Out 1: What I learned watching a 13-hour French movie from 1971

In the nearly 13 hours it takes to watch Jacques Rivette's 1971 masterpiece Out 1: Noli me tangere — one of the longest narrative movies ever made — you'll blink around 15,460 times. Your heart will beat roughly 61,840 times. And if your goal was buffing up your cinephile credentials, you could have instead seen all of Bela Tarr's Sátántangó (seven hours and 22 minutes) or even Claude Lanzmann's Shoah (10 hours and 13 minutes) and had plenty of time to spare.

The number of people to have actually watched Out 1 is very limited. Since it was completed more than 40 years ago, Out 1 has only been shown a handful of times. Nevertheless, the movie remains a kind of "holy grail" for the hardcore moviegoer; the Brooklyn Academy of Music is currently giving it its world theatrical run, marking the first time (outside of a few one-off specialty screenings) that an average filmgoer can buy a ticket to see Out 1 in its entirety. And when the opportunity to see something like that comes knocking, you at least have to consider going.

What I didn't realize when I bought my ticket is that 13 hours is a really, really long time — even when split up over two days. You don't go to a 13-hour film and stay for the sake of staying. You stay because there's something that makes it worth your time — all 13 hours of it.

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Out 1 is divided into eight slightly more digestible episodes. (When I saw Out 1, the theater put a blessed 15-minute intermission between episodes, with a longer break for dinner.) Watched this way, the entire series can be finished in two weekend days, a process that took from 2 p.m. until about 11 p.m. on both Saturday and Sunday.

What of the film itself? It's a little difficult to capture— but broadly, Out 1 follows four major storylines in Paris, all of which eventually begin to overlap as the hours wear on. Two of the central stories follow separate theater groups that are rehearsing different plays by Aeschylus (Seven Against Thebes and Prometheus Bound); the most difficult swaths of the film show the actors practicing voices or doing experimental improvisation exercises for half an hour at a time (the likes of which made one fed-up viewer in my theater shout "Not this again!" when the troupe appeared back on screen).

The first episodes of Out 1 are occasionally excruciating in their long, undivided attention to the theater troupes' exercises. But it quickly becomes obvious that we're dealing with a director with a strong sense of humor about his massively long project. While not exactly a comedy, there are quite a few laugh-out-loud lines — some of which seem almost to be mocking the devoted viewer for spending her time watching the entire production.

Rivette took just six weeks to shoot the 13-hour film, and it shows. The film often seems amateur and clumsy, unscripted, and experimental. Even the film's subtitle, Noli me tangere — Latin for "touch me not"— would seem to be Rivette's own joke, distinguishing the 13-hour cut (or lack thereof) from its highly abridged four-hour version, Out 1: Spectre.

Ultimately, then, Out 1 is about itself as much as it is about theater or performance or movie-watching as an act. Everything returns to itself: the way actors play actors, or the way the improvised scenes in the film were un-choreographed in real life as well. The film ends with a shot of one of the troupe's directors laughing and crying on the beach — and who, after 13 hours, isn't doing the same?

What Rivette couldn't have seen coming in 1971 is how the world around Out 1 would change, and how the audience would transform along with it. In an age of binge-watching, attention spans are almost paradoxically growing shorter. But when we find projects worth our time, we commit.

Out 1, then, appeals to the same part of us that accepts the challenge to sit down to watch all of Master of None as soon as it goes up on Netflix. An experimental French New Wave film might not be as full of cliffhangers or be as fast-paced as Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead, but it plays better to an audience newly trained to watch long, complicated stories unfold over many hours. I suspect in some adventurous circles, the future availability of Out 1 will allow for screenings to be as ubiquitous as binging through Game of Thrones or The Walking Dead or Twin Peaks.

That's the beauty of this movie-that-isn't-quite-a-movie, this television-show-that-isn't-quite-TV. It doesn't seem right not to "binge watch" it all the way through, to sit down and swallow the entire 13-hour film whole. Even when we left the theater after the first evening, I felt almost rudely kicked out, like I was doing Rivette a disservice by leaving when I was only halfway through his work. Out 1 is both incredibly difficult and incredibly accessible, holding you captive in its own wild, mysterious, mocking logic. It requires an investment, but once you've made it, you can't — and don't want to — let it go.