life gay husband at the time, Michel Berto], usually starts by flirting and/or inventing stories about her identity and background.) For the first three dozen or so shots of Spectre — ten of them black-and-white stills accompanied by an electronic hum – Rivette cuts between these four autonomous units, establishing no plot connections. The only links set up are occasional formal repetitions: a scene echoed by a subsequent still, two pans in separate shots of Colin and Frédérique in their rooms. Even within each unit, many shots are either “too long” or “too short” to be conventionally taken as narrative. Rivette often cuts in the middle of a sentence or a movement, and the missing pieces are not always recuperated. Conversely, a shot in which Colin’s concierge reminds him to leave his key ends irrelevantly with her walking away from the camera and sitting down at a table to write. Like some of the cryptic stills punctuating later portions of the film, such a diversion proposes — without ever substantiating — yet another supplementary fiction.

Then almost miraculously, 13 minutes and 35 seconds into Spectre—and 35 minutes and 28 seconds into the second episode of the serial (or more than two hours into the overall proceedings) — two of the four “plots” are brought together: Colin is suddenly handed a slip of paper by Marie (Hermine Karagheuz), a member of Lili’s theatre group. On it is typed a seemingly coded message which he sets out to decipher, along with two subsequent messages he receives, following clues provided by references to Lewis Carroll’s “The Hunting of the Snark” and Balzac (the latter gracefully explicated by Eric Rohmer in a cameo role). And when Colin’s deductions eventually lead him to a hippy boutique called “l’Angle du hasard,” the “plot” appreciably thickens: the boutique is run by Pauline, whom we later discover is a friend of both Thomas and Lili, another member of the collective; and all three are members of the alleged “13.”

Meanwhile, Frédérique, the fourth narrative strand, has been making some unwitting connections of her own. After stealing letters from the flat of Etienne (another one of the “13,” along with his wife, Lucie) for the purpose of possible blackmail, she dons a wig and arranges a meeting with Lucie: an incongruous match suggesting Mickey Rooney in an encounter with Rohmer’s Maud. Then, when she fails to collect money, she turns up at the boutique to try the same ploy with Pauline.

This second encounter marks the fusion of all four “plots,” and occurs just before the intermission of Spectre, although it doesn’t occur in the serial until much later, during the fifth episode. It is the only time Frédérique and Colin ever cross paths (they are the only important characters who never meet), and the spectator may well feel at this point that she or he is finally being led out of chaos. But the remainder of the story in both versions, after drawing the four strands together more tightly, proceeds to unravel them again; and the final hour of Spectre and the remaining episodes of the serial leave us as much in the dark as we were at the beginning.

By this time, many of the characters have wound up revealing various secrets – Colin, for instance, starts talking a blue streak in one of the intermediate episodes, losing his deaf-mute pose for several hours — and the conspiracies paradoxically seem to grow thicker at the same time that both groups start to dissolve. Even though certain scenes toward the end defy explanation or decoding — in a dialogue between Colin and Sarah at the end of the seventh episode, some of her lines and one of his are literally played backward on the soundtrack, and Frédérique in the eighth episode is killed in an obscure intrigue with her recently acquired lover on a rooftop involving dueling pistols and a black mask (in effect, another romantic 19th century fantasy that seems to rhyme with Colin’s obsession with Balzac) — the overall design and meaning of Out 1 become increasingly lucid as the serial unfolds. By the end, the paranoid fiction that the actors have generated has almost completely subsumed the documentary, even though the implied conspiracy continues to elude their grasp as well as ours. The successive building and shattering of utopian dreams — the idealistic legacy of May 1968 — are thus reproduced in the rising and declining fortunes of all the characters, outlining both the preoccupations and the shape of the work as a whole.

Much as folie à deux figures centrally in L’Amour Fou and Céline et Julie vont en Bateau, failed folie à deux gradually becomes the very essence of both Out and Spectre. The inability to “connect” reveals itself as part and parcel of the incapacity to sustain fictions, a failure registering most poignantly in the relationship of Ogier and Léaud, which begins with mutual attraction and ends in estrangement. Of all the ”two-part inventions”, theirs is the richest in shifting tensions, and the growing rift is brilliantly underlined by the staging of their scenes in the boutique — particularly when they’re stationed in adjoining rooms on opposite sides of the screen, each vying in a different way for our attention. This spatial tension reaches its climax in their last scene together, on the street, when Ogier forcibly breaks away and Léaud mimes the invisible barrier between them by pushing at it in agonized desperation, finally wandering in a diagonal trajectory out of the frame while blowing a dissonant wail on his harmonica.

II

The ideal form of viewing the film would be for it to be distributed like a book on records, as, for example, with a fat novel of a thousand pages. Even if one’s a very rapid reader — which, as it happens, isn’t my case — one never reads the book in one sitting, one puts it down, stops for lunch, etc. The ideal thing was to see it in two days, which allowed one to get into it enough to follow it, with the possibility of stopping four or five times.

– Rivette describing the serial to Gilbert Adair, “Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette,” Film Comment, September-October 1974

At least part of the impressionism you see in Duras and Straub (who, by the way, was totally hypnotized by a screening of the thirteen-hour Out) comes from their low-budget techniques. I aim at something a little different in my recent films; you might almost say that I am trying to bring back the old MGM Technicolor! I even think that the colors of Out would please a Natalie Kalmus [Hollywood color consultant 1934-49]….

– Rivette to John Hughes, “The Director as Psychoanalyst” (Spring 1975), http://www.rouge.com.au/4/hughes.html

Complot becomes the motivation behind a series of transparent gestures: specters of action playing over a void. We watch actors playing at identity and meaning the way that children do, with many of the games leading to dead ends or stalemates, some exhausting themselves before they arrive anywhere, and still others creating solid roles and actions that dance briefly in the theater of the mind before dissolving into something else. Nothing remains fixed, and everything becomes ominous. Relentlessly investigated by Colin and blindly exploited by Frédérique, the specter of the “13″ reactivates the paranoia of its would-be members, mainly increasing the distances between them. Other crises intervene (a stranger runs off with the money of an actor in Lili’s theater group; Pauline threatens to publish the intercepted letters); fear begets fear; both theater groups disperse; Emilie and Lili are last seen driving off to meet the perpetually missing Igor; and Frédérique and Colin are each returned to their isolation. Repeated “empty” shots of Porte d’Italie in the final reel of Spectre — chilling mixtures of Ozu-like emptiness with Langian terror — embody this growing sense of void, which ultimately widens to swallow up everything else in the film.

The delivery of the first message to Colin is totally gratuitous, an act that is never explained or even hinted at, and most of the other “connections” are brought about by equally expedient contrivances. In a country house occupied at various times by Sarah, Thomas, Emilie (aka Pauline), and Lili, Rivette parodies the very notion of “hidden meaning” in a subtler way, by making sure that a single nondescript bust with no acknowledged relation to the “plot” is visible in every room. It even crops up in the locked room possibly inhabited by Igor, Emilie’s missing husband, a room she enters only near the end of the film. Obviously the bust is a joke; but why is it there? To suggest a complot. And according to the tactics of Out 1, suggesting a complot is at once an absurdity and a necessity: it leads us nowhere except forward – a compulsive movement that often leads to comedy in the serial but mainly produces a feeling of anguish in Spectre.

For much of the preceding, I’ve been treating the plots of Out 1 and its shortened and fractured “double” as if they were identical, but in fact the experiences and meanings of the serial and of Spectre are in many ways radically different, as they were meant to be. The opening shot of Spectre, for instance, occurs almost three hours into the serial, and the final episode of the serial largely consists of material missing from Spectre. One of the more striking differences in the long version is that Thomas (Lonsdale) emerges as virtually the central character (which he clearly isn’t in Spectre) — not only because of his role in guiding his group’s improvisations and psychic self-explorations, but also because his ambiguous role as a rather infantile patriarch, climaxing in his falling apart in his last extended sequence on the beach, becomes pivotal to the overall movement of the plot.

Beginning as a documentary that is progressively overtaken by fiction, the serial has no prologue, merely a rudimentary itinerary set down in five successive intertitles — “Stéphane Tchalgadjieff présente / OUT 1 / Premier Episode / de Lili à Thomas / Le 13 avril 1970″ — followed by an opening shot of five actors in a bare rehearsal space performing elaborate calisthenics together to the sound of percussion. Minus the date, the same pattern of intertitles launches every other episode, each of which is labeled as a further relay between two characters, beginning in each case with the second character named in the previous segment. (In the sixth chapter, the relay is between two guises of the same character, Pauline/Emilie.)

All seven of the remaining episodes have prologues, each of which is structured similarly: 15 to 28 black and white production stills shot by Pierre Zucca that recap portions of the preceding episode, accompanied by the same percussion heard in the first shot of the first episode, followed by the one or two concluding shots of the preceding episode in black and white that carry their original direct sound. Thus the notion of precise links in a chain — between one episode and the next, between one character and the next – is maintained throughout as a strictly practical principle as well as a formal one. Each black and white prologue provides both a ghostly abstraction of the preceding segment as an aide de mémoire and a version of “the thirteen” (roughly, 2 x 13 = 26) as a compulsive rearrangement of existing data that might provide certain clues about what is to come. Similarly, each relay-title posits a beginning and an end to the trajectory of characters within each episode while establishing that each new beginning was formerly an end and each new end will form a new beginning — another form of abstraction-as-synopsis that retraces the action as if it were a kind of puzzle that might yield hidden meanings. (In Spectre, these titles vanish, but the black and white stills are reformulated at various junctures to provide cryptic extensions to as well as recollective summaries of the action, accompanied by a droning hum rather than percussion. As Rivette described this sound and function in a 1974 interview, “What we have is just a meaningless frequency, as if produced by a machine, which interrupts the fiction — sometimes sending messages to it, sometimes in relation to what we’ve already seen or are going to see, and sometimes with no relation at all. Because there are stills from scenes, especially toward the end [of Spectre], which don’t appear in the body of the film and are frankly quite incomprehensible.”)

In contrast to the serial, Spectre might be said to begin as a fictional narrative that is progressively overtaken by documentary — the precise opposite of its predecessor. Despite the fact that both theater groups are putatively preparing to perform plays ascribed to Aeschylus, there are no deaths at all in the serial apart from that of Frédérique, and apparently none whatsoever in Spectre. (One can’t be entirely sure about the messenger played by the film’s producer, Stéphane Tchalgadjieff — brained by Pauline with a blunt instrument bottle in the back of the hippie boutique where she works, for no apparent reason, and never seen again.) Moreover, the meaning and impact of many individual shots and sequences are markedly different. Colin’s efforts to get an Eiffel Tower trinket to swing back and forth 13 times -— a minor gag in the serial that parodies his manic efforts to impose meaning where there is none, to convert chance into destiny —- becomes the final shot of Spectre. There it figures as an ironic metaphor for the viewer’s frustration in trying to make sense out of the latter film. After repeated efforts, Colin finally concludes, “It didn’t work,” speaking now for Rivette as well as the spectator: the physical act becomes metaphysical.

III

ROSENBAUM: Why did you choose the title Out?

RIVETTE: Because we didn’t succeed in finding a title. It’s without meaning. It’s only a label.

– “Phantom Interviewers Over Rivette,” Film Comment, September-October 1974

Seen as a single work, or at least as two versions of the same work, Out 1 strikes me as the greatest film we have about the counterculture of the 1960s. I hasten to add that unlike all the American or English examples one could cite, there is nothing in Out 1 about hallucinogenic drugs (despite some riotously bright, psychedelic colors), and as a period statement that is related directly to the disillusionment that followed the failed revolution of May 1968, it projects a specifically French zeitgeist. (One could perhaps speculate that the Cartesian basis of French thought provided French culture with a sort of shortcut to the mindset provided by hallucinogenic drugs in North America, thereby delaying and otherwise limiting their cultural impact.)

But seen more broadly as an epic reflection on the utopian dreams of the counterculture as they manifested themselves on both sides of the Atlantic, Out 1 remains an invaluable touchstone, above all in its perceptions of the options posed between collectivity and isolation, the major theme of Rivette’s early features. Virtually all of Out 1 can be read as a meditation on the dialectic between various collective endeavors (theater rehearsals, conspiracies, diverse counter-cultural activities, manifestos) and activities and situations growing out of solitude and alienation (puzzle solving, scheming, plot spinning, ultimately madness) — the options, to some extent, of the French left during the late 1960s.

Formally, the serial could be called Bazinian and Renoiresque in its preference for the long take and for mise en scène in deep focus over montage as a purveyor of meaning, and in this respect, the aggressively edited, splintered, and Langian Spectre forms a striking dialectic with it. In the serial, this ultimately leads to a kind of parodic summation of Bazin’s notions about realism — a Rouch-like pseudo-documentary mired in fantasy — that might be said to undermine Bazinian theories more than simply illustrate them.

A major difference between the Rivette’s serial and the crime serials of Feuillade — accounting for their vast difference in popular appeal, at least to the audiences of their respective periods — rests in the notion of a stable base beneath or behind all the machinations. In Les Vampires (1915-1916) and Tih-Minh (1919), a supreme confidence in the fixed generic identities of heroes and villains and in the fixed social identities of masters and servants makes all the “revisions” of these characters and the improvised spirit of their enactments a form of play that never threatens their root functions and identities as narrative figures. In Out 1, the absence of this social and artistic confidence — a veritable agnosticism about society and fiction alike that seems to spring from both the skepticism of the late 1960s and the burden placed on all the actors to improvise — gives the narrative a very different status, entailing a frequent slippage from character to actor and from fiction to nonfiction. Because none of the masks seems entirely secure, the fiction-making process itself — its pleasures, its dangers, even its traps, dead ends, and lapses — becomes part of the overall subject and interest. (The issue at stake isn’t so much the skill of Rivette’s actors — which varies enormously — as the perfunctory nature of many of the fictions that they embody.) Here there is no fixed text beneath the various proliferating fictions that might guarantee their social and generic functions; what one finds instead is a series of references and allusions — Balzac and Renoir, Aeschylus and Lang, Dumas and Rouch, Hugo and Feuillade — that can provide only theoretical pretexts or momentary, unsustainable models, as well as an overall spirit of drift and play.

IV: Three Afterthoughts

He who leaps into the void owes no explanation to those who watch.

– Jean Luc Godard, reviewing Montparnasse 19 (1958)

1. Perhaps the most detailed comparison between the two separate theater groups in Out 1 has been offered by Cristina Álvarez López and Adrian Martin in two separate videos and an accompanying text commissioned by the Melbourne International Film Festival in late 2014 as part of an ongoing series of audiovisual essays and written texts about Out 1. (Kevin B. Lee and I provided the second video in this series, Álvarez López/Martin made the first and fourth, David Heslin and Chris Luscri provided the third, and Luscri alone, working with an audio interview with Tchalgadjieff, produced the fourth.) The following two passages are drawn from an essay posted in mubi.com/notebook on 7 August 2014 to accompany the first of these videos, “Paratheatre: Plays Without Stages (from Ito IV)”:

“The fact is that Out 1 is an extraordinary, synthesizing document of many experimental movements in theater, dating from the immediate post-war period and surviving through to our day, in performance workshops grand and small across the globe. Although some of the commentaries indicate, in passing, that Rivette drew upon (through his actors) a mélange of influences including the Polish theatre guru Jerzy Grotowski and The Living Theatre from USA, it is dizzying to realize just how many traditions and tendencies are referenced in the physical work of the performers that Rivette records with such care, and at such length. The film is like an immense corridor through which the history of contemporary, experimental theatre passes.”

“One group uses gestural and vocal work to explore and express, in highly stylized ways, Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes; the other uses a radical form of improvisation, nominally based on the pretext of Aeschylus’ Prometheus Bound, that is not quite psychodrama (its aim is not in the least bit therapeutic), but certainly reaches down to the roots of Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty — in the latter case, the written text slips further and further away. Both groups base their work on the types of rigorous exercises (Grotowski’s exercises, psychophysical exercises, and ancient games such as mirroring) that are crucial, for instance, to Richard Schechner’s The Performance Group (which later became The Wooster Group), whose production of Dionysus in ’69 was documented (in split-screen) by Brian De Palma in 1970.

“Both troupes talk, analyze and review their work a lot — but whereas the Thebes group tend to re-work things practically (according to various kinds of ‘scores’ for voice and movement), the Prometheus group is more into research and self-critique, once they emerge from each ‘trance.’ Note, too, the dual orientation of both groups: while, in one way or another, they are fully avant-garde, they are also trying to plug back into mythic, sacred sources — the revival of theatrical spectacle as ritual which both attracted and disturbed Pasolini by the end of the 1960s.”

Based on my own limited theatergoing experience in this period, I would add to this account that some of the “trances” in the Prometheus group closely resemble certain interludes in The Living Theatre’s production of Paradise Now (which I attended at Brooklyn’s Academy of Music in the fall of 1968, after the same group and production toured Europe).

2. The eventual knitting together of four seemingly autonomous and unrelated narrative strands — more cursory in Spectre, but central to the serial — might be seen as the belated fulfillment of an innovative aspect of Erich von Stroheim’s original Greed, running at a length of some 40-odd reels, that is completely absent from the release version. As I’ve noted in my monograph about Greed (BFI Classics, 1993), an enormous amount of narrative material was added by Stroheim to the plot of Frank Norris’s novel McTeague: “Nearly a fifth of the plot (a quarter of the [latest version that we have] of the script — 69 out of 277 manuscript pages) transpires before one arrives at McTeague eating his Sunday dinner at the car conductors’ coffee joint, the subject of the novel’s opening sentence. Mac’s life prior to his arrival in San Francisco, which takes up about a quarter of this prologue — over twenty-four pages in the published script — comprises an elaboration of only two shortish paragraphs in the novel.

“A brilliantly designed and extended sequence that comes four pages later in the published script, and encompasses about thirty pages more, introduces all the other major characters in the film [including three that are entirely missing from the release version] on a ‘typical’ Saturday, the day that precedes the novel’s opening, without establishing any connections between them apart from the fact they live in the same building. It seems entirely plausible that Harry Carr — who described watching a forty-five-reel-version of Greed between 10:30 am and 8:30 pm—had this sequence at least partially in mind when he wrote in Motion Picture Magazine (April 1924), “Episodes come along that you think have no bearing on the story, then twelve or fourteen reels later, it hits you with a crash.”

3. Undoubtedly the most significant change brought about in Rivette’s re-editing of the serial between 1989 and the early 90s was his deletion of Léaud’s powerful climactic scene, which is no longer part of the film. (The only other changes I’m aware of involve the order of certain sequences.) This lengthy plan-séquence occurred originally just after a comparably lengthy scene between Bulle Ogier and Bernadette Lafont. (In fact, the final episode in its original, ninety-minute form showed all four of the major characters — Ogier, Léaud, Berto, and Lonsdale — going to pieces in a separate extended sequence; no trace of any of these four sequences is to be found in Spectre. Lonsdale’s scene is placed last, and his reduction from director-patriarch to a mass of blubbering jelly on a beach seems to bring the serial full circle from the wordless hysteria of his group’s first exercise.)

I suspect that this hair-raising sequence, which showed Colin alone in his room in a state of hysteria oscillating between despair and (more briefly) exuberance, carried too many suggestions of Léaud’s subsequent real-life emotional difficulties for Rivette to feel comfortable about retaining it. When Léaud appeared at the Viennale in 2013 to speak about the film, along with its heroic producer Stéphane Tchalgadjieff (whose other adventurous credits include India Song [1975], Rivette’s Duelle, Noroît [both 1976], and Merry-Go-Round [1981], Straub-Huillet’s Fortini/-Cani [1976], and Bresson’s The Devil, Probably [1977]; Out 1, moreover, was the first film he produced) and myself, he didn’t allude to this deletion. But it also became clear that he’s never seen the serial in its entirety; he spoke mainly about his earlier friendship with Rivette and the influence played by North African music on his harmonica wails.

Based on my notes taken at the 1989 Rotterdam screening, the missing sequence, punctuated by a few patches of black leader, showed Colin crying, screaming, howling like an animal, banging his head against the wall, busting a closet door, writhing on the floor, then calming down and picking up his harmonica. After throwing away all three of the secret messages he has been trying for most of the serial to decode, he starts playing his harmonica ecstatically, throws his clothes and other belongings out into the hall, dances about manically, and then plays the harmonica some more. Dramatically and structurally, this raw piece of psychodrama inevitably suggested certain parallels with the sequence relentlessly recording Jean-Pierre Kalfon’s self-lacerations with a razor in Rivette’s L’Amour fou — a disturbing piece of self-exposure in which the fictional postulates of the character seem to crumble into genuine pain and distress, representing in both films a dangerous crossing of certain boundaries into what can only be perceived as madness.

Note: This article draws on material from two previous essays (“Work and Play in the House of Fiction,” Sight and Sound, Autumn 1974, and “Tih-Minh, Out 1: On the Nonreception of Two French Serials,” The Velvet Light Trap, spring 1996) and a few other previous texts, most of them available at jonathanrosenbaum.net