Filmed with a silent 16mm camera and a rudimentary tape recorder, Chris Marker’s essay film could be described as the most dazzling home movie you’ll ever see. Not that Marker — a Frenchman who rubbed shoulders with the nouvelle vague — spends much time at home. There’s footage here he shot in Iceland (supposedly for a planned sci-fi film), Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde and San Francisco. Incorporating movie clips and early digital post-production effects, Marker — using the alias Sandor Krasna — ruminates on topics that range freely from ritual, philosophy, politics, movies and memory. It’s a work of great erudition but also poetic and playful, a movie for the permanently curious, a movie about connection, the creation of meaning, souvenirs for the mind.
Sunday’s Pantheon screening will feature a 15-minute introduction by a local film scholar and be followed by an audience talkback.
For anyone who has not seen a Chris Marker film, their varied effects may be compared with that in reading the journal of some eighteenth century traveler: Johnson in the Hebrides, Rousseau’s promenade through his own sensibility, or Goethe’s visit to Rome. The work is based on the assumption that a cultivated man should express himself in words or in film. Add to that the engaging fusion of seriouness and humour; a precise eye for strange places and a quizzical response to unfamiliar people… Beneath all this, there is the unaffected independence of a man who sees that all people are travelers, lonely or self-suffient, whether they lap the earth or stay at home.
David Thomson, A Biographical Dictionary of Film
The consummate cine-essay, framed as reportage from a roving cineaste, built mainly from Marker’s observations of the ’empire of signs’ that is modern Japan and the poverty endemic in Guinea Bissau. Entertainingly provocative speculations on the ’post-political’ world, haunted by the piano music of Mussorgsky.
Tony Rayns, Sight & Sound
A reverie on Japan, technology, and the conjunction of different times and peoples in the world. It shows how rich the potential is for filmmaking, like the writing of essays and the keeping of journals.
David Thomson
Chris Marker
Alexandra Stewart
France
1983
In English, French and Japanese with English subtitles
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Also in This Series
The greatest films of all time.
Fantasia
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Image: © Disney, 1940
Breaking the Waves
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The Leopard
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Rear Window
James Stewart is the man who sees too much. "Jeff" Jeffries is a sports photographer waylaid by a broken leg, doomed to spend the summer in a wheelchair in his New York apartment. That's how he comes to witness a murder in the dead of night (or does he?).
Day of Wrath
Anna, the young second wife of a well-respected but much older pastor, falls in love with her stepson when he returns to their small seventeenth-century village. Stepping outside the bounds of the village's harsh moral code has disastrous results.
