Meurtrière is the second movement of a triptych by Philippe Grandrieux whose common thread is anxiety. This performance of four women dancers is the follow-up to White Epilepsy. The theme of Meurtrière is “Das Ding”. For Grandrieux, “it is on the edge of what can be shown and seen.” Read More »
Unrest is the final part of a multidisciplinary trilogy (performances, films, installations) with the central theme of worry. The bodies of dancers Nathalie Remadi and Lilas Nagoya reconnects with the haunted aesthetic of La vie nouvelle in a frantic, sombre experience.
Read More »
In 1969, the painter-sculptor Daniel Pommereulle made his third film, this one financed by Sylvina Boissonnas. Although only a short, Vite was one of the most costly of all the Zanzibar productions. It features, for instance, shots of the moon taken by a state-of-the-art telescope, the Questar, that Pommereulle first saw while visiting Marlon Brando in southern California in 1968. In Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, Pommereulle and his friend Adrien philosophize on how best to achieve le vide (emptiness) during their summer holidays. Three years later, Pommereulle would transform the word “vide” to “vite” (quickly), signifying his profound disenchantment with the aftermath of the revolution of May ’68. —Harvard Film ArchiveRead More »
Synopsis:
The first Zanzibar film, Détruisez-vous takes its title from an oft-repeated ’68 slogan (“Aidez-nous, détruisez-vous”) 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. Read More »
The experimental film takes place in North-Caroline. In the last days of the American civil war three characteristic figures of the 1849 Hungarian emigration fight: the geographer artillery officer Fiala János, the rational scientist, Vereczky Ádám, the heroic fatalist and the attendant of Fiala: the emotional Boldogh, who struggles with homesickness. The fate of all the “”slowed down”” revolutionaries is hopeless. The boasting Vereczky dies a meaningless death on a huge swing which he was able to survey with the theodolite. Boldogh longs for home, maybe to die, while there is only one possibility for Fiala: he can participate in the construction works of the Pacific railway.Read More »
“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.Read More »
Quote:
“In Re-entry he successfully synthesizes the Yogic and the cosmological elements in his art for the first time by forcefully abstracting and playing down both of them…” P. Adams SitneyRead More »
Bressane’s first color film, shot in the home of the artist Elyseu Visconti. Part of it is missing sound and final editing because the director was forced to leave Brazil. Horror and humor to deal with the subject of insanity: “In the end everyone leaves the house as though they were laboratory mice escaping, they invade the city and contaminate the world”. “If we talk about horror, this film deals with national horror, with Mojica Marins as an emblem. There might be a few touches of Corman and English horror, but it is another level of horror. What transformed the film was the location where we were shooting, the house of a 19th century painter, a receptacle of light. When I arrived and saw that house, that light, I said: ‘This is the film. This is the horror’. The meaning of the film, its appeal, derives from this laboratory of light” (J. Bressane). — Torino Film FestivalRead More »
Quote:
Narcisa Hirsch (Berlin, 1928), a pioneer of experimental cinema in Argentina, produced continuously in various media since the 60s. In the beginning, as a painter and illustrator, her works were exhibited at the Gallery Lirolay, which, like the Instituto Di Tella, was the most important art gallery in Buenos Aires in the 60s. She conducted performances and happenings, and was part of the group of filmmakers formed by Marie Louise Alemann, Claudio Caldini, Horacio Vallereggio, Juan Villola and Juan José Mugni, exhibiting their films outside the circuit of theaters and institutions, with the exception of the Goethe Institute, an organization that during the last military dictatorship in Argentina accompanied this movement and gave a formal context to it.Read More »