Where does one start (or end). A document of reticulate breakdown within a zeitgeist, an artist, a generation, a form (or two, or three); all of Rivette’s career-long dialectics spilling out of a pot suspended in the air where no surface can catch them. It’s easy to miss how self-critical his work is, or rather how ethical his demands are for the arcane process and play by which meaning is obtained, and in that clamor for a kind of righteous formulation for creative, political, and emotional impulses, so often those dialectic contradictions sit as un-finalized as Out 1’s plot. In L’Amour Fou or La Belle Noiseuse, you can’t make art, no matter its inward specifications, if you give in to solipsism. Expand that to an entire social movement, cinematic lineage, theatrical theory, generational “scene”, and you have what Out 1 deems a failure. As Rosenbaum emphasizes, the duality between collectivism and solitude, and the impossibility of their cohabitation, is the rub. The duality between causes, goals, praxis, a kind of social pantheism declaring our interconnectivity, and the private mazes we make for ourselves to get lost in, the distant stars we seek to travel toward for answers which have no bearing on the world around us. Incredibly, this feels apt and comprehensive as a story of the American counterculture’s inwardly narcissistic political recidivism from the 60s to 70s, and apt to the way the internet has fragmented any idea of homogenous truth into an untold number of niche-truths built to satiate us. Perhaps the film speaks even more to the latter. I don’t think our problem now is narcissism, so much as the easy graspability of private realities, although the film and life alike are too complicated to indict that reshaping-of-reality too sternly. Rivette is often earnest about finding the inner-truth behind the obfuscation of a false first layer, it’s just that in Out 1 that process will leave you insane. 

No film has gotten closer to what life felt like in my Colin-and-Federique days in Austin in the early-to-mid 2010s, in the music-theater-art scene, where leftism and a latent paranoiac’s delusion walked hand-in-hand (this was a time when Infowars, founded in Austin, and the cities’ alternative weekly both were available on the same newsstand next to the newspaper). Rather than a post-revolutionary malaise, that time might have been a pre-apocalyptic naivety, not realizing in our fantasies of suitable alternatives to American social order we were burrowing into our own false empires; the kind that makes stopping a Trump impossible, or worse, makes illusions he offers attractive to the most lost of us. 

I suspect every generation, movement, or collective recognizes themselves onscreen here. That familiar sequence of a spirit of mass solidarity, its inevitable decay, and various retreats into private permutations, toxic resentments, or more manageable family units (this also marks in many ways the process of “growing up”, rightly or wrongly). I think of Bob Dylan, post-motorcycle accident, and of Inherent Vice’s many lonely cars driving into the same neo-liberal fog. For Rivette, this might have felt so personal because he could delineate from his process and philosophy of art to the revolutionary moment happening around him; these questions are the questions between a director and the improvisation he ask of his collaborators, the question of the sanctity of various experimental theater tactics, and even the saliency of Bazin’s concepts of realism which Rivette applied. It’s common to say Rivette films are like planets in a solar system, of a piece together and impossible to separate, and we track this contradictory process between creator/artist/surveyor/god–and their mechanistic attitude–and the sense of freedom and collaboration with the players under them across his films in different moral formulations. In Gang of Four or Celine and Julie he knows where the battle-lines are drawn; a post-modern fluidity rebels, uncomplicatedly, against systemic confines and the history of masculinist art. But his dialogue with himself is too rich to be didactic, and Out 1 only presents the conundrum without answer. If Celine and Julie is a victorious display of utopian optimism, and La Belle Noiseuse an equilibrium between control and freedom, Out 1 and L’Amour Fou are the psychosis and irresolvability of these processes. The sense-of-play cannot avoid solipsism, the activities to foster connection are bound to split and divide – the first steps out into a world without structure feel like walking on air. Out 1 is ruthlessly satirical and self-incriminating in its way. Rivette surely sees some of himself in both theater groups, in the Thirteen, and in Colin and Frederique simultaneously; he is as weary of his tendency to control as he is the possible inefficiency of collaboration. Just as he is weary of the possibility of finding truth on a completely solitary path like Colin’s, who admits his life will fall apart without his magical aggrandizing. The skepticism of the conspiratorial searchers and theatre-kids he so willfully identifies with elsewhere makes this film‘s despair so subtle — the theater groups are somewhat laughable in their pretentiousness, Thomas (who we at times might think is a Rivette stand-in) is big headed and manipulative, Colin and Frédérique lie and cheat to acquire money. Pauline is so often selfish and cruel. We feel Rivette’s own inner tension about himself as an artist through this inability to completely co-sign his portraits of like minded questers.

And that’s what is so brilliant – that our political problems, our creative problems, and our personal problems are all conceived as different versions of the same process. Every theme arrives at the same vertex of inconclusive either/or. Rivette, of course, believed in the gamesmanship and exploratory playfulness of experimental theater just as he believed in Bazin’s theories of realism – he documents them or uses them here (long takes, documentary techniques — though we might take his tendency toward discursive cross-cutting against the grain of that duration to be representative of the destabilization of the Bazinian formal strategy itself). But like its answerless question about the zeitgeist and its ability to either hold a collective center or splinter, a psychosis reigns in Rivette’s fealty to his forms (to documentary, improvisation, long takes, freedom). Can they sustain him/us? Can one not go insane living by them, or creating by them? A generation proved no, or at least couldn’t avoid falling into myopia under the boot of capitalism or empire (and perhaps, looking for enemies, could not see the true form of the latter either way). Could an artist prove otherwise? Later, maybe. Not in 1970. Not in Out 1.*

*Or, perhaps, Rivette is the elusive Pierre, and Pierre really did get those messages to Colin. Consider the final shot is of Marie, the messenger, so soon after the members of the Thirteen observe the possibility of Pierre’s ploy. So the film is the game, and Rivette the game-master, unambiguously. The psychosis of the film, and our psychosis watching it, is the experimental process itself. But that’s an essay for another day; perhaps it’s entirely the point that the film both endlessly critiques its myopia, but engenders even more. One of those contradictions. One of those things Rivette spent a lifetime figuring out.