The Zanzibar Group: Serge Bard & Olivier Mosset

Director: Serge Bard, Olivier Mosset

1968 / 121min / DCP

Ici et maintenant, 1968, 71 mins

Fun and Games For Everyone, 1968, 50 mins

The short-lived Zanzibar Group, composed of radical film artists—including Pommereulle and, most famously, Philippe Garrel—who were able to work outside the system in freedom thanks to the hands-off patronage of patron Sylvina Boissonnas, produced some of the most astonishing, visionary films to come out of France from 1968 to 1970, two of which screen here. Bard’s Ici et maintenant, shot largely in long takes on Brittany’s Pointe du Raz, is a work of austere splendor, its black-and-white negatives “flashed” in the lab to produce an otherworldly high-contrast image; per fellow Zanzibar member Patrick Deval, it “consists of the dreams of the solitary rambler, post-revolution.” Fun and Games for Everyone, also by Bard, documents the private viewing of a 10-canvas exhibition of works—all the same, black circles on a field of white—by the minimalist painter Oliver Mosset, with perambulating visitors that include the likes of Salvador Dali, Michel Auder, Barbet Schroeder, and Pommereulle.

Introduction from curators Boris Bergmann and Armance Léger on Sunday, September 15th