It would both magnify and belittle the films grouped under the name Zanzibar to call them a footnote to film history. They are subterranean, practically chthonic films, and they deserve the honor of remaining clandestine. By programming them together, the Harvard Film Archive’s retrospective (curated by Sally Shafto) preserves their discrete, disruptive character. And though each film holds up on its own, they’re stronger seen as a block.

A parallel cinema, existing apart from and in opposition to normal structures of production and distribution, Zanzibar Films took form in France in early 1968 under the patronage of heiress Sylvina Boissonnas. The filmmakers she sponsored shared a few things: youth, an æsthetic shaped by French avant-garde tradition (from Lautréamont to Godard), a passion for personal and social transformation. The absence of title credits reflects the group’s collectivist, anti-auteurist ideology (though one major auteur — Philippe Garrel — emerged from Zanzibar). They’re films of images, in which shots tend to be autonomous while narrative is secondary.

Patrick Deval’s Acéphale (1968; Friday at 7 p.m.) takes its title from a journal edited by Georges Bataille in the late ’30s and a secret society Bataille formed during the same period. At one point, a young man recites a text by Bataille that gives some notion of the principles of the Acéphale movement: “It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light. . . . Man has escaped from his head just as the condemned man has escaped from his prison.” Deval postulates a new acephalic (i.e., headless) group in 1968 Paris leading a parallel existence in the woods and in an abandoned subway station. In one memorable sequence, the hero walks through a park, passing, among the many people who happened to be there the day the scene was shot, two women carrying torches (in daylight) who acknowledge him in an ambiguously threatening manner. Everyday reality is a neutral background over which Deval and his actors trace an obscure symbolism. Acéphale is filled with presentiments of a marginality without future: Deval’s group, perhaps imagining they’re in a remake of Edgar G. Ulmer’s The Cavern, repeat to themselves, “We have to get out of here,” then take off toward the light at the end of their railway tunnel. Near the end, the hero, reduced to lethargy in his barren apartment, grunts, “I swear to you that two years from now, we’ll have the whole earth in convulsions.” By this time it’s difficult to take such pronouncements seriously, especially since we next see him emptying shampoo bottles on the floor.

The richest film here is Jackie Raynal’s Deux fois (1969; Friday at 8:30 p.m. and Monday at 7 p.m.), which promises and delivers nothing less than “the end of meaning.” The first shot is riveting. Raynal, a fashionable young woman with wide eyes and abundant wavy hair, sits on a terrace eating a salad. She looks mistrustfully to her left and right, and sometimes straight ahead at the camera, as if to make sure we’re still there. Strange bird cries fill the soundtrack. She stops eating, looks at the camera, poses her right elbow on the back of her chair, and tells us what we are going to see. As she makes clear, the film is less a narrative than a catalogue of simple, dazzling, and mysterious images, in which things happen both “at once” and over and over.

Raynal’s on-screen personality dominates the film. Her persistent stare at the camera is not a challenge, an aggression, or a seduction but a kind of innocent provocation. She appears both as a storyteller (in the first shot and again later, reading pages from her dream journal) and as an actress in her story (walking into a pharmacy and choosing between the two bars of soap she’s offered — a scene repeated in three increasingly overexposed takes). In other scenes, she’s a stumbling, abused, or reluctant presence: she trips over her Isadora Duncan–length scarf; a man grabs her from behind by the hair and pulls her out of the frame; she writhes in a corner and finally pees (on camera) through her black tights. The film can be read as a feminist allegory about authorship in which Raynal starts by parodying a claim to control that she then more or less explicitly renounces — with the result that she achieves a freedom and an authenticity beyond the reach of an art oriented toward mastery. Both playful and deeply serious, Deux fois is a perhaps unique example of a work that makes an overt theme of its own principles of construction while functioning powerfully on the level of enigma and dream.

In Le lit de la vierge (1969; Saturday at 7 p.m. and Monday at 8:30 p.m.), Philippe Garrel’s marvelous retelling of the Christ story, Jesus (a frail, haggard Pierre Clémenti) is born into a world that already knows about him and doesn’t care. Unable to communicate with people or get them to listen to him (“I am the savior!” he shouts, knocking at doors and windows that remain shut), this Jesus is fearful, incapacitated, and dependent on women. Late-’60s icon Zouzou (later the Chloé of Eric Rohmer’s Chloé in the Afternoon) plays both Mary and Mary Magdalene. The distinction between the two characters blurs as the film progresses — they both become Woman, a ubiquitous presence who both attracts and repels Jesus (at one point he becomes enraged and apparently beats her to death). He consoles no one, though he does manage to coax a little girl into climbing out of a pit; he has no disciples until, late in the film, he picks up two scarecrow-like waterbearers (in the next shot, the two are standing in a river beating each other up).

Shot in Brittany and Morocco in black-and-white Cinemascope, Le lit de la vierge consists of sinuous long takes that follow human figures through ribbons of deep black space. The film is circular. It begins with a kind of birth: Mary is lying on her back, apparently on a barge or a small pier, her knees apart in the air; Jesus emerges out of the water and she towels him off. At the end, Mary is lying on the shore, huge-bellied, and Jesus leaves her side to walk off into the sea. For Garrel, Christ’s life on earth is not a singular advent but an eternal return — a perpetual cycle of pain and disappointment.

Serge Bard’s Détruisez-vous (1968; Sunday at 7 p.m.) — i.e., “Destroy Yourselves” — is an assemblage of black-and-white and color shots, some of which could be fragments from a tale of political intrigue. The central figure is Caroline de Bendern, a model with short blond hair on whom Bard places the double burden of proclaiming the revolution and embodying the difficulty of communication. She looks more uncomfortable as the film progresses. In one scene, she struggles to sway a young man with a revolutionary screed (he’s posed at the other end of a stone wall: the camera crosses the space between the two with Godardian back-and-forth camera movements). Later, in a lecture hall, writer Alain Jouffroy delivers the full speech of which de Bendern’s version appears, in retrospect, to have been a broken, failed repetition — or should we hear Jouffroy’s speech as the smoothed-out final draft of her heroic first effort? This ambiguity is crucial to Détruisez-vous, which repeatedly invites us to question the source of the heroine’s speech and the authority by which the male filmmaker represents her difficulty in speaking. The key sequence of this slablike film shows de Bendern propped up, as usual, against a white wall, while a low male voice makes assertions like “You see your body as an uncrossable frontier.”

Visual artist Daniel Pommereulle is best known today for an activity he probably regarded at the time as a completely ephemeral sideline: playing one of the central trio in Eric Rohmer’s 1967 La collectionneuse. In his brutal, enjoyable short conceptual piece “Vite” (which plays on the same program as Détruisez-vous), Pommereulle spits at, berates, and throws things in the direction of the camera, in shots that he intersperses with bracingly clear telescope-aided images of the moon and stars. The two other short films in the series (both programmed with Le lit de la vierge) lack the offhand intensity of “Vite.” Frédéric Pardo’s “Home Movie: On the Set of Philippe Garrel’s Le lit de la vierge” contains no footage of Garrel at work and will probably be of interest mainly to fans of Tina Aumont (a dark-eyed starlet of European films of the ’60s and ’70s who’s briefly visible in the Garrel film). Pierre Clémenti’s “La révolution n’est qu’un début: continuons” (“The Revolution Is Only the Beginning: Let’s Continue”) is a barrage of lens flares, multiple exposures, shots of a woman and a child, and footage of helmeted Paris police confronting demonstrators — all of which confirms critic Serge Daney’s observation that May ’68 was “opaque” as far as French cinema was concerned.

Clémenti’s film does at least exemplify the Dionysiac aspect of the Zanzibar films. “We are going to bring you all the mad laughter of the idiot,” someone says in Acéphale, and that could be a motto for the Zanzibar experiment. Another motto is spoken by Raynal in Deux fois: “All the images of our imagination are real.” At one point during the same film, Raynal tells a new version of Zeno’s paradox about the race between Achilles and a tortoise. The tortoise could be Zanzibar’s mascot: defying apparent motion, triumphant in alternate time.

Issue Date: May 17-24, 2001