Prisma #54

In the middle of an apartment, two toddlers, two women, a man, and a dog are sitting on a carpet. The adults are professional actors playing the characters Pauline, Thomas and Iris in Out 1 (1971), Jacques Rivette’s nearly thirteen-hour-long film. The children are unaware that they’re being filmed; they’re busy with their toys. In the meantime, the adults chat and fool around with the children. Pauline and one of the kids are playing with a teddy bear that supposedly has a cold. Then, suddenly, Thomas conjures up a turtle that he christens Zéphirine. Pauline, however, is worried about her missing husband. Thomas tries to reassure her and picks up a toy plane. He moves it through the air and makes shooting sounds. “See, that’s death,” he says. “Can’t you play a different game?” Pauline asks. “I play with what I find,” Thomas replies, seemingly enunciating his own strategy as an actor. Like the children, the actors in Out 1 play with “what they find.” Rivette made a film with a large group of actors without a screenplay; he only set some rules. Much like the turtle, the plane and the bear nurture the children’s playing, he mobilised disparate references, quotes and a vague plot set in a mysterious society to support the actors’ improvisation. His long, elusive Out 1 is nothing more than the documentation of this playacting. Like the children with whom they share the playmat, the actors indulge in a type of fiction that claims to represent nothing. They invent their characters and narrative lines as they go. Yet as for a child, the fact of play is not optional; through stories and fabrication, they attempt to get a grip on the world. Fiction offers them an access to reality precisely by creating something new. With their play, Rivette and his actors also create a fictional universe with its own logic that, despite its strictly imaginary nature, also changes the world itself. Out 1 is the ultimate proof that those in cinema who take form seriously can create something real.