Haphazard travels of Sirman Deville to Zanzibar Archipelago

[Holdrüholoheuho]

Personal Challenges, 2021
I watched this year (2020) the following documentary...
ZANZIBAR (Jackie Raynal, 2005)
https://letterboxd.com/film/zanzibar-2005/
Thereafter, I made a little reading and tagged on Kinometer 21 films (besides the doc above) as "zanzibar group"...
https://www.kinometer.com/?tag=8910
I don't remember anymore if I copy-pasted a single list of such films or if I picked them one by one from various sources.
There are certainly some more films of this kind which I didn't spot yet.
Then, I hoped to watch those films (as many as possible) and get familiar with the phenomenon (about which I know near to nothing).
But so far I didn't watch a single film from this list.
So, I guess I can resolve to make such an investigation in 2021.
On January 1st 2021, I will start a thread called "Zanzibar Films" (here somewhere) and throughout the whole year will keep tirelessly uncovering all the Zanzibar film movement treasures (I hope those are mostly treasures and not knick-knacks).

it is not January 1st yet but who cares about a few days discrepancy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zanzibar_Group


(Hyères, April 1968)
BACK ROW: Alain Jouffroy, Philippe Garrel, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, Francoise Brion, Marianne Di Vettimo, Jean-Louis Comolli, Poussine Mercanton, Daniel Pommereulle, Jean Norboni, Bernadette Lafont, Diourka Medveczky, Anne Héliat, Patrick Deval
FRONT ROW: Jackie Reynal, Charles Matton, Pascal Aubier, Anne Aubier, Edouard Niermans, Michel Fournier

During the volatile late 1960s in Paris, the filmmaking collective known as Zanzibar began creating outsider underground movies, many of which are now lost or neglected. The group (consisting of Philippe Garrel, Jackie Raynal, Serge Bard, Daniel Pommereulle, Olivier Mosset, Frédéric Pardo, Patrick Deval, Caroline de Bendern, Zouzou, and one or two others) resembled a clique of Warhol Factoryesque characters — artists, writers, actors, and models, a few of whom had actually worked at the Factory. Though all were cinephiles, jointly they had only modest movie-making experience. Yet the Zanzibar films, with their refreshing lack of regard for revenue, are infused with the countercultural energy and restlessness of May 1968. Zanzibar’s benefactor, hippie heiress Sylvina Boissonnas, generously funded many of these works in expensive 35mm format. Within two years’ time, however, Boissonnas had moved on to other projects. Similarly, most members of the group eventually abandoned filmmaking, though Jackie Raynal made a few more films and Patrick Deval worked for French TV. Only Philippe Garrel — the group’s nominal leader — achieved notable fame as an arthouse director.

Watched/Read = W/R
(W0 = watched prior 2021)
(ZG = Zanzibar Group)
(ZGGF = Zanzibar Group Gravity Field)

1/ ZANZIBAR GROUP (ZG)
https://www.kinometer.com/?tag=8910

https://letterboxd.com/gump/list/zanzibar/
https://letterboxd.com/quermesse/list/zanzibar/
https://letterboxd.com/melvin_sheppard/list/zanzibar/
https://letterboxd.com/timeistheking/li ... bar-films/

NAME INDEX:
A/
KEEPING BUSY (Michel Auder, 1969) (M.Au. *1945)
B/
DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS • DESTROY YOURSELVES (Serge Bard, 1968)
FUN AND GAMES FOR EVERYONE (Serge Bard, 1968)
ICI ET MAINTENANT • HERE AND NOW (Serge Bard, 1968) (S.Ba. = Abdullah Siradj *1946)
UN FILM (Sylvina Boissonnas, 1969) ... unviewable at authoress' wish (S.Bo. *1942)
C/
POSITANO (Pierre Clémenti, 1969)
LA RÉVOLUTION N'EST QU'UN DÉBUT. CONTINUONS. • THE REVOLUTION IS ONLY A BEGINNING: LET'S CONTINUE FIGHTING (Pierre Clémenti, 1968)
VISA DE CENSURE N° X • CERTIFICATE No. X (Pierre Clémenti, 1967, 1975) (P.Cl. 1942-1999)
HEADS AND TALES (Francis Conrad, 1967) ... a "proto-Zanzibar" film (F.Co. ??)
D/
HÉRACLITE L'OBSCUR • HERACLITUS THE DARK (Patrick Deval, 1967)
ACÉPHALE • HEADLESS (Patrick Deval, 1968)
ACÉPHALE BIS (Patrick Deval, 1968) ... lost film (P.De. *1944)
F/
L’HOMOGRAPHE: À QUOI RÊVE LE FŒTUS? (Michel Fournier, 1969) ... lost film (M.Fo. 1945-2008)
G/
LA CONCENTRATION • CONCENTRATION (Philippe Garrel, 1968)
LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE • THE INNER SCAR (Philippe Garrel, 1972)
MARIE POUR MÉMOIRE • MARIE FOR MEMORY (Philippe Garrel, 1968)
LE RÉVÉLATEUR (Philippe Garrel, 1968)
LE LIT DE LA VIERGE • THE VIRGIN'S BED (Philippe Garrel, 1969) (P.Ga. *1948)
J/
L'ABOLITON DE L'ART (Alain Jouffroy, 1968) (A.Jo. 1928-2015)
M/
ÉMET (Claude Martin, 1969) ... lost film (C.Ma. ??)
UN FILM PORNO • FILM PORNO (Olivier Mosset, 1968) (O.Mo. *1944)
O/
HOMEO: MINOR DEATH: COMING BACK FROM GOING HOME (Etienne O'Leary, 1967)
CHROMO SUD (Etienne O'Leary, 1968) (E.Ol. 1944-2011)
P/
HOME MOVIE, AUTOUR DU 'LIT DE LA VIERGE' • HOME MOVIE: ON THE SET OF PHILIPPE GARREL'S 'THE VIRGIN'S BED' (Frédéric Pardo, 1968)
(F.Pa. 1944-2005)
ONE MORE TIME (Daniel Pommereulle, 1968)
VITE • QUICKLY (Daniel Pommereulle, 1969) (D.Po. 1937-2003)
R/
DEUX FOIS • TWICE UPON A TIME (Jackie Raynal, 1968) (J.Ra. *1940)

CHRONOLOGY:
— — — — — 1960
— 1967
HEADS AND TALES (Francis Conrad) W12 ... a "proto-Zanzibar" film
HÉRACLITE L'OBSCUR • HERACLITUS THE DARK (Patrick Deval) W4 ... a “philosophical peplum” (prefigures Pasolini’s ‘mythological’ phase)
HOMEO: MINOR DEATH: COMING BACK FROM GOING HOME (Etienne O'Leary) W6 ... a "proto-Zanzibar" film
VISA DE CENSURE N° X • CERTIFICATE No. X (Pierre Clémenti) W5 ... a "proto-Zanzibar" film
— 1968
DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS • DESTROY YOURSELVES (Serge Bard, 1968) W8
FUN AND GAMES FOR EVERYONE (Serge Bard) W9
ICI ET MAINTENANT • HERE AND NOW (Serge Bard) W10
LA RÉVOLUTION N'EST QU'UN DÉBUT. CONTINUONS. • THE REVOLUTION IS ONLY A BEGINNING: LET'S CONTINUE FIGHTING (Pierre Clémenti, 1968)
ACÉPHALE • HEADLESS (Patrick Deval) W3
ACÉPHALE BIS (Patrick Deval) ... lost film (mostly people walking past a camera in Boissonnas’ living room)
LA CONCENTRATION • CONCENTRATION (Philippe Garrel)
MARIE POUR MÉMOIRE • MARIE FOR MEMORY (Philippe Garrel)
LE RÉVÉLATEUR (Philippe Garrel)
L'ABOLITON DE L'ART (Alain Jouffroy)
UN FILM PORNO • FILM PORNO (Olivier Mosset)
CHROMO SUD (Etienne O'Leary)
HOME MOVIE, AUTOUR DU 'LIT DE LA VIERGE' • HOME MOVIE: ON THE SET OF PHILIPPE GARREL'S 'THE VIRGIN'S BED' (Frédéric Pardo) W16
ONE MORE TIME (Daniel Pommereulle)
DEUX FOIS • TWICE UPON A TIME (Jackie Raynal)
— 1969
UN FILM (Sylvina Boissonnas) ... unviewable at authoress' wish
POSITANO (Pierre Clémenti) W14
L’HOMOGRAPHE: À QUOI RÊVE LE FŒTUS? (Michel Fournier) ... lost film
KEEPING BUSY (Michel Auder)
LE LIT DE LA VIERGE • THE VIRGIN'S BED (Philippe Garrel) W13
ÉMET (Claude Martin) ... lost film
VITE • QUICKLY (Daniel Pommereulle) W15
— — — — — 1970
— 1972
LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE • THE INNER SCAR (Philippe Garrel) W11
— — — — — 1980
— — — — — 1990
— 1999
ZANZIBAR À SAINT-SULPICE (Gérard Courant) W2 ... short silent documentary
— — — — — 2000
— 2005
LES AMANTS RÉGULIERS • REGULAR LOVERS (Philippe Garrel) W7 ... an ironic reflection upon the group’s objectives (dedicated to D. Pommereulle)
ZANZIBAR (Jackie Raynal) W0 W1 ... documentary
— — — — — 2010
next... W17

2/ BOOKS:
2.1/ The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968 (Sally Shafto, 2000) R7
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/360 ... f-may-1968

3/ ARTICLES:
3.1/ “Africa is a Revolutionary Country”: Sally Shafto’s Zanzibar: The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968 (Keith Reader, 2007, Senses of Cinema) R2
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/boo ... bar-films/
3.2/ Deval in ’68: An Interview with Patrick Deval (Fergus Daly, Maximilian Le Cain, 2008, Senses of Cinema) R3
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/bef ... ick-deval/
3.3/ The new, new wave (Sally Shafto, 2002, Guardian) R1
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/f ... dianreview
3.4/ Bel homme, adieu! — In Memoriam: Michel Fournier 1945-2008 (Patrick Deval, 2009, Senses of Cinema) R4
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/in- ... ick-deval/
3.5/ Interviews: Jackie Raynal (Janique Vigier, 2021, Artforum) R5
https://www.artforum.com/interviews/jac ... vies-85066
3.6/ No Wave: The Zanzibar Group (Sally Shafto, 2008, Artforum)
https://www.artforum.com/print/200805/n ... roup-19962
3.7/ Lines of Flight (Nick Pinkerton, 2017, Artforum)
https://www.artforum.com/film/nick-pink ... ilms-70201
3.8/ Michel Auder (Amy Taubin, 2010, Artforum)
https://www.artforum.com/print/201009/m ... uder-26638
3.9/ Lessons of ’68 (2008, Artforum)
https://www.artforum.com/print/200805/l ... f-68-19944
3.10/ Remembering Michel Fournier (Sally Shafto, 2009, Senses of Cinema) R6
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/in- ... ly-shafto/
next... R8

4/ FILMS IN "ZANZIBAR GROUP GRAVITY FIELD" (ZGGF)
HIGHLY SUBJECTIVE SELECTION OF ANYTHING AND EVERYTHING RELATED TO:
— EITHER/ MAY 1968, 1960s-1970s COUNTER-CULTURE, etc., etc.
— OR/ PROTAGONISTS OF THE ZANZIBAR MOVEMENT (THEIR INVOLVEMENT IN ANY OTHER FILM PROJECT, etc. etc.)

— — — — — 1950
— 1954
SANSHÔ DAYÛ • SANSHO THE BAILIFF (Kenji Mizoguchi) W2 ... opening scene of HÉRACLITE L'OBSCUR (P. Deval) imitates the scene from this film
— 1958
BONJOUR TRISTESSE • HELLO, SADNESS (Otto Preminger) ... an extra: Jackie Raynal (her first involvement with film)
— — — — — 1960
— 1963
NORMAL LOVE (Jack Smith) W0 ... NORMAL LOVE vs. REGULAR LOVERS
— 1966
ZOÉ BONNE (Patrick Deval, Christian Ledoux) ... lost film (Featured Claude Chabrol playing the role of a notary who hires the young Zoe as a maid, and immediately tries to seduce her. At the end of the film, Zoe's brother (Deval himself) arrives on a motorcycle to save his sister.)
LE VOYAGEUR DIURNE • DAY TRIPPER (Etienne O'Leary)
— 1967
BELLE DE JOUR • BEAUTY OF THE DAY (Luis Buñuel) W0 ... cast: Pierre Clémenti
LA CHINOISE (Jean-Luc Godard) W12 ... fascination with a grotesquely idealized version of Chairman Mao’s China
MARIE ET LE CURÉ • MARIE AND THE PRIEST (Diourka Medveczky) W16
EDIPO RE • OEDIPUS REX (Pier Paolo Pasolini) W3 ... a "brother movie" to HÉRACLITE L'OBSCUR (P. Deval)
LA COLLECTIONNEUSE • THE COLLECTOR (Éric Rohmer) W8 ... a "harbinger of Zanzibar"
WEEKEND (Jean-Luc Godard) W0
— 1968
SCUSI, FACCIAMO L'AMORE? • LISTEN, LET'S MAKE LOVE (Vittorio Caprioli) ... cast: Pierre Clémenti
WHEEL OF ASHES (Peter Emmanuel Goldman) ... cast: Pierre Clémenti
LES IDOLES • THE IDOLS (Marc’O = Marc-Gilbert Guillaumin) ... cast: Pierre Clémenti, Daniel Pommereulle W11
LYDIA (Reto Andrea Savoldelli) W0 ... eurohippies
JET GENERATION: WIE MÄDCHEN HEUTE MÄNNER LIEBEN • JET GENERATION: HOW GIRLS LOVE MEN OF TODAY (Eckhart Schmidt) W7
STOLEN KISSES (François Truffaut) ... opens with a shot of the shuttered and locked Cinémathèque (film dedicated to Langlois)
— 1969
INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER (Kenneth Anger) W4 ... a "brother movie" to VISA DE CENSURE N° X (P. Clémenti)
MODEL SHOP (Jacques Demy) W9 (cup21, r3.6)
LE GAI SAVOIR • JOY OF LEARNING (Jean-Luc Godard) ... discourse about the need to return to zero
JEANNE ET LA MOTO • JEANNE AND THE MOTORBIKE (Diourka Medveczky) W15
PAUL (Diourka Medveczky) W14
L'AMOUR FOU • MAD LOVE (Jacques Rivette)
PORCILE • PIGSTY (Pier Paolo Pasolini) W0 ... cast: Pierre Clémenti
— — — — — 1970
— 1970
LE CLAIR DE TERRE • EARTH LIGHT (Guy Gilles) W6 (cup21, r1.3)
THE PACIFIST (Miklós Jancsó) ... the problem of revolutionary violence, in the context of an affluent society
— 1972
LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON (Éric Rohmer) W13 ... cast: Zouzou
LUCIFER RISING (Kenneth Anger) W5 ... a "cousin movie" to VISA DE CENSURE N° X (P. Clémenti)
ATHANOR (Philippe Garrel) ... cinematographer: Michel Fournier
STELLA DA FALLA (Jacques Sandoz, Reto Andrea Savoldelli) W0 ... eurohippies
— 1973
LE RETOUR D'AFRIQUE • RETURN FROM AFRICA (Alain Tanner) ... enthusiasm for what was then known as the Third World
— 1974
OUT 1, SPECTRE (Jacques Rivette)
— 1976
ANATOMIE D'UN RAPPORT • ANATOMY OF A RELATIONSHIP (Luc Moullet) ... cinematographer: Michel Fournier
UN RÊVE PLUS LONG QUE LA NUIT • A DREAM LONGER THAN THE NIGHT (Niki de Saint Phalle) ... cast: Laurent Condominas
— 1978
NATURE MORTE (Jacques Richard) ... cinematographer: Michel Fournier
— — — — — 1980
— 1980
NEW YORK STORY (Jackie Raynal)
ALTERED STATES (Ken Russell) W0
— 1982
ATTENTION POÉSIE (ENTRETIEN AVEC PHILIPPE GARREL II) (CARNET FILMÉ: 8 JUIN 1982) (Gérard Courant)
— 1984
HOTEL NEW YORK (Jackie Raynal)
— 1985
ELLE A PASSÉ TANT D'HEURES SOUS LES SUNLIGHTS... • SHE SPENT SO MANY HOURS UNDER THE SUN LAMPS (Philippe Garrel) W0
— 1986
À L'OMBRE DE LA CANAILLE BLEUE • IN THE SHADOW OF THE BLUE RASCAL (Pierre Clémenti) W10
— — — — — 1990
— — — — — 2000
— 2000
NOTES ON JONAS MEKAS (Jackie Raynal)
— 2001
CINÉMATON N°2023: DANIEL POMMEREULLE (Gérard Courant) W1
— 2004
LE FANTÔME D'HENRI LANGLOIS • HENRI LANGLOIS: THE PHANTOM OF THE CINÉMATHÈQUE (Jacques Richard)
— — — — — 2010
— 2015
REMINISCENCES OF JONAS MEKAS (Jackie Raynal)
— 2017
IN THE INTENSE NOW (João Moreira Salles)
— — — — — 2020
next... W17
------------------------------------------------------------------
SCFZ Poll: Philippe Garrel ... https://scfzforum.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=157

[wba]

[Holdrüholoheuho]

R1

Sally Shafto, 9 Feb 2002
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2002/f ... dianreview

The new, new wave
In 1968 a bunch of French dandies vowed to 'hurl a cobblestone into the cinema'.
Sally Shafto on the Zanzibar group, unofficial chroniclers of the barricades

In May 1999 a group of film-makers, actors and technicians gathered at the Café de la Mairie on the Place Saint-Sulpice in Paris. It was a momentous occasion: many of them had not seen each other since 1968, when they had united on the barricades in the Latin Quarter. They were the Zanzibar group, named after a film-making expedition across Africa in 1969. In just two years, between 1968 and 1970, the Zanzibar group shot 13 films, most of them since forgotten, some of them lost for ever.

The story of how the Zanzibar films came to be made is a fairy tale. A young French patron of the arts, Sylvina Boissonnas, decided to finance new film-makers. Streamlining production, she had no contracts with her directors, and did not pay the actors. These were renegade productions, made outside the film-making system. One of her directors, Patrick Deval, remembers that she financed his work, no questions asked.

A decade earlier the New Wave directors had spent years getting ready to make feature films, and were mostly 30 or older when they began breaking with the script-driven films of the "cinéma de papa". The Zanzibar group, by contrast, were very young; many of them had dropped out of college to start making films, so anxious were they to make their mark. They went even further than the New Wave directors, making films without scripts at all. Despite the speed with which they were put together, their films were enormously ambitious, and all except one were shot using expensive 35mm film - usually the preserve of professionals.

Boissonnas took seriously the contemporary idea that we are all artists, and her criterion, perhaps unconscious, for selecting projects was not experience but aesthetic considerations. She surrounded herself with like-minded people: the poet and art critic Alain Jouffroy was a crucial mentor for many of these young people. In addition, three artists participated in the Zanzibar circle: Daniel Pommereulle, Olivier Mosset and Frédéric Pardo. All of the Zanzibar members were dandies, and two of them, Caroline de Bendern and Zouzou, were professional models.

The group's figurehead was Philippe Garrel. In April 1968, when Garrel was 20, his first feature, Marie Pour Mémoire, won the top prize at the fourth annual festival of young cinema at Hyères (it was subsequently registered under the Zanzibar name). In his acceptance speech, Garrel announced that he was fed up with cinema; what interested him now was prophecy. If his film was to have a value, he declared, it should be like a cobblestone hurled into the cinema. That vision became real on the barricades in the Latin Quarter as the événements of May 1968 unfolded.

Another film-maker who shared his ideas was Serge Bard, a sociology dropout from Nanterre university. While Garrel was at Hyères, Bard was in Paris, filming Détruisez-Vous, the first official Zanzibar film. He took the title from an incendiary graffito on the walls of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, "Aidez-nous, détruisez-vous" ("Help us, destroy yourselves"), and the film clearly anticipates the events of May.

In 1969 Bard set off with more than a dozen others on a well-equipped expedition to Africa. With three Land Rovers, a 35mm camera and extensive musical equipment, Bard intended to cross the continent and reach the island of Zanzibar, while filming his new project entitled Au-delà (Beyond). Not long into the trip, however, he went off on his own. Rejoining his crew in Tamanrasset in December 1969, he announced his conversion to Islam and his abandonment of the film. No images survive.

Even before Bard left for Africa, the incredible energy that had brought the group together had begun to dissipate. In autumn 1968 Garrel was in Morocco, shooting Le Lit de la Vierge (The Virgin's Bed), his third film financed by Boissonnas. Shortly afterwards, Nico and Viva, two of Andy Warhol's superstars, visited Garrel in Rome during post-production. It was an important meeting. For the next decade, Nico was Garrel's muse, and they collaborated on several films, including La Cicatrice Intérieure (released in the US as The Inner Scar). Although Boissonnas contributed to the budget of Garrel's next film, her sponsorship of Garrel and the other Zanzibar film-makers was nearing an end. She went on to become a militant in the French feminist movement.

Until the Cinémathèque Française screened these films in 2000 in a retrospective of experimental cinema, they remained for the most part invisible. Boissonnas had earlier tried, without success, to sell them to an American distributor. She even thought of buying a cinema in Paris where they could be screened, but - typically - none of Zanzibar's members were willing to run it.

[greennui]

Clementi's films from this period

I enjoyed the home movie about the filming of Garrel's LE LIT DE LA VIERGE more than the actual film.

[St. Gloede]

I adore VISA DE CENSURE N° X, though Clémenti's later In the Shadow of the Blue Rascal is without a doubt his best (and one of the best films of the 80s). Unfortunately, I am not at all a fan of Garrel from this period, though Le révélateur has its moments (and besides I'm in the minority here) and that'd all I've seen - the Garrel films + Visa.

Best of luck. Looking forward to reading about your discoveries.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

thanks!
i will be glad if anyone having any experience with anything related to "zanzibar films" will post it in this thread.

after i will rewatch ZANZIBAR doc, i am gonna start with VISA DE CENSURE N° X.
considering it was made prior to 1968 and none of the letterboxd "Zanzibar" lists included VISA DE CENSURE N° X, it is (most probably) not part of the hardcore cannon. tho sometimes it is mentioned in relation to "zanzibar". so i expect it is a "proto-zanzibar" movie.

about HOME MOVIE: ON THE SET OF PHILIPPE GARREL'S 'THE VIRGIN'S BED' (1968) and THE VIRGIN'S BED (1969) it is somewhat amusing "film-about" (1968) seems like preceding (in terms of release) the "film" (1969). looking forward to seeing both (not sure yet if i will start with "film-about" or "film").

in just two years, between 1968 and 1970, the Zanzibar group shot 13 films

French heiress Sylvina Boissonnas financed twelve of these films, apparently holding court at the Coupole restaurant, ready to sign checks for virtually anyone with an idea – making rather costly 35mm film stock available to a fascinating crowd.

for now, i am curious what are those 12-13 core canonical movies. tho i expect they are listed in the book.
my current list contains 20 films made during 1968-1970 (thus 7-8 out of those entries are not hardcore "zanzibar").
in any case, i want to focus not only on the hardcore canon but on any film anyhow (even very loosely) connected to "zanzibar" phenomenon.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

R2
Highlights from...
3.1/ “Africa is a Revolutionary Country”: Sally Shafto’s Zanzibar: The Zanzibar Films and the Dandies of May 1968
(Keith Reader, 2007, Senses of Cinema) https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2007/boo ... bar-films/

1/

the world of cinema was profoundly affected by May, of which Henri Langlois’ (temporary) dismissal from the Cinémathèque Française was an important early symptom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Langlois
In 1968, French culture minister André Malraux tried to fire Langlois by stopping funding of the project. Malraux had invited the Soviet Minister of Culture to Paris. Malraux suddenly requested Langlois to privately screen, at the Cinematheque at Palais de Chaillot, for the visiting minister, the original version of a movie—Octobre—directed by Sergei Eisenstein. Langlois had already programmed the entire week and told Malraux that he could not accommodate the demands of the Soviet minister and that the Cinematheque was not a governmental agency. As an answer, Malraux simply closed the Cinematheque and sent the police against protesters (March 1968, including almost all of the directors of the New Wave; Nicholas Ray was there in person as well.) Local and international uproar ensued, and even the prestigious Cannes Film Festival was halted in protest that year. Protesters in Paris included the student activist Daniel Cohn-Bendit from University of Nanterre-Paris. Support came in telegrams from renowned directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Kurosawa to Fellini to Gianni Serra. Malraux eventually reinstated Langlois after intense debate, while reducing museum funding. Truffaut opens Stolen Kisses (1968) with a shot of the shuttered and locked Cinémathèque and dedicates the film to Langlois.

2/

The influence of the May zeitgeist was much more apparent in critical and theoretical developments; Cahiers du Cinéma adopted an often sectarian line grounded in an amalgam of Althusserian Marxism and Lacanian Freudianism, seen as alone capable of breaking the imaginary specular relationship between spectator and image, and thereby producing a genuinely revolutionary cinema in radical opposition to the Hollywood dream-machine and its European counterparts.

3/

a group of cinéastes who were based in Paris, but whose work had more in common with the ‘US/alternative’ than with the ‘French/oppositional’ style of filmmaking. These formed what she (Shafto) refers to as “the Zanzibar constellation” – a term presumably chosen because of their informal mode of organization and association

4/

His (Garell's) 2005 feature, Les Amants réguliers, can indeed be seen as a continuation of and partly ironic reflection upon the group’s often inflated æsthetic and (in a broad sense) political objectives, influenced by copious consumption of narcotics and a frequently minimalist approach – both characteristic of much US underground filmmaking.

5/

Boissonnas may have been based in Paris, but her modus operandi was far closer to Haight-Ashbury.

6/

Laurent Terzieff, known for his work with Marcel Carné, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luis Buñuel, appears with Bernadette Lafont, a leading female icon of the New Wave, in the silent feature Le Révélateur (1968); Zouzou, who was to appear in Eric Rohmer’s L’Amour l’après-midi (1972) and Marco Ferreri’s La Dernière Femme (1976), is in three of the four Philippe Garrel-directed films listed by Shafto; Jean-Pierre Léaud, often seen along with Godard on the May barricades, makes an appearance in Garrel’s La Concentration (1968); and Pierre Clémenti, familiar from his roles in Buñuel’s Belle de jour (1967) and Pasolini’s Porcile (1969), is in two Garrel films, one of which, Le Lit de la vierge (1969), figures in Shafto’s list. The other Zanzibar directors, such as Jackie Raynal and Daniel Pommereulle, who makes a brief appearance in Godard’s Week End (1967), worked with less well-known performers; indeed, in the US independent tradition, Raynal takes the lead role in her own Deux fois (1968) and Pommereulle in his Vite (1969).

7/

The constellation derived its name from the African archipelago – part of Tanzania – which supposedly became “a talisman for young people” in the late 1960s because “it was not only a crossroads between Eastern and Western cultures, it was also a Maoist island”. The Oriental infatuation figured here betokens a cross between the French fascination with a grotesquely idealized version of Chairman Mao’s China, lampooned in Godard’s La Chinoise (1967), and the Anglo-American hippy trail which led to many an odyssey through Africa and/or Asia.

8/

The political naïveté of so much European enthusiasm for what was then known as the Third World, explored by Alain Tanner a few years later in Le Retour d’Afrique (1972), is nowhere more apparent than in Caroline de Bendern’s account of “the trip to Zanzibar”

9/

few have realised that the May 1968 movement had spawned a grouping closer to American counter-culture than to revolutionary Marxism, and Shafto’s study is important because of the detailed information it gives about this perhaps surprising development

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W1
ZANZIBAR (Jackie Raynal, 2005)
https://letterboxd.com/film/zanzibar-2005/

1/ names mentioned in the doc and not mentioned in this thread yet:
— Jean-Pierre Kalfon
— Tinguely, Spoerri (Olivier Mosset worked as their assistant)
— Otto Hahn (a critic)
— Didier Leon
— Pierre-Richard Bré
— Denis Berry
— Mijanou Bardot
— Jean-Jacques Lebel

2/ trivia mentioned in the doc:
— Caroline de Bendern used to sleep with Olivier Mosset.
— Olivier was friends with Hahn and knew Daniel. Otto Hahn and Alain Jouffroy were two important critical voices of the era. Serge was friends with Jouffroy and Jouffroy was friends with Daniel. That's how they all met.
— Daniel was open to surrealism, which didn't interest Jouffroy that much.
— Serge was a big-time user of drugs (all of them). Drugs destroyed Pierre.
— Serge studied sociology in Nanterre. He knew Cohn-Bendit.
— Olivier Mosset's first trip to NY was in 1967 and met Warhol. He met Jack Smith too. Caroline de Bendern met Warhol, had a brief fling with Lou Reed, and listened to Velvet Underground before it was cool.
— Caroline first smoked weed with Daniel and first time took acid with Daniel.
— Phillip was the youngest.

3/ responses to the question, "Who picked the name "Zanzibar"?"
— Serge Bard. He took it from a Rimbaud poem. "I might travel to Zanzibar..." It's a letter, not a poem. But never mind. Yes, it's a letter. He wrote he could reach Japan, crossing India and China, and God knows where else. He adds, "And God knows where else..." Zanzibar is the first stage of traveling to the Far East.
— We started something like a production company that was a little bit virtual. Serge Bard wanted to make a movie, but in order to rent gear, buy film stock, you had to have a company. So we started one. That wasn't Zanzibar yet, the name came later. Serge Bard heard the word "Zanzibar" as a young child. Serge Bááárd - Zanzibááár. Maybe that's where he took it from. You need two people to start a company. Sylvina had 99 shares, I (Olivier Mosset) had 1. She bankrolled the whole adventure. Phillipe quickly got interested.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W2
ZANZIBAR À SAINT-SULPICE (Gérard Courant, 1999)
https://letterboxd.com/film/zanzibar-a-saint-sulpice/

30 years after their artistic revolution, members of the Zanzibar group meet in 1999 in Saint-Sulpice Square in Paris (France) in front of Gérard Courant’s camera. Silent.

https://youtu.be/yA_fe1x4dSI
B/
Catherine Baratier & Jacques Baratier
Serge Bard
Caroline de Bendern
Jacques Boissonnas (brother of Sylvina)
C/
Laura Duke Condominas (actress, A DREAM LONGER THAN THE NIGHT, LANCELOT OF THE LAKE, etc.)
Gérard Courant
D/
Patrick Deval
Alain Dister
G/
Garcia
Philippe Garrel & Caroline Garrel, Esther Garrel, Lena Garrel
M/
Marcel Mazé
Ester de Miro
N/
Dominique Noguez
R/
Jackie Raynal
S/
Jean-Paul Sarré
Sally Shafto
T/
Serge T
Z/
Zouzou

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZGGF W1
CINÉMATON N°2023: DANIEL POMMEREULLE (Gérard Courant, 2001)
https://letterboxd.com/film/cinematon/

Daniel Pommereulle's (1937-2003) portrait by Gérard Courant

Cinématon is a 156-hour long experimental film by French director Gérard Courant. It was the longest film ever released until 2011. Composed over 36 years from 1978 until 2006, it consists of a series of over 2,821 silent vignettes (cinématons), each 3 minutes and 25 seconds long, of various celebrities, artists, journalists, and friends of the director, each doing whatever they want for the allotted time.

https://youtu.be/OLNKMsIaHrk

[Holdrüholoheuho]

R3
Highlights from...
3.2/ Deval in ’68: An Interview with Patrick Deval (Fergus Daly, Maximilian Le Cain, 2008, Senses of Cinema)
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/bef ... k-deval/#2

All the elaborations about ACÉPHALE and HÉRACLITE L'OBSCUR omitted (gonna use them once I will watch those films).

Can you (Patrick Deval) tell us about Visage du cinéma, the magazine you set up with Serge Daney and Louis Skorecki, in the context of how your early cinéphilia influenced the making of your early short, Zoe Bonne, and then Héraclite l’obscur?

In 1960, I was 16 years old at the Lycée Voltaire, Paris XI, with Daney and Skorecki among other characters. Our teacher of French and Latin was Henri Agel, a cinema critic who had set up a cine club in the Lycée. With him, we were tripping from Cicero to F. W. Murnau, from [Jean] Racine to Fritz Lang, from Molière to Kenji Mizoguchi. We became cinéphiles, haunted the Cinemathèque, met Henri Langlois and Jean Douchet. With our 18-year-old ingenuity, we thought we could bring “a politique des auteurs” further than Cahiers du Cinéma, our idols. We believed we could do even better: quest for fatherhood and attempted killing of the father at the same time. So we created Visages du cinéma. That lasted two issues only (Howard Hawks and Otto Preminger), a real teenage endeavour! But that was part of our very lively ‘sons of cinema’ trail. I’m amazed you know about this episode!

When I did Zoe Bonne in 1966 (I was then 22), it was more out of respect for Jean Renoir and under the influence of comedy à la française. It’s a strangely classical first film.

On the other hand, Héraclite l’obscur looked more like me, obsessed with the origin of everything, from words to seeds, fond of history and antiquity, and enraptured at the time by the words of the philosopher. I still appreciate the daring spirit that allowed me to endeavour a philosophical peplum.

What did you do on a daily basis during the ’68 Events? Did you go out on the streets or, as you suggest, did your Dandyism see the whole thing as a bit messy? Was there a certain violent element to your Rimbaldien desire for both purity (the zero-degree) and hybridization (“I am a bastard, a beast, a negro …”)?

First, in February ’68, I was at the manif’ supporting Henri Langlois, father of the Cinemathèque, who had just been fired by André Malraux, Minister of Culture for [Président] De Gaulle, for bad accounting. That took place in the garden of the Trocadero in front of the Cinemathèque. The police charged, beat us. Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais were bleeding, Jacques Rivette and François Truffaut were yelling. That was the first act of this revolutionary year. Later, we understood the words of president Mao: “One spark set fire to the plain.”

On the 3rd of May, I think, I went to hang around, as the atmosphere was electric, on the Boulevard Saint-Michel. Here I see people starting to break open the pavement with big iron grilles that are at the foot of Paris trees. Then a human chain takes the paving stone and passes it on – like in China – to erect a barricade. Then came a night of war with the police, cars burned, tear gas, the Sorbonne invested as a refuge and a free territory. That started a crazy month.

Then I got involved with the états généraux du cinéma, where most of the movie people gathered to reconsider their relationship with the socièté du spectacle and with their activity as a whole … as did the shoemakers, the nurses, teachers … everybody at the time. Then all dwindled in typical French rap, indefinite dialectic and drunkenness of the logos. I shared that at the Théâtre de l’Odéon where free speech and free happenings were going on. I met Julian Beck among others there.

I attended also some heavy manif’ at Gare de Lyon, and I remember walking on a railway bridge with a gang trying to reach La Bourse [Stock Exchange] to burn it. Paris nous appartenait. [“Paris belonged to us.”]

In the general ’60s climate of revolt, many different youth factions believed in overthrowing your ‘elders’. As Dandies, how did you look on the hippies? Were there feelings of contempt towards their faux innocence or, on the other hand, was there an admiration for the more edgy New York underground? How exactly would you define the Dandy ‘philosophy’?

About the hippies, after a short snobbish reaction of rejection, I became resolutely one of them and shared the “Peace and Love” motto as well as “turn on, drop out, tune in” and became fully immerged in the trip, brother and sisterhood, and so on … And still am, but completely outdated. So the Dandy ‘philosophy’ is one thing and me another. Yes “ma différence est ma nécessité” as the poet says. Like Pasolini, I wonder about human beauty and ugliness, but can’t we appreciate life only through death?

I believe you have published at least one book of poems. Can you talk about your poetry? And couldn’t this be a possible definition of (your lifetime of) Dandyism: to be able to apply the Poetic Attitude to whatever field one is inhabiting at a given time, be it writing, filmmaking or living?

Yes, Friedrich Holderlin said it all: “L’homme habite en poète.” Or, earlier, the Latin poet Horace: “Vetat mori”, “It prevents from dying, poetry.” Let’s dwell and abide in those maxims.

No, I never published a book of poems as such, even if what I wrote along my way – scripts, dialogues, newspapers or essays – is consubstantial with the poet’s relation between words, visions and imagination. It takes a lifetime to fathom the lies and truth embedded in language. Even several lives, if you believe in reincarnation. Then you have to start again a new mother tongue, learn how to babble and speak. This is quite strange for an old soul wrinkled in the corridors of time, becoming blank again, like a cuneiform tablet of tender argile ready to be printed anew …

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W3a
ACÉPHALE • HEADLESS (Patrick Deval, 1968)
https://letterboxd.com/film/acephale/

It's time to abandon the bright lights of the civilized world.
It's too late for attempts to be reasonable and educated.
Which, in any case, makes life highly unattractive.
Whether secretly or not, we must change completely or cease to exist altogether.
The world to which we belonged gave us nothing to love beyond the inadequacies of each individual.
One's existence is limited by one's commodities.
A world one cannot love to death represents nothing more than an obligation to work.
Compared to previous worlds, it is hideous, the most ill-conceived of all.
In previous worlds, one could lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in this world of educated vulgarity.
The advantages of a civilization can be measured by the ways in which men profit from them.
Today's men profit from civilization by becoming more degraded than all of their predecessors put together.
Life always seems to be tumultuously incoherent — its grandeur and its reality to be found only in ecstasy and in ecstatic love.
He who ignores or misunderstands ecstasy is an incomplete being whose thought is reduced to mere analysis.
Existence is more than a restless void.
It's a dance that forces us to dance fanatically.
When the object of thought is dead and fragmentary, the thought itself has an internal life, like that of a flame.
There is no point in responding to those who believe that this world exists and justify themselves accordingly.
When they speak, you can see them without hearing them.
And even if you look at them, you can see only what exists far in the distance behind them.
There is no point in exciting oneself "en route", trying to attract the attention of those who have only vague desires such as wasting time, laughing, or become eccentric.
You have to advance without a backward glance, paying no attention to those who haven't the strength to escape their immediate reality.
Humanity overextends itself, trying to be the raison d'etre of the universe.
If it becomes vital to the survival of the universe, it becomes a slave.
An unfree existence is an empty, neutered existence — and a free existence is in danger.
As long as the earth engendered nothing but cataclysms, trees, and birds, it was a free universe.
Liberty's gleam became tarnished when the earth produced a being who placed the laws of necessity above the universe itself.
Man remained, however, free from necessity.
He is free to resemble everything in the universe that he was not.
He could ignore the thought that it was either God or himself that prevented everything else from becoming absurd.
Man escaped his own brain as one escapes from a prison.
Beyond the confines of his own identity, he discovered, not God — who represents prohibition —, but a being who ignored all prohibitions.
Beyond my own identity I discover a being who makes me laugh, because he has no head, who fills me with anguish, since he consists of both innocence and crime.
He holds a weapon made of iron in his left hand, flames which resemble a sacred heart in his right hand.
In the same burst of energy he unites birth and death.
He is neither man nor God.
He is not me, he is more than me.
His stomach is a maze in which he has lost himself, in which I lose myself with him, in which I find myself as him, in other words, a monster.

Beyond my own identity I discover a being who makes me laugh, because he has no head, who fills me with anguish, since he consists of both innocence and crime.
He holds a weapon made of iron in his left hand, flames which resemble a sacred heart in his right hand.
His stomach is a maze in which he has lost himself, in which I lose myself with him, in which I find myself as him, in other words, a monster.

Georges Bataille - Acéphale
https://monoskop.org/Ac%C3%A9phale

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W3b
(cont.) ACÉPHALE • HEADLESS (Patrick Deval, 1968)

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/bef ... ick-deval/
Did you see connections between the political impulses current at the time of your Acéphale and those impacting on Bataille in his time?

Not precisely. But the general mood in ’68 drove us to plotting, underground, esotericism and whatever could subvert, trouble and erase the establishment. So, I may have recognized in Bataille’s Acéphale or Le Grand jeu some secret links, some ancestors. Nevertheless, I was too much of a Dandy to bother about really acting.

Acéphale (Zanzibar Group) vs. Acéphale (Bataille) vs. Acéphale (Le Grand Jeu)
1/ Bataille's Acéphale (viz previous post)
2/ Acéphale of the Le Grand Jeu (viz in this post below)

My high interest in the French group "Le Grand Jeu" brought me in June 2019 to Prague's exhibition devoted to the work of the painter Josef Šíma and his affiliation to Le Grand Jeu. I made several pictures there. One of them is a snapshot of the drawing by Maurice Henry depicting an acéphale figure.

Maurice Henry was a French painter, poet, filmmaker, as well as a cartoonist. Between 1930 until his death, he published over 25,000 cartoons in 150 newspapers and a dozen books. His cartoons were generally surrealistic and satirical.

In 1926, he co-founded the magazine Le Grand Jeu with René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, and Roger Vaillard, with whom he formed the "Phrères simplistes" collective. Henry provided poems, texts, and drawings, while also making his debut as a journalist in Le Petit Journal.

He left Le Grand Jeu in 1933 to join André Breton's group of Surrealists and their magazine Surréalisme au service de la Révolution. He also worked with the artist and photographer Artür Harfaux on the screenplay of twenty films, including ones starring the comic characters 'Les Pieds Nickelés' and 'Bibi Fricotin'. Maurice Henry spent the final years of his life making paintings, sculptures, and collages. He passed away in Milan, Lombardy, in 1984.

So, I am very glad there is some (nevermind it's only vague) connection (via inspiration) between Zanzibar Group and (much earlier) Le Grand Jeu.
Thus as a detour to my Zanzibar investigations, I want also (in some indefinite future) to take a closer look at the movies Maurice Henry and Artür Harfaux were involved in...

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurice_H ... o%C3%A8te)
CINÉMA
- La nuit fantastique (1942), film de Marcel L'Herbier, adaptation de Marcel L'Herbier, Louis Chavance et Maurice Henry, dialogues d’Henri Jeanson, distribution : Fernand Gravey, Micheline Presle, Saturnin Fabre, Charles Granval, Bernard Blier...
- Si cette histoire vous amuse (1946), film de Marcel Martin, commentaires : Arthur Harfaux et Maurice Henry, distribution : Georges Gosset, Jean Guirec, Raymond Bailly, Kay Morgan...
- Madame et le Mort (1943), film de Louis Daquin, scénario de Marcel Aymé, d'après le roman de Pierre Véry, Les Gagmen associés : Maurice Henry et Arthur Harfaux, distribution : Henri Guisol, Renée Saint-Cyr, Michel Vitold, Marguerite Pierry, Pierre Renoir...
- Coup de tête (1944), film de René Le Hénaff, scénario, adaptation et dialogues de Roland Dorgelès, distribution : André Alerme, Pierre Mingand, Josseline Gaël, Jean Tissier, Gisèle Casadesus...
- 120, rue de la Gare (1946), film de Jacques Daniel-Norman, scénario de Jacques Daniel-Norman d'après Léo Malet, scénario de Maurice Henry et Arthur Harfaux, distribution : René Dary (Burma), Sophie Desmarets (Hélène), Jean Parédès...
- Par la fenêtre (1947), film de Gilles Grangier, dialogue d’Arthur Harfaux et Maurice Henry, distribution : André Bourvil, Suzy Delair…
- Les Aventures des Pieds-Nickelés (1948), film de Marcel Aboulker, scénario d’Arthur Harfaux et Maurice Henry, distribution : Rellys (Croquignol), Robert Dhéry (Filochard) et Maurice Baquet (Ribouldingue)…
- Rondo sur la piste (1950), court métrage de Maurice Henry, scénario de Maurice Henry et Arthur Harfaux, distribution : Maurice Baquet et Denise Prêcheur
- Bibi Fricotin (1951), film de Marcel Blistène, scénario d’Arthur Harfaux et Maurice Henry, distribution : Maurice Baquet (Bibi Fricotin), Colette Darfeuil…
- La P... sentimentale (1958), film de Jean Gourguet, distribution : Maurice Sarfati, Maria Vincent; Pierre Larquey, Andrex... et Maurice Henry
- La belle saison est proche (1959), documentaire de Jean Barral, avec Youki Desnos, Marcel Achard, Jean-Louis Barrault, Roger Blin, Maurice Henry, André Breton, Alain Cuny, Max Ernst, Henri Jeanson, Marcel Mouloudji, Jacques et Pierre Prévert, Jean Wiener...
- Les heures chaudes de Montparnasse (1963), documentaire télévisé de Jean-Marie Drot, int. : Jean-Marie Drot, Louis Aragon, Pierre Bertin, Maurice Henry...

The end of the Habsburg Monarchy and the rise of an independent Czechoslovak state played a key role in the establishing of international contacts by the Czech avant-garde. Unlike most of the inter-war European avant-garde movements where contacts with their Czech counterparts were rather sparse, communication between Czech and French avant-garde was quite extensive. It could be credited for the most part to Josef Šíma.

The exhibition project aims to map the Šíma's work from the early 1930s. The focus of the project lies on the occasion of the first time in the Czech Republic to present in detail and on unique pieces and documents one of the most remarkable chapters of the Czech avant-garde art abroad - the Šíma's main influence in the Parisian group "Le Grand Jeu".

Permanently residing in France from the beginning of the 1920s, Josef Šíma was the communication link for progressive artists from the young Czechoslovak Republic to get in touch with French artists who set the tone of contemporary art. Thanks to the dissolution of Austria-Hungary Czech artists were no longer in a subordinate position and were able to confidently enter into partnerships with avant-garde groups, such as the Great Game or the Surrealist Group.

Josef Šíma (1891-1971)
https://www.wikiart.org/en/josef-sima

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W3c
(cont.) ACÉPHALE • HEADLESS (Patrick Deval, 1968)

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/bef ... ick-deval/
With the recent resurgence in interest in the Zanzibar films, much emphasis has been placed on the Zanzibar group as a group. To what extent did you, at the time, feel that you were working as part of a ‘group’?

I never knew I was part of a group named Zanzibar when we were playfully producing Acéphale. Actually, it was only in the ’80s, when coming back to France, that I learned my pals of the time – mainly Philippe Garrel, Daniel Pommereulle, Jackie Raynal, Serge Bard – had done a movie with a cheque from this lady, Sylvina Boissonnas, and that the productions of this group in the year ’68/’69 came to be called Zanzibar. I even learned only in ’85 that Acéphale had been shown at La Quinzaine des réalisateurs in Cannes ’69, which shows how much I had gone ahead without looking back!

In this summer of love, the cameraman of Garrel, Michel Fournier, whose purity and quest of origin (family, cinema, society …) impressed me, worked for me, and true enough we were all excellent friends – actors, painters, musicians. Many are not here anymore. I keep seeing a few, others are elsewhere, life has many paths, it’s another story.

There was Laurent Condominas, a close friend and alter ego. There was this group from London, The Exploding Galaxy, and I was also friends with David Medalla, Eve Ridoux, Christian Ledoux, Michael Chapman. Also Jackie Raynal, editor and my girlfriend at the time; Barbet Schoeder, Serge Bard, Pierre Kalfon, Pierre Clémenti, Pierre-Richard Bré, Pommereulle. We shared a lot.

Can you tell us about the performances in Acéphale? How did you work with the actors? What were the influences behind the performance style?

The performances in Acéphale, the ones in the forest, are a mix of free expression of that group of friends who came from London, The Exploding Galaxy, early flower people who lived on garbage-runs and at love-ins in the parks and participated in Acéphale – Eve Ridoux, Michael Chapman, Christian Ledoux, Audrey Vipond, mostly – and my own first acid trip in this Fontainebleau forest revisited. Nobody was a professional actor, but, in those days, my friends were playing their life and expressing themselves a lot. La Coupole restaurant, L’Odéon theatre, everywhere was a stage and life a play.

Besides that, I still wonder why there are so many direct glances to the camera in this movie, talking to you from the other edge of time …

How does your interest in anthropology tie in with what one might call the ‘pseudo-anthropological’ passages in Acéphale: observing the characters as if they were of a completely different culture or from a different era? You mentioned that you are “obsessed with the origin of everything”. Is Acéphale, in a way, imagining a ‘new origin’ (or return to origins) for a new society?

Yes, genealogy matters. At the time, I often felt I was not the son of my father and mother. Refusal of my human origin; I must come from another planet. My generation is also coming from elsewhere. Freaks of nature. Those were the peculiar bases upon which rested my anthropological outlook, which I don’t think Claude Levi Strauss would appreciate.

I became a bit radical in my refusal of Western Civilisation, constantly raving about the end of the white man. Rouch was closer to this view, becoming himself a joyful African in the oral tradition. But that was not so far from [Arthur] Rimbaud, [Antonin] Artaud or [Paul] Gauguin when he decided to ‘ensavage’ himself.

In common with many films of the Zanzibar group, Acéphale appears profoundly pessimistic, especially for a film coming from a time reputedly infused with the desire for renewal.

It is true nobody laughs in Acéphale (except for the forced ‘affreux rire de l’idiot’ close-up). We were involved in ‘tabula rasa’ and that’s no joke. There were some joyful moments in ’68, feast-like, maybe Dyonisian here and there, but mainly we were serious and grave, first because we hated the greasy laugh of our elders, but also because we could not get satisfaction. There was nothing to laugh about when you were in this world, being a Vietnamese or otherwise. I feel there is even much less to laugh about today. I understand more and more Heraclitus, ‘the weeping philosopher’.

It is true nobody laughs in Acéphale (except for the forced ‘affreux rire de l’idiot’ close-up).

Actually, there are two more cases of laughter in Acéphale. In the very last scene of this (upliftingly) pessimistic film, a girl is laughing (HAPPY END). And also when the group of outcasts leaves their fur coats & refuge of the primordial forest behind and moves forward (backward) to enter the darkness of the prehistoric cave, they smile.


"Waiting for the head" that "does not (yet) exist".

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZGGF W2
SANSHÔ DAYÛ • SANSHO THE BAILIFF (Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954)

In the (already often quoted) interview, Patrick Deval speaks about his overall inspiration by Kenji Mizoguchi and mentions he specifically mimicked the scene from SANSHO THE BAILIFF in his opening scene of HERACLITUS THE DARK.

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/bef ... ick-deval/
Visually, much of Acéphale could be seen as an attempt to update Mizoguchian techniques with the new technologies.

Yes, I loved the Mizoguchian touch at the time. Now I appreciate also Yasujiro Ozu and Akira Kurosawa, S. Ray and N. Ray, without forgetting Ernst Lubitsch, Vincente Minnelli, and Sam Fuller. Here and there I must have picked up techniques and manners. These guys were my universities, then came ’68, new technologies and the opening of the South, and that became the world as our playground, praxis, and discoveries. Another trip.

the first shot of Héraclite going down a huge slope to the sea was exactly imitated from a shot in Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu [1954].

This made me do a detour.
But before even starting with SANSHO, I watched "Extras" and it became already clear what specific scene from the film was mimicked in the opening of HERACLITUS.


TADAO SATO (film critic):
It's the scene where Anju goes into the lake.
The scene is suggestive of Japanese theater arts, such as Kabuki and Noh, which use a passageway called the hashigakari, which leads through the theater to the stage.
All an actor does on it is simply walking, but it's a very important element in Japan's traditional theater arts.
To walk powerfully, or very sadly, or with a springy step.
There are lots of ways and they're all stylized.
The scene where Anju goes into the lake doesn't exactly use that kind of stylized walking, but it clearly shows the actor walking.
The simple act of walking makes it beautiful.
It's not only beautiful but also a superbly expressive piece of acting.


KYOKO KAGAWA (actress):
This scene was shot in Kyoto, in February, the coldest time of year.
I had to enter the water.
The assistant director laid a plank down under the water so that I wouldn't slip.
It was on an incline.
I tried to walk down that plank as gently as I could since there couldn't be any retakes.
I walked gently down the plank up to my waist.
It wasn't that difficult, but I had to do it in one take.
It was cold, but I was so nervous that I forgot all about that.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W4a
HÉRACLITE L'OBSCUR • HERACLITUS THE DARK (Patrick Deval, 1967)
https://letterboxd.com/film/heraclitus-the-dark/

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/bef ... ick-deval/
... Like Pasolini, I wonder about human beauty and ugliness...

Mentioning Pasolini, Héraclite l’obscur, in particular, reminded me of Pasolini, but later Pasolini, as if the influence was in the other direction, from you to him. Can you talk more about your ‘formal’ concerns when you made Héraclite? What governed your shot choices, shot lengths, camera movements, etc.? Were these worked out in advance or did you give the cinematographer a relatively free hand? Also, do you think May ’68 affected the form of Acéphale and how different were your formal or plastic concerns then than they had been when you made Héraclite?

I still wonder if I saw Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex [1967] before or after I made Héraclite l’obscur? In any case, I always felt they are brother movies. In the Third World approach to Antiquity and in the will to actualize mythology.

My formal leanings at the time before ’68 were under the spell of classical cinema: Murnau, Carl Dreyer, Lang, Howard Hawks, John Ford, Mizoguchi, Raoul Walsh, Renoir and Luis Buñuel, the giants who impressed my imagination through frames and lights and stories. Suddenly arrived shoulder cameras and synchro sound; that changed it all. Is the medium the message? Or were we too weak to adapt the new instruments and tools to the old ‘classical’ manner? Would it be expressionist like Lang or plain magisterial like Mizoguchi? I think the dream went on and we are still in it with some nightmares passing by. L’art onirique par excellence.

So, to answer precisely, yes, in Héraclite and Acéphale I remember I was quite precise with my cameraman. I knew what I wanted to the point that the first shot of Héraclite going down a huge slope to the sea was exactly imitated from a shot in Mizoguchi’s Sansho Dayu [1954]. I was fond of citation anyway. Then there are a lot of static shots in Acéphale, in contrast with very speedy mobile shots: that was wanted too! That was subversion at the time and I liked to provoke the passive crowds!

But, while shooting, I’m sure I was not thinking of how I should make films differently from the elder New Wave. Neither the spirit of May ’68 nor some Pop or Warholian influence reached me. Next to the cinéastes I mentioned, Rimbaud, [Le Comte de] Lautréamont, Artaud, Bataille, [Henri] Michaux and Thelonious Monk were rather haunting my soul.

Both Acéphale and Héraclite l’obscur contain interesting tensions between documentary and fiction elements and techniques. What is the relationship between fiction and documentary in the context of your work? And what led to your ultimate decision to work only in documentary?

[Louis] Lumière and [Georges] Méliès. From the start, they were the two patrons, the two ways to relate to the new mystery of the memorized image – pictures that last. Cinema shows the world and makes it up as well.

I loved Orson Welles, the magician. Then I met Jean Rouch, who showed me African sorcerers. Finally, I chose Rouch and the world. Discover, transmit, marvel, get to know. I became friends with Joris Ivens and Richard Leacock, who still tells me about Robert Flaherty. Actually, I just met Al Maysles in NYC, 80 years old, beautiful pioneer of American cinema direct. Without talking of Jonas Mekas: I must be a gerontophile!

To go back to Acéphale and Héraclite, yes, you saw something there, some signs of my attraction to blunt talk, lack of artifice and outer worlds. It was also the début of light shoulder synchro cameras, freedom, end of studios, improvisation, jazz. Documentary is outdooring. I like that. At the time, boundaries between fiction and documentary started to blur. Disappearance of the frame. Premises of digital today.

Were you interested in making documentaries before encountering Rouch?

I was interested in documentary since I saw Nuit et brouillard [Alain Resnais, 1956] when I was 16. But the real trigger came after ’68, while I discovered the South, from where I could see the ignorance of the North, and naïvely thought I could document to alleviate it.

I feel there is even much less to laugh about today. I understand more and more Heraclitus, ‘the weeping philosopher’.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heraclitus
A later tradition referred to Heraclitus as the "weeping philosopher", in contrast to Democritus, who is known as the "laughing philosopher"; this statement generally references their reaction to the folly of mankind.

At some time in antiquity, Heraclitus acquired the epithet "The Obscure" (The Dark); generally interpreted to mean his sayings—which contain frequent paradoxes, metaphors and incipient utterances—are difficult to understand.

He (Hegel) attributed dialectics to Heraclitus rather than, as Aristotle did, to Zeno of Elea.

Infinity as a spirit of nations and the world may be understood only from a clumsy point of view.
We must expose the myths themselves more conclusively.
—FRIEDRICH HÖLDERLIN

SANSHO THE BAILIFF vs. HERACLITUS THE DARK

[Holdrüholoheuho]

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(cont.) HÉRACLITE L'OBSCUR • HERACLITUS THE DARK (Patrick Deval, 1967)

Give me a fixed point (MARTHA or HERACLITUS) and I will move the whole world 720°.
—Archimedes the Thoughtful

MARTHA (1974) 720°
https://youtu.be/iiS2kJCLhgA

HERACLITUS THE DARK (1967) 720°

[Holdrüholoheuho]

R4
ZG W3d
(cont.) ACÉPHALE • HEADLESS (Patrick Deval, 1968)

ACÉPHALE was shot by two cinematographers (Michel Fournier and Guy Gilles) and this is the (savage) reason why...

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/in- ... ick-deval/
In Memoriam: Michel Fournier 1945-2008 (Patrick Deval, 2009)

In April 1968, I was at the Hyères Film Festival to present my philosophical short film, Héracilite l’Obscur (1967). Philippe Garrel was there with his cameraman, Michel Fournier, to present their opus, Marie pour mémoire (1967). This film made a big impression on me and I admired its photographic quality.

During May ’68, I saw Garrel and Fournier again in Paris at the home of Alain Jouffroy, where a group of spiritual brothers and soul sisters got together. Happenings, music, demonstrations, revolutionary films and various radical texts resulted from those gatherings. When, in July 1968, I was ready to begin filming Acéphale, it seemed only natural to ask Fournier to shoot my film.

Forty years after our collaboration, I remember his good taste, his perfectionism and his silence, his demanding nature as well as his concentrated and alert frame of mind. Soon I was describing him as a “mystic of light”, because he knew better than anyone how to use Kodak’s black-and-white 4-X to obtain contrasts that had not been seen since F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang or Carl Dreyer, and with his images he could create both an indescribable darkness and a bath of lustral light.

A problem occurred during the shoot. The actor Edouard Niermans proposed biting off the neck of a rooster in imitation of a gesture of ancient savagery. Which he did. Fournier who was already a vegetarian was appalled and abandoned the set. This is how Guy Gilles happened to finish shooting Acéphale. I hadn’t seen Michel since then, when he appeared, dressed all in white, and with his gentle, ironic smile at the Cinémathèque a few years back. After all these years, we hugged each other, with no hard feelings.

Bel homme, adieu!

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZGGF W3
EDIPO RE • OEDIPUS REX (Pier Paolo Pasolini, 1967)

https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2008/bef ... ick-deval/
(P. Deval:) I still wonder if I saw Pasolini’s Oedipus Rex before or after I made Héraclite l’obscur? In any case, I always felt they are brother movies. In the Third World approach to Antiquity and in the will to actualize mythology.

"In your fate, it's written you shall kill your father."

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/d ... s.filmnews
He (Danilo Donati 1926-2001) continued his apprenticeship with credits as "assistant for the scenic realisation" to several of Visconti's drama productions of the 1950s, designed by the director himself. He designed for several musical revues and the popular television variety Canzonissima, before getting his first important credit designing for Pier Paolo Pasolini in La Ricotta (1962). I remember admiring how he improvised costumes on the spot, even for the religious tableau shot in a studio, where he brought reams of cheap coloured silks and kept them in place with safety pins.
With The Gospel According To Matthew (1964), also made quite cheaply, Donati created, perhaps, the most original costumes ever seen in a religious film. The work won him an Oscar nomination, though he lost to the costumist of Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?, commenting that he had been "beaten by woollen jumpers". He also left a personal stamp on the poet-director's last films, including Oedipus Rex (1967), Decameron (1970) and Salo (1975).

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W5
VISA DE CENSURE N° X • CERTIFICATE No. X (Pierre Clémenti, 1967, 1975)
https://letterboxd.com/film/visa-de-censure-n-x/

Under the influence of Franco-Canadian experimentalist Etienne O’Leary, Clémenti had begun shooting his own 16mm experimental short. His "Visa de censure, no. X" is a face-melting rush of superimpositions, mandalas, pagan convocations, and freakout flashes of wriggling vomited spiders. Sections of "Visa" were shown as early as 1967—aptly titled "Psychedelic"—but the final version is dated 1975, when it was synched with a 40-odd-minute multi-movement jam by French psych-prog rockers Clearlight Symphony.

One can encounter two types of claims related to the parts of "Visa de Censure No. X"
(the second is more frequent and probably closer to the truth):

1/ "Certificate No. X" is broken up into two separate works that, while bearing separate names, "Visa de Censure No. X" and "Carte de Voeux", and filmed eight years apart (1967 and 1975, respectively), render what appears in context to be a seamless whole.

2.1/ This ("Certificate No. X") flamboyantly poetic film includes two works of art: "Livret de Famille" and "Carte de Voeux".
2.2/ From this first experience as a filmmaker, the films "Livret de Famille" (1967) and "Art de vie" = "Carte de Voeux" (1969) were born, later merged into one and the same film: "Visa de Censure n°X" (1975).

In the first claim, wrong is certainly the phrase "filmed eight years apart".
There is no dispute that "Carte de Voeux" (also called "Art de Vie) was shot in 1969.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0315207/
And it seems also more likely that besides "Visa de Censure No. X" & "Carte de Voeux" the footage of "Livret de Famille" (1967) was incorporated into "Visa de Censure No. X" amalgam.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1369675/

"Carte de Voeux" was seamed to "Visa de Censure No. X" after min 24.
It is not hard to figure out due to the final credits of "Visa de Censure No. X" and the subsequent "Carte de Voeux" title.


Where is the seam between "Carte de Voeux" and "Livret de Famille" remains rather a mystery?!
"Carte de Voeux" is said to be 3 or 4 min long and "Livret de Famille" 12 min.
"Visa de Censure No. X" (24 min) + "Carte de Voeux" (3 min) + "Livret de Famille" (12 min) makes together 39 min long footage which is basically the length of "Visa de Censure No. X" amalgam.
So, the next seam one would expect somewhere around min 27 but I can't see it there.
The second seam is either much smoother than the first one or "Carte de Voeux" and "Livret de Famille" are mixed in a more intricate manner than just one short following the other?!
Anyway, whatever.

"Visa de Censure No. X" amalgam is accompanied by a soundtrack (released in 1975) that can't be missed.
I must admit I watched the film twice (once with the soundtrack and once without) and I prefer the second viewing.

Like an acid-soaked freefall, "Visa de censure n° X" is a rush of nudity and color from one of France’s most seductively watchable actors, set to an album’s worth of psychedelic prog-rock (performed by the "Delired Cameleon Family", a group featuring members of French band "Clear Light").

"Delired Cameleon Family" was originally conceived as the soundtrack to Pierre Clémenti's "Visa de censure nº X", and was originally released as an LP in 1975. It was a host of reputed experimentalists who took charge of producing this soundtrack. Under the direction of Cyrille Verdeaux we found the likes of Yvan Coaquette (Música Electrónica Viva, Spacecraft...), Gilbert Artman (Lard Free, Urban Sax...), Christian Boulé, Tim Blake (Gong, solo recordings...), Ariel Kalma (Heldon, solo recordings), Jean-Claude d'Agostini, François Jeanneau, Jean Padovani, Olivier Pamela, Joël Dugrenot, Antoine Duvernet, Aude Cornillac, and Valérie Lagrange. Cyrille Verdeaux was, of course, the main force behind the better known French band "Clear Light". Verdeaux was born on the 31st of July of 1949 in Paris. At the age of 15, he became a student at the French National Conservatory of Music, specializing in studies of harmony, composition, and piano. He won three times the first prize in student composition. After the 1968 student riots, he left the Conservatory to join a band as a keyboardist. In 1972 he released "Clearlight Symphony", thus forming the band "Clear Light" to tour through Europe performing his symphony. "Clear Light" would release three more LPs through the '70s, and also the soundtrack to "Visa De Censure". The music form "Delired Cameleon Family", as it has been told somewhere, 'is the synthesis of piano's technical, epic scales, psychedelic wah wah guitar sounds and electronic cosmic, molecular machines arrangements.'

Songs / Tracks Listing:
1. Raganesh (6:45)
2. Weird Ceremony (4:21)
3. La Fin Du Debut (5:05)
4. Le Boeuf (8:37)
5. Novavanna (13:36)
6. Ananta (9:42)

Line-up / Musicians:
- Cyrille Verdeaux / grand piano, e-piano, organ, harp, glockenspiel, percussion
- Jean-Claude d'Agostini / lead guitar, bass
- Ivan Coaquette / guitar, e-piano
- Christian Boulé / guitar
- Tim Blake / tambura
- Antoine Duvernet / alto sax, percussion
- François Jeanneau / soprano sax, ARP 2600 synth
- Ariel Kalma / tenor sax
- Joël Dugrenot / bass, chorus vocals
- Jano Padovani / drums, tabla, percussion
- Gilbert Artman / percussion, vibes
- Valérie Lagrange / vocals
- Olivier Pamela / chorus vocals
- Aude Cornillac / voice

Cover Artwork: Jean-Claude Michel

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W6
HOMEO: MINOR DEATH: COMING BACK FROM GOING HOME (Etienne O'Leary, 1967)
https://letterboxd.com/film/homeo/

Under the influence of Franco-Canadian experimentalist Etienne O’Leary, Clémenti had begun shooting his own 16mm experimental short.

"One of the very few films made by Etienne O’Leary, all of which emerged from the French underground circa 1968 and can be very loosely designated ‘diary films’. Like the contemporaneous films by O’Leary’s more famous friend Pierre Clementi, they trippily document the drug-drenched hedonism of that era’s dandies. In contrast to the back-to-origins minimalism of the Zanzibar Group (Garrel, Deval, Reynal, Bard, etc), O’Leary worked with an intoxicating style that foregrounded rapid and even subliminal cutting, dense layering of superimposed images and a spontaneous notebook type shooting style. The touchstone would seem to be Mekas and the New York underground rather than Godard. Yet even if much of O’Leary’s material was initially ‘diaristic’, depicting the friends, lovers, and places that he encountered in his private life, the metamorphoses it underwent during editing transformed it into a series of ambiguously fictionalized, sometimes darkly sexual fantasias.

A travelogue of sorts, O’Leary second work blends cityscapes, nature, summer holidays, and charismatic portraits all together, with everything awash in radiant colors. The droning harmonium soundtrack provides a continuous pulse, with occasional flutters that match the quasi-spiritual vision quests. Most significantly, Homeo foregrounds O’Leary’s radical approach to in-camera editing, with rapid-fire cuts bringing photographs and magazine ads to vibrant life alongside friends’s eternal wanderlusts.

... was incorporated at the Pablo's Picasso play, 'Le Désir attrapé par la queue", directed by Jean-Jacques Lebel (Gassin, France, summer 1967).

In 1967 he (Jean-Jacques Lebel) staged in Gassin at the Festival de la Libre Expression Pablo Picasso's 1941 surrealist theatrical farce in six acts Le Désir attrapé par la queue (Desire Caught by the Tail).

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x43qd3c

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZGGF W4
INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER (Kenneth Anger, 1969) ... a "brother movie" to VISA DE CENSURE N° X (P. Clémenti, 1967)
ZGGF W5
LUCIFER RISING (Kenneth Anger, 1972) ... a "cousin movie" to VISA DE CENSURE N° X (P. Clémenti, 1967)

According to Anger, the film (Invocation of My Demon Brother) was assembled from scraps of the first version of Lucifer Rising.

The film Clémenti began working on in 67, Visa de Censure No X, comes on like an ecstatic fusion of a benign Kenneth Anger and the diary films of Jonas Mekas; I can think of no other film that so epitomises the optimism and hedonism of that year.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

something sinister and truly disturbing is going on here...

titles of my latest viewings:
INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER
LUCIFER RISING
topic views:
666

[greennui]

I think Anger may have put a curse on you, just like he did to Jimmy Page and Stan Brakhage.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

I still have a chance to thwart this curse by dedicating my 666th post on this forum to Anger and Baphomet. (Hopefully, I won't forget.)

[nrh]

jackie raynal - https://www.artforum.com/interviews/jac ... vies-85066

[Holdrüholoheuho]

jackie raynal - https://www.artforum.com/interviews/jac ... vies-85066

thanks, nrh! interesting.
R5

Jackie Raynal first became involved in film when, riding through Paris on a Vespa in 1958 at the age of eighteen, she was stopped and asked to be an extra in Otto Preminger’s Bonjour Tristesse.

Much later, in 1966, I met with an assistant director on Last Year at Marienbad who asked me if I’d like to be an editor, and I said, “I don’t know what it is.” Soon after I met Eric Rohmer and began working on the first Moral Tales. When I was a child, we weren’t poor, but I would knit and sew the extra clothes I wanted. Editing is similar to making clothes.

All the Zanzibar Group films were made in 1968, regardless of their date.

The Zanzibar Group wasn’t a political project like Chris Marker’s or Godard’s. We wanted to excise a single author, to work in a collective mode. There were filmmakers, musicians, painters, writers mixing together and inspiring each other. The name came from an Arthur Rimbaud letter to his sister: “I will go to Zanzibar, where there is gold.” The word was a talisman.

in 1974, at a screening of Deux Fois at MoMA, I met Sid Geffen, my future husband. We had lunch, he asked me if I would be interested in doing programming, and complained about the Carnegie Hall cinemas he had just bought, saying “It’s terrible, I have only one screen.” I said, “Why don’t you buy Bleeker Street Cinema?” and he found a way. The first film we showed was Three Lives by Kate Millet. Then I did a New Wave Film Festival, putting the ’60s New Wave, Rouch, Truffaut, etc., next to films made by Renoir and Dreyer.

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZG W7
LES AMANTS RÉGULIERS • REGULAR LOVERS (Philippe Garrel, 2005)

"Can we make the revolution for the working class despite the working class?"

https://archive.li/85tgj#selection-355.0-355.6
Philippe Garrel and Stefan Grisseman, “History is the enemy of art: Philippe Garrel on Les amants réguliers,” Cinema Scope, nr. 25, 2006, 29.

Cinema Scope: In Les amants réguliers, a very subjective, very personal take on May 1968, your son Louis plays a 20-year-old guy getting caught up in an unexpected revolution. You were 20 in 1968 as well. How autobiographical is this film?

Philippe Garrel: It’s autobiographical only as far as the period is concerned. The love story on the other hand is more Romantic, very literary. But formally the film is of course very personal: the scene in which Louis meets the girl crossing the street is deliberately shot like a newsreel. I did shoot a lot of documentary footage of the events of May 68 myself in 35mm, but unfortunately I lost all the negatives of that material. So I tried to reconstruct those images now, three-and-a-half decades later. I tried to shoot them exactly the same way again. In that sense, Les amants réguliers is less autobiographical than a reproduction of the films I shot at that time. That is as far as the autobiography extends: it concerns the period, the climate, the morale of that story. The romance part has more to do with Proust, though, and other literary references. I am now 57 years old, this is my 24th film, and I did in fact already create films that were a lot more autobiographical—films like L’enfant secret. In Les amants réguliers, the love story needed to be more universal, more classical, so that it would make identification possible.

Scope: Your gaze back at the Parisian May of 1968 seems quite pessimistic—or maybe more precisely, skeptical. You are not romanticizing the period at all, the film is completely unsentimental. It also seems very honest, as you focus on the uncertainty of your protagonists, on their uneasy mix of emotion and ideology. The revolution that you describe is quite often based more on accident than on heroism.

Garrel: Yes, well, historically May ‘68 has been a great defeat. What makes my film optimistic, though, is the sheer fact of its existence. It is positive to know that you cannot censor this era at last. Art always finally tries to re-establish different truths of events; there’s never just one truth to an event, after all, but always many. So my film provides an alternative, a personal truth of the time of May 1968. I was able to make this film from a participant’s point of view, like someone who directs a movie about a battle that he himself actually fought. I am an eyewitness of that time, and I can show what I have experienced through cinema without any economic intervention or censorship so typical of all industries. I could relate my truth on May ‘68 despite the fact that I had very few means, very little money to do so.

Scope: Two years ago, Bernardo Bertolucci also made a film on May ‘68, The Dreamers—a radically different film. Les amants réguliers almost seems to be the opposite of everything Bertolucci tried to do.

Garrel: The Dreamers is very classical, whereas I consider my film more of an avant garde work. It is shot in a way that is actually characteristic of cinema in 1968. And, by the way, my film cost about a tenth of what Bertolucci used for The Dreamers. In that sense also I think Les amants réguliers is very modern: it makes the most of very limited means.

Scope: Did you have the feeling you had to tell this tale once more—also to revise dominant views on those historical events?

Garrel: In France , for a long time many truths about May ‘68 were withheld because De Gaulle was still around. The role he played during the fights was of course less than glorious, but since De Gaulle to this day virtually embodies the Resistance, which cannot be touched in France , ever, many facts have been denied regarding May ‘68. But since I was there and since I also happen to be a filmmaker—I had already released my first film, Marie pour mémoire, in 1967—I can finally tell my version of that era. That in itself is positive. Other than that, May 1968 has been a serious defeat. And now one of those who lost the battle tells that story once again. It’s a loser’s film really.

Scope: To me Les amants réguliers is much more than just a film about the specific history of May ‘68. It is also about film history, about personal history, about history proper. Isn’t this film in its essence also a tale about the mechanics of history in general, and about the impossibility to recreate history on the screen?

Garrel: No. I think my film somehow resembles Stendhal’s novel, The Charterhouse of Parm a , in which the two Romantic heroes occasionally leave their story by crossing history. No, I have a different dialectic: For me, history is the enemy of art. Usually when artists touch history, they are always prisoners of time, because every time is ruled by history. But it’s impossible to recreate history itself. Cinema is what we have learned to mistake for history, but cinema is only mise en scène. For instance, we think we teach students about the history of Napoleon Bonaparte, but what we really teach them is Abel Gance’s very romanticized movie about Napoleon. When we think about the revolution of 1917, we immediately think of Eisenstein’s Potemkin (1925). Even newsreels from World War II have turned out to be fiction, manufactured by directors after the war. I believe that cinema is an integral part of history itself, also in its symbolic function. Cinema is by now a part of our memory. It is an attempt to rebuild our imperfect memories. In that respect it can be fiction. I do not think art represents history, I think it is a part of it. Even if it’s fake and mythological sometimes.

Scope: Les amants réguliers cultivates a very austere, very painterly kind of beauty. How did you work with William Lubtchansky? Did you let him do what he wanted, or did you have any say in the camera work?

Garrel: That depended really. William and I belong to the same generation, as does my editor, Françoise Collin. This film truly is a generational movie. We all identified strongly with this story. So we decided to exchange ideas often. And since we all have definitely reached the second half of our working lives, it depended very much on who was most awake at a given morning, and who liked to direct things. At our age we tend to group together more easily than we used to do. So in the film there are camera positions that are typically mine, and other framings that are more characteristic of William. We worked together like musicians, really: we had dialogues, like a jazz band that keeps improvising on what had been written. Whoever felt like playing, played first.

Scope: How do feel about your position as an artist working at the very margins of the French film industry? Is that position self-chosen, or was it really forced on you?

Garrel: It has always been like this. Since my very first film. I did not choose to be marginalized. I was literally put outside. I remember my first film, it was a short movie I made in 1964, Les enfants deésaccordées. I shot this film when I was 16 years old. It was shown on television together with another short film that somebody else did. This other director was interviewed for the occasion, and when it was finally my turn, I was told they were not going to interview me since I was so different and just too original. They were not interested. That’s the way I started. I was always considered different from anybody else. So this forced me to make cinema outside of cinema, so to speak. It was only when I met Andy Warhol in 1969—that was after he had been injured—that I realized it was not so bad to be an outsider. To work outside the established art world. In my case this is not a pose at all: I was forced to work that way. Now I’m used to it, so I don’t feel frustrated any more.

Scope: It’s been four years since your last film, Sauvage innocence. Has it become even more difficult to finance your work lately?

Garrel: You know, every cent in Les amants réguliers has come from the political left, even though it’s a production funded by private and public money. That’s not a joke, it’s true. It had to be that way. There was no way you could tell this story that offers a radically left perspective with right-wing money. So yes, it was particularly difficult to finance this film. But I am not the only one. It is becoming more and more difficult for other filmmakers as well to get their productions together. I used to say that I only do movies for myself, but people kept asking me if I was crazy, why I was making films at all then. It has become so difficult—and almost paradoxical—to make true cinema in a period that’s invaded and ruled by industrial images. Had somebody discovered and supported me back in the mid-60s as a great classical filmmaker, my career might have been different. That said, I did have strong supporters in my life: one was Henri Langlois of the Cinématheque française.

Adrian Martin, “A Cinema of Intimate Spectacle: The Poetics of Philippe Garrel,” Cineaste, nr. 4, 2009, 37-41.

“Garrel’s work is less ‘first person cinema’ than something more collective – a ‘family romance’ based on ages, generations, transmissions. Regular Lovers brings everything to a peak in its three-way dinner table scene of son-playing-father (Louis Garrel), ex-wife (Brigitte Sy, Louis’s mother) playing his own mother, and Maurice Garrel as now the somewhat dotty but hypnotically appealing grandfather.

With Regular Lovers, at last, the great myth of origin underlying the entire Garrel œuvre is revealed, re-created, and directly depicted: 1968 and the riots, the life-and-death struggles with police at the barricades... And now, the paranoia, the sense of being an eternal outsider to society, the fragility of sanity and the anxiety of ever holding onto a glorious moment, all this suddenly make perfect sense in the light of that momentous origin in a divided Paris of ’68 that resembles nothing so much (in Garrel’s retrospective depiction) as a Bosnian war zone.

Back in the bedrooms, there is sleep. Garrel is a poet of sleep to rival, even surpass, Murnau. From its first moments, Regular Lovers shows us its characters supine, laid out on couches or on the floor, relaxed as they suck on the opium pipe. Among his silent, abstract, experimental portrait-films of the Seventies, Les Hautes solitudes (1974) with Jean Seberg concentrates mainly on the Warholian spectacle of sleep – because what event could pose for us, more acutely, the ‘paradox of the actor’ (as Denis Diderot once dubbed it), whether he/she is ‘performing’ or simply ‘being’? There are two types of sleeper in Garrel’s films: dead sleepers and light sleepers. Dead sleepers zone out, escape all torment and misery for those blessed moments of sheer unconsciousness. Light sleepers are those disturbed souls who suffer every kind of night terror – and perhaps the single most terrifying sight in any Garrel film is the glimpse of a child who cannot sleep. Garrelian sleep is the gateway to death – its prefiguration, for death, as Regular Lovers calls it, is the ‘sleep of the just’ – and to the realm of dreams. We should never overlook Garrel’s attachment to Surrealism: dream sequences appear prominently in Regular Lovers [and many of his other films].

It is the world itself – in its most seemingly 'regular' faces, bodies, gestures, spaces and places – that comes into being as we watch his work. Love is truly a mystery in Garrel, and it happens between people who (as in Nicholas Ray’s They Live by Night [1948]) have ‘not properly been introduced to the world we live in’; the yearning to understand this mystery permeates these films, finding its richest expression in those early scenes between François and Lilie in Regular Lovers: two people standing or sitting together, just looking, or being silent, or exchanging a few words... an intimate spectacle which returns us to the very heart of Garrel’s poetic cinema.”

[Holdrüholoheuho]

R6

3.10/ Remembering Michel Fournier (Sally Shafto, 2009, Senses of Cinema)
https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2009/in- ... ly-shafto/

This past January while in Paris I tried to contact Michel Fournier, Philippe Garrel’s legendary cameraman on six films, from Marie pour Mémoire (1968) to Athanor (1972). I was getting ready to go to Bordeaux where I was to present two Zanzibar films (Garrel’s La Concentration, 1968, and Patrick Deval’s Acéphale, 1968) in conjunction with the exhibition on French psychedelic art at the CAPC, Bordeaux’s museum of contemporary art. Zouzou and Patrick Deval would be presenting the films with me, and I wanted to ask Michel a few questions beforehand. When finally, after a week of trying to call him, I got a message on France Télécom saying the number no longer existed, I knew something had happened. Michel didn’t travel much.

We last spoke in September 2008. I gave Michel a call just to say hello and to find out how he was. I told him about the exhibit in Bordeaux and said I would be in touch. He sounded fine. I had last seen him in October 2001, when he exceptionally made the trip to Paris for a roundtable discussion hosted by the Cinémathèque Française. Re: Voir Editions had just brought out Garrel’s Le Révélateur (1968) on cassette and I was invited to lead a roundtable on the film. Bernadette Lafont and Alain Jouffroy were also with us, and Patrick Deval in the audience. My interlocutors had not seen each other in a very long time and the atmosphere was electric.

The unusual nature of this event was later confirmed to me by Bernadette Lafont. The Cinémathèque was supposed to be recording our discussion, but unfortunately there was a technical snafu and nothing made it onto tape.

I first met Michel in the summer of 1999, shortly after I began my research on the Zanzibar films. He invited me to come visit him in Semur-en-Auxois in Burgundy. I remember my surprise when, upon picking me up at the train station, all dressed in white, he asked what my astrological sign was and then immediately started to map out my chart! Apparently, after going into early retirement, he became adept at astrology. I spent the afternoon listening to his memories, most of which were so outrageous I doubted I could publish an interview from them. He also gave me a photo of him with Philippe, probably taken on the set of La Cicatrice intérieure (1971).

In 1968, the young Michel Fournier had a reputation for being “tranchant” (severe) and the intervening years hadn’t softened him any. That year, he proffered the following memorable definition of a camera: “a machine which moves on a trolley and whose long shots are bursts of fire”. His uncompromising nature was confirmed by all those who knew him. He had abandoned the shoot of Acéphale after a dispute. At the end of Anatomie d’un rapport (1976), Fournier took the initiative to zoom in on his characters, while the film’s voiceover indicates the directors’ disaccord. It would be Fournier’s last film as cameraman.

Like the other participants in the Zanzibar constellation, Fournier was something of a dandy. It’s visible in these wonderful photos. I can’t help but think of him as a spiritual brother of the character, Adrian (Patrick Bauchau), in La Collectionneuse (1967), who declares he can’t have a conversation with someone he deems physically unattractive (laid). Like Garrel and Nico, he wore his hair long with short bangs, in a medieval-inspired look.

Besides shooting several of the Zanzibar films, Fournier also made one himself, L’Homographe, a marker of both Sylvina Boissonnas’ attempt to promote film technicians to the level of creators as well as her esteem for him. In 1969 or 1970, he won a prize at the Festival of Young Cinema at Hyéres, where Garrel had won the first prize for Marie pour mémoire. It’s hard not to think that Fournier’s prize was as much for his work with Garrel as for his own film. Curiously, this magician of light chose to make a camera-less film, working directly on the filmstock. One day, perhaps, the Cinémathèque Française may re-discover it somewhere in its vaults.

Like all of the Zanzibar filmmakers, Fournier was in a hurry. He lived his twenties at an accelerated pace, dropping out of the École Louis Lumière without finishing his diploma. His collaboration with Garrel in fact pre-dates Marie pour mémoire; he had filmed The Pink Floyd for him for French television in 1967. In my book on these films, I mention the Icarus complex that many of the Zanzibar participants seemed to embody and Michel Fournier perhaps best of all: a cameraman at twenty-two and in retirement by thirty-one. Still, Fournier’s work as co-creator of those early Garrel films remains an incontestable achievement. Le Révélateur was his favourite, because the film’s miniscule budget forced him to “create something new in almost every shot”. Each of these films is very special, and several of them still await a larger public, in particular La Concentration, Garrel’s very strange film shot on the heels of May 1968.

Finally, not knowing whom else to contact, I called Michel’s ex-companion, the Swedish photographer Ewa Rudling. It was thanks to her I first met Michel. She told me what I already suspected: that Michel had died, apparently in his sleep of a heart ailment shortly before Christmas. He was just 63.

List of Michel Fournier’s Films as Cameraman:
Marie pour mémoire (Philippe Garrel, 1968)
Le Révélateur (Philippe Garrel, 1968)
Acéphale (Patrick Deval, 1968). Fournier did most of the camerawork on this film. Guy Gilles finished shooting it.
La Concentration (Philippe Garrel,1968)
Le Lit de la vierge (Philippe Garrel, 1969)
La Cicatrice intérieure (Philippe Garrel, 1971). Fournier shares the camerawork with Jean Chiabaut, assisted by Jacques Renard.
Athanor (Philippe Garrel, 1972). Fournier shares the camerawork credit with André Weinfeld.
Anatomie d’un rapport (Luc Moullet, 1976)

[Holdrüholoheuho]

ZGGF W6
LE CLAIR DE TERRE • EARTH LIGHT (Guy Gilles, 1970)

I guess i can enlist this film in "ZG Gravity Field".
Guy Gilles was participating in shooting "Acéphale" and was casting (as a director) Pierre Clémenti, so there must have been some (vague) ties.
However, despite sharing with members of the Zanzibar Group an outsider status, he is still rather "the secret child of the New Wave" than the Zanzibar affiliate.
Zanzibaresque in this particular film is a juvenile dandy-type hero who is distancing himself from his father and is looking for roots in Africa.
However, (instead of psychedelics) he is indulging in Proustian recollection.