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Jacques Rivette's Out 1, Noli Me Tangere (1971) is showing on Mubi in the United States.There’s a lot of confusion about what improvisation in movies consists of—when it is or isn’t used, and sometimes what it means when it is used. Those who think that the dialogue in Orson Welles’ The Other Side of the Wind is improvised don’t realize that the screenplay by Welles and Oja Kodar with that dialogue was published years ago, long before the film’s posthumous completion. It’s worth adding, however, that the film’s mise en scène was improvised by Welles on a daily basis. Similarly, those misled by director Robert Altman’s dreamy pans and seemingly random zooms in The Long Goodbye into concluding that the actors must be inventing their own lines are ignoring the careful work done by screenwriter Leigh Brackett, not to mention Raymond Chandler.

Although François Truffaut has written that the New Wave began “thanks to Jacquette Rivette,” the films of this masterful French director are not well known. Rivette, like his “Cahiers du Cinéma” colleagues Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and Éric Rohmer, did graduate to filmmaking but, like Rohmer, was something of a late bloomer as a director.

In 1969, he directed the 4-hour L’amour fou (1969), the now legendary 13-hour Out 1 (1971) (made for French TV in 1970 but never broadcast; edited to a 4-hour feature and retitled Out 1: Spectre (1972)), and the 3-hour Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), his most entertaining and widely seen picture. In these three films, Rivette began to construct what has come to be called his “House of Fiction”–an enigmatic filmmaking style involving improvisation, ellipsis and considerable narrative experimentation.

Celine and Julie Go Boating

In 1975, Jacques Rivette reunited with Out 1 producer Stéphane Tchal Gadjieff with the idea of a four-film cycle.