Heiress at the Revolution

Those ciné-tracts were not the only films of ’68. Long overlooked, the so-called Zanzibar films—of which there are roughly twenty (not all have come to light)—bear direct testimony to that long-ago May. Its members constituted less a formal group than a loose tripartite constellation around three key figures—Serge Bard, Philippe Garrel, and Patrick Deval—in whose orbit many other people gravitated, including the noted poet and art critic Alain Jouffroy, who at the beginning of 1968 had published his L’abolition de l’art. And they were made thanks to the young heiress Sylvina Boissonnas, a rare French woman who very definitely had her own bank account. A scion of the Protestant Schlumberger family, her maternal grandfather, Conrad Schlumberger, had invented an oil-prospecting device in the 1920s. In 1963, at the age of twenty-one, she inherited a substantial fortune, and she and her extended family became Medici-like figures in the world of modern art. She got her start at the intersection of art and the women’s movement in the mid-1960s, when she began working in the atelier of the groundbreaking French feminist artist Niki de Saint-Phalle, where she first met the Swiss painter Olivier Mosset. Her friendship with Mosset, then part of the revolutionary quartet BMPT (Buren, Mosset, Parmentier, and Toroni), was a crucial catalyst for her, and Sylvina’s artistic sponsoring began by paying for a catalogue for an imaginary Mosset exhibition.

By early June of 1968, the writing was on the wall that the outburst of May would result in no major changes but rather a return to order, and it was then that Boissonnas, who had previously supported a film project by the novice filmmaker Serge Bard by requesting a family member to fund it, took the lead in financing. Unlike the ciné-tracts, which were shot in super 8, these films were shot in 35 mm, a professional and more costly format that could theoretically be distributed, and signaled that the work was to be taken seriously. Just as notable was their rejection of classic plot lines and carefully constructed screenplays in favor of improvisation.

Among Boissonnas’s major beneficiaries was the twenty-year-old Philippe Garrel. Upon his return from Munich after shooting his response to May, Le révélateur, Boissonnas funded postproduction on the film, and later that summer bankrolled his next film, La concentration. Garrel confined his actors—Zouzou and Jean-Pierre Léaud, clad only in unisex underwear—in a studio for seventy-two hours, while the set around them transformed into a spontaneous happening, with some crew members and visitors dropping acid. It’s hard not to see La concentration as a mocking response, a pied de nez, to the reestablishment of the status quo in French political life following de Gaulle’s march on May 30, 1968, which united some 800,000 people on the Champs-Elysées and led to the right’s massive electoral win three weeks later. Gaullist France, Garrel intimates, is no less than a prison, a concentration camp for youth. One wonders how Sylvina’s family reacted to the film, considering that her godfather, former Foreign Minister Maurice Couve de Murville, had just been named Prime Minister that July.

Concurrently with Garrel’s La concentration,  Patrick Deval, who like Garrel had already made several films, shot Acéphale,  a portrait of a young man wandering through an apocalyptic, post-’68 Paris. But by the end of 1968, de Gaulle’s return to order ensured a harsh crackdown on all perceived dissidents. As a result, many like Garrel went underground for years while others scattered  to the four corners of the earth. Before its dissolution, Boissonnas decided to enlarge her cenacle of male directors by inviting the young Jackie Raynal, who appears in Deval’s  Acéphale,  to make a film. At the time, Raynal was Eric Rohmer’s editor, and today it might be difficult to grasp the audacity of Boissonnas elevating a woman and a technician to the status of creator. At the time, other than Agnès Varda, there were very few living role models for women who wanted to direct films. The unflinching, experimental  Deux fois, which Raynal directed and starred in, showed she was up for the challenge. The episodic film includes several striking scenes that operate as metonyms for the liberation of her gender. In one, we see her head in profile with her free-flowing hair cascading around her. Suddenly, a male hand grabs and tames it, forcefully pulling her out of the frame as she resists. In another scene, Raynal appears dressed as a chic Amazonian warrior running down a deserted road. And in a third, she depicts a pixelated video game with a violent physical match between a man and a woman. Clearly, the battle of the sexes was very much on Raynal’s mind.

Boissonnas’s support of Raynal was happening at the same time that other major female figures in the French film landscape were embarking on careers previously largely barred to them on account of their gender. In 1966, Babette Mangolte graduated in the cinematography section of the distinguished École Nationale de la Photographie et de la Cinématographie (a.k.a. the Vaugirard School); in 1970, she earned her first credit as a camerawoman, on Marcel Hanoun’s film L’automne, becoming France’s first female D.P. And although not the first French woman to work as an assistant director—Françoise Giroud, who had worked with both Jean Renoir and Jacques Becker, preceded her—Godard and Garrel collaborator Isabelle Pons helped to open up this traditionally male-held position to women in the mid-to-late 1960s.