For a couple of years at the end of the sixties hippie heiress Sylvina Boissonnas financed a series of films by a group of young artists and writers with little to no cinematic experience. The end result was the French equivalent of US underground movies, which is hardly surprising when you consider that Andy Warhol and The Factory had been a big influence on this informal group of around a dozen hipsters. When I saw the Zanzibar short Vite by Daniel Pommereulle screened at Tate Modern as part of a 1968 movie season in London last year, I got the impression that very few of those in the audience were aware of Zanzibar films: most seemed to have turned up to see the 1968 newsreel shorts that were screened alongside Pommereulle’s fabulous 37 minute freak out that takes you from the north African desert to outer space.
When I first heard of Zanzibar, quite a few years ago now, it was via whispered tales of a freaky heiress who would write cheques for hippies who wanted to make films, and then never asked them to account for the money she very freely handed out. Vite is actually the shortest Zanzibar flick, most are an hour to two hours in length, and with one exception they are filmed in 35mm, not the cheaper 16mm format that was so typical of American underground movies. Likewise, little effort was made to distribute Zanzibar material, so it isn’t nearly so well known as transatlantic improvisations by directors such as Maya Deren, Stan Brakhage, Ken Jacobs, Bruce Connor, Jim McBride or Jack Smith. Reflecting Warhol’s Factory aesthetic, Zanzibar films are full of beautiful people, non-actors, a number of whom were high-fashion models. Likewise, the technicians and directors who made these movies were predisposed to formal experimentation because they had little if any film training. The results are on the whole much more interesting than the self-consciously commercial recuperation of letterist cinema by the earlier and older French ‘new wave’ of Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut (but not as good as Alain Resnais or Chris Marker when they were firing on all six cylinders).
It has always been difficult to see Zanzibar movies outside Paris, and at least four of the sixteen Zanzibar titles Shafto lists in her pamphlet appear to have been lost. Philippe Garrel is the only film-maker from this group still working as a director today, and he is now well known for more ‘mainstream’ material such as his 2005 movie Regular Lovers, starring his son Louis. Garrel Senior had a ten year relationship with Nico, the model turned drug-icon and pseudo-singer (she also appeared in seven films Garrel directed), and so his name should also be familiar to those with an interest in mock-rock and substance abuse.
The Zanzibar group took their name from a part of Africa that boasted a Maoist regime in the late-sixties, and which some saw as a crossroads between the ‘orient’ and the ‘occident’. An attraction to Maoism is merely one factor that makes it difficult to take the group’s political and mystical pretensions seriously. It should go without saying that despite their deployment of ‘communist’ rhetoric, virtually everyone whose political inspiration can be traced back to Lenin is a moderniser attempting to effect a shift from the formal to the real domination of capital in societies still largely characterised by agrarian modes of production. However, and as I’ve already said, aesthetically Zanzibar represent a real continuation of letterist experimentation in the cinema. Likewise, the fact that two of the Zanzibar films were made by women directors (Un Film by Sylvina Boissonnas and Deux Fois by Jacqueline Raynal) at a time when it was unusual for women to helm French movies, serves to further underscore the way in which the group’s practice ran ahead of its theoretical positions.
Sally Shafto’s pamphlet on Zanzibar consists mainly of an extended essay about the group and its dissolution during a journey through Africa that fell far short of its original geographical and artistic goals. This is appended with a ‘who’s who’ of the group, credits for sixteen Zanzibar films, and sleeve notes for an album of music recorded on the trip that put an end to this loose collective. There are a lot of really groovy photographs illustrating the text too, so despite an ungainly academic prose style quite an odds with the elegant subject matter, this is a good introduction to the Zanzibar group. What I’m reviewing here is a 64 page pamphlet put out by Zazibar USA (AKA Jackie Raynal-Saleh and Joseph J. M. Saleh) in 2000: there is also a dual French and English language book of this material with additional interviews issued as Zanzibar: Les films Zanzibar et les dandys de mai 1968 by Paris Experimental Editions in 2006. Neither publication appears particularly easy to obtain but if you put a little work into getting your mits on this shit your efforts will be well rewarded!
And while you’re at it don’t forget to check – www.stewarthomesociety.org – you know it makes (no) sense!
Comments
Comment by Howling Wizard,Shrieking Toad on 2009-09-18 13:06:43 +0000
It’s so easy — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TlO8Sr0U36I&feature=related
Comment by Zen Master K on 2009-09-18 15:05:25 +0000
I’ll never forget the time me and Tessie ended up having a full on orgy with the exotic dancers at the Zanzibar Club… it was a nude sensation!
Comment by The Real Tessie on 2009-09-18 15:27:58 +0000
What the Zen Master is saying isn’t strictly true because he had to keep his clothes and a blonde wig on…. the Zanzibar exotic dancers are hardcore lesbian separatists and if they’d realised K was a geezer wearing make-up they’d have chopped his balls off – but aside from K it was a nude sensation and definitely a groove sensation!
Comment by Frank Borthwick on 2009-09-18 16:58:07 +0000
I was searching for the full lyrics to the song Bobby Shafto and ended up here… Not exactly what I was looking for, but after coming here I found the original song and I’m still wondering if Sally Shafto is descended from those associated with it:
Bobby Shafto’s gone to sea,
Silver buckles at his knee;
He’ll come back and marry me,
Bonny Bobby Shafto!
Bobby Shafto’s bright and fair,
Panning out his yellow hair;
He’s my love for evermore,
Bonny Bobby Shafto!
Bobby Shafto’s getten a bairn,
For to dangle on his arm;
In his arm and on his knee,
Bobby Shafto loves me.
Bobby Shafto’s looking out,
All his ribbons flew about,
All the ladies gave a shout,
Hey for Boy Shafto!
The original Bobby Shafto has been identified with a resident of Hollybrook, County Wicklow, Ireland, who died in 1737. The song was then used by the supporters of Robert Shafto (sometimes spelt Shaftoe), who was an 18th century British Tory and Member of Parliament (MP) for County Durham (c. 1730-97), and later the borough of Downton in Wiltshire.
Comment by Peace Frog on 2009-09-18 17:54:59 +0000
love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love love
Comment by Sid The Situationist Skinhead on 2009-09-18 18:40:13 +0000
In nineteen hundred and seventy one
My red doc martens i put on
My red Doc martens i put on
To work upon the railway, the railway
Comment by Chairman Mao on 2009-09-18 19:11:39 +0000
Command is given, we must obey, and quite forget old Christmas day:
Kill a thousand men, or a Town regain, we will give thanks and praise amain.
The wine pot shall clinke, we will feast and drinke.
And then strange motions will abound.
Yet let’s be content, and the times lament, you see the world turn’d upside down.
Comment by William Burroughs on 2009-09-18 19:43:59 +0000
O! say can you see by the dawn’s early light
Where the foe’s haughty host in dread silence reposes,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight,
As it fitfully blows, half conceals, half discloses?
And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air,
In full glory reflected now shines in the stream:
O! say does that shit-stained bummer yet wave
O’er the home of the capitalists and the land of the slaves.
On the shore, dimly seen through the mists of the deep,
What so proudly we hailed at the twilight’s last gleaming?
What is that which the breeze, o’er the towering steep,
O’er the ramparts we watched were so gallantly streaming?
Now it catches the gleam of the morning’s first beam,
Gave proof through the night that the exploiters are in retreat.
O! say does that shit-stained bummer yet wave
O’er the home of the capitalists and the land of the slaves.
Comment by The Man In The Moon on 2009-09-18 21:51:48 +0000
Far out!
Comment by Paul Ricoeur on 2009-09-18 22:22:59 +0000
When Nanterre became a hotbed of protest during the student uprisings of May 1968, those involved with Zanzibar cheer-led those deriding me as an “old clown” and tool of the French government for my role in the administration there – leading to my US exile before my triumphant return to France in the eighties as an intellectual star. I hate them all but especially their friend and mentor Alain Jouffroy! I spit on the memory of these wreckers of civilisation and civilised Christian values!
Comment by Paul McCartney, tripping on acieeed and now voted America’s Favorite Beatle on 2009-09-19 11:12:49 +0000
Hey I used to be an underground Polish filmmaker. But so far nobody has entered the competition I launched in an early edition of International Times. There’s still time.
Comment by No Zen McCartney on 2009-09-20 09:43:16 +0000
I’m not me, I’m freaking out on LSD!
Comment by Frank The Freek! on 2009-09-20 17:35:29 +0000
Too much information man. You’ve bummed me out.
Comment by mistertrippy on 2009-09-20 18:40:12 +0000
But Frank, too much information would be a groove sensation, if only there was such a thing as too much information! The po mo demand is always and as ever – MORE!