Jackie Raynal: Camera-Stylo
Sunday November 22nd - 7:30PM
UnionDocs
322 Union Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11211
DOCUMENTS—JACKIE RAYNAL: DISCOURSE ON THE METHOD
This is the fourth screening in a 4-part retrospective Red Channels has organized with UnionDocs -- a new "microcinema" based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn -- surveying the life and work of Jackie Raynal. UnionDocs focuses its efforts on the presentation and study of non-fiction and documentary arts, so we've selected a number of pertinent and expressive works from Jackie Raynal's filmography, spanning over 45 years, and representing various aspects of her multifaceted career as editor, filmmaker, exhibitor, distributor, and documentarian. It is a bit of a sequel to last April's "Cinema According to Jackie Raynal" series, curated by Marie Losier for the French Institute Alliance Française.
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Raynal began her career in Paris as an editor, working closely and often with Eric Rohmer (1920-) throughout the early 1960's. She would go on to edit Barbet Schroeder's omnibus production Paris vu par... (1965), which featured segments by Claude Chabrol (1930-), Jean Douchet (1929-), Jean-Luc Godard (1930-), Jean-Daniel Pollet (1936-2004), Rohmer, and Jean Rouch (1917-2004).
She made her directorial debut in 1962, alongside Étienne Becker (1936-) and Patrice Wyers, on a short documentary project, Merce Cunningham -- an early look into the artistic process of Cunningham (1919-2009), John Cage (1912-1992), and Robert Rauschenberg (1925-2008). Towards the end of the 1960's she was a member of the Zanzibar Group, a radical filmmaking collective, which included a very young Philippe Garrel (1948-). With Zanzibar she produced and edited the films of Patrick Deval, Héraclite l'obscur (1967) and Acéphale (1968); and directed her debut feature, Deux fois (1969).
In 1974, looking for a change of scenery and new filmmaking opportunities, she arrived in New York. After working as an editor here on Jules Dassin's The Rehearsal (1974) and David Buckley's Saturday Night at the Baths (1975), she began a relationship with entrepreneur Sidney Geffen (d.1986). The new couple would soon acquire and revamp the Carnegie Hall and Bleecker Street Cinemas, operating two of the city's most revered, ambitious, and avant-garde "arthouse" theaters (they would both close in the early 1990's). From the theaters they published a monthly magazine, The Thousand Eyes, which ran listings for all of New York's repertory programming, and included reviews, articles, essays, and interviews. They also ventured into distribution with Coralie Films, which included titles from the Zanzibar Group, as well as work they wanted to book for the theaters that no other distributors would touch.
Raynal would return to filmmaking in 1981, over a decade since Deux fois, with the autobiographical tale New York Story -- later expanded into a feature as Hotel New York (1984) -- which featured both her and Geffen as themselves. With bit parts played by Gary Indiana (1950-), Errol Morris (1948-), and Jonathan Rosenbaum (1943-), Raynal reinvented herself as a member of the then-flourishing downtown independent cinema scene, which she championed at her theaters.
Though it wasn't until the earlier part of this decade that Raynal would begin her most prolific filmmaking stage, due in part to her embracing video technology. She has focused in recent years on a series of video portraiture works, featuring subjects like Jonas Mekas (1922-), Jacques Baratier (1918-), and her own parents in Gougnette (2009).
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The fourth and final program in the series, CAMERO-STYLO, looks at the essay film-as-documentary. Raynal was the editor of this early masterpiece by Jean-Daniel Pollet, a filmmaker mostly unknown in the United States (barring last fall's retrospective at Anthology Film Archives, organized by Raynal). Pollet's non-fiction work is unlike any other film we've seen, its images, repetition, and construction still haunt us a year later (text by Philippe Sollers (1936-)). This film by Godard is an important transitional work, ending a series of collaborations with Jean-Pierre Gorin (1943-), and beginning a series of collaborations with Anne-Marie Mieville (1945-). It carries traces of both, Godard caught in the middle, making it all the more exciting and powerful. It was released at a time when Godard was, believe it or not, considered something like "box office poison" here in the US, and was thus unable to find either distribution or theatrical release. It was the beginning of the trilogy of Godard's works distributed and premiered by Raynal, including Numéro deux (1975) and Comment ça va? (1976).
--Mediterranee – Jean-Daniel Pollet with Volker Schlondorff, 1963, 45 minutes
--Ici et Ailleurs (Here and There) – Jean-Luc Godard, Jean-Pierre Gorin, Anne-Marie Mieville, 1974/6, 55 minutes
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 100 minutes | Digital Projection
Discussion with:
--Michael Chaiken - curator, archivist, critic; editor of Arthur Penn: Interviews and A Maysles Scrapbook
--Benj Gerdes - curator, filmmaker, professor, member of the 16Beaver Group
--Jackie Raynal
Co-presented by French Institute Alliance Française
(The Pollet film was released on DVD (2006) by POM Films in France.)