All the Zanzibar Group films were made in 1968, regardless of their date. I cut Serge Bard’s Détruisez-vous, which had been financed by Sylvina’s brother, and then she and I met at the screening and she asked, “Why don’t you make a film? I’ll give you all the money you need.” From this came Deux fois. We were influenced by Andy Warhol, and we were closer in spirit to the Factory than to the French New Wave. We thought of ourselves as the New New Wave. We were questioning the rules: of having great actors play in films, of plot, of the relationship between image and words. — Jackie Raynal
Each of us carrying our own experience of the world, we encounter every film with references and assumptions that we may not even be aware we have. The following program is composed of two films that not only question the rules of actors, plot, and the relationship between images and words, but also ask us to confront our ways of encountering what is presented before us. The camera acts as a companion, at times mockingly acknowledged with a smile. The usual cues of dialogue or narrative sense are suddenly suspended. Aching to interpret, we are instead compelled to look. Then look again. ‘Meaning’, or what we have come to understand as ‘meaning’, is never truly stabilised. Drifting between public and private spheres, the staged and the diaristic become increasingly indecipherable, evading the definitions of what performance is, or can be; evading the definitions of what a film is, or can become.
In the presence of Jackie Raynal
Curated by Natalia Orasanin
In collaboration with EQZE — Elías Querejeta Zine Eskola
Thanks to Petra Belc, Nikola Krstić, Bata Petrović, Collectif Jeune Cinéma and The Alternative Film Archive of Academic Film Center Belgrade
Krstić’s travel diaries of a view seen through a window, and eventually a city street. Belić’s home diaries, where she stands, poses, and films her reflection in a bedroom mirror. The title might recall a weaving Penelope awaiting the return of her husband Odysseus, unravelling thread each night as a line of suitors linger outside her door. With the exception of Penelopa 77 and the 1972 film Pieta, all of Belić’s 11 films are considered lost. In his 1985 essay on Belić — one of the few documents describing the breadth of her work before her death in 1986 — Jovan Jovanović writes: “In 1977, as a protest against the (Yugoslav) institutions of non-professional filmmaking — particularly against juries — Biljana Belić, together with Dragiša Krstić, withdrew from the cine-club and organised amateur cinema. The two of them founded the Family Workshop for Filmmaking and Film Distribution, within which Penelopa 77 was created.” The film is largely considered unfinished, but it is known to us as it is.
After beginning her film career as an editor in the early 1960s, Jackie Raynal’s 1968 directorial debut emerged from the short-lived but vital Zanzibar group, funded by heiress Sylvina Boissonnas. Set in Barcelona, the film unfolds through scenes that refuse linear progression, guided instead by what feels like a secret logic. A knot of meaning comes undone, and the act of looking turns into a game. What if repetition removes itself from any dominant structures of being? What if ‘making sense’ is taken to its extreme, pervading — or possessing — the very form of the film itself? Perhaps there is a delight in looking once, twice, or several times over. Raynal, in the principal role of the film, begins by telling the camera — or us — exactly what will transpire. Yet nothing is exactly how one might imagine it to be.
