His is not a pious cinema, although it is a cinema of revelation.
--Gilles Deleuze, speaking of Philippe Garrel in The Time-Image
Zanzibar Films, less a production company than a state of mind, was originally formed under the auspices of a wealthy French heiress-turned-film-producer, Sylvina Boissonnas, as a haven for young Parisian artists and intellectuals whose only qualification was their willingness to transplant what they had witnessed in the lead up to the revolution onto the silver screen. The short-lived film collective was offered an unprecedented level of creative freedom at a time of great social upheaval and the few films that remain today stand as the most deliberate affront to French cinema’s classical narrative conventions on record. There were 13 film projects made under this banner between 1968 and 1970, many of which were never completed, went missing, or, in the case of Boissonnas’s directorial debut, entitled simply UN FILM, intentionally destroyed. Nevertheless, the films that survived document an important cultural heritage mapped out in a series of 35mm black-and-white experimental films, a virtual zeitgeist repository which taken together bridge the gap between the nouvelle vague and the avant-garde, Zanzibar films stepping in as their proudly illegitimate offspring.
The first film to bear the Zanzibar name, Serge Bard’s DETRUISEZ-VOUS (the title a reference to the incendiary mantra emblazoned on the graffiti-ridden walls of the University of Paris’s Nanterre campus: “Aidez-nous, détruisez-vous/Help us, destroy yourselves”), prefigured the events of the revolution of May ‘68 and was shot literally weeks before the uprising with prophetic scenes of lecturers speaking to empty classrooms. Soon after the revolution, more films began production under Zanzibar, many of them shot outside of France in Africa and Morocco by artists in self-imposed exile. Most were directed by first-time filmmakers who were famous for working in other facets of the industry. Jacquie Raynal, who had already been working as a professional editor on Eric Rohmer’s films, was encouraged by Boissonnas to direct a film of her own, resulting in DEUX FOIS, a film in which Raynal introduces herself and the story to follow by asserting, “This evening will mark the end of meaning.” Another Zanzibar film immediately following the revolution, VITE, a non-narrative, surrealist act of protest heavily influenced by the French Symbolists, was directed by the accomplished Daniel Pommereulle, a painter, sculptor and occasional actor who played Daniel in Eric Rohmer’s LA COLLECTIONNEUSE and Joseph Balsamo in Jean-Luc Godard’s WEEK-END, ironically proclaiming at one point in Godard’s anti-film, “I am here to announce the beginning of flamboyance in all domains, especially in the cinema.”
But out of all the various filmmakers and artists who factored into the Zanzibar constellation, it was Philippe Garrel who shined the brightest, a young savant who first made a name for himself by directing LES ENFANTS DESACCORDES at the tender age of 16 and whose MARIE POUR MEMORIE, made four years later, had won the top prize at the Festival d’Hyères in 1968. By the end of Zanzibar’s run, Garrel would make 3 films under the Zanzibar imprint: LA CONCENTRATION, starring New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Léaud; LE REVELATEUR, featuring Laurent Terzieff, known for his roles in films by Pasolini, Carné, and Buñuel, and Bernadette Lafont, who played Marie in Jean Eustache’s LA MAMAN ET LA PUTAIN / THE MOTHER AND THE WHORE; and, lastly, the film which represents the culmination of the director’s early, radicalized career, LE LIT DE LA VIERGE, begun only months after May 1968, with Garrel leaving the barricades of Paris behind to travel to Marrakesh and Rome.
LE LIT DE LA VIERGE opens on an extreme close-up of Zouzou, the model/actress, here playing dual roles – The Virgin Mary (the Mother) and Mary Magdalene (the Whore), an unholy trinity of fame, divinity and carnality, wrapped up in a headscarf and shrouded in black. Her expression is one of quiet rapture and calm ecstasy. The camera slowly tracks back on the woman’s blissful state, revealing a bed floating near the sea. Garrel, who once described cinema as “Freud plus Lumière,” plays with Oedipal themes throughout the course of the film, preoccupations which go back to his early Cocteau and Dreyer-influenced silent film, LE REVELATEUR. As the canvas widens further, another figure (Pierre Clementi, an actor who likewise directed a number of Zanzibar films, here playing Jesus Christ in a trance-like, mythmaking performance) dressed in white linen emerges from the water, shivering and bewildered, a child naked and delivered from the womb. The family is now complete – save for an absentee Father.
Thus begins Garrel’s first in a series of exactly 30 extended tracking shots which make up the whole of LE LIT DE LA VIERGE. If tracking shots really are “a question of morality,” as Godard, inverting Luc Moulet’s assertion in a 1959 issue of Cahiers du Cinema, so ingeniously proclaimed, then Philippe Garrel’s LE LIT is undoubtedly the most moral – or, perhaps more appropriately, morally questionable – film ever made. With the revolution still fresh in his mind, Garrel, effortlessly manages to compress the Immaculate Conception, the Resurrection and the Crucifixion in a single, circular, blasphemous movement, all the while posing a question at the outset uniquely suited to his time: What would Jesus do if he were reborn a Parisian in 1968? No one in the film, including the Savior himself, seems to quite know the answer. What follows in the parabolic arc of Garrel’s allegorical tale reflects his profound disillusionment to this end, one that the director would carry with him for 40 more years and 30 some films, all the way up through LES AMANTS REGULIERS.
Jesus, the reluctant revolutionary, is greeted with scorn upon his entrance into the city, treated kindly only by the prostitutes and lost children he encounters along the way. Amid all the cries and desolation above, the film eventually moves underground to the sacred Christian catacombs of Rome, where an even worse fate awaits him. Herein lies the horrors of the failed revolution, a nightmarish wellspring of shackled and wailing prisoners, masked men and tear-gas, guard dogs and firing squads; a surreal mosaic of serpentine hallways, ancient crypts, and half-mad generals; a “liturgy of bodies” as Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher and film theorist, once referred to them. According to this dark vision of a crumbling civilization filled with straw men and scarecrows stuffed with newspaper, one can only barter with rocks – or, in a more apropos translation, “cobblestones.” In Garrel’s blasphemous version of the Bible story, Jesus is a lost soul in the complete sense, thrust upon a world he wants little to do with. Kafka’s lose-lose scenario: The Son of God can’t gain entrance to the Castle, even with a bullhorn. Sadly, the Savior’s only solace comes from playing that most existential of games: Hopscotch.
In the end, LE LIT DE LA VIERGE is a refutation of practically everything: revolution, religion, atheism, apathy, engagement, affectation, asceticism, action, inaction. Even the collectivist spirit of the Zanzibar group, evidenced by the lack of credits, is deliberately undermined by the director’s appearance as himself in a scene in which he boldly orchestrates the action, pointing the camera towards the two leads as Nico’s “The Falconer” plays ominously on the soundtrack. This willingness to separate himself from the pack was received poorly by many of his fellow Zanzibar filmmakers who accused the film of betraying the intentions of the movement, with its aesthetic beauty, technical virtuosity and deeply pessimistic view of the revolution and its promise. In this way, Garrel succeeded in making a truly total and unified provocation, an achievement that was in keeping with the true spirit of the Zanzibar vows, but like so many of the aims espoused by the zealous militants of the May ’68 revolution, was more acceptable to them in purely theoretical terms.
--Jameson West, Associate Programmer, Austin Film Society
