Zanzibar films

(now nobody knows who they are!! revolution 0 / bittersweet small victories 1)

Not true! Viz,

Acephale
Capsule by Fred Camper
From the Chicago Reader

The "Zanzibar filmmakers," working in France amid the revolutionary fervor of the late 60s, renounced cinematic artifice and constructed narratives: this 1968 feature by Patrick Deval is both visually inventive and static to the point of frustration, a fascinating provocation that also feels incomplete. It opens with shots that rotate around a man's head and shoulders as his hair is cut, a symbolic stripping away; as director Jackie Raynal declares in the film, "Europe for us has become a blank page." But long scenes in a forest and an abandoned subway station seem to meander, and Deval is never clear about where this new beginning will lead. The characters oppose "existence reduced to comfort," but the best Deval can offer is "a world between intelligence and stupidity"--a noble stab at reinventing culture that never quite succeeds. 65 min.

Destroy Yourselves
Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the Chicago Reader

This 1968 feature was one of the first "Zanzibar films," a group of low-budget experimental works made in France during the late 1960s. By turns fascinating and frustrating, it mixes playful nihilism with political exhortation. At one point an abstraction of a flashing ambulance light leads to a flicker sequence of black and white frames, and later a dialogue plays out in voice-over against a black screen. Though the film has minimal dialogue, a number of monologues shot in long takes seem crucial: in one sequence, filmed at the University of Nanterre only a month before the revolutionary action of May 1968, art critic Alain Jouffroy lectures on the need for revolution to a large hall with only four people in it. Director Serge Bard made this first film at age 21 and directed two more before converting to Islam and renouncing cinema in 1969. 75 min.

Deux fois
Capsule by Jonathan Rosenbaum
From the Chicago Reader

This seminal 63-minute experimental film by French director Jackie Raynal was part of the "Zanzibar collection," a group of mainly political films financed by heiress Sylvina Boissonnas between 1968 and '70. Raynal, a film editor working for most of the French New Wave directors, made the film in black-and-white 35-millimeter during a visit to Barcelona and its environs, with herself as the main performer in practically every sequence. Instead of a story it offers a flow of sequential events that formally rhyme with each other, so that the title ("two times") becomes a succinct reference to her method--though some things in the film appear three, four, or five times, always with distinct variations. Years later, faced by a team of feminist film theorists, Raynal admitted that the film is partially about "the representation of the image of woman as a sign," but apparently in the more footloose, less gender-conscious 60s she was more interested in exploring the sexy forms of duplicity between various sequences, their secret points of accord and strongest points of tension. It's a film about coupling (a man appears with Raynal in many of the sequences) but also about flirting with camera and spectator alike. If I wanted to convey the excitement of France in 1968, this brave, pleasure-driven provocation would undoubtedly carry me part of the way.

Vite AND Keeping Busy
Capsule by Ted Shen
From the Chicago Reader

Two films from the "Zanzibar collection," a series of underground films shot in France in the late 60s. Perhaps the most expensive of them all, Daniel Pommereulle's Vite (1969, 37 min.) was shot partly in Morocco and reflects the filmmaker's disgust toward the industrialized nations: it opens with Pommereulle and an Arab boy in a desert, clapping their hands to a Middle Eastern rhythm and spitting epithets like "Enough!" and "Garbage!" at the camera. Images of futility (a pair of feet kicking the sand, one man giving another a piggyback ride around a pool of fetid water) are juxtaposed with telescopic time-lapse shots of the sun and moon ascending. Scored with whistles, rattles, and other berserk sounds, Pommereulle's montage conjures up bracing surrealist poetry, as if Un chien andalou had been updated for the Vietnam generation. Michel Auder shot Keeping Busy (1969, 80 min.) during travels with the jet set in Rome, Morocco, and Malibu; the film emulates the New York avant-garde with its scratchy sound track, sprocket noises, unfocused shots, and portions of underlit or overexposed footage, faithfully recording the ennui-heavy sentiments of Warhol "superstar" Viva and her bedmates Auder and Louis Waldon (who coupled with her on camera in Warhol's Blue Movie). Reportedly a favorite of Cinematheque Francais guru Henri Langlois, this artless, self-indulgent exercise now seems hopelessly dated.