Out 1: Jacques Rivette’s 13-hour labyrinth gets a rare UK screening

Jacques Rivette’s 1971 film Out 1 (co-directed by Suzanne Schiffman) has played the longest of long games. It’s not only that it lasts 13 hours – always the first thing anybody mentions about it – or that, by comparison with his prolific nouvelle vague contemporaries, Rivette took a long time to get to this fourth feature (Godard and Chabrol had each signed more than 20 by 1971). It’s that, having premiered as a work in progress at a now mythical screening in Le Havre, Rivette’s film slunk back out of view, like a continent appearing just long enough to be discovered before being tantalisingly reclaimed by the sea.

Out 1: Spectre, Rivette’s four-and-a-half hour digest and reformulation, arrived on German TV in 1972, but the full-length version was to be a white rabbit, always running ahead. Unless you happened to catch one of a small number of festival screenings in the late 1980s and early 90s, the pre-millennium era offered no opportunity to even sample it. This scarcity would help foster Out 1’s eventual status as perhaps the quintessential fetish object of 21st-century cinephilia: at once leviathan and holy grail.

Its forbidding length and textual strangeness have kept the legend alive even after – as suddenly as it had disappeared – marathon screenings began to happen from 2004 onwards: in Rome, Naples, at London’s National Film Theatre (now BFI Southbank), and in New York and Vancouver. A decade later, it would stream on Mubi and get a Blu-ray release from Arrow. For so long, Rivette’s film had been a rumour, an arcane footnote; now it was a click away.

Even so, when Out 1 and Out 1: Spectre screen in March as the de facto centrepieces of the ICA’s springtime Rivette retrospective, they count as rare projections indeed. This will be perhaps only the third time Out 1 has screened in London, following that initial BFI screening in 2005 and a 2015 revival at the Prince Charles Cinema courtesy of a collaboration between A Nos Amours and the Badlands Collective. The numbers suggest that the next time to see it in a cinema could be 2035.

Numbers, after all, are vital to Rivette’s labyrinth, which comprises eight episodes, hinges upon two separate theatre groups rehearsing two separate Aeschylus plays, and which – as the hours run on – becomes subsumed by the apparent threat of ‘The Thirteen’, a mysterious cabal originating in Balzac’s La Comédie humaine. Then there’s that enigmatic, numeral title, Out 1. As Rivette himself admitted, it defies real meaning. Perhaps it should be taken in the same spirit as the names of Eric Dolphy’s avant-jazz albums Out There (1961) and Out to Lunch! (1964): as a ‘See ya!’ from an artist in the process of pushing the boat way out.

Two of Rivette’s previous features – Paris nous appartient (1961) and the four-hour L’Amour fou (1969) – also revolve around theatre rehearsals, but not quite like here. In Out 1 they are extended, improvisational wig-outs of writhing bodies and primal wailing. Hours pass in fly-on-the-wall style, beckoning boredom or madness. Then the intrigue of the Thirteen begins to creep in at the edges, becoming a monomania for Colin, the outsider obsessive played by Jean-Pierre Léaud. In real-time we witness the documentary mood being irrevocably shaped by plot, paranoia and the order imposed by storytelling. Rivette borrows from Louis Feuillade’s silent serials in offering us a realistic Paris tinged with surreal danger.

Rivette’s imposing half-day of a film seems to predict and be made for a future audience that would willingly surrender to vast running times in continuous, episodic form (David Thomson called it “a film that declares the readiness of cinema to replace rather than represent life”). Made during the burn out from May ’68, it found its people in the internet age, when proliferating conspiracies, private fascinations and the parsing of diffuse information for meaning have made outsider obsessives of us all.

Out 1 screens at the ICA on 8 and 9 March.

Out 1: Spectre screens on 16 March.

Spectres: The Cinema of Jacques Rivette runs until June.