Out 1 - Style

Style

After working with both 35mm film and 16mm film in L'amour fou, Rivette was comfortable enough with the 16mm format to work with it on Out 1, whose massive length precluded any serious attempt to shoot the whole film on expensive 35mm. Incredibly, despite the immense length of the final product, the film was shot under a tight shooting schedule of only six weeks. Rivette's preference for the long take was the main reason why such a schedule could be maintained. Because he wanted the performances to have a level of realism, some takes include lines "fluffed" by actors, or other common "mistakes" such as camera and boom microphone shadows, as well as unwitting extras looking at the camera in exterior shots (including a memorable scene where two young boys doggedly follow Jean-Pierre Léaud along the street during an extended monologue). Rivette has said that the intimacy of the performances in the face of such mistakes was precisely why he kept those takes in the film. Many of the rehearsal scenes, particularly those of the Prometheus Bound group, are composed almost entirely of long shots, although the film also contains more conventional editing elsewhere. The slow pacing of the film as a whole is also loosely based on Balzac, and its first few hours are constructed more like a prologue, where the editing is slower and the characters are no more than introduced. It is not until three or four hours into the film that characters' motives and the story lines begin to reveal themselves.

The work also includes stylistically adventurous techniques, including the shooting of long shots through mirrors (again developing from work in L'amour fou), short cuts to black to punctuate otherwise continuous scenes, short cutaways to unrelated or seemingly meaningless shots, non-diegetic sound blocking out crucial parts of the dialogue, and even a conversation in which selected lines are re-edited so that they appear to be spoken backwards. However, these experiments form a fairly small part of the work as a whole, which is generally conventional in style (aside from the length of takes and of the work as a whole), and is fairly easy to follow.