GEOFF ANDREW ON "OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE"

OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE (1971, Jacques Rivette, 12 hours 40 minutes) will be screened on 25-26 June at the Reading Room in Bangkok. You can read the details of the screening here:
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=229626473716719

This is what Geoff Andrew wrote about OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE in Time Out Film Guide:

This reviewer goes along with much of Jonathan Rosenbaum's assessment of the shorter OUT 1: SPECTRE, but can confirm that qualitative judgment flies out the window after two or three of the eight "episodes" that make up the stunning 12.5 hour version. For one thing, the extensive footage of experimental theatrical workshopping in the earlier episodes forces one to adjust to a pace and vagueness of 'meaning' wholly different from those found in narrative cinema. For another, specificity is rare throughout, evocative ambiguity the norm. Thus it's unclear whether the 'outsiders' (Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto) are any less crazed than the thesps intent on updating Aeschylus or the 'conspirators' concerned by a possible internal breach of trust. Still, great fun may be had following the (probably insoluble) plot twists, relating 'real' events, such as they are, to the theatrical, literary, and filmic allusions (Balzac, Lewis Carroll, Sergio Leone), watching so many attractive nouvelle vague performers, and – well – going with the admittedly variable flow. There are moments of ennui, but it's mostly exciting, scary, strange, tiring, exhilarating – and, surprisingly, often very funny.


Jonathan Rosenbaum on OUT 1: SPECTRE (1972, 255 min) in Time Out Film Guide

Jacques Rivette's grandest and boldest experiment to date (based on Balzac's L'HISTOIRE DES TREIZE) enrages some spectators because it gives them so much to cope with: 255 minutes of improvisation by at least half of the best New Wave actors, edited and arranged so that sometimes it's telling a complex mystery story – about thirteen conspirators, two theatre groups, and a couple of crazed outsiders – while the rest of the time it's telling a realistic story about the same people that deliberately makes no sense at all. Not so much a digest of Rivette's legendary 12-hour version (hardly ever screened, it's title is OUT 1: NOLI ME TANGERE) as a ghost and a reworking of some of the same material ('a critique', Rivette himself says) it's a challenging and a terrifying journey for all who can bear with it. As Richard Roud put it: 'Cinema will never be the same, and neither will I."


Richard Roud on OUT 1: SPECTRE

"a mind-blowing experience, but one which, instead of taking one ‘out of this world’ as the expression has it, took one right smack into the world. Or into a world which one only dimly realised was there – always right there beneath the everyday world...the cinema will never be the same again, and nor will I."