Tih-Minh, Out 1: on the nonreception of two French serials.(Critical Essay)

On the Issue of Nonreception

What connections can be found between two French serials made almost half a century apart? Aside from the fact that both of them appear on my most recent "top ten" list, (1) I'm equally concerned with the issue of why such pleasurable, evocative, enduring, multifaceted, and incontestably beautiful works should remain so resolutely marginal--unseen, unavailable, and virtually written out of most film histories except for occasional guest appearances as the vaguest of reference points. The problem isn't simply an American or an academic one; although no print of either serial exists in the United States, it can't be said that either film has received much attention in France either--or elsewhere, for that matter. (2) Yet both are major testaments to the joys of spontaneous filmmaking and the complex adventures these entail, for their viewers as well as for their makers.

Louis Feuillade's seven-hour, twelve-episode Tih-Minh, shot on the Cote d'Azur in 1918, released in early 1919; first seen by me at the Museum of Modern Art in April 1969. Jacques Rivette's nearly thirteen-hour, eight-episode Out 1, shot mainly in Paris in spring 1970, rejected by French state television, shown publicly only once (9-10 September 1971, Le Havre) as a workprint. First seen by me (in a finished print) at the Rotterdam Film Festival in February 1989; finally shown as a serial on the Paris Premiere cable channel in the early 1990s, and recently released in France on video. (3)

Properly speaking, I've never seen either serial in its integral form or as a serial, which already suggests part of the problem in keeping such works alive and discussed: their implied mode of reception is no longer ours, and the same applies to their original status as texts. The seven-hour Tih-Minh that I saw in 1969, a version held by the Brussels Cinematheque, is (or was) missing most or all of the film's intertitles, but it runs an hour longer than the (mainly) intertitled version held by the Paris Cinematheque, shown at the New York Film Festival in 1980 and seen by me more recently on video. When I saw Out 1 in 1989, about forty minutes of the soundtrack in the sixth episode were still unlocated; these have been subsequently found and restored, but prior to most or all of its post-Rotterdam showings, Rivette did further editing on the serial, altering the order of certain scenes and making a few deletions, which makes the final running time 750 minutes instead of 760, a shorter version that I've also had access to on video. (3)

Complicating the textual status of Out 1 still further is the 255-minute Out 1: Spectre (1972), which Rivette spent the better part of a year editing out of the original material--not so much a digest of the longer film as a different work with a substantially different structure and tone. Part of the fascinating difference between the two films can be seen in the ways that identical footage can often carry disparate meanings and perform radically different dramatic and narrative functions according to its separate placement in each film. (The opening shot of Spectre, for instance, occurs almost three hours into the serial. One of the more striking differences in the long version is that Michel Lonsdale, the director of one of the film's two theater groups, emerges as the central character--not only because of his role in guiding his group's improvisations and psychic self-explorations, but also because his ambiguous role as a rather infantile patriarch becomes pivotal to the overall movement of the plot.) The only English subtitled print of Spectre, no longer complete, has received scattered screenings in the United States since 1974, though it remains undistributed; the longer Out 1 has never been subtitled or shown here at all.

Within the institution of mainstream criticism, the absence of any commentary about these films is of course wholly unremarkable and extremely unlikely to change even if either or both serials should acquire U.S. distribution. The sustained silence within academic criticism, on the other hand, seems harder to justify--apart from the major and understandable fact that few film academics have had many opportunities to see either serial, leading to a characteristic vicious cycle of neglect and inertia in which any revision of the standard canon becomes unlikely. Still, if one wants this situation to change, one has to start somewhere, and this article is motivated by the assumption that even a rudimentary account of both serials is preferable to continuing neglect and indifference.

What follows are a few suggestions about certain common points of interest--as well as some equally important divergences--between these two major, epochal works. By necessity, these remarks will be somewhat tentative and sketchy--notes toward more comprehensive work that might be undertaken by myself or by others if these films become more readily available.