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.
