Throughout its rich history of cinema, France has boasted an admirable number of female filmmakers. Household names like Alice Guy-Blaché, Germaine Dulac, Jacqueline Audry, and Agnès Varda often come to mind for the general film enthusiast. These formative women are salient figures in French film history, but just as important as these women are those of critical interest who are less acknowledged. Scholars and students will often discuss the works of Varda in relation to the French New Wave. But what of Jackie Raynal as an instrumental force in the Zanzibar group, the aftershock of the New Wave? How might we better address other female French filmmakers who are underwritten about, and reconsider whom we hold in esteem among other more-transparent figures? Perhaps most importantly, how is Raynal situated as a striking force in French film history? Raynal’s defining feature Deux Fois (1968) deserves further attention as a salient feminist work of French cinema. This marginal, experimental work was also in company with other contemporary Zanzibar films, which were all subsidized under Sylvina Boissonas’ generous patronage. The incendiary, short-lived Zanzibar filmmakers of the late ‘60s were brief in their output of work. But their radical filmmaking exercises remain a crucial presence in French cinema, as we will see in Deux Fois.
Deux Fois begins in a flurry of peculiar materials, both on and offscreen. Here, Raynal’s brazen, self-conscious opening scene is brilliantly, and obliquely, executed. The film literally pops and crackles as we are introduced to an overexposed image of Raynal in the opening scene, washed in the sun-drenched countryside of Spain. While seated before her luncheon on a bright September afternoon, her head is bowed in ostensible prayer. Truly, this is a moment of reverence and awareness of the cinematic image. Her physique becomes the surrounding space, as the light reflecting off the edges of her hair (like a halo) bleeds into both the sunlit wood of the background, and the feathered foliage ornamenting the table in the foreground. As the din of offscreen fauna begins to chirp and sing, Raynal awakens and voraciously begins dining on cola, bread, and other indistinguishable foods. The noise of the surrounding birds becomes increasingly obfuscated, and the chortles and distorted guttural noises seem to close in around her. As she rushes into the meal, Raynal glances surreptitiously to her left and right, while also casting her gaze directly toward the viewer. By this gesture, she interrogates the spectatorial position of the audience, as if to say, “I see you. You see me. And thus, reality and fantasy converge.” Her nervous and agitated gestures begin to subside as she collects herself and poses her body upright. She then delivers a speech directed toward the viewer, detailing vague sketches of forthcoming sequences that will appear in the film. While bemusing in its execution, here she contrasts her evasive behavior by directly addressing the audience and claiming her stance as this film’s author. The most interesting gesture is her gnomic final words of this sequence: “Tonight will be the end of meaning. Ladies and gentlemen, good evening.” The din of the birds continues as Raynal’s visage is rendered in a freeze-frame, concluding with a white-out transition into the next scene.
Within this experimental medium-length feature, the text is rich with contending aesthetics: still cinematography coupled with an erratic sound design; clear dictation versus unintelligible offscreen sounds; nonsensical in media res activities paired with an announcement of forthcoming sequences; and a nifty, yet seemingly simplistic editing design. The film is neither functional nor gratuitous in style. Instead, Raynal crafts a minimalist film of uncertain artistic expression, which resounds in its whispered boldness of style. Here is a filmmaker who is directing her own underlying editing impulses, vying against her earlier work as an editor of Eric Rohmer films during the French New Wave, and sublimating this into more cursory, provocative content. Sally Shafto also notes the importance of Raynal’s atypical ascendence in status from technician to creator. In an industry where female role models were (ostensibly) limited to Varda, Raynal appeared as a welcomed agitating and artistic voice.
Raynal’s cryptic declarations about the end of meaning seem to self-consciously provoke the audience, rather than satisfy any potential inquiries. However, it is also important to understand this sentiment as a shared ethos among the Zanzibar cohorts. In an interview with Lynn Higgins, Raynal shares, “At the time when the film was made, we had decided to ‘end’ cinema. All of those people, Deval, [Alain] Jouffroy, Pommereulle, Serge Bard, they wanted to make a film about the end of cinema. One film and it would be the end. It was a period of decisive resolution.” Raynal’s contentions still hold to a sense of vagueness, but it appears that by each Zanzibar member crafting a highly personalized, insurgent work of art, their films would dismantle preconceptions of film form and stand as truly unique projects among the white noise of commercial fare, while additionally responding with gusto to the New Wave films earlier in the decade. Nick Pinkerton writes that “The meaning-making interplay between spoken word and image, and a desire to disrupt their accepted relationship, runs through the Zanzibar corpus.” Zanzibar works like Deux Fois were devised to be rendered in circumstances that were liberating in their deconstruction. Raynal expresses that her idea for the title stemmed from working as an editor where film stock would often go to waste on multiple takes. Thus, she envisioned a project which would film only two takes per scene. This notion continued with the action of repeating certain scenes by showing various takes. Raynal refers to this as an exercise of style. However, in its roots, the central narrative is built around the construct of a diary film, and Raynal’s intent to set out from her coevals and make a film on her own terms. Frédérique Devaux writes about the notion of twice signifying repetition, randomness, and chance as themes that acknowledge the futility of artistic inspiration, while also celebrating it. Therefore, the need for repetition in efforts to tell a story provides some aesthetic commentary on the idealistic inefficacy of filmmaking as an inspirational art. And from this perspective, we can further approach the end of cinema, as postured by the Zanzibar group, as an artistic idea.
Deux Fois continues with a few dozen subsequent scenes (some of which repeat twice or thrice, with variation), that do not connect in any logical manner, nor do they cohere in an intelligible story. Instead, Raynal plays with techniques of light, repetition, obscurity, and measures of dream logic in which to divulge her unconscious artistic expressions. Various scenes include a shallow focus shot of Raynal with hands pulling her hair and body out of frame, a 360-degree pan surveying a busy intersection, Raynal fiddling with a collection of cameras and reflecting light at the audience with a small mirror, her tripping over her scarf on a countryside lane, buying soap in a Spanish pharmacy, smoking in bed while writing notes, and other seemingly unrelated activities. Raynal also continues her self-conscious appearances throughout the film, often in silence, and her lover (Francisco Viadel) appears multiple times in scenes either alongside her or alone. There is some spatial consistency in the exterior Spanish countryside outside of Barcelona, and recognizable urban locales like La Rambla. But more often, the audience is left perplexed by Raynal’s radical expose of silence, at times menacing stares into the camera, and issues of radical expression through reflected light, quietude, and maniac gestures from the performers. These bizarre methods fare far brasher and more daringly than that of the French New Wave. While la nouvelle vague showcased a variety of creative features that were often cheeky in their approach to readdressing generic film form and exhibiting an applied cinephilia, the Zanzibar group took their approach further by leaning more into experimental modes. Instead of formulating their work with a cinephilic methodology and genre-play like Jacques Demy, Jean-Luc Godard, or François Truffaut, the Zanzibar members dismantled cinematic conventions to a degree in which their work attempts to deconstruct the medium itself. This comes across as a devised effort to “reduce cinema to zero,” by radicalizing, affronting, and reconstructing its narrative form.
A historical perspective is further useful in examining Deux Fois as a central case study of the Zanzibar movement. Brewing social and political unrest in France during the sixties finally reached a fever pitch with the mass student protests, occupation of universities, and union strikes of May 1968, which collectively threatened the country with genuine revolution. Several million dissident voices also reflected the zeitgeist of young French artists, whose creative endeavors held to this same rebellious charge. It was around this time, too, that la nouvelle vague began to simmer in their repute, although most of the Cahiers du cinéma cohorts, as well as the Left Bank, continued making films for many years following. It was also around this moment of French cinema history that the Zanzibar group began to coalesce under the patronage of hippie heiress Sylvina Boissonnas, who openly financed over a dozen films on expensive 35mm, some of which were lost or wavering in their “Zanzibar” affiliation. Boissonnas’ relationship with Swiss painter Olivier Mosset was also a catalyst in informing her early interests in artistic sponsorship. To add to this, leading scholar Shafto refers to the collective as the “Zanzibar constellation,” due to their informal concentration as artists, more bound together by circumstances than by a cohesive style.
It was Serge Bard’s 1968 Détruisez-vous, shot just a month before the events of May 1968, that has since been regarded as the inaugural Zanzibar film. Raynal ponders Bard’s interest in the Zanzibar archipelago as a cheeky allusion to his own name. Bard also greatly admired Arthur Rimbaud, who famously wrote a letter to his sister in which he poetically mused over touring the islands. Moreover, it was Bard who led the vain excursion through Africa in 1969 with his contemporaries, while aspiring to shoot the uncompleted Au-delà. The troupe never made it to their destination in the east, due to internal dissolution within the group and Bard’s diverted attention to Islamic faith — but the locale later became the group’s namesake. In fact, it was with Détruisez-vous that Raynal made her entry into the Zanzibar coterie, as she was invited by peer Néna Baratier to edit Bard’s film. This acquaintance later led to further involvement with Boissonnas and the Zanzibar group as one of its formative creative members. Other filmmakers and performers who rounded out this coterie include Pierre Clémenti, Patrick Deval, Philippe Garrel, Bernadette Lafont, Daniel Pommereulle, and Zouzou. While each film project was idiosyncratic in content, most of the works did share vaguely similar approaches in conception: sparse productions devoid of scripts; no contracts; minimal dialogue; freedom of form; and unconscious ideas exhibited through deliberate provocation and experimentation.
The majority of the Boissonnas-financed features were shot in 1968 and released with limited distribution over the following two years. However, Boissonnas’ interests in this film patronage, and thus the movement, mostly withered by the end of the ‘60s. Initially, her patronage derived from a rebellion against her family’s wealth (they owned various real estate properties, including blood gold mines in Africa). By the cusp of the ‘70s, Boissonnas shifted her attention more toward feminist projects, such as her editorial work for The Burning Dishcloth, and her organizing efforts in establishing the feminist bookshop Women. Drug abuse and financial dissipation also led to further dissolution of the collective. By the end of 1968, Raynal had already left France to work in the United States.
Oddly enough, Raynal remains a reasonably peripheral figure, despite her storied career as a head editor for Rohmer films during the New Wave, in her directorial work shortly thereafter, and later in her stewardship of film as a programmer for theater venues in New York City during the late 20th century. In fact, it is because of her later curation work that many of the Zanzibar films were revisited and received with renewed interest. Through its eventual distribution through Re:Voir, these artists received additional reception, despite their vaporous debuts coming off the heels of the New Wave. One would be remiss not to acknowledge Raynal’s instrumental work within and beyond the brief Zanzibar movement, in her contributions to its roster of daring work, and in her role as a regenerative figure in giving the Zanzibar films a second life of circulation. Of these films, Deux Fois remains an essential work within the movement and merits reappraisal, despite some scholarly attention from Sally Shafto and a featured discussion in the first issue of the feminist journal Camera Obscura in 1976.
**While the Zanzibar group disbanded and most of its members seemed to disappear into the ether, figures like Garrel continued making films with relative success and notoriety for subsequent decades. Raynal, on the other hand, remained a quiet, albeit constructive force in America working as the program director for both Bleecker Street and Carnegie Hall from 1974 to 1991. She had released a few additional feature films sporadically in the ‘80s and the new millennium. Her work as a programmer also included involvement with Anthology Film Archives, the Cine Club of the YMCA, and the Angelika 57 theater during the mid-’90s. These activities were crucial regarding the Zanzibar movement, as Raynal co-sponsored an American/European tour of many of these films in 2002. This came a couple of years after a retrospective screening of Zanzibar films at the Cinémathèque Française. Boissonnas had struggled to sell the films’ rights to distributors during this extended interim period and the coterie was less willing to invest in the screening of their work. Aside from brief Zanzibar screenings for Andy Warhol and at the Pacific Film Archives in the early ‘70a, these features remained generally disregarded for nearly three decades, waiting to be re-viewed. Many of the group’s films were later sold to Pip Chodorov, who founded Re: Voir Video Editions in 1994. And thus, many Zanzibar features remain in circulation today.
The Zanzibar films went beyond the New Wave to flourish in an ephemeral moment of artistic patronage and overt social unrest, all while challenging film form more than that of the New Wavers. This is all the more apparent, considering New Wave star Bernadette Lafont’s involvement in Garrel’s Le Révélateur (1968), and Raynal’s decision to make a detour from her professional career editing New Wave films. On a personal note, Raynal also fancied an opportunity to depart the country, and her Zanzibar coeval/lover Patrick Deval. Raynal even chuckles over the notion of setting off for Barcelona, finding a new lover, and documenting her libertine attitudes on film, as a way of contending with Deval’s prior infidelity. In this sense, Deux Fois is calculated as a feminist rebellion against the problematic, dodgy male perspective. Raynal was also critical of the New Wavers’ infatuated, yet shallow depiction of women, apart from the works of Alain Resnais. Moreover, Raynal drolly expresses the functionality of editing as similar to sewing fabric — enjoyable as a recreation, but ultimately these activities are closely aligned with domestic duties. Duties which she could now avert from. And by diving further into the Zanzibar movement, she sublimated her previous filmmaking work by indulging darker, more unconscious materials. Now under the auspices of Boissonnas, Raynal quickly departed France for Barcelona and began shooting her film over the course of a week and a half. Boissonnas’ encouragement of Raynal to break free from the male-centric perspective which pervaded much of la nouvelle vague gave rise to the subversive Deux Fois. In fact, the film was so radical in style and content that Raynal was unable to find steady work as an editor thereafter.
Ultimately, the Zanzibar films were forged from an unstable ecosystem of social unrest surrounding the events of May 1968, generous momentary financial sponsorship from Boissonnas, stylistic rebellion against the nominally rebellious New Wave, and an audacious flashpoint of artistic insurgence that challenged film form and reception. As such, Deux Fois serves as a vivid, challenging, and confounding work of this period. In her interview with Higgins, Raynal shares, “It’s true that with Deux Fois I had an agenda, I wanted to say that in my films it wouldn’t be the same […] in an abrupt way, without too much reflection. Without declaring, ‘I’ll show you what women are like!’ But that is there somehow, unconsciously. That we had enough.” While baffling in its content, the film is certainly less cerebral than it is visceral. But its striking materials and conspicuous jacquerie toward intelligible narrative form resound with bemused interest that has continued to inspire renewed scrutiny and revisitation of this renegade work of Zanzibar cinema. Like the astonishing work by other Zanzibar members, there is an indulgence of stylized black-and-white cinematography, and a paranoid coldness of desire. In Deux Fois, this unconscious expression comes across in the claustrophobic soundscapes of the opening scene, in the silent screaming directed at the camera that occurs during several moments of the film, and in the very desire to repeat scenes. Raynal seems to pursue repetition and variation for fear that something has yet to be truly realized. Nothing is done, not even twice. The entropic ethos of this group to end cinema thus comes across in Deux Fois as a rich portrait of Raynal’s desires to diverge from her career involvement in a male-dominant industry and discover her own, creative voice.
Her rebellion, perhaps, comes across most daringly in the infamous urination scene, which occurs in the latter portion of the film. While standing half-naked in a stark room with an anonymous man, the male figure suddenly lunges offscreen and returns to the foreground, obscuring Raynal in the frame and laughing frantically into the camera. As he departs to the periphery of the frame, Raynal is revealed alone in the room — buckled over on the floor. Her internalized paranoia manifests in a controlled outburst as she lifts her body, flails around, and then calmly regards the camera (and the audience) as she soberly wets herself through her stockings. While this provocative moment would come to isolate her career as an editor in the years following, in this flagrant gesture Raynal literally pisses on any preconceptions of gentility or conformity in cinema.
In Deux Fois, Raynal postures her artistic obscurities by contending personal qualities of both the admirable and the abject. She invites the audience to meditate on her seditious impulses, while also agitating our relationship with the innate desire for conventional aesthetic beauty. I would argue that while her content is confronting, this naked scene is a triumph in an aesthetic appreciation for the Zanzibar movement. Raynal’s candor in self-consciously posturing herself and exposing this unconscious, fiery behavior is truly revelatory. As daring as this moment was, dark experimental content pervades the Zanzibar oeuvre, as they each forged their affronting artistic voices — au-delà du cinema de la nouvelle vague. And while most of these Zanzibar features were shot between 1968 and 1969, in this brief period of rebellious filmmaking their self-mythologization still resounds and is imprinted into the social history of late ‘60s France. Pinkerton further offers, “Though the dream didn’t last long, going to pieces as revolutions have a tendency to do…it left behind a rich, combative body of work.”
The Zanzibar group seems to have extinguished as quickly as they ignited, but the smoke has yet to clear. In fact, there has been a recent screening of Deux Fois at the Cinematek in Brussels, followed by a lucid interview with Raynal herself, substantiating her continued activity with cinema. With Raynal’s conscious and unconscious statements across her filmmaking/curating career, audiences are roused to look and think twice. To see what comes of simultaneous variation and renewal. Raynal’s mystifying declaration that “Tonight will be the end of meaning” appears to signal the dismantling of film form entirely. But more importantly, it augurs a continuation of spectatorship, despite expressions of finality. Like other august cinematic works of consideration, Deux Fois exists at the crux of conflicting aesthetics; as the work at once denies revisitation through its self-conscious death, while also signaling to spectators the value of looking at things a second time. As argued here, artistic evanescence is not without renewal. And although the Zanzibar collective may have held differing views on the perceived legacy of their films, Raynal has helped to ensure that her work, and that of her milieu, demands to be acknowledged as a salient part of French film history. While the Zanzibar films were once evanescent, they are now enduring. At Boissonnois’ assent, perhaps one day she may even approve the distribution of her own unreleased, feminist Zanzibar contribution Un film, as a dormant Zanzibar work; quietly prompting further interest in these historical French female filmmakers who merit renewed attention.
