Three Films by Chris Marker

La Jetée 
France, 1962
Written, directed and photographed by Chris Marker

The photographs are fabulous, especially as used in the service of this tremendous, tremendously laid out concept.  Motion pictures contain banal actuality, or morbid fantasy.  The still image contains worlds, or at least suggests them.  Photography’s limitations are also the source of its profound evocativeness.  The implicit argument here is that photos are, like objects and sense stimuli, definitive memory prompts, full of memory’s paradoxical partiality and fullness, its substance and self-deception.  The point is proven.    

As for the story, Marker really effectively withholds, effectively doles out his plot information.  That hermaneutic distribution really isolates our protagonist, and makes us sympathetic toward him.  This combination of sympathy and suspense is pretty formidable, and it leads to the shattering feeling of that climax.  It’s all masterfully calculated; we realize what has happened just as our protagonist does.  So close to consummation—permanent, no-more-to-go-out union—and so everlastingly far.  The value-added part is that it’s not mere suspense, not just high concept sci-fi.  The elusive nearness, the everlasting inaccessibility of the abundant past has real tragic heft.  

This is textbook expressionism—searching for transcendence in a world darkened and even destroyed by technology.  Expressionist and very, wonderfully male: the transcendent hope is embodied in the female ideal, but one that is also actual—look at that face!  The hopeful couple's quotidian trysts are tremendously beautiful, and it’s all that beautiful quotidian time that earns them their glancing, indelible moment.  There’s no objectification or voyeurism here.  It’s no coincidence or mistake that the film’s single, shattering moving shot is an index of intimate exchange, and that she is looking fully, knowingly, willingly back at him/us.  Has there ever been a more powerful after/sex scene?  (Honourable mention to the figurative plunge in Sokurov's 2011 Faust...)

… A Valparaiso

East Germany, 1962

by Chris Marker and Joris Ivens

This is a lost masterpiece.  Actually, it’s more a masterpiece that hardly any one has ever heard of, at least after its initial production and utilization.  How many more of these are there out there?  Ivens and Marker, for heaven’s sake, both working at the top of their game, which means the top of anyone’s game.  Erik Barnouw can’t mention every single great film, but it gets to the point where even the informed don’t quite know where to turn, or how to find what’s right and worthy.

You are struck at first by how photogenic this Chilean community is, and by how superbly that beauty has been cinematically shaped.  You are also, equally, struck by the beauty and aptness and sharpness of the accompanying commentary.  Predictably, the elements are not working together in the service of mere picturesqueness; this is actually one of the great film dissertations on the gaps between appearance and reality, on the ironic reality of material deprivation in the midst of great beauty.  It’s quite reminiscent of Alain Resnais' Night and Fog, actually, in its extraordinarily evocative imagery, in its extraordinarily interrogative commentary, in its very effectively unsettling (Hanns) Eislerian score.  I wouldn’t say this one is better, but I would point out that it benefits from its consideration of a problem that is considerably less terrible, and considerably more common, and maybe, as a result, considerably more pressing.

The manner of that consideration makes this an exemplary piece of political cinema: clear about causes and effects and even possible remedies, keying on issues and collectivities but never losing sight of the individual’s life.  The change to colour!  Beautiful, and terrible, and still even hopeful.  

Here: https://vimeo.com/5690624 

A Grin Without a Cat

France, 1977
Written, directed and assembled by Chris Marker

Agit prop, evolved to a very high, challenging and invaluable degree.  Marker is still a dedicated Marxist here, but he’s no party hack, and I think that this is better and truer—more searching, more self-critical, more humane—than so many of the original Soviet films.  Not that he has softened in his attitude toward the colonialist, capitalist project.  This enormous four hour assembly starts with a stunning interweaving of Eisenstein’s Odessa Steps sequence (from Battleship Potemkin/1925, of course) with documentary footage of actual repressions, actual state murders.  From these events we leap forward to a more recent Imperialist Incursion, embodied by the gleeful, bomb-dropping American pilot in Vietnam. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.  But for all of these clear lines and bold assertions, Marker's elegant film essay is still, always, subtly shaded.    

Much of that subtlety lies in the fact that A Grin Without a Cat is not only ideological cinema, but also educational cinema.  That thunderous prologue is the shape of things to come, as far as the rest of the film goes.  It's dramatic, but it's also densely, scrupulously informational.  Tons of data, coming clear, coming fast and hard.  Interrogation and critique.  Questions, like crazy.  Answers too, occasionally even expressed as moral certainties.  On the other hand, when things are less clear, Marker says so.  It occurs to you that he is actually a good example, as a film investigator, world citizen, person.  He is firm, principled, but never doctrinaire. 

The title is somewhat perverse.  (That Marker and his cats...)  It's partly a problem of translation, since the French original doesn't really have an easy English equivalent.  The grin and the cat seem to refer to the shining promise of revolutionary realities, and the fact that they never actually arrive.  There's a Cheshire tinge to the film too.  A few of the dozens of well thought out, well articulated and strongly segue’d ideas here don’t quite stand up, or pan out.  Marker might not mind have minded that characterization.  Looking outward (at his subjects), he sees complexity, acknowledges insufficiency, condemns perfidy, where so e’er (cf. Rosi’s Manos sula Citta).  The same goes for his own side, and the same comes after the inward glance.   

This means that Ché Guevara and Fidel Castro and the revolutionaries of Paris '68 come in for considerable, well-detailed criticism.  It means that the Communist film director lets François Mitterand (also allied with the left, mind you) reasonably articulate an integration of progressive and market objectives.  That sensible Citroen guy is given the floor to suggest that when it comes to the production of consumer goods, which we all need, capitalism really does make a lot of sense. From all of this we see that conscientious revolutionaries, and their conscientious films, can be in conflict with themselves.  The exacting ideologue can admit as much.  Or, in addition to political conviction, things are complicated.  

And for the unconverted?  Well, for one thing it is good to hear from the folks on the other side of the aisle, even if they're on the way other side.  Then, in addition to all of this inquiry, made with such integrity, are the informational torrents. Facts! and vivid interpretations thereof.  These are important things that we really ought to know.  After all, the Shah's reign, the entire trajectory of the Prague Spring and the subsequent Soviet crackdown, Allende ascendent and Allende deposed, Minimata, even arms sales and the culling of wolves are all part of a pattern, a historical and ideological tapestry that have everything to do with the geo-political present.  

Most of us don't do much of this kind of thing, and yet it may be the most important thing we can do.  Education, and application—when you spend a lifetime on this kind of stuff, you start to know what you’re talking about.  And of course, after knowledge and discourse, action.  Participate!    

Secret Ballot, d. Babak Payami (Iran, 2001)