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Satori wrote:Well, I think that the actors and everyone on set were pretty obviously enjoying the rehearsal segments. A lot of Rivette films have lengthy rehearsal sequences because he and his collaborators are interested in the process of artistic creation and improvisation. Rivette doesn't give you the end result without making you work through the process (if you even get the end result at all). His conspiracy plots are similar: the important part is the journey and the piecing together of the puzzle. This is why it often doesn't matter if the conspiracy is real or not. If it is real to Colin and changes how he lives his everyday life, then that is what matters. In Out 1, the formal structure of the rehearsal segments train you how to read the "conspiracy" part of the film. So the rehearsal segments are absolutely crucial to what the film is trying to do. And if you can't handle the rehearsal segments, you probably aren't going to get much out of the film as a whole.

Rivette very obviously isn't for everyone. I'd cut your loses and move on to filmmakers who you like better. Perhaps you can also understand why fans of Rivette might be frustrated when someone who hasn't even watched all of Out 1 declares that the "emperor has no clothes" and that no one could enjoy or provide a "good reason" for the rehearsal segments. That kind of rhetoric doesn't help anyone.

dda1996a wrote:That's why I asked if someone can elaborate more on the importance of those scenes. I don't need a conspiracy to make sense (as my love for Long Goodbye, Inherent Vice and my current enjoyment of reading Pynchon's Crying Lot of 49 can attest) and those were the only scenes that held me. I'm not giving up on Rivette as Va Savior was a decent enough film to make me keep watching him. It's just that I found those scenes utterly purposeless for the viewer. I'm sure everyone on set enjoyed them, as obviously those are most likely things actors go through in acting classes etc.,still doesn't mean it makes for interesting viewing.
Again, that's my thoughts, and would love to hear why those scenes are crucial and why they help train me for what is to come

Tommaso wrote:As John Cage said: “If something is boring after two minutes, try it for four. If still boring, then eight. Then sixteen. Then thirty-two. Eventually one discovers that it is not boring at all.” Exactly my experience with the rehearsal scenes in the first two parts of OUT1, and by extension the whole of the film. As Satori writes: it feels like an investigation, like mentally 'scanning' these performances from all sides, discovering ever new details in the interactions etc. Which is why the "Spectre" cut left me disappointed; it's simply too short to allow the viewer to delve as deeply into the things that are shown and that we want to understand, only perhaps to find out that there's nothing to 'understand', which I believe is the point of the film. And then to look back at what a fantastic ride it was to reach this point.

hearthesilence wrote:I would expect anyone who loves Rivette (at least pre-'80s Rivette) to love Out 1 because it really is the apotheosis of his work. Not just the darker aspects of it but also the humor - again, the "big" reveal of Out 1 was such a hysterical pay-off to me that it, alone, justified the extraordinary running time. The fact it took that many hours to get to that revelation made the joke all the more hilarious.

[The film's characteristics include] (1) exhibiting a narrational approach where plots seem to materialize out of thin air roughly an hour into the film, only for the viewer to realize the story had been there all along; (2) delving deeply and exuberantly into his thematic obsessions such as (again) doubling, roleplaying, games, performance, creativity, and the nature of spectatorship; and (3) indulging in a host of tonal shifts, from mystery to comedy to thriller to horror

All the Best People wrote:I'm not entirely sure what the "joke" is referred to above about the messages, though it's been about a year since I watched it all. As I recall:

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It actually was to get The Thirteen back together, though I don't remember why Colin specifically was chosen to motor that.

All the Best People wrote:After having loved Duelle, yesterday I watched Noroit (Une Vengeance), and I don't know what to make of it. On a moment-to-moment level, it contains many pleasures, with elegant visuals and the performances and on-screen scoring providing a frequently sinister and mesmeric mood. Yet, does it add up? It's not uncommon for Rivette to structure his plots in such a way that they don't even emerge into roughly halfway (or later) into the film, where the prior seemingly disparate elements cohere and coalesce into a subject that drives the rest of the film (e.g. Celine and Julie, Duelle, Gang of Four, and arguably Secret Defense, though as there's an explicit mystery in the plot that doesn't quite qualify). Noroit takes the opposite tack, where what starts off as a straightforward plot gradually dissolves as character motivations become elusive, behaviors depart the rational, and the facts of the story become both so elaborate and scattered that the final ten minutes are rather, for lack of a better word, bonkers.

There is, as is so frequently in Rivette's work, a strong element of game-playing and play-acting here, so I almost wonder if we aren't simply to take the whole thing as a game and dismiss any sort of diegetic reality. But that would feel out of sorts in his cinema as a whole. Also, would that mean anything? And I come back to wondering just what this film adds up to.