There have been so may vital movements and collectives in film history that has contributed in shaping a genre and inspiring a generation. We have Third Cinema/Militant Cinema, Brazilian Marginal Cinema, Hong Kong New Wave, Chicano cinema, Baltic "Poetic Documentaries" , Taiwanese New Wave , New French Extremity, Mumblecore, Kazakh New Wave, Panic movement, L. A. Rebellion film movement, Czech New Wave, Yugoslav Black Wave, Second Golden Age of Philippine Cinema, Black Audio Film Collective, Polish Film School, Parallel Cinema, Japanese New Wave, Pure Film Movement, Cinema Novo, Australian New Wave, Dogme, New Queer Cinema, Kitchen Sink Realism, Expanded Cinema, New Hollywood, Greek Weird Wave and Cinema of Transgression. At this half-way point, i want to take a moment to remember the man who coined "Cinema Of Transgression," Nick Zedd who sadly passed away in Febrauary this year. A iconic rebel and a flame-keeper of the New York underground film movement of the 1980s. I still haven't covered so many, i'll add Yugantar here as it is one of my favourite moments and considered to be India's first feminist collective.
Now coming to Zanzibar film group, it was a result of collective efforts of amateur filmmakers who were like minded and moved away from the conventions of the French New Wave genre and created radical experimental films with no specific binding of events in the narrative. It wasn't like the Dogme 95, French Extremity or leaning towards genre films belonging to CAT III, Pinku-Eigas. They believed in the principle of 'the weird- the better'. After Jackie Raynal shot one of the most important avant-garde piece in 1968 (I'm being completely serious), it was obvious to me that no titles from the Zannzibar film group can recreate the same. I have covered almost 70% of titles and it felt it was extremely difficult to jump over the bar set by Deux fois (1968) in terms of the experimental aesthetics. Let me remind here that Raynal started her career in the 1960s as the film editor for New Wave directors such as Eric Rohmer, Jean-Daniel Pollet and Jean Eustache. But the years of work has influence on her filmmaking or acting style, she is really great in this one, there are simply no words!
I watched the movie a few days back and coincidentally the week was the Patrick Deval who directed this movie. I decided to write about it and still can't make everything out of it. The film is set in the post May 1968 France and the journey of a young man and his friends through the backstreets of their own unconscious raise a number of questions, absurd statements, stageplays and wander in ruins. The name of the film is taken from the magazine of the same name, published by the French philosopher and writer Georges Bataille, it means "headless" The opening scene is rooted in the abstract expressionism as we see a head being shaved, the sound penetrate the role, thereby destroying the psyche as it an electric saw that we hear, a tabula rasa, a blank slate. This short of is avant-garde in the truest sense of the word. I would only recommend it to those who love watching experimental and avant-garde films, the rest can ignore this.
