Orignially published by Cluster, written by Silvia Maglioni

Marie pour mémoire

If films are to have a value at all they should be like a cobblestone hurled into the cinema. So said Philippe Garrel presenting his first feature film Marie pour mémoire at the Festival of Young Cinema at Hyères in april ’68. Meanwhile, as Garrel was hurling his cobblestone at Hyères, Serge Bard, another cineaste who shared a similar passion for stone-throwing, was shooting Détruisez-Vous, a film which takes its title from a piece of graffiti on the walls of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (“Aidez-nous, détruisez-vous”). It was the beginning of Zanzibar. And then there was May ’68 and the barricades, and Garrel’s encounter with Nico and subsequent entropy, but that’s a whole other story.

It is fairly rare to see an entire retrospective of the mythical half-forgotten Zanzibar films (named after a film-making expedition in Africa in 1969, the Zanzibar group, comprising a wild bunch of poets, experimental artists and filmmakers, dandies and top models, miraculously financed by a young French patron of the arts named Sylvina Boissonnas, shot around a dozen visionary films in just two years), but here In Marseille there are other things besides films deserving of attention: the pulsing streets around the Festival premises, the “war-zone” neighbourhoods in the northern part of the city with buildings being pulled down every five minutes by bulldozers clearing a path for the city’s inevitable gentrification as part of fortress Europe, the gradual displacement of undesirable social classes and the consequent pockets of resistance for whom throwing a cobblestone or two may become a physical option. Off-screen visions that can equally occupy a terrain of prophecy, revealing the future through luminous (and ominous) dust.
So I end up missing a lot of unmissable Zanzibar movies. Still, the dust in Garrel’s images is the beauty of pure cinema-time, a rain of over or underexposed pulviscular motes, the immediacy of the moment, the dancing grains of shadow and form.

Marie pour mémoire – two symmetrical couples diametrically depart, recite aesthetic phrases without looking at one another, without listening, mechanically, man-woman (and a child to come) posing in stylised Godardian postures. Two programmed encounters (the work of a historical dating agency that tells us we are on the eve of the May ’68 system overload) that somehow cross wires leading to the formation not of complementary but additive, self-cancelling scenarios, one couple lost in lyricism, the other depressive, mutually suicidal. Garrel’s first full-length feature is a forking path, a double exposure that contains the road he didn’t travel, the stone-faced Marxist burlesque of the late 60s nouvelle vague for which he shows an undeniable flair but which, Godard aside, had already reached exhaustion, yet through the comic facade you can already see glimpses of the blinding, aphasic white-outs that mark his later work, particularly in the scenes of Marie’s hospitalization, believing too ardently in a phantom pregnancy.

Marie pour mémoire

Le révélateur – the haunting trinity man-woman-child summoning a flickering geometry of forms that vanish almost as soon as they appear, an impossible primal scene, black holes of immobility, circles and semicircles, a space entirely created by a liturgy of bodies erring in a pre-legendary zone, moving in a semitransparent a-temporal soundless halo, a space occasionally striated by straight lines (a ladder, a road, trees in the Black Forest, the fence surrounding a US military base, the oppressive presence of the police constantly threatening to stop shooting), an Ur-silence. Contrasted black and white illuminated by a pocket torch (ode to the immense potential of the most basic, improvised means of invention) and shot with a hyper-sensitive film, “revealed” only in the developing process (hence le révélateur of the title). Plastic, palpable but always close to self-destruction. Mary-Joseph-Child displaced “before the legend” and thus, perhaps, redeemed.

Le révélateur

In 1969 Serge Bard sets off with 3 Land Rovers, a 35mm camera and some musical equipment to cross the African continent and reach the island of Zanzibar, with the idea of making a film called Au-delà. But soon he abandons ship, rejoins his crew some weeks later and announces his conversion to Islam and that’s it. No images survive of that trip, and the Zanzibar group is already starting to crumble.

But strangely enough, at the FID in Marseille there is another au-delà to see this year, Wael Noureddine’s A film far beyond a god, a visionary trip across Yemen back to ancient pre-Islamic Arab divinities, another form of disoriented (or, rather, disoccidented) liturgy displaced “before the legend”. But this time, or so it seems, unredeemed. Suspended overlayered images “revealed” only in the developing lab, red-green-turquoise chemical reactions, fire and water, figures of a crowd traversing a city, a shadow in the desert, waves over sand, gunshots echoing in a valley. And each successive shot killing the previous one. Hypothesis of an au-delà: a film can be saved only by not making it, or by shooting (at) it shot by shot.

A film far beyond a god

“ La violence au cinema ne peut être que la restitution du désert intégral qui fonde le rapport irréconciliable du spectateur à l’écran. ” (Serge Bard)