The UCLA Film & Television Archive and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association (LAFCA) have joined forces to present the West Coast premiere of a new 16mm print of nouvelle vague filmmaker Jacques Rivette's twelve-and-a-half-hour 1971 counterculture epic Out 1 / Out 1: Noli me tangere, described by Dennis Lim in the New York Times as "the cinephile's holy grail." The screening — actually, screenings — will be held on Saturday, July 28, and Sunday, July 29, at the Billy Wilder Theater in Westwood.
Set in the counter-cultural world of post-'68 Paris, Out 1 stars Jean-Pierre Léaud (an excellent child actor in François Truffaut's Le Quatre cents coups / The 400 Blows; an unbearable adult actor in just about everything else I've seen him in), Juliet Berto (of Jean-Luc Godard's Week End and La Chinoise), and Bulle Ogier (one of the guests who never quite manage to finish their meal in Luis Buñuel's Le Charme discret de la bourgeoisie / The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), in addition to several names of 1960s French cinema, including actresses Bernadette Lafont and Françoise Fabian, and directors Eric Rohmer and Barbet Schroeder.
According to the description found on the UCLA Film Archive website, Out 1 is a "shaggy-dog tale, seemingly about two theater groups rehearsing Aeschylus, that takes off into a complex mystery loosely adapted from Balzac (with a nod to Lewis Carroll)." In Rivette's own somewhat cryptic words, "the fiction swallows everything up and then self-destructs." The Village Voice's J. Hoberman has a review here. (I'm not sure if that was Hoberman's intention, but he makes Out 1 sound both appalling and appealing.)
Rivette, by the way, remains active. His latest film, Ne touchez pas la hache / Don't Touch the Axe, based on Balzac's novel La duchesse de Langeais, was up for a Golden Bear at this year's Berlin Film Festival.
Due to its length, Out 1 will be presented in two parts, on two consecutive days. There'll also be two brief intermissions (10 min.) and a one-hour dinner break (at approx. 5:30 p.m.) at each screening.
Saturday, July 28 at 2pm
Out 1 Episodes 1-4
Sunday, July 29 at 2pm
Out 1 Episodes 5-8
Directed by: Jacques Rivette
Written by: Jacques Rivette, Suzanne Schiffman. Based on stories by Honoré de Balzac
Cast: Jean-Pierre Léaud, Bulle Ogier, Juliet Berto, Eric Rohmer, Michael Lonsdale, Françoise Fabian, Bernadette Lafont, Barbet Schroeder
France, 1971, TRT of episodes 1-4 is 396 min.; TRT of episodes 5-8 is 347 min., 16mm, French w/English subtitles
VENUE: Programs screen at the Billy Wilder Theater, 10899 Wilshire Blvd. at Westwood Blvd. (courtyard level of the Hammer Museum)
TICKETS: Advance tickets are available for $10 at www.cinema.ucla.edu.
Tickets are also available at the Billy Wilder Theater box office starting one hour before showtime: $9, general admission; $8, Cineclub members, students, seniors and UCLA Alumni Association members with ID; $7, Cineclub members who are students or seniors.
PARKING: UCLA Lots 32 and 36 are $6 on weekends. Enter from Kinross, between Gayley and Veteran.
INFO: www.cinema.ucla.edu / 310.206.FILM
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