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What I’d like to focus on here is how these films wind up getting misrepresented due to the circulation of incomplete data. For instance, everyone who’s seen any stills from the two films and hasn’t seen the films probably concludes that they’re both in black and white. They’re wrong; the problem is that the only photos available from the films on the Internet and in film magazines are in black and white, undoubtedly because color stills would cost too much money to process. In fact, the beautiful restoration of Spectre that showed at the Gene Siskel Film Center last Saturday, blown up from 16-millimeter to 35, had far more luscious and luminous colors than any other print I’ve ever seen—finally justifying Rivette’s supposedly extravagant claim in a 1975 interview that “you might almost say that I am trying to bring back the old MGM Technicolor! I even think that the colors of Out would please a Natalie Kalmus.”
All of which leads me to my major point. Thanks to both my prolonged immersion in the film and an interview I did with Rivette during the same period, I can state without hesitation that a major aspect of the film’s structure is clarified by the placement of the film’s intermission exactly halfway through, e.g., a little over two hours into the film. Up to this point Rivette has been intercutting between four mainly autonomous plots that have only gradually started to link up, involving two separate theater groups and two lonely, solitary, and eccentric individuals played by Jean-Pierre Leaud and Juliet Berto (decked out in a wig in the accompanying still, supposedly to make herself look like a gangster, with Francoise Fabian to her left). Then, immediately before the intermission, for the first and only time in the film, Leaud and Berto briefly cross paths, at a hippie boutique significantly called L’Angle du Hasard (roughly, “The Angle of Chance”), virtually unaware of each other’s existence—at which point all four of the film’s plots become magically interlinked.
