Saturday, November 13, 2021 at 7pm
A Conversation with Jackie Raynal
155 Freeman Street, Brooklyn
“Did you notice at your cinematheque screening that people were laughing like mad? It will be very naive to believe that they were laughing because it’s just funny to see people going in front of the camera. They laugh because they are on the good side. Laugh = fear.”
- Serge Daney to Jackie Raynal
Born in 1940 in the south of France, Jackie Raynal is a central figure for modern film culture. Her first feature as a director, the fractured Barcelona-set trance film Deux Fois (1968), is a milestone in French experimental cinema. (Peter Wollen called her “a pioneer of the unedited long take.”) Her second, Hotel New York (1984), has a similar place in the pantheon of 1980s downtown satire, with cinematography from Babette Mangolte and an indelible performance from Raynal’s co-writer Gary Indiana. In the previous two decades, she has turned to digital and nonfiction cinema with a cluster of tender, precise documentary portraits: of Jonas Mekas, Jean Rouch, the 100-year-old banking scion Simon Lazard, and her own parents.
The collaborative spirit of her films reflects the many other roles she has taken in film production and exhibition over the past six decades. As an editor on films such as Jean-Daniel Pollet’s Méditerranée (1963) and Eric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse (1967), she gave 1960s French cinema some of its major works of tense summer energy. As a member of the elusive “Zanzibar group,” a cohort of young filmmakers exploring the outer limits of film style in the aftermath of May 68, she both made Deux Fois and edited or starred in films by Philippe Garrel, Serge Bard, and Patrick Deval. And as a programmer, working alongside her husband Sid Geffen, she turned the Bleecker Street and Carnegie Hall Cinemas into centers of gravity for New York’s repertory circuit. Writing in 1983, Jonathan Rosenbaum estimated that “she has been more responsible than any other individual for the exposure in this country of major films by Chantal Akerman, Scott B and Beth B, Marco Bellochio, Marguerite Duras, Jean-Luc Godard, Ulrike Ottinger, Yvonne Rainer, Jacques Rivette, and Wim Wenders, among many others.”
Her career has been defined by her openness to experimentation and risk. By the mid-1980s, she had not only emerged as a major filmmaker, programmer, and editor but also co-directed a 1965 short film about Merce Cunningham; contributed photographs to the Mexico volume of Chris Marker’s travel book series Petite Planète; shot a now-lost film in Algeria, India, and Tibet, Shiva Puri; lived on a New Mexico commune; co-edited David Buckley’s 1975 bathhouse romance Saturday Night at the Baths; given an unforgettable cameo as a “theory-speaking femme fatale” in Rainer’s The Man Who Envied Women (1985); and published one of the major American film magazines of the 1970s, The Thousand Eyes.
We are pleased to welcome Jackie Raynal to Light Industry for an evening-long conversation about her life and work.
- Pierre Folliet and Max Nelson
Tickets - Pay what you can ($8 suggested donation), available at door.
Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 6:30pm.