Experimental

“Treefall” was originally made for a dance performance at the Vancouver Art Gallery, April, 1970. Structured in the form of two loops of high-contrast images of trees falling, reprinted and overlapped.
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Quote:
“The block of marble is the most beautiful of all statues” – Carlo Mollino
This is the story of the godlike architect, Carlo Mollino, animated within the desk space of failed architect, Rhayne Vermette. Made, with love on 16mm, 35 and Super 8, this classic tale of Pygmalion investigates intersections between cinema and architecture.
For E. Ackerman, A. Jarnow, and T. Ito.Read More »

A convicted rapist, Ikuo is released from prison and goes in pursuit of the woman he raped, Mieko. So obsessed is he with revenge he see’s her in every woman he meets. After carrying out vicious attacks on a prostitute and a young girl he finally comes face to face with her. Mieko tells him she wants to escape from Tomimori. To redeem himself in her eyes Ikuo takes her plea to the extreme resulting in inextricable tragedy for them all. The film is set in Japan’s notorious ‘soaplands’ – areas where young women offer bathing and massage to men, as a way round the laws prohibiting prostitution.Read More »

Quote:
“A rarity-packed treat for opera and silent-film buffs!”
– Variety

In this mesmerizing collage of silent Italian melodrama, found-footage filmmaker Peter Delpeut (Lyrical Nitrate) affectionately captures the spirit of the World War One-era cinema diva. In all-but-lost gems such as La donna nuda (1914), and Tigre reale (1916), superstars such as Lyda Borelli and Pina Menichelli portrayed heroines teetering dangerously between defiant indulgence in sexual passion and hysterical remorse at their own cruelties. Delpeut’s inventive celebration of Black Romanticism is both striking and heartbreaking in its composition —a beautifully woven narrative of tempted fate and self-torment, elegantly guided by Loek Dikker’s original score. Zeitgeist Films is proud to present Delpeut’s stunningly experimental work in all its heaving bosomed, luridly tinted glory.Read More »

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.
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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 »