"The fiction swallows everything up and then self-destructs."
—Jacques Rivette

Drawing inspiration from both the silent serials of Louis Feuillade and Balzac's mammoth La Comédie humaine, Jacques Rivette's freewheeling epic is an all-consuming odyssey through the remnants of post-68 Paris.

Imbued with an inescapable atmosphere of conspiracy and paranoia, Rivette's tale of two solitary individuals who find themselves drawn into the orbit of two avant-garde theatre troupes and an apparent secret society, is an astonishing testament to both the power of imagination and Rivette's commitment to the possibilities of fiction.

Nearly thirteen hours long, divided into eight episodes, and featuring an astonishing cast including Jean-Pierre Leaud, Juliet Berto, Bulle Ogier, Michael Lonsdale, Bernadette Lafont, Michèle Moretti, Hermine Karagheuz and Françoise Fabian, Out 1 and the experience of watching it, is, as Melissa Anderson describes, 'a reminder of the rewards of succumbing totally to a work that breaks and remakes all preconceived notions of what it means to watch.'