Quote:
“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 attending the opening of the minimalist painter Olivier Mosset and whose exhibition consisted of 10 paintings, all alike: white with black circles painted in their center. It’s the revolution criticizing art and painting… and Serge criticizing cinema!” – JACKIE 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
—

1968 was a very good year for Serge Bard alias Abdullah Siradj. At just 21, this Enfant Terrible of the Zanzibar group was lucky enough to be financed by the “art patroness” Sylvina Boissonnas. He made three films in 35mm, very experimental in nature. The first film was called “Destroy Yourselves.” Shot in March 1968, it made headlines in May 1968 in the columns of Maoist filmgoers for its radical Warholian side (long still shots of some superstars – Caroline de Bendern, Alain Jouffroy, Thierry Garrel) and visionary in its anticipation, already in March, of the strikes and demonstrations of May 68. Noblesse oblige, it was one of the Zanzibar group’s first revolutionary films.

“Fun and Games for Everyone,” Serge Bard’s second film shot in 1968, was also filmed in 35mm with Henri Alekan in control of the lights and the camera. Bard, in this second film, again leaves the field open to an incessant coming and going of Parisians attending the opening of the minimalist painter Olivier Mosset and whose exhibition consisted of 10 paintings, all alike: white with black circles painted in their center. It’s the revolution criticizing art and painting… and Serge criticizing cinema! Alekan asked LTC film labs to flash the negative before processing it, giving the film a semi-negative look.

Like Warhol’s screen tests, Bard films people passing back and forth in front of the camera and paintings. Shot with a 50mm lens, we recognize the whole fashionable intelligentsia of the period: Barbet Schroeder, Amanda Lear, Jean Mascolo, Pascal Aubier and the imposing Salvador Dali who exclaims in front of one of the paintings: “It’s WERmeer!”

To further confuse the soundtrack, Serge asked Barney Wilen to compose haunting psychedelic music, very present during this 53-minute film essay. – Jackie Raynal

Serge Bard - Fun and Games for Everyone.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	53 min 15 s
Size: 	1.72 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	4 385 kb/s
BPP: 	0.088
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 235 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/1FD20AED99A1AE5/Serge_Bard_-_Fun_and_Games_for_Everyone.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:Not needed

The post Serge Bard – Fun and Games for Everyone (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

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.

http://nitroflare.com/view/F18DEA37D7F2FFE/Detruisez-vous_%28Destroy_Yourselves%29_%281968%29_–_Serge_Bard.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English. Spanish, Italian, German (muxed)

The post Serge Bard – Détruisez-vous AKA Destroy Yourselves (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

“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.

“A disavowal of the overtly political is also evident in the two films that Bard made following Détruisez-vous, in which he put aside bullet-point plans in favor of aesthetic research. Filmed by the renowned cinematographer Henri Alekan (who had worked on Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, as well as relatively mainstream movies like Roman Holiday), Ici et maintenant (Here and Now, 1968) and Fun and Games for Everyone (1968) exploit the kind of highly graphic image that the designer Roman Cieslewicz had popularized in the influential leftist journal Opus International … ”

from: Sally Shafto. No Wave. Artforum International, May 1, 2008

Quote:
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.”

Quote:
One of the most hypnotic and fascinating film ever made thanks not only to a ‘beating-heart’ image but also to a sound tension, between non-nature silence, lighthouse tragic squeak and sea howling alarms. The mise en scène seems to create and deliver drop by drop a secret, a disparition-apparition in each shot… When the simple ‘ici et maintenant’ looks like sci-fiction, feels like ‘everywhere and always’… It could be a silent hidden companion of La Jetée…

http://nitroflare.com/view/AF6A85EB7ACF22E/Ici_et_maintenant_-_Serge_Bard_%281968%29.mkv

Language(s):French (very few)
Subtitles:English

The post Serge Bard – Ici et maintenant aka Here and now (1968) first appeared on Cinema of the World.