This event is part two and three of a four part series with Jackie Raynal at UnionDocs, presented with Red Channels.
Jackie Raynal present with guests Marie Losier and Sebastien Sanz de Santamaria following the THE DIARIST. Curators Livia Bloom and Rachael Rakes will join Raynal for a discussion following REALISATION.
Like Raynal, Jonas Mekas is perhaps best known for his championing of the avant-garde — from Film Culture, to the Film-maker’s Cooperative, to Anthology Film Archives — having been involved in criticism, distribution, exhibition, etc. But he’s also had an intensely prolific, though under-appreciated, filmmaking career, and is one of the pioneering practitioners of the “diary film.” These same issues could be said to apply to filmmaker Pip Chodorov (1965-), founder and director of the Re:Voir distribution label, and moderator of the Frameworks listserv. This second program in the series (part of a double feature), THE DIARIST, looks at these three figures in the international avant-garde, expatriates (Lithuania-to-United States; France-to-United States; United States-to-France) from three different generations.
Program #2: THE DIARIST
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 91 minutes | Digital Projection
6:00 PM
Notes sur Jonas Mekas by Jackie Raynal (USA, France, 2000, 20 minutes)
Jonas Tourne Toujours by Pip Chodorov (USA, 2002, 10 minutes)
Williamsburg, Brooklyn by Jonas Mekas (USA, France, 2003, 15 minutes)
Gougnette by Jackie Raynal (2009, 46 minutes)
Program #3 REALISATION
TOTAL RUNNING TIME: 78 minutes | 16mm & Digital Projection
8:30 PM
The third program in the series (part of a double feature), REALISATION, pairs Raynal’s first two directorial efforts, both of which could be considered “non-fiction,” back-to-back. As wildly different from other documentary films as they are from each other, these films feel as provocative and iconoclastic as ever, over 40 years after the fact. Performance, exhibitionism, deconstruction, and confrontation are all on full display — if anything making for a more challenging presentation today than they were upon initial release. We’re nervous just thinking about this one…
Merce Cunningham by Jackie Raynal (France, 1962, 13 minutes)
Deux fois (Twice Upon a Time) by Jackie Raynal (France, Spain, 1969, 65 minutes)
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).
Co-presented by:
