'Out 1: Spectre'

In some ways the most venturesome of nouvelle vague filmmakers, Jacques Rivette went through the looking glass in the 1970s. For the better part of a decade, Rivette created a series of fantastic movies that—in their conspiratorial premises, theatrical structure, and Paris locations—suggested an analogue to the fantastic Louis Feuillade serials of the teens and '20s. Céline and Julie Go Boating (1974) is the mode's masterpiece (and main commercial success). The most legendary, however, is Out 1: Noli Me Tangere, a 12-and-a-half-hour improvisation, shot in early 1970 and intended as an eight-episode TV miniseries. That never happened, and the movie's subtitle notwithstanding, Rivette touched his original—editing it down to a four-hour "shadow" in which rival theater groups and stray hippies (including Jean-Pierre Léaud and Juliet Berto), who may or may not belong to a secret society, crisscross Paris in a confounding mystery. Out 1: Noli Me Tangere has never been shown in New York; it's been decades since Out 1: Spectre screened here. Anthology's calendar cautions that, given the film's rarity, the 16mm print quality is "not ideal."