Arrow Video have announced the January Blu-ray and DVD release of The Jacques Rivette Collection, which brings together some of the director’s hardest to see works, each restored, newly translated and debuting on home video for the first time in UK.

Out 1 is one of the crowning achievements of Rivette’s remarkable career. Conceived as a television mini-series, this near-thirteen-hour monolith consists of eight feature-length episodes revolving around two theatre troupes, blackmail and conspiracy. Multiple characters introduce multiple plotlines, weaving a rich tapestry across an epic runtime.

Originally screened just the once in its full-length version in 1971, Out 1 was then re-conceived by Rivette as a four-and-a-half-hour feature and re-named Out 1: Spectre to acknowledge its shadow-like nature. Both are presented in this boxed-set, fully restored and with newly-translated English subtitles.

Complementing Out 1 are two ‘parallel films’, Duelle (une quarantaine) and Noroît (une vengeance). The former sees Rivette head into fantasy territory: the Queen of the Sun (Bulle Ogier – Maitress) and the Queen of the Night (Juliet Berto – Celine and Julie Go Boating) search for a magical diamond in present-day Paris. The latter is a loose adaptation of The Revenger’s Tragedy and a pirate tale, starring Geraldine Chaplin (Nashville, Cría cuervos). Also included is Merry-Go-Round, in which Joe Dallesandro (Flesh for Frankenstein) and Maria Schneider (The Passenger, Last Tango in Paris) are summoned to Paris, kickstarting the most surreal of all Rivette’s mysteries.

The Jacques Rivette Collection will be released in the UK as a 16-disc Limited Edition Blu-ray and DVD box set on 18th January 2016 by Arrow Films as part of the Arrow Academy label at an as-yet unspecified RRP, although the best pre-order price we've found so far is £84.99 at the Arrow store.

Box set details:

• Limited Edition Blu-ray & DVD collection (3,000 copies)

• High Definition Blu-ray (1080p) and Standard Definition DVD presentation of all films from brand new 2K restorations of the films with Out 1 supervised by cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn

• Optional newly-translated English subtitles for all films

Special features:

• The Mysteries of Paris: Jacques Rivette’s Out 1 Revisited – a brand-new feature length documentary by Robert Fischer and Wilfried Reichart containing interviews with actors Bulle Ogier, Michael Lonsdale and Hermine Karagheuz, cinematographer Pierre-William Glenn, assistant director Jean-François Stévenin and producer Stéphane Tchalgadjieff, as well as rare archival interviews with actors Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Michel Delahaye, and director Jacques Rivette

• Scenes from a Parallel Life: Jacques Rivette Remembers – archive interview with the director, in which he discusses Duelle (une quarantaine), Noroît (une vengeance) and Merry-Go-Round, featuring additional statements from Bulle Ogier and Hermine Karagheuz

• Brand-new interview with critic Jonathan Rosenbaum, who reported from the sets of both Duelle (une quarantaine) and Noroît (une vengeance)

• Exclusive perfect-bound book containing new writing on the films by Mary M. Wiles, Brad Stevens, Ginette Vincendeau and Nick Pinkerton