jiri kino ovalis wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 9:42 pm something sinister and truly disturbing is going on here...
titles of my latest viewings:
INVOCATION OF MY DEMON BROTHER
LUCIFER RISING
topic views:
666
Blessed be Anger and all glories to his favorite character the Baphomet! —post No666jiri kino ovalis wrote: ↑Tue Feb 16, 2021 10:06 pm 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.)
The second name seemed familiar from my Zanzibar hoardings.St. Gloede wrote: ↑Sat Mar 06, 2021 12:17 am the low-tier new wavers no one talks about, like Pierre Kast and Jacques Doniol-Valcroze (he even co-founder Cahier du cinema - but his films are so mediocre people still don't want to talk about him)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacques_Doniol-Valcroze
In 1955, then 23-year-old François Truffaut made a short film in Doniol-Valcroze's apartment, Une Visite. Jacques's daughter Florence played a minor part in it.
https://cinematicscribblings.wordpress. ... site-1954/
“Frankly, there’s nothing to say about this short film. For me, my first film was Les Mistons! Une visite didn’t count!” — François Truffaut
There’s the presence of the little girl, for a start, even if Florence Doniol-Valcroze was only incorporated into the movie out of convenience or necessity. Her mother made note of the fact that she was “the first child in Truffaut’s cinema,” because children would appear in the vast majority of his films, whether as central characters (The 400 Blows, The Wild Child [1970], Spare Change [1976]) or in smaller roles.
"It's about the kidnapping of a young banker, Antoine Bigut and his sequestration in a suburban house. His jailers are the heroic militants of a patriotic movement and ask for a ransom to support their cause. But is it really the truth?
comment by Weimar ↓
An experiment in cinematic formalism masquerading as a thriller: what can be more exciting? Merci bien!
13 = 12 sponsored by Sylvina + 1 made by Sylvinaickykino tweeovalis wrote: ↑Sun Dec 27, 2020 1:55 amin just two years, between 1968 and 1970, the Zanzibar group shot 13 filmsfor now, i am curious what are those 12-13 core canonical movies. tho i expect they are listed in the book.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.
so, the list from the first post with highlighted 13+2 films looks like this...At the end of 1969, Sylvina Boissonnas realized the need for exhibiting these film commercially. In September of 1969, she created with Olivier Mosset a production company. It was Serge Bard who inspired the company's name. ... In February 1970, she produced with Mosset's help, a catalogue of these films, marketed for the American public. The films she had produced were retrospectively collected under the rubric "Zanzibar Films". ... With its cover in bright red orange (almost certainly a visual echo of Mao's little red book!), the catalogue carried a title whose typographic modesty contradicts its ambition: "NEW FRENCH FILMS". ... The catalogue presents a list of films, alphabetically listed, by the name of the filmmaker:
DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS (April 1968) Serge Bard
ICI ET MAINTENANT (1968) Serge Bard
FUN AND GAMES FOR EVERYONE (1968) Serge Bard
UN FILM (1969) Sylvina Boissonnas
ACÉPHALE (1968) Patrick Deval
L’HOMOGRAPHE (1969) Michel Fournier
MARIE POUR MÉMOIRE (1968) Philippe Garrel
LE RÉVÉLATEUR (1968) Philippe Garrel
LA CONCENTRATION (1968) Philippe Garrel
LE LIT DE LA VIERGE (1969) Philippe Garrel
ÉMET (1969) Claude Martin
VITE (1970) Daniel Pommereulle
DEUX FOIS (1969) Jackie Raynal
Thirteen films: all motivated by the desire to change the face of French cinema. At the end of DEUX FOIS's prologue, Jackie Raynal announces: "This evening will be the end of the meaning."(pp.9-10)Not included in the catalogue are ACÉPHALE BIS by Deval (this film was lost, shortly after its competition), and KEEPING BUSY by Michel Auder.
Not at Hyeres were the following: Serge Bard, a novice filmmaker; Caroline de Bendern, his actress; Olivier Mosset, painter and actor in Bard's films; and Sylvina Boissonnas, the patroness for the Zanzibar activities. They were in Paris, shooting Bard's first film, DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS, premonitory of the events of May 1968 and the first of the Zanzibar films. (p.7)
in this regard, the aforementioned book says the following...ickykino tweeovalis wrote: ↑Thu Feb 11, 2021 12:09 am ZG W4b
(cont.) HÉRACLITE L'OBSCUR • HERACLITUS THE DARK (Patrick Deval, 1967)
MARTHA (1974) 720°Give me a fixed point (MARTHA or HERACLITUS) and I will move the whole world 720°.
—Archimedes the Thoughtful
https://youtu.be/iiS2kJCLhgA
HERACLITUS THE DARK (1967) 720°
(Sally Shafto, pp.12-13)
With regard to camera movement, there is a predilection in these films for traveling shots and 360-degree panoramic shots. ACÉPHALE opens with a panoramic shot, circling the head of painter Jacques Monory. In DEUX FOIS, Jackie Raynal relies five times on a panoramic. In LE RÉVÉLATEUR, the child is separated and then reunited with his parents with the help of a panoramic. Garrel repeats this movement in LA CICATRICE INTÉRIEURE where he abandons and rejoins Nico thanks to a double circular traveling. In an interview, Thomas Lescure asked Garrel the meaning of such a camera movement, occurring ostensibly "for no reason". Garrel's response is relevant:Garrel's comment here bears the imprint of a Godardian discourse in LE GAI SAVOIR (1968), where Juliet Berto and Jean-Pierre Léaud speak of the need to "return to zero".The New Wave filmmakers were much preoccupied with the sequence shot. A sequence-shot is characterized by its continuity and its depth of field. Now, in a desert, there is nothing, which right away does away with the question of depth of field. In addition, the end of such a shot in the desert would be identical with its beginning, and thus the idea of duration is also discarded. Such a traveling is thus a sequence shot in all its purity, a kind of zero degree for the sequence shot.
https://www.quinzaine-realisateurs.com/ ... isez-vous/
Détruisez-vous takes its title from an oft-repeated ’68 slogan (“Aidez-nous, détruisez-vous” / "Help Us, Destroy Yourselves") and its lead from Godard’s La Chinoise, Warhol’s Factory, and the French Revolution. A drop-out from Nanterre University, Serge Bard returned to the school to shoot his film in April ’68, just a month before the student protests erupted. Incidentally, Anne Wiazemsky, who stars in La Chinoise, was also a student at Nanterre at that time. Bard’s muse, the English fashion model Caroline de Bendern, plays a confused member of an agit-prop cell led by Alain Jouffroy, cast as a professor proselytizing revolution to a near empty classroom. Juliet Berto, who also appears in La Chinoise, is another member of the cadre but offers no sisterly love to de Bendern, who grows increasingly uncertain and fragile in light of all the militancy.
revolution enacted on a building site!echo of ACÉPHALE (another lecture into the void about a headless monster that is haunting people).
1/ Practice civil disobedience as a rule.
2/ Expropriate the French bank.
3/ Destroy the archives of the Sureté and the police.
4/ Establish a Council for the city of Paris, composed of 85% men and women under 25, both French and foreigners.
5/ Declare the army a decoration for public holidays.
6/ For six months change all professors into students and for the other six months all students into professors.
7/ Place a progressive tax, as high as 65%, on the income of all men and women who declare themselves faithful and monogamous.
8/ Force the future minority of churchgoers to prove having had an exciting sex life for six years, and to present the details in front of the Council.
9/ The revolution will choose its own government.
10/ Declare that the revolutionary government will itself grant funds, willingly and generously.
http://retentionalfinitude.blogspot.com ... ryone.html
One of the best films to have come out of the Zanzibar Group, Serge Bard's Fun and Games For Everyone playfully transforms a gallery opening into a radically creative vision of life and art. Bard films a festive crowd, which includes Salvador Dali, Barbet Schroeder, and Caroline de Bendern (star of Bard's Detruisez-vous), gathered at the Gallery Rive Droite to view Olivier Mosset's paintings. Mosset was a defiantly non-representational artist: between 1965 and 1971, he worked on a series of paintings that were simply black circles on a white background. The serial presentation of "O"s indicated the demand to begin again from zero, a call for the revolutionary subtraction of what exists. In some ways, Bard attempts to do for cinema what Mosset does for painting. Like Isidore Isou's Venom and Eternity, Bard's film attacks the image in search of new graphic possibilities. In addition to drowning out the conversations at the opening with a pounding psychedelic soundtrack by Barney Wilen and Sunny Murray, Bard films the event in high contrast black-and-white. The result is a kind of film painting, in which human beings and their environment are reduced to abstractions that exist on the same flat plane as Mosset's paintings, which seem to float around the screen. The gallery visitors are derealized and transformed into graphic figures that are in constant, fluid motion. One can only presume Bard intends this on-screen revolution of life to cross over to the film audience. In his contribution to "Four Manifestoes for a Violent Cinema / Quatre manifestes pour un cinéma violent" (the others are by Pommereulle, Deval, and Garrel), Bard explains his confrontational cinematic goals: "Cinema's violence can only be the result of that integral desert on which rests the incompatible rapport between spectator and screen. The mental field of this rapport has meaning and force only in its movement of divisive ascent. Here the mise en scene must move over to the cinema hall. The field of the definition of this violence must be the difference. We must burn all the bridges, and transform the shock of identification into an aggressive shock. Of each film, we will make a question mark whereby the thought of the spectator will be, as the case may be, the only response, or absence of response. In short, that means war." After this film, Bard's quest for a revolutionary-aesthetic absolute would lead him in a completely unforeseen direction. At the beginning of 1969, he went with a group of Zanzibar figures (including Boissonnas, Mosset, de Bendern, and Pommereulle) on a trip across Africa, planning on making a film of the voyage to be titled "Normal." But in the middle of the expedition, Bard one day suddenly announced that the film was cancelled and that he had converted to Islam. He reportedly lived the next eleven years in the desert, losing his voice for three of those years, before ending up an international businessman working between Mecca and Paris.
“Fun and Games (for Everyone): a pitch black and milky white film shot during one of Olivier Mosset’s exhibition openings. A psychedelic game of improvisation joins the Zanzibar group with Salvador Dalí, Barbet Schroeder and Jean Mascolo... the solarized image reminiscent of thick strokes of a paintbrush.” —PHILIPPE AZOURY
“Bard, in this second film, again leaves the field open to an incessant coming and going of Parisians at- tending the opening of the minimalist painter Olivier Mosset and whose exhibition consisted of 10 paint- ings, all alike: white with black circles painted in their center. It’s the revolution criticizing art and painting... and Serge criticizing cinema!” —JACKY RAYNAL
“(On Fun and Games) Light can become volumeless graphic expression and dehumanize the actors until their faces are «absorbed» erasing all detail and creating an attractive environment.” —HENRI ALEKAN
“I had nothing to do with the film, it just was filmed at my exhibition.” —OLIVIER MOSSET
(Sally Shafto, pp.15-16)
As for the narrative, the Zanzibar filmmakers rejected out of hand an idea of a conventional narrative.
...
The narrative of these films seems often constructed by episodic blocks instead of by sequences. These filmmakers rejected an idea of traditional causality. For them, the idea of cause and effect was tied to the dominant ideology with which they wished to break. DEUX FOIS's mention of the fable of "Achilles and the Tortoise," demonstrating the error of a traditional notion of time and space, expresses this search for new ways of narration. Instead of causality, the Zanzibar filmmakers emphasize repetition and nonsense.
In September of 1968 the Cahiers du Cinéma published an interview with Garrel. His interviewers commented on the construction of his films:This tendency towards block-like narration necessarily influenced the approach of these filmmakers towards editing. Although a professional editor (Raynal) was part of the group and even edited three of their films (DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS, ACÉPHALE, and DEUX FOIS), the Zanzibar films employ a strictly minimal editing. In 1960, Godard revolutionized editing with his jump cuts in BREATHLESS. Godard's first feature film caused a stir among editors of the day, because he broke with traditional montage. But if Godard terrorized editors with his editing that resembled "the beating of a heart", then Zanzibar filmmakers delivered the coup de grâce. All the Zanzibar films are composed of long sequences with little editing. A few years after editing PIERROT LE FOU, Francoise Colin was hired to edit LE LIT DE LA VIERGE. She recalls that in fact she didn't have much to do on the Garrel film, because there were very few cuts. This film, lasting almost two hours, consists of only thirty shots. Raynal's DEUX FOIS (90 min), only thirty-three. ACÉPHALE less than thirty. UN FILM by Boissonnas, lasting an hour, is made up of only eight or nine shots.Seeing your films for the first time, one has the impression that they are made up of large blocks of shots three, four, five minutes, blocks entirely self-sufficient, which are put next to each other, in a manner wherein one could randomly invert their order.
(Sally Shafto, p.19)
Just a few years earlier, it was Godard who seemed to be beating all the records, turning out his films in a mere three or six weeks. But here too the Zanzibar participants seemed to have done him one better. Raynal, for instance, made DEUX FOUIS, in nine days. Deval filmed ACÉPHALE in two weeks. Garrel made MARIE POUR MÉMOIRE in ten days. Then, he made LE RÉVÉLATEUR in two weeks: one for filming and one for the editing. Subsequently, he filmed LA CONCENTRATION nonstop in seventy-two hours, and then edited it in a week. Bard's FUN AND GAMES FOR EVERYONE was filmed in two sessions. Boissonnas shot UN FILM in less than a week.
Serge Bard was twenty-one when he made his three films in 1968
https://www.gartenbergmedia.com/dvd-dis ... maintenant
In 1968, Serge Bard made three films in a row. They were DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS (DESTROY YOURSELF), FUN AND GAMES FOR EVERYONE and finally, ICI ET MAINTENANT (HERE AND NOW). The latter film was photographed in striking black and white by cinematographer Henri Alekan (who also shot Cocteau’s LA BELLE ET LA BETE). In the laboratory, the director and cinematographer had the film flashed so as to create a high-contrast, grainy, abstract and luminous image when projected onscreen.
Shot primarily in long takes on the Pointe du Raz in Brittany, ICI ET MAINTENANT (HERE AND NOW), according to fellow filmmaker Patrick Deval, “consists of the dreams of the solitary rambler, post-revolution... The moralist has given up on chaos; he takes his own pulse; he listens to the world, perhaps vibrating with it; he is in sympathetic ecstasy. The filmmaker holds his position, stiff as the statue of the commander, on alert for the phenomena which approach him; he resembles the lighthouse whose rectitude Bard captures magnificently, on an ink-dark night, with its hallucinatory lamp set against a background of winds and tides."
One of the major revelations to emerge from the resurgence of the Zanzibar films is Bard’s Fun and Game for Everyone (a.k.a Fun and Games for Everyone), a velveteen, chiaroscuro boogie-woogie chess match of a film, which documents a vernissage for an Olivier Mosset exhibition. The new print practically drips inky blacks and blinding whites as art circle dandies dissolve in and out of view, as if melting into the background and morphing into a Mosset diachromatic tableau.
But in some ways, Ici et maintenant is even more radical, employing the same high contrast black-and-white technique to film the ocean off the coast of Normandy. With no script and very little game plan, the haphazard film stars then-lovers Caroline de Bendern and Olivier Mosset, and includes a very sweet and very stylized motel breakfast scene, complete with pain et confiture. Her face outlined in positive, Caroline adjusts her bangs like a toned-down version of Nico’s obsessive primping in Chelsea Girls. While the film is pretty incoherent and devoid of a decipherable narrative thrust, it oozes style, astonishing with extremely long takes in disorienting semi-darkness, with the howling wind threatening oblivion. It’s more mood than anything else. And it feels slightly unhinged, like the contorted bodies in a Bronzino. Self-conscious artistry in the extreme and a healthy dose of artifizio, Ici et maintenant may just be a manifestation of ‘60s Mannerism; at least, it makes a convincing case for “the stylish style.”
“I had the idea to call my film ICI ET MAINTENANT, because the cinema is exactly the contrary of the here and now. The cinema is always elsewhere and before…It seemed important to rediscover the magic of the present, that is the here and now. I wanted the spectator during the film to return to himself and thus not to participate in the usual process of identification where he is able to escape from himself” (Serge Bard). Emblematic of the Zanzibar movement’s youthful, revolutionary zeal, the title of Bard’s film Ici et maintenant is a “seize the day” clarion call, fitting for a generation who sought to change the world. Shot in Brittany, with Caroline de Bendern and Olivier Mosset who were lovers at the time, and no script, the film took as its subject the idea of “contestation .” With its loose, radicalized narrative, and hyper-aestheticized flamboyance, Ici et maintenant depicts a series of symbolic attacks against society and an atomic factory threatened by sketchy characters. This was the final film Bard made before decamping for Africa and clandestinely converting to Islam, expeditiously sending his film crew, many of whom had worked on Ici et maintenant, back to Paris, bewildered.
(Sally Shafto, pp.19-21)
First of all, there are specific connections between LA COLLECTIONNEUSE and the Zanzibar constellation. Jacques Aumont has described well what he calls "the migration and transfer of an image" from one film to another. This formal observation can be extended to another kind of migration, that of technicians and actors, moving from film to film. In fact, the overlapping of persons between LA COLLECTIONNEUSE and the Zanzibar films is too numerous to go unremarked. LA COLLECTIONNEUSE was edited by Jackie Raynal. Rohmer's film was co-produced by Barbet Schroeder. He and Pierre-Richard Bré (who briefly appears in the Rohmer film) also show up in Serge Bard's film, FUN AND GAMES FOR EVERYONE. Bré briefly performs in Garrel's LE LIT DE LA VIERGE. one of the principal "actors" of LA COLLECTIONNEUSE was Daniel Pommereulle who himself finished the short film VITE under the logo Zanzibar.
...
LA COLLECTIONNEUSE presents the portraits of young revolutionaries in the making. One of the key words of the film is the void ("le vide") Adrien announces that he is looking for nothing ("rien") and the void ("le vide"). Towards the end, he identifies Daniel as his master. During their summer vacation, the two men attempt to achieve a total void ("un vide total"). In an interview in March 1999, Daniel Pommereulle explained the connection between the void and its opposite ("le plein"). For him, the two concepts are two sides of the same coin, like night and day or shadow and light. Notwithstanding his retrospective view, with regard to the film made in 1966, one is aware in fact of a desire for a babula rasa, to start again from zero, like the canvases of Mosset dating from this period.
distance established by elegance. (it creates a kind of void around the person.)(Sally Shafto, p.21)
In the film Adrien and Daniel are introduced not simply as intellectuals but also as dandies, thanks to their elegant appearance.
(Sally Shafto, p.10)
In an interview, Abdullah Siradj (the Islamic name of the former Serge Bard) remarked that all of the Zanzibar participants were physically attractive, and that there had been a kind of unconscious selection process. Not surprisingly, there were strong ties between the Zanzibar participants and the world of fashion. Caroline de Bendern worked in the mid 1960s as a model in Paris and New York. Zouzou, actress in four Garrel films (MARIE POUR MÉMOIRE, LA CONCENTRATION, LE LIT DE LA VIERGE, and LE BLEU DES ORIGINES) was a model for various fashion magazine... Before entering the New York underground, Nico, muse to Phillippe Garrel, worked as a high fashion model in Paris and New York. Laurent Condominas, the main actor of ACÉPHALE, briefly worked as a model, before undertaking a career as a photographer. Michel Auder, loosely associated with this group, made his debut as a fashion photographer. In an article that appeared in Opus International in 1968, Alain Jouffroy himself underlined the importance of fashion photographers. The dandyism of the Zanzibar members is to be found in their attachment to their physical appearance.
(Sally Shafto, pp.35-36)
At the time, there were two principal ways of taking leave of one's consciousness: drugs and music. Jackie Raynal remembers that drugs were widely available then, and that one never had to go looking for them.
But if drugs and music were an important way of abandoning everyday reality, they were not the only ones. A popular expression of the late 1960s was: "Je vais planer au Maroc" ("I am going to soar in Morocco"). Another way of altering one's consciousness was to travel, and the Zanzibar participants were all great travelers.
...
It was at the end of 1968 that these individuals began their travels in earnest. Following the events of May, there was a kind of diaspora.
...
The three informal groups that made up Zanzibar (Garrel, Bard, and Deval) took shape.
On December 22, 1968 Patrick Deval, Laurent Condominas, with the journalist and photographer Alain Dister, left for the United States. A month or so later, Jackie Raynal joined them in New York. Raynal and Deval traveled in the U.S. for nine months.
Earlier in the autumn of 1968, Garrel left for Brittany, Marrakesh, and finally Rome to film LE LIT DE LA VIERGE. It was for Garrel a luxurious shoot, lasting three months! In Rome, Michel Auder borrowed Garrel's 35mm camera to shoot a part of his film diary, KEEPING BUSY.
In the spring of 1969, the third band, made up of Serge Bard, Sylvina Boissonnas, Oliver Mosset, Caroline de Bendern, the jazz musician Barney Wilen, Didier Léon, Babette Lamy, and Daniel Pommereulle, took off for Africa. They left with two goals in mind: to film Bard's new script entitled NORMAL, and to reach their elected homeland, the island Zanzibar. For them, the trip to Africa was a return to origins. The group, in fact, failed on both counts. Their intention to film Africa, to capture African images on film was seriously handicapped by the nihilist spirit of Bard and Mosset. For Moset, the painter of the zero, there was a sensory overload in Africa. He preferred to stay in the desert. Not long after, he left the group to return to Paris. As for Bard, he was responsible for the cameras, and all the images he captured have been lost. The group waited for him during six months in Tamanrasset. When he returned to see his friends in December 1969, he announced that he had given up filmmaking to embrace Islam. Curiously, he left for Timbuktu with the cameras, thus ensuring the failure of the group's cinematographic enterprise.
I came here for a vacation, not to make a movie. But I fell in love with LA. I just had to make a film. It’s so marvelous. When I left Paris it was dead. Now I’ve missed the revolution and everything. But I had been so depressed, so discouraged. I said I must go someplace where something’s happening. I don’t want to be pretentious but I want The Model Shop to be Los Angeles 1968 – like Rossellini’s Europa ’51. . . . I want to forget Cherbourg, Rochefort. I’ve gone as far as I can with that. I needed another language, new problems. —JD
https://twitter.com/jirinvk/status/1475 ... 90120?s=20- We apologize to the audience for the lack of order and logic.
Music: Gilbert Artman
https://twitter.com/jirinvk/status/1482 ... 22048?s=20- The butter of education was never spread on my toast.
- I had just been studying applied photogenics.
- Before you were an idol, you were a clairvoyant psychic.
- What are your demands? Are you communists? Red Army? How much do you earn? Have you become a militant?
- No, daddy!
- Yé-yé!
- Tarantula, hula, hula, hula, too...
- Plip, plop, fizz, plip, plip, plop, plip.
- You present us with the spectacle of an embittered young man.
- Consumers. Voyeurs.
- Too literary for the masses.
- Yé-yé!
- Yé-yé! Wow, wow, wow!
- Let me go where the bird idly dreams.
- I knew that wisdom would ultimately prevail.
3/During a press conference and show to present their new band, Gigi la folle, Charly le surineur, and Simon le magicien, "idols" of the French music scene, let it all out (programmed successes, flops, compromises, obligations, arranged marriages), publicly denouncing their managers and sabotaging their own careers in the process.
4/ (from an interview with Jean Eustache conducted by Philippe Haudiquet and originally published in La Revue du Cinéma , no. 250, May 1971, translation by Ted Fendt)LES IDOLES started as a stage play; director Marc’O assembled some of his regular troupe of stage actors, including Bulle Ogier (in her first major film role!) and Pierre Clementi, to bring this 1960s French pop farce to the big screen. Marc’O assembled quite an impressive roster to help him out: Andre Techine acted as an assistant director, while the film was edited by Jean Eustache. The costumes and settings alone are enough to make this worth seeing; but it’s the zany, weird, but relatable performances by Bulle Ogier (as a France Gall stand-in), Pierre Clementi (Johnny Halliday), and Jean-Pierre Kalfon as a palm-reader turned singer that bring the film to life.
5/ (Revolt Into Style: Les Idoles, by Sam Di Iorio, FILM COMMENT, September-October 2008 Issue)PH: It seemed too easy to you that your films were liked without any problems?
JE: That’s it, I didn’t really try to do better. And, at the same time, as I was going to the movies less and less and I was very disappointed when I did go, I was very happy to be outside what was being done everywhere. In the end, I no longer felt like being a filmmaker, like making films. And the questions that I was asking myself for more than a year came to this: why do we make films? What is it for? I found myself in the most total confusion and I considered giving up movies. I had always enjoyed working on other people’s films more than my own. For what is in other people’s films, when I edited them, I felt like I thought more deeply about them, that I brought more to them. The work I’m most happy with in cinema is that which I've accomplished on other people’s films and not on my own ones...
PH: Which films, for example?
JE: Well, I’ve edited quite a few shorts and two features, Marc’O’s Les Idoles and Moullet’s Billy the Kid. I really love that work.
No film captures the glittering, zombified world of yé-yé pop royalty with as much style as Marc’O’s 1968 musical Les Idoles. Seen today, this flamboyant tale of complicity and revolt yields multifaceted readings—as backstage drama, as denunciation of consumer capitalism, and as the historical record of a crucial meeting between commercial auteurism and the avant-garde. Think of it as an all-singing, all-dancing missing link between the melancholy pop fantasy of Godard’s Masculin-Féminin and the aerial views and blank screens of Guy Debord’s Critique de la separation.
Like Debord, director Marc’O began his career close to the Lettrist movement and experimental cinema. After producing Isidore Isou’s Venom and Eternity, making a first feature (Closed Vision, 53), and editing the influential but short-lived film journal Ion, he began to drift from film to theater in order to pursue intensive work with actors. In the late Fifties he joined the thriving artistic community at Paris’s American Center and founded the improbably named Center for Theater and Experimentation on Actor Performance (while elsewhere in the building Yves Klein gave judo lessons and Henry Miller swam in the nude). He quickly attracted a motivated troupe of almost-unknowns—Jean-Pierre Kalfon, Bulle Ogier, Pierre Clémenti, and Michèle Moretti, among others—and built up a repertoire of original works like Les Bargasses, a play about an army colonel’s wartime visit to a whorehouse that impressed Jacques Rivette so much that he constructed L’Amour fou around Kalfon and Ogier, two of its stars.
The stage version of Les Idoles was among the group’s last and most successful productions. Teetering on the verge of chaos (there was a standing offer of free tickets to anyone who rode into the theater on a motorcycle), its open structure and physically demanding roles recalled the confrontational performance ethic of The Living Theatre. The story was simple: three pop singers—reformed Brechtian delinquent Charly the Knife (Clémenti), fausse naïve Gigi la Folle (Ogier), and part-time psychic Simon le Magicien (Kalfon)—see their initial success give way to betrayal, conflict, and disillusionment. Though it narrates a decline, Les Idoles avoids the orgies and overdoses of rock mythology’s late-period primal scene in order to raise broader questions about economic systems. By dealing with pop stars, Marc’O re-frames Situationist theory as individual experience: in essence, he shows us living representatives of the Society of the Spectacle eaten alive by their own image.
When the offer came to turn the play into a film, Marc’O kept its skeletal plot, retained most of the cast (which also included underground figures like Daniel Pommereulle and actual pop singers like Valérie Lagrange), and expanded the production team, notably adding André Téchiné as assistant director and Jean Eustache as editor. (Eustache was especially proud of his work; rumors abound of a phantom print of The Mother and the Whore with an extra scene set at a screening of Les Idoles.) In order to move past the spatial constraints of theater, Marc’O also asked Paul Virilio and architect Claude Parent to help choose locations that could enhance the action. The film plays on the disjunctions between these varied settings, making baroque associations and head-scratching leaps from place to place and never bothering to tie anything together. The splintered landscape underscores the protagonists’ personal fragmentation. Both the on-screen world and the characters who inhabit it are depicted as pure products of an alienated culture that remains incapable of authenticity, clarity, or coherence.
And yet, like the finest moral tracts, the film’s critique of the culture industry is also its own form of fetishism. Little by little, the accusations it levels are drowned out by the sensual appeals to props, costumes (wait till you see the costumes), or, more simply, bodies in motion. Marc’O is clearly in love with his actors, and frames them with such care that even their clumsiest gestures appear epic. The performances he elicits are unforgettable: Ogier’s crass, hunchbacked moves dovetail perfectly with Clémenti’s convulsive lyricism and Kalfon’s star turn, which calls to mind Frankenstein’s monster cradling an armful of puppies. The three leads become endearing, grotesque giants whose every sigh and high kick is echoed in the freaked-out, punked-up musical backing of house band Les Rollsticks. The sheer rush of all this frenzied action complicates easy readings of Marc’O’s work. While the film tears down existing idols, it is also responsible for creating new ones. Ultimately, it is this sly coupling of censure and caress that lies at the heart of its cruel genius: first it suggests that pop music is the sound that kills—then it makes us want to hear more.
ZGGF W12neon ovalis wrote: ↑Mon Jul 12, 2021 10:09 pm ZG W8
DÉTRUISEZ-VOUS • DESTROY YOURSELVES (Serge Bard, April 1968, "first Zanzibar film")https://www.quinzaine-realisateurs.com/ ... isez-vous/
Détruisez-vous takes its title from an oft-repeated ’68 slogan (“Aidez-nous, détruisez-vous” / "Help Us, Destroy Yourselves") and its lead from Godard’s La Chinoise, Warhol’s Factory, and the French Revolution. A drop-out from Nanterre University, Serge Bard returned to the school to shoot his film in April ’68, just a month before the student protests erupted. Incidentally, Anne Wiazemsky, who stars in La Chinoise, was also a student at Nanterre at that time. Bard’s muse, the English fashion model Caroline de Bendern, plays a confused member of an agit-prop cell led by Alain Jouffroy, cast as a professor proselytizing revolution to a near-empty classroom. Juliet Berto, who also appears in La Chinoise, is another member of the cadre but offers no sisterly love to de Bendern, who grows increasingly uncertain and fragile in light of all the militancy.
https://twitter.com/jirinvk/status/1483 ... 04289?s=20- At first, Nanterre bored me.
- This is Omar, a comrade in philosophy at Nanterre.
- Shouldn’t we start from scratch?
- Comrades, we must: 1/ close the puppet universities...
- For example, closing the universities I think is great.
- Do you agree education is a big problem?
- What is analysis?
- It’s seeing the inherent contradictions.
- Hate, love, sorrow, happiness, red bird, et cetera.
- Not Novalis.
- A bombless revolutionary is not a revolutionary.
- Revolution is a violent uprising.
- It’s not made like a work of art.
- Poor Novalis.
- In any case, you need sincerity and violence.
- I’m only a worker producing revolution.
- I’d even say Melies was like Brecht.
For his cast, Godard brought together five young people, each of whom played a role derived from their own lives. So Anne Wiazemsky plays a student at Nanterre University involved in radical politics.
The relationship between art and revolution is the chicken-or-egg question, and whether the rioters at the University of Nanterre caused Godard to film La Chinoise — a pop-art manual of revolution — or else the revolutionaries of last May’s riots discovered their discontent in Godard’s film, is insoluble. What is certain is that in 1968 a revolution in life began to resemble one in art. (Godard and Revolution, by Norman Silverstein, in Salmagundi, No. 9, Spring 1969, pp. 44-60)
However radical La Chinoise might have appeared when it first hit cinema screens in 1967, it turned out to be remarkably prophetic in light of the explosive events of the following year. When student protests turned into riots in May 1968, many of those protesting spoke in slogans that might have been uttered by one of the characters portrayed in the film. Godard was able to be so accurate because he had experienced first hand the world of student politics the year before at Nanterre University where his girlfriend, and later wife, Anne Wiazemsky, was enrolled. Many of the students in this dull suburban campus on the outskirts of Paris, were deeply dissatisfied both with the society in which they lived and the university in which they studied. They produced endless tracts analysing the problems of the world and how they might be put right. Godard became a regular visitor to the campus, coming to pick up Anne in his sports car, and he too was soon reading these denunciations of capitalist society.
Jonathan Sisson, 19 November 2016
Mysticism in Film: ‘The Inner Scar’ (‘La Cicatrice Intérieure,’ 1972) Part 1 → https://wearecult.rocks/mysticism-in-fi ... 972-part-1
Mysticism in Film: ‘The Inner Scar’ (‘La Cicatrice Intérieure,’ 1972) Part 2 → https://wearecult.rocks/mysticism-in-fi ... 972-part-2
Mysticism in Film: ‘The Inner Scar’ (‘La Cicatrice Intérieure,’ 1972) Part 3 → https://wearecult.rocks/mysticism-in-fi ... 972-part-3
Janitor of lunacy
Paralyze my infancy
Petrify the empty cradle
Bring hope to them and me
Janitor of tyranny
Testify my vanity
Mortalize my memory
Deceive the devil's deed
Tolerate my jealousy
Recognize the desperate need
Janitor of lunacy
Identify my destiny
Revive the living dream
Forgive their begging scream
Seal the giving of their seed
Disease the breathing grief
https://youtu.be/XahNuQYawgs
and the moment i saw Pierre the archer on a white horse, i immediately recalled Kristina Söderbaum (for some strange reason)...This masterwork's echo is heard even in Gus Van Sant (Gerry) and Vincent Gallo (The Brown Bunny)
Macocha Abbys → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macocha_Gorge
neon ickyshonky wrote: ↑Mon Dec 21, 2020 3:15 pm STELLA DA FALLA (Jacques Sandoz, Reto Andrea Savoldelli, 1972)
https://letterboxd.com/film/stella-da-falla/https://youtu.be/CJINQr5A-PAA quest film about a young man on a wondrous and strange trip around the world has more in common with medieval mystery plays than with most modern films, as it is rich in symbols and low in explanatory materials.
this film is (obviously) called HEADS AND TALESThis movie has been forgotten after its director came back to the USA in 1968; it was re-discovered during the 16th Paris Festival for Different Cinema, in 2014. Like his friend Pierre Clémenti, Francis Conrad was widely influenced by Etienne O'Leary, especially by his "editing in camera" technique. All of them used to shoot, live and party together, thus they were part of what we called "cinéma souterrain", which is the French translation of underground cinema. They all appear in Heads and Tales. This film can be characterized in between film diary and psychedelic film. It's meant to be a letter sent to an American friend of Francis Conrad.
A young woman comes to despise her lover because his bike has just broken down.
from a director that came from Eastern Europe
a film that establishes any pretension of realism at the level of irrelevant
Philippe Garrel’s free-form Biblical tale, supposedly filmed in the Moroccan desert without a script and under the influence of LSD, was an allegory for the 1968 student movement at a crossroads. Pierre Clémenti is spellbinding as an afflicted hippie-Christ figure, while Zouzou, as both Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene, tries to set him back on his destined path. Clémenti associated The Virgin’s Bed with his other so-called prophetic films, which reflected the period’s revolutionary fervor meeting its breaking point. Within a year of this second collaboration with Garrel, he appeared in Miklós Jancsó’s vision of Milan under the terror of the Red Brigades in The Pacifist and Glauber Rocha’s delirious foretelling of Francisco Franco’s demise in Cutting Heads. “It was a time of great passions,” the actor later reflected, “but much of it went to waste.”
I believe my point of view on the Christian myth is quite clear in The Virgin’s Bed. It is a non-violent parable in which ... Pierre Clémenti incarnates a discouraged Christ who throws down his arms in face of world cruelty. In spite of its allegorical nature, the film contains a denunciation of the police repression of 1968, which was generally well understood by viewers at the time.
Saviour's PRSD (Post-Revolution Stress Disorder) aside, the question is:Filmed in vivid 35mm black-and-white widescreen and described by the director as "a non-violent parable… [that] contains a denunciation of the police repression of 1968," Garrel's second film with the Zanzibar Group (after Le Révélateur) is a dreamlike modern retelling of the Christ story, starring Pierre Clémenti as Jesus and Zouzou as both the Virgin Mary and Mary Magdalene. "Filmed in the smolder[ing] ashes of the failed social revolution[,] Le Lit de la vierge [is] an impassioned, reflexive apologia composed in the fog of a drug-fuelled delirium that not only reflected [an] implicit denial [of] the failure of the revolution, but also served to reinforce the counterculture generation's delusive posture as alienated and discarded messianic ideologues who, nevertheless, continue to hold the keys to an ever-receding utopian paradise"
Father child
Angels of the night
Silverframe my candlelight
Father child
Angels of the night
Silverframe my candlelight
The falconer is sitting on
His summersand at dawn
Unlocking flooded silvercages
And with a silverdin arise
All the lovely faces
And the lovely silvertraces erase
My empty pages
The falconer is sitting on
His summersand at dawn
Beside his singing silverwaves
And his dancing rebelrace
That compose ahead of timeless time
A sound inside my candle light
