Jean-Pierre Léaud strides down a narrow Parisian street,
declaiming a few lines of nonsense poetry,
stylistically imitative of Lewis Carroll.
He repeats the passage several times over in circular fashion,
such that one soon loses track of any sense
of a beginning or end to the text in question.
As he cycles through the words,
Léaud undergoes a strange metamorphosis.
From an actor reciting a character's lines,
he is transformed into an altogether more mysterious being.
The text he utters assumes the quality of an incantatory spell,
sending its enunciator into a state of trance-like hypnosis.
As the scene progresses, Léaud’s locution becomes
more violent, more frenzied.
It is as if he is consumed by the words he is to speak,
as if they form his entire universe,
a shell from whose encasement he cannot break free.
Léaud is seemingly oblivious to the world around him –
but in this scene the “outside world” possesses
a degree of plenitude rare in the cinema.
Numerous bystanders gawk languidly at the actor,
while others hurry out of the way.
Roadside stalls sell fruit,
posters advertise cola or call for the withdrawal
of American soldiers from Vietnam,
tinny music and the cries of children spill out onto the soundtrack,
Most remarkably, midway through the scene
two young boys start following Léaud.
Palpably transfixed by the surreal event unfolding before them,
they alternate between lurking at a safe distance
from the strange man and boldly approaching him,
persistently clinging to his side as they periodically peek their heads into the frame.
This miraculous scene, caught by a prowling,
handheld 16mm camera,
comes close to the end of the sixth episode
of Jacques Rivette’s 12-and-a-half hour opus
Out 1: Noli me tangere.
Filmed in May 1970 on the Rue Tiquetonne
it is one of the most emotionally intense scenes in the history of the cinema.
Its haunting, perturbing quality can no doubt be ascribed
to Rivette’s “direct” shooting style,
which effaces the boundaries between the fictive and the real,
the planned and the improvised,
the controlled and the unpredictable.
But credit, too, must go to Léaud’s inimitable performance,
which resides in an interim zone between acting
and sheer, unmediated delirium.
Léaud plays Colin Maillard, a young Parisian who,
ekes out a living by panhandling in cafés,
under the pretense that he is a deaf-mute.
Colin is attempting to uncover the existence
of a shadowy conspiracy known as “The Thirteen.”
Within the narrative universe of Out 1,
the text Colin recites is of major importance.
He comes across the passage in an enigmatic letter,
dropped down a stairwell by an individual who is never seen.
Its message, printed on light blue paper,
resembles a form of concrete poetry.
The fact that allusions to the “Snark”, the “Boojum” and the “Thirteen”
occur only on every second line of the message
leads Colin to the conclusion that this missive
actually contains two texts,
interspersed with each other in interlocking lines,
so as to form the following extracts:
Seeking to uncover the mystery of the Thirteen,
Colin turns to the use of acrostics to guide him.
To find Warok, a character who will be the closest
he will come to penetrating the conspiracy,
Colin reads the final letter of each of the lines
of the Snark passage backwards,
and then substitutes the English word “crew”
for the French term “équipage”.
This revelation comes to Colin immediately after the scene in the Rue Tiquetonne,
and in episodes 7 and 8 he pays visits to the cagey Warok.
At Warok’s suggestion that the messages were merely a joke,
Colin initially responds,
Later, however, with Out 1 drawing to a close,
Colin decides to quash his suspicions as to the real existence of the Thirteen,
declaring to Warok that:
Disabused of his interest in the Thirteen,
one of the very last scenes in Out 1
shows Colin in a return to his prior existence:
as at the start of the film,
he prowls around the café terraces of the Champs-Elysées,
posing as a deaf-mute, he coaxes patrons out of a franc
in exchange for a “message of destiny.”
The return to normality, however, is anything but reassuring.