Zanzibar Productions

A composition of symbolic, surreal and almost mystic images.

Cleopatra situates itself in the same relationship to Hollywood as the Warhol/Morrisey films of the period. It corresponds to Joseph Mankiewicz's 1963 Cleopatra, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton which Auder's cast watched and used as the starting point for scene by scene improvisation Auder drew his cast from Warhol's ensemble – including not only Viva and Louis Waldon, but also Taylor Mead, Ondine, Andrea Feldman, Gerard Melanga and others.

A 4-year-old child is the element from and around which the action develops, and brings sentiments and emotions to light.

“FUN AND GAMES (FOR EVERYONE): a pitch black and milky white film shot during one of Olivier Mosset's exhibition openings. A psychedelic game of improvisation joins the Zanzibar group with Salvador Dalí, Barbet Schroeder and Jean Mascolo... the solarized image reminiscent of thick strokes of a paintbrush.” - Philippe Azoury

Eileen has something important to discuss with her teenage son, Stephen. But on the day she decides to talk to him, Stephen has his own surprise in store for her.

30 year old child enters the new city, riding on a donkey. He says he is the Savior. He has spent no time among men. He is trembling with cold. His clothes are soaked. His mother was overprotective ; his father conspicuously absent. He knows that he must face the mockery, refusal, ignorance and blindness of the men around him. They travel in gangs, in large numbers : soldiers, mercenaries or the like, on majestic, imposing horses. Everything is out of proportion to his thin, bewildered, innocent body ; he is the madman of the new city...

A comedy about New York and its eccentric inhabitants. A French filmmaker comes to New York to show her film at MOMA. Fascinated by the city, she decides to stay.

La Concentration features an androgynous young man (Jean-Pierre Léaud) and woman (Zouzou), dressed only in their underwear, locked in a room with a bed.

An experimental and poetic portrait of a woman.

Detruisez-vous is a ‘primitive’ film which breaks all the rules of film-making. It’s the first Zanzibar film (and predates the very naming of the movement), an attempt to make a film which defies the rules of production, the production line of commerce

Twice is a 1968 experimental film by Jackie Raynal. Raynal stars in the film, her first as a director; she had previously worked for several years as a film editor, most notably for films in Éric Rohmer's "Six Moral Tales" series (she was, reportedly, the youngest professional editor in France at the time). The film's title, which literally translates as Twice and is sometimes translated into English as Twice Upon a Time, refers to the occasional repetition of scenes or actions.

Maddening and mysterious,with the elements—ocean, wind, rocky terrain—dominating the scenes.

This autobiographical film portrays a regression to life in the womb and represents three psychic states.

In 1972, what does making a film mean? How does a movie make? What is the relationship between the producer of shows and the spectator? How does meaning travel in the story? These are the questions posed and proposed by the film.

An experimental arrangement of austerely executed but intensely hallucinatory episodes that build into a nightmarish fever of isolation and hopelessness.

A look into Africa that is rarely available to ethnographers or anthropologists. At its heart is the spirit of interaction. It observes, but with the wavering eye of home movie, rather than the fixed formality of a documentary.

In 1969, the painter-sculptor Daniel Pommereulle made his third film, this one financed by Sylvina Boissonnas. Although only a short, Vite was one of the most costly of all the Zanzibar productions. It features, for instance, shots of the moon taken by a state-of-the-art telescope, the Questar, that Pommereulle first saw while visiting Marlon Brando in southern California in 1968. In Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, Pommereulle and his friend Adrien philosophize on how best to achieve le vide (emptiness) during their summer holidays. Three years later, Pommereulle would transform the word “vide” to “vite” (quickly), signifying his profound disenchantment with the aftermath of the revolution of May ’68. —Harvard Film Archive

The title of the film Émet refers to the legend of the Golem. It is an enigmatic film, coming from a reflection on the confrontation of man with his identity.

Memory of what belongs to the invention of cinema. the film is a single shot to be shown in any order and size (Normal or scope) made in eight hours with a machine that conceptualizes light.