All violence is political.
There are no politics here.
This weekend I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to see a theatrical screening of Jacques Rivette’s 1970 masterpiece, OUT 1 (Noli me tangere). The movie has been described as “the Holy Grail” of French New Wave cinema, if not the medium overall. I’m happy to report that it was all that and more.
Why “once-in-a-lifetime”? Because despite its reputation as one of the greatest films of the era, it has never in its 45 years gotten a theatrical release of any kind in this country — only a handful of festivals have shown it over the decades, and with no home-viewing options (the first-ever DVD will be released later this month), opportunities to see it have been almost nil.
Why? Because it’s 773 minutes long. I went to the theater to watch a nearly 13-hour movie (and I’d do it again).
Until the 2005 civil unrest, the last time Paris had seen violence on a massive scale was 1968, when clashes between university students and police led to an all-out political war between the French left and the government. Tens of thousands marched on May 6 in a solidarity action that ended in riots: tear-gas from the police, rocks from the protesters, hundreds injured and/or arrested. By the next week the crowd of sympathizers had grown to a million, and as the state’s show of violence increased, the rocks were upgraded to Molotov cocktails. The left was (for the most part) united, the president was driven out of the city, and for a brief moment, it looked as if the promise of the 60s, the set of ideals we associate, as in this country, with an anti-war, politically left, broadly inclusive ideology, would be fulfilled in the streets of Paris.
I say all this not to draw direct parallels with Paris’ current state — that’s a very different sort of mass violence — but to give some sense of the atmosphere hanging over the film, which is set two years later and involves characters who were, though they never say it directly, involved with these events. Crucially, no one was killed in the 1968 riots, though hundreds were injured, and the would-be revolution was definitively squashed in the next round of elections, which gave even greater gains to de Gaulle’s government. Much as in this country, the promise of the 60s had given way to the stagnant 70s.
There’s still a great deal of nostalgia for that moment. Where the slow fade-out of the 60s was unmarked in this country by any specific event, the Parisian left (especially older generations) tends to look back at May 1968 with a kind of bittersweet fondness: it showed the power of human solidarity against the mechanisms of the state, but its political program dissipated into the ether. For that generation, it turned out to be something of a last hurrah.
Many of Rivette’s characters are 60s dreamers who continue pursuing their dreams while the city moves on around them: more than once, we watch them discuss or act out their ideals in cloistered spaces while the film cuts to the city bustle outside, unaware of and unaffected by what happens indoors. These characters are not just artists and politically-minded philosophers, but successful lawyers, architects, and entrepreneurs, some of whom wonder if their chance to create meaningful change has passed them by. Others seem to be more involved than they let on, perhaps pulling strings we didn’t know were there. Rivette’s Paris is a paranoid fantasy.
How to describe the plot of OUT 1? Well… there’s a young gamine con-artist who tricks men out of their money, a self-described “deaf-mute” panhandler who plays a harmonica (loudly, badly) at people who refuse him change, a theatrical troupe rehearsing a formalist performance of Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, a second theatrical troupe improvising around the themes of Aeschylus’ Prometheus, a possible network of individuals who belong to a secret society based on Balzac’s Thirteen, a very hippie-friendly tea shop (with “Let It Be” painted in their window) that may be a cover for more sinister activities, and a swirl of associated characters and situations — maybe another secret society? Maybe two?, a chase around the Paris metro stations, stolen letters and an attempt at blackmail, coded messages with Lewis Carroll-based acrostics, characters with two, three, or even four separate identities, etc., etc,. etc. During its 13 hours the film envelopes you in an increasingly complex, maddening world of double-crosses and backroom plots, an unsolvable puzzle-box that slowly absorbs you into its madness. It’s also funny as hell.
If the juxtaposition of crazy plots and paranoia and ridiculous characters and the death of 60s idealism sounds familiar: yes, multiple critics have noted that OUT 1 plays like a Pynchon novel. (And for those of you who study hermeneutics in art, the movie is a treasure trove: it’s constantly raising patterns of interpretation — juxtapositions, dialectics, allusions — then allowing them to fizzle out un-meaningfully, challenging our ability to draw anything like closed interpretations of what’s unfolding before us. It’s dizzying in the best way possible.)
The epigraph to this post is a line from the movie about the relation between violence and politics, but even that line is contingent: the character who says it, or rather, the actress who says it improvises it on the spot. She (the real-life actress) is playing an actress who’s playing a gender-bent version of the titan Prometheus who’s playing a trick on a would-be acolyte (Trust me: this makes total sense in context.) It’s one of the few times the word “violence” or “politics” is used directly in the film’s 773 minutes, where both are present in the form of preterition, like the half-erased graffiti we sometimes see in the backgrounds of shots (political graffiti was a major part of the ‘68 actions).
That feigned indifference nearly breaks through to honest, direct engagement in one scene, some ten hours into the movie. An improv troupe is running through an exercise where individual members have to begin scenarios based on the body positions of the actors at the end of the previous scenario, and after seven or eight iterations of the exercise, one of the actors begins to play a policemen or military figure of some sort threatening to mow down civilians, who are begging him to stop the violence. The leader of the troupe, Thomas, who has been taking notes on each performance, turns white and backs away in clear discomfort, his one moment of disengagement from his troupe’s activities. When Thomas delivers his notes afterwards, critiquing the way the actors handled their scenarios, he does not mention this iteration at all.
What’s left is for us to read between the lines: the memory of engagement, of violence, and the refusal to discuss that violence in the present. We can run with this in any number of directions, connecting Thomas’ failures to his timidity, or allowing a kind of shell-shock from the experience, or wondering, even, if Thomas’ horror is not that of a former victim of violence, but one of its perpetrators. The movie is open-ended but not empty, and we find ourselves watching every line, every facial expression, and every shift in tone for evidence of who these people are, and what drives them to do what they do.
We wonder who’s “really pulling the strings,” but also whether backroom conspiracies are any less lucid than individual motivations. We watch characters role-play to the point that we’re no longer sure what isn't role-playing, but that role-playing doesn’t prevent characters from facing real-life consequences. We question who’s on whose side, and if they even really know for sure.
We start wondering what our lives and relationships would look like from the outside. We start seeking out patterns around us, wondering if Rivette is infecting us with apophenia — or if not Rivette, the universe itself, the biggest conspiracy of them all.
And in the meantime, Paris continues. We watch people sitting in cafés and reading the paper, cars and trucks lining the city’s thoroughfares, children playing in the streets (unplanned: running at and looking toward the camera, as if it were a documentary), barges coursing down the Seine, and tourists snapping photographs — only to have the loud wail of the air-raid siren wreck our tranquility and remind us of what’s been lost.
The violence of last week also hung over our showing. The woman who introduced the film, a native of Marseilles who runs a French film series here, nearly broke down in tears during her opening comments. She noted that they’d had a serious discussion about cancelling the showing, but realized they couldn’t do that. This was Paris. This is where we were going to express our love for the city, after the violence.