ZOO ZÉRO
dir. Alain Fleischer, 1978
France. 96 min.
In French with English subtitles.
THURSDAY, NOVEMBER 4 – 10 PM
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12 – 10 PM
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20 – 7:30 PM
SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 28 – 10 PM
During a cataclysmic rainstorm in a Paris largely reduced to ruins and rubble, guests in baroque animal masks crowd a smokey nightclub called Noah’s Ark. Here, Eva (Eden and After’s Catherine Jourdan) takes the stage to perform a riviting song of illicit interspecies desire and a formative erotic experience involving a lion mauling at the Berlin Zoo. It’s the last number, of the night, and maybe of the city — “an accident or a disease” has ravaged the streets as trucks trundle over cobblestones with news of the military government in crisis and the animal world seems poised to reclaim lost ground from a waning humanity. But an encounter with a stranger at the club (a tuxedoed, stammering Pierre Clementi) sends Eva out into this city of crumbling bordellos and verdant parks to a series of fateful meetings with a fragmentary family — a mother ogre, a ventriloquist chauffeur who narrates the failure of the Spanish revolution with a Donald Duck puppet, twin foley artists, and, narrating from a vocoder organ at the heart the liminal human-animal space of the city zoo, a mournful Klaus Kinski. But like other pulp peaks of the 70s, this is less a film that suggests tidy synopsis than a true cinematic dream, where nocturnal correspondences between Mozart, escaped large cats, and the grasping of all-too-temporary human edifices override the logic of the waking world and categories become blurred by their own mysterious logic.
Exquisitely shot in oneirically shadowed day-for-night (and night-for-night) by Bruno Nuytten (of such Spectacle essentials as INDIA SONG, MON COEUR EST ROUGE, and POSSESSION!), and with assistant direction by Claire Denis, ZOO ZÉRO has been all but unseeable outside of messy bootleg transfers for far too long. Now, at last, artist and director Alain Fleischer’s masterpiece has been newly restored from 35mm, in a gorgeous HD transfer.
Newly restored HD print courtesy of Alain Fleischer, with English subtitles newly corrected and custom retimed by Spectacle volunteers.