Film.  1961.  Post-apocalyptic story in Paris following World War III.  The film is all black and white stills, with just a voice narrating and soundtrack, and is 28 minutes in length.  The film opens with a young boy seeing the profile of a woman, and then the world is destroyed, forcing people underground.  Years later he is chosen to be sent into time to find the secret to re-building the world.  Film is worth watching both for it’s unique style as well as the story.  Supposedly, provided inspiration for ’12 Monkeys.’  One of the more enjoyable films I’ve watched in a while.

There is no future, only the onslaught of time.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee (NY: Tanam Pres, 1982) is an experiment in autobiography that blends poetry and prose, history and memoir, and reproductions of photographs and documents.  Many of Cha’s themes overlap with those found in the work of W.G. Sebald: history, memory, war, cruelty, family.

To the other nations who are not witnesses, who are not subject to the same oppressions, they cannot know.  Unfathomable the words, the terminology: enemy, atrocities, conquest, betrayal, invasion, destruction.  They exist only in the larger perception of History’s recording, that affirmed, admittedly and unmistakably, one enemy nation has disregarded the humanity of another.  Not physical enough.  Not to the very flesh and bone, to the core, to the mark, to the point where it is necessary to intervene, even if to invent anew, expressions, for this experience, for this outcome, that does not cease to continue.

To the others, these accounts are about (one more) distant land, like (any other) distant land, without any discernable features in the narrative, (all the same) distant like any other.

But Cha adds additional layers: Catholicism and feminism.  Dictee opens with Communion, followed by confession, and it closes with a scene embodying acts of charity (water, medicine, advice) between a woman and a young girl.  Overseeing Cha’s enterprise are the nine classical Muses, the daughters of Zeus and Mnemosyne (memory) who presided over the arts and sciences.  Each of Dictee’s chapters is assigned the name of a Muse.  The history that Cha probes is the story of twentieth century Korea (where her family originated): the Occupation by Japan as a result of the Sino-Japanese War; the country’s division into two parts as a result of the Cold War; and the violent student demonstrations of the 1960s.

But Cha’s main concern, it seems to me, is human communication itself.  Dictee (the dictation) is structured as an unending struggle to move from inarticulateness to utterance.  Words become syllables, sentences become strings of single words, continuity is disrupted.   Where, Cha seems to ask, does language become meaning?  Parts of the book are written in French and there are many references to the issues of translation and multilingualism.

Dictee is heavily influenced by film theory.  It contains abrupt jump cuts, makes powerful use of vantage point, and dwells on the intellectual dichotomy of listening to spoken language while reading sub-titles in a different language.  Following the lead of Michel Butor and other French writers of the nouveau roman, Cha sometimes moves into second person in an attempt to obliterate the boundary between reader and subject.

Her movements are already punctuated by the movement of the camera, her pace, her time, her rhythm.  You move from the same distance as the visitor, with the same awe, same reticence, the same anticipation.  Stationary on the light never still on her bath water, then slowly moving from room to room, through the same lean and open spaces.  Her dress hangs on a door, the cloth is of a light background, revealing the surface with a landscape stained with the slightest of hue.  Her portrait is not represented in a still photograph, nor in a painting.  All along, you see her without actually seeing, actually having seen her.  You do not see her.  For the moment, you see only her traces.

More than once, as I read Dictee, I was eerily reminded of Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jetée.

A decade ahead of Sebald, Cha interlaced her text with uncredited news photographs, portraits, reproductions of documents, and even reproductions of what appear to be the handwritten manuscript for the pages of Dictee.

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha was born in Korea, but raised in the US.  After studying at the University of California, Berkeley, she studied filmmaking and critical theory in Paris.  A week after Dictee was published, she was murdered by a stranger on the streets of New York.  Tanam Press was an important publisher of avantgarde art titles (Jenny Holzer, Reese Williams, Philip Glass, Werner Herzog, Richard Prince) from 1980 to 1986.

As I noted previously, I love the NYTimes Screentests with Lynn Hirschberg. Visiting the website always posed as somewhat of a hassle, the site was extremely annoying to navigate. It used to have a minimal interface: splash page upon loading, followed by endless flash menus. I visited today to find a new interface that was a much needed step forward, there were major stories as well as headliners on the front page making it much easier to get from point A to B.

To make things sweeter, they launched a new video player making it much easier to access all media found on the site. Upon watching a dozen screentests, I noticed an Arts category in the menu so I figured I’d give it a look. The first thing that caught my eye was La Jetee. It turns out the site does a little column called Critics Pick with A.O. Scott that features older as well as a few relatively recent films. These films range from the likes of Wes Anderson, Spielberg, Spike Lee, Woody Allen, Federico Fellini, Hitchcock, and Coppola to name a few. These are arguably a few of the influential directors of our time which is why La Jetee really jumped out at me. It felt like a rather obscure choice and stuck out like a greasy bearded man wearing a trenchcoat at Chuck E. Cheese, has anyone heard of Chris Marker? Honestly, I don’t even know much about his other works aside from this one. From searching him up on IMDB, I can’t say i recognize any of his other works. La Jetee is not a film for everyone, in fact I wouldn’t recommend it to anyone not interested in filmmaking or in the abilities of film as an artistic medium of communication. Why? It’s a 28 minute long film that uses only still images except for one shot where a woman opens and blinks. Sounds boring right? It can actually be quite entertaining. It’s often hailed as being an emotionally moving film, the atmosphere it creates as well as the emotion it gives rise to, really leaves the viewer thinking “wow”, similar to the feeling of having an intense orgasm and basking in the afterglow. A.O. Scott spends time talking about the relationship between time and film, and moves onto discussing how our brains perceive time and how it mimics the act of watching a film. That’s some heavy shit that draws upon the literary works of… I don’t even remember… Metz? Althusser? Barthes? I think I need to go back to my old film books.

Anywho, if you have time, check out A.O. Scott’s thoughts on La Jetee here. If anyone is brave enough to watch this film, I can lend you my copy of it (Criterion Collection WHAT!).

La Jetee

If I had Four Dromedaries…
Chris Marker, 1966

1988, 20:15 min, color, sound

In Japanese and French.

Presently I don’t have much in the way of words worth sharing, so the following two faces will have to do for now (just to prove that this blog still has a pulse):

From Marker’s Sans soleil (1983).

From Eisenstein’s The General Line/Old and New (1929).

If the five sides of the pentagon seem impregnable, attack the sixth side.” — Zen proverb

Forty years ago, during the U.S. mayhem in Vietnam, one of the first books I taught was Norman Mailer’s autobiographical “nonfiction novel” The Armies of the Night (1968), in part about the massive antiwar demonstration that proceeded from the Lincoln Memorial to the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1967. Chris Marker and François Reichenbach’s documentary La sixième face du pentagone covers this event. The French filmmakers, journalistically amidst and spiritually amongst the protestors, thus created the footage for their eyewitness account. Marker cinematographed and also composed the commentary. I assume it is he whose voiceover narration we hear.
     The day before, people at phones mobilize for the peace march; nearly a thousand draft cards, we are informed, “will be solemnly deposited” at the Department of Justice. A largely apathetic university campus turns activist, in the name of academic freedom, when officials overreact to a student peace demonstration. Marker summarizes this remarkable expansion of radicalization as we witness an on-campus ocean of student faces: “It is from universities such as this one that demonstrators took off for Washington, some already having made their choice, the others siding with them, but all conscious politically.” The film is indeed greater because it begins a day early.
     The absent hero the next day is Che Guevara, whose death less than two weeks earlier elicits now a moment of silence. Marker: “[Che] is the common denominator for the battle against the Vietnam War, for the revolt of the [black Americans], for solidarity with the Third World, for the will to transform society.” What is even more stirring here than the mythologizing of Guevara, which is stirring enough to make one’s heart burst, is the expansiveness of vision that relates a single peace demonstration to the antiwar movement it is a part of and to other political movements, activities and impulses this is akin to, assisting in the creation of historical testimony to the flush of political possibilities at that moment that can help future generations understand the withdrawal into reactionaryism subsequent to the soon-after Leftist failures in both France and the United States. This film ranges brilliantly beyond what the filmmakers wanted or could possibly know at the time, clarifying the imminent massacres of hope, and anticipating what would become a central theme in Marker’s cinema: the failure of the Left, its causes and consequences. Indeed, the spectacle of the clubbing of Oct. 21 demonstrators, in restrospect, gives one an awful premonition—and, ironically, it restores their resistance.
     For those of a certain age, the sights and sounds of that day now strike nostalgic and poignant chords: the invocation by the Yale University chaplain; Peter, Paul & Mary singing; speeches; past celebrities; pacifist pantomime shows. (Marker: “If you give the military all the power to defend you, who will give you the power to defend you against the military?”) It is a dynamic day. The film captures that; ah, but it does much more than that. In our hearts it revives the audacity of hope.

Perhaps because he gave it expansive treatment in his 1977 Le fond de l’air est rouge, Chris Marker nowhere mentions in the alternately glib and thoughtful commentary in his depressing documentary partly about filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin’s rocky relationship with the Soviet state, Le tombeau d’Alexandre, a critical source of his sourness vis-à-vis Soviet history and Sovietism: the failed outcome of revolutionary sparks in Paris in May 1968, itself proceeding from the divorce the previous year of France’s socialist and communist factions. Indeed, do we not see a trace of the shadow of this behind the premise of the film that is being called The Last Bolshevik in the States? Medvedkin, about whom he made his brilliant 1971 documentary Le train en marche, chided Marker for not writing him more often; one reason that Marker did not may have been the humiliating blows that Marker suffered because of Leftism’s failure at home. This new film of his about Medvedkin, begun after Medvedkin’s death in 1989 and amidst and after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, is framed as a series of six letters to his deceased friend, with an entr’acte, between letters three and four, featuring a cat (of course!), huge in closeup, catnapping on the keys of a piano, with one paw occasionally striking a key—for us, silently: whether an image of the U.S.S.R. or of idealists, like Medvedkin, resisting the reality of the U.S.S.R. I’m not quite sure. But you know what Freud might say: Sometimes a cat is just a cat.
     One of those interviewed for the film, writer-actor Viktor Dyomin, summarizes Medvedkin’s situation as “the tragedy of a pure communist in a world of would-be communists.” It turns out that Medvedkin, feeling alienated, however, tried his best to “fit in” so that he could continue to make films. Ranging well beyond the launching example that the director of Schastye (1934) provides, though, Marker homes in on the relationship between Stalin’s Russia and filmmakers and on images that Soviet films fashioned to replace a Soviet reality that was drab, and worse. Some images attempted to rewrite Soviet history; but Marker is just plain wrong about the Odessa Steps massacre in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925), as I have previously explained: “Eisenstein’s fiction remains true to political circumstance in Russia. His fabricated event captures the cruelty and oppressiveness of tsarist rule, creating for these a stark, fiercely lit metaphor.” One does not blame the poet for telling, or showing, the truth so compellingly that viewers mistake it for fact. There was no intention of deceiving—only a successful attempt to get to the heart of the matter.

Poetic weight for a dreary day, courtesy of Chris, Serge and Rainer Maria.

From Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1983).

Unidentified images are printed on the retina; unknown events happen fatally; spoken words become the secret code of an impossible self-knowledge. These private moments are the primitive scene of the cinephile, the scene in which he wasn’t present although it was exclusively about him. In the way Paulhan speaks about literature as an experience of the world ‘when we are not there’ and Lacan speaks about ‘what is missing from its place’. The cinephile is the one who keeps his eyes wide open in vain but will not tell anybody that he could not see a thing. He is the one preparing for a life as a professional ‘watcher’, as a way to make up for being late, as slowly as possible. (Serge Daney, “The Tracking Shot in Kapo’’)

And we: spectators, always everywhere, looking at all of that, never beyond! It fills us too full. We set it right. It disintegrates. We set it right again and we disintegrate too. (Rainer Maria Rilke, Duino Elegies)

Written and directed by Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon, the daughter of French photojournalist Denise Bellon, Le souvenir d’un avenir takes its title from a poem by Claude Roy, who had died a few years earlier. The film is dedicated to Roy and to actress/playwright Loleh Bellon, Yannick’s younger sister, who had died even more recently. (Childhood photos show the two girls “always together”—and they remained so.) It consists almost entirely of their mother’s photographs—although an inserted sliver of archival film footage has the effect of the single bit of motion in Marker’s La jetée (1962), which otherwise consists of stills. That film involves a mind-trip to the future in order to grasp and redeem the past; this one, set in the past, is full of anticipation of darker days to come in the Second World War. It goes back in time, then, to look forward a little—say, back to 1938 to look ahead to 1940. However, the “look back” to Denise Bellon’s photographic record valuably reclaims some of the past that might otherwise be lost to us. A 1944 attempt to conquer Franco in Spain—Republican forces had surrendered to Franco in 1939—was documented by Bellon’s camera. The commentary notes that the failure of this post-Spanish Civil War Republican attempt devastated Spain’s Communist Party, adding: “These photographs are perhaps the only trace [of the event] that remains for history.” Victors write history—and, when advantageous, suppress it.
     Identifying Surrealists (though not all) with love of freedom, the film is framed by two Surrealist exhibitions in Paris, in 1938, with the war coming, and 1947, with the war over. Time is put on hold; the Olympics to be held in Helsinki in 1940 were because of the war delayed until 1952. An image of gas masks intended for fresh use invites this comment: “France is still preparing for World War I”—a forward look to the backwardness that in some sense always attaches itself to war. In Finland, which is readying for war, “pacifist forces are hunted down.” Survivors of the First World War “testify to what war did to them,” the commentator notes, adding, “Everyone knows what followed.” “Europe was to program its own suicide.” Look, outdoors, at these celebrants; from our vantage, their upbeat mood seems “empty.” They “will leave a field for the exterminators.”
     The filmmakers weave together Bellon family history, French national history, world history, renewing the excitement of early photojournalism. Long-distance aircraft and “the compact, professional camera” coincided; the photojournalist’s camera acquired a responsible role, “capturing the moment, discovering the world.” A wonderful long passage coordinates Denise’s photographs in French Colonial Africa: “She saw the work in the forest. She followed the cycle of exploitation in the diamond mines.” Continent-crashing, withering irony: “The literacy campaign in black Africa is finding a practical application: reading the posters for army mobilization—the same ones being put up in towns all over France.” Europe drew “recruits” from Africa, its back yard. An official replacement there, the commentator notes, had it not occurred “might have changed the course of the war.” In France, look at the field of donated and accumulated scrap metal: future bullets. See the dark passageways leading to future “hiding places” for the Resistance. Everything looks ahead—to uncertainty. Every face is a prisoner of time.
     The closing photograph, humorous, chills: Surrealists—participants in the 1947 exhibit—outdoors together, each one wearing an identical mask. The recent past gave them much to hide from—and they are looking at us.
     In 2001, Yannick Bellon was 77; Marker, 80.

La Jetée, as defined by Chris Marker, is neither a film, nor video, nor even an essay; instead, its own title sequence defines it as follows: ‘un photo-roman.’

If my limited knowledge of the French language serves me, Marker’s calling La Jetée ‘a picture book.’ Now, it might be my stream of consciousness or my stream of craziness writing this here and now, but whenever I hear picture book, my mind tends to drift towards the fantastic, of worlds decidedly beyond our own and of boundless imagination, the fictional, and in this case the science fictional.

My mind similarly drifts towards and invokes memories of childhood, of the first stories being encountered as those told not by means of reading a given text, but by the oral and visual experience of seeing, first-hand, the story play out in snapshots forwarded by the narration of my father over the book’s images.

And this is precisely where the narrative of La Jetée begins — with a memory, an image, from one’s childhood. A series of still photographs make up a memory, sparse in their continuity but organized so as to function in a linear fashion. Marker’s narrative guides us through the proverbial picture book of the mind’s eye — the fragmented nature of recall, of the own edits we impose perhaps partially selectively and others which disappear into the caverns of our consciousness.

I have long thought that our minds store the minimum amount necessary, only those moments (or images, in this case) necessary to complete the whole. If we were to recall every second of any given memory, surely our process of recall would be overlong and perhaps even mundane, whereas when we think back about an event, moments are encased in sensations that act as descriptors (ie. sight, sound, smell, etc.). Senses bind us to a moment, an instant — senses fill in the gaps of a moment, extend the memory by means of the complexities inherent in each sense; no sense is an instantaneous process, after all.

And perhaps this is what I love best about La Jetée, which is that it illustrates so elegantly how a picture might be worth a thousand words, that even a single image (in contrast to twenty-four frames per second) can be overwhelming in the detail it can communicate in five sustained seconds. It goes without saying that the perfect example of this contrast is held in the single, perfect moment of motion featured in La Jetée, when the woman appears to wake from the science fiction web of memory, the proverbial picture book that Marker has a stranger narrate for us. The image becomes real, a thing which a picture book by all restraints cannot do, except by means of imagination. The viewer either misses it entirely, mistakes it for an illusion or becomes so utterly taken aback that he or she might seize up in disbelief. Movement becomes shocking, alarming, overwhelming even. Either way, the power of a single image is made clear.

So, too, a single image serves as a vortex of sorts — an endless spiral as in Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, a mesmerizing abstraction which traps the viewer in time. Or, rather, does looking at the image, engaging in the ferocity of nostalgia place oneself outside of the rings left by dendrochronology at a place on the outskirts of time? Does time spent reminiscing become stored in the same way as that original time does? Is a memory made of recall? Or… is time spent in rueful recollection time not worth remembering; uncollected, uncategorized, unavailable to the conscious mind?

I’ll let you know if I sit down today, tomorrow or a time in the coming years and remember the time that I remembered the time that I remembered the time that I remembered the time that I remembered the time and so on into infinity, when I look back into the picture book of my memories, the snapshots of the significant, those most special of days that deigned to be documented and fall away from time.

New in at Cinema Books: The Personal Camera Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film by Laura Rascaroli, $25.00 paper. Exploration of the essayist film with examples from the work of Chris Marker and Jean-Luc Godard and  Harun Farocki.  The the personal cinema is examined: the diary film of Aleksandr Sokurov, and the notebook film of Pier Paolo Pasolini. What is authorship and spectatorship and the state of subjectivity today?

2084: Video clip pour une réflexion syndicale et pour le plaisir
Fr. 10 min

I presonaggi enigmatici, si sà, tendono già di per sè a nutrire un culto, con tanto di adepti e venerazione per la loro opera. Chris Marker – all’anagrafe Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve – l’appellativo di enigmatico se lo merita, almeno tanto quanto se lo possa permettere Thomas Pynchon in letteratura, nonostante la sostanziale antitesi artistica. Solo che a differenza del noto scrittore post-moderno, Marker non ha mai avuto apparizioni celebri ne ‘I Simpsons’ e non è ricordato per siparietti divertenti come il rifiuto di ritirare di persona un premio prestigioso come il National Book Award. Ma insieme Pynchon – e i più grandi artisti in generale – è conosciuto e vissuto dai suoi seguaci soprattutto per la sua poliedrica materia di interesse, capace di stuzzicare la mente di intellettuali e artisti che altrimenti non avrebbero punti di contatto. Inoltre, viene menzionato poco, anche dal giro del cinema settario e di nicchia, forse per una forma cinematografica esteticamente difficile come il documentario o forse per il semplice fatto di essere un uomo che ha sempre prediletto il ruolo dell’osservatore borderline colto e curioso, piuttosto che quello del cineasta critico ed egocentrico (come, ad esempio, poteva esserlo il grande Pier Paolo Pasolini). Nasce in un sobborgo di Parigi e prima di approdare al cinema, è scrittore e giornalista. Scrive di tutto (poesie, racconti, articoli) e ha modo di studiare filosofia con Jean-Paul Sartre, anche se la sua erudizione poi si intensifica viaggiando per mezzo mondo in veste di traduttore per conto dell’Unesco; grazie a questa grande fortuna – e confrontandosi con luoghi e persone anche lontani dalla propaganda occidentalista dell’epoca – ha modo di maturare quel punto di vista analitico e profondo che sarà costante di tutta la sua opera di cinema Veritè. Nel corso della sua vita instaura amicizie importanti e non casuali in ambito cinematografico, persone con le quali si relazionerà anche in campo artistico, dedicandovi dei film (i grandi Andrei Tarkovsky e Akira Kurosawa) o collaborandone alla realizzazione (Alain Resnais). Forse proprio per la sua vicinanza a Resnais, con il quale condivide la concezione di un tempo non lineare (si ricordi ‘Lo Scorso Anno A Marienbad’), Marker viene accostato ai registi della Nouvelle Vague e ricordato come uno dei maggiori rappresentanti, anche se il suo è un contesto che esula gli stretti spazi dettati da mode o manifesti artistici: sarebbe come dire che Philip K. Dick è *solo* uno scrittore di fantascienza. Il suo modus di raccolta informazioni e di assemblarle in commentari giornalistici è simile ad un flusso di coscienza a la James Joyce – ma calzerebbe più Marcel Proust -, in cui la speculazione filosofica di stampo ampiamente relativista si concilia perfettamente con riferimenti culturali non banali: una scrittura in cui la sensorialità di Marker sconfina con l’oggettività e l’oggetto viene preso per come viene sperimentato e vissuto da Marker stesso. Egli è uomo ossessionato dalle modalità secondo cui una società si trasforma e dal come gli usi e i pensieri delle persone si evolvano tenendo conto dell’ambiente circostante, in una ricerca storico-antropologica che continua da sempre e che gli ha permesso di sviscerare nel profondo diverse culture a cominciare da quella nipponica, per la quale nutre una vera e propria ossessione e alla quale dedica due delle sue opere più importanti (‘Sans Soleil’, ‘Level Five’). Oltre al saggio documentario, che costituisce gran parte della sua opera, egli ha prodotto poche opere di fiction e senza dubbio la più nota – e quella che lo ha consacrato in qualche modo al grande pubblico – rimarrà per sempre ‘La Jetée’ del 1962: un fotometraggio di mezz’ora in cui Marker racconta una delle più belle storie fantascientifiche mai congegnate, talmente superlativa che Terry Gilliam ne avrebbe realizzato un convincente remake trent’anni dopo con ‘12 Monkeys’. Simile ad una fiaba psicologica e futurista, è al contempo una sorta di ‘Vertigo’ fantascientifico, in cui la sequenzialità degli eventi viene stravolta/ritorta su sè stessa e forse non è un caso che la scena del Sequoia Park nel film di Alfred Hitchcock venga citata sia da Marker (‘Sans Soleil’) quanto da Gilliam, proprio in ‘12 Monkeys’. A tal proposito è bello ricordare la citazione di Tarkovsky presente sul sito del cineasta a proposito dei viaggi del tempo, che ribadisce come la fantascienza e il futuribile non rappresentino nient’altro che le paure e le aspettative dell’uomo per il futuro e che l’incontro con gli alieni potrebbe essere semplicemente un confronto con i nostri discendenti venuti a farci visita da un futuro remoto.

FILMOGRAFIA ESSENZIALE:

Les Statues Meurent Aussi (1953) – Opera seconda di Marker, in collaborazione con Resnais, che parla del valore che attribuiamo alle statue di culture africane, un tempo sacre per i popoli che le hanno forgiate e ora trapassate a forma d’arte; è anche una profonda riflessione sulla Morte, che già prefigura gli sviluppi delle opere successive: “quando gli uomini muoiono diventano storia, quando le statue muoiono diventano arte.” Con Resnais anche il successivo ‘Nuit Et Brouillard’.

La Jetée (1962) – Cosa dire ancora di uno dei cortometraggi più incredibili mai realizzati? Parlare di una semplice storia di fantascienza sarebbe riduttivo; piuttosto, potremmo tranquillamente parlare della rappresentazione di una concezione sullo spazio-tempo in cui il relativismo diventa pilastro su cui fondare una nuova logica dell’esistenza umana. Da visionare con cura, nonostante sia probabile giungere alla fine sfiniti, e non solo per il montaggio sferragliante.

Le Joli Mai (1963) – Un film che analizza la condizione degli uomini d’Europa di quegli anni e che parla di come viene vissuta la felicità individuale, inpendentemente dal background sociale di ciascuna persona. La prima parte ruota attorno a contesti privati e strettamente relativi alle vite dei singoli, la seconda si apre a riflessioni più ampie e altisonanti, prendendo in esame, tra le altre cose, i tumulti parigini del 1962. Si interroga sul significato e la necessità del denaro, vent’anni prima che Auriti parlasse di signoraggio in Italia.

Le Fond De L’Air Est Rouge (1977) - Uno dei film più politicamente espliciti di Marker, che comunque non si concede mai ad ammissioni personali o prese di posizione nette e scontate; è un film che parla sull’ascesa e la caduta della nuova sinistra in Francia a cavallo tra gli anni ‘60 e ‘70, del divario tra le diverse fazioni che vi si agitavano al suo interno e del loro ruolo in relazione alla contrapposizione internazionale tra i due blocchi. Va inteso come saggio storico di valore innestimabile sull’argomento.

Sans Soleil (1983) – Un documentario che racchiude tutte le caratterstiche dello stile di Marker. Antropologia, filosofia e cronachismo dosati con la maestria dei migliori giornalisti, in cui inconsapevolmente emerge anche il rapporto del regista con la macchina da presa. Una summa anche a livello di temi: il Giappone, la Storia e la Cultura, come se fosse la cosa più semplice del monto coniugare cose tanto stratificate. Roba da veri globetrotter.

A.K. (1985) – Pellicola che si giostra lo spazio tra il set di ‘Ran’ e le impressioni, le idee e la caratterizzazione di colui che può tranquillamente venir ricordato come il più grande regista nipponico: Akira Kurosawa. Un film che parla di un altro film, certo, ma forse si tratta del migliore nel suo genere e uno dei rarissimi che assurge la forma del making-of ad Arte. L’altro film che Marker dedicherà ad un altro regista è ‘Une Journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch’, in onore di Tarkovsky.

Level 5 (1996) – Qui il regista francese porta all’esasperazione l’idea che i significati abbiano una stratificazione a livelli e che anche la lettura della Storia stessa si strutturi alla stessa maniera. Partendo da una simulazione al computer della battaglia di Okinawa (c’è sempre stato un forte interesse per la tecnologia in Marker), si parla di come possa essere classificato l’esistente e di come la Storia rappresenti un’oggettività relativa di quello che è stato. “Okinawa Mon Amour”, parafrasando Resnais.

After watching Inglourious Basterds last week, I skimmed through a few films I was referring to in my review and felt that Tarantino’s movie, its last chapter in particular, refers to them in a manner slightly deeper than mentioned. What I present here may be plainly speculative, but the very fact that Tarantino’s film retains enough ambiguity to generate such arguments makes the film one to be celebrated. Inglourious Basterds, more than any other movie, seems to be closest to Jean Luc Godard’s History of Cinema (1988-98). If one considers Godard’s film as a classroom lesson in cinema (Why not? The movie even resembles an office presentation!), then Tarantino’s movie is a student project (that would easily get an A+) based on that lesson. It seems that everything that the French discusses in his video anthology is absorbed and blended cleverly into a mainstream flick by Tarantino. For the sake of simplicity, I lift and reproduce the same lines from my post on Godard’s film to compare it with Inglourious Basterds.

“If we had to single out Godard’s most favorite quote it has to be the misattributed Bazin one: “The cinema, substitutes for our gaze a world that corresponds to our desires”. And this is where the series kicks off. Cinema as a substitute for our dreams – the dream factory. Godard explores the meaning of “dream” as interpreted by the two functioning extremes of cinema then. He presents the occident interpretation as one that had converted cinema into a portal offering an alternate reality, a second life, to the audience whose “dreams” were the fodder for the larger-than-life images that the films projected -one that continues till date.”

Tarantino’s film, on a basic level, as the director himself confesses, is a form of wish fulfillment. As with his other films, Inglourious Basterds unfolds as a revenge saga. But by situating his plot amidst real life events, unlike its predecessors, Tarantino is able to involve his audience more and provide better justification to the characters’ actions, rather than dealing with simple morality.

“[Godard] argues that cinema could have prevented unfortunate tragedies and averted genocides rather than merely crying over damages dealt and observing helplessly the misery of its subjects.”

Here, Tarantino seems to deviate. He seems to be of the opinion that cinema, perhaps all art, can’t ever change the world (unless, of course, you consider the way he uses it in the movie!). Proof? Take a look around. What it can do is to change the image of the world when it is passed onto a new generation.

“And in resonance with this ideology, instead of bemoaning what is lost and what could have been, Godard anticipates the death of cinema (He apparently asked Henri Langlois to burn the archives). Death, so that it can rise again from the ashes. “Art is like fire. Born from what it burns.” says Godard and that is precisely what he desires – Cinema to go down with all its exploitations and restrictions and rise in its purest form. Back to infancy, so that it can learn everything out of free will, without rules and without vanity.”

This is exactly what Marcel does when he burns the films – destroying those exploitative propagandist films of the Nazis and perhaps also those WW2 films that insist upon being loyal to reality and hence impotent. With the fire at the cinema hall that flips conventional reality, Tarantino places us at the beginning of a new history – of cinema (courtesy Tarantino) and of the world (courtesy Marcel).

“Godard attempts to reconstruct history as seen in retrospect. He utilizes existing film fragments to fabricate various histories of film – the one that was and the ones that weren’t but could have been. He examines how cinema could have been made independent of historical accounts and even made to influence them.”

This theory seems to form the core of Inglourious Basterds. Why should art ever trail history? As Bazin would say, Realism in cinema should just be the means, not the end itself. Tarantino, like Godard, sure can’t change history, but, at least, he can examine the history – again, of cinema and of the world – that could have been.

“Godard elucidates this servile relation that cinema bears to history using images of dictators and authoritarians. He highlights how the visual medium itself is being manipulated by a few people in power and how in turn, modern cinema manipulates the audience. Godard reproaches this moral policing and expresses his disapproval of the hypnosis that the TV-driven audience is subjected to. He appeals for a cinema that provokes but doesn’t direct, a cinema that gives you options but doesn’t select one, a cinema that makes you think and doesn’t think for you and a cinema that is only complete with its audience. As he quotes in one of the segments, “Cinema does not cry. Cinema does not comfort us. It is with us. It is us”.”

Tarantino, also, fills the film with fascists who seem to be exploiting the medium for questionable purposes. Goebbels’ film, like many a mainstream film that are made by another kind of fascists, has manipulated reality and wants its audience to buy that as truth. And Shoshanna’s film (like Tarantino’s) is what Godard seems to be wanting in place of Goebbels’.

“There is an intriguing recurrence of the image of human hands in the film. Godard urges artists to think with their hands – their real tools that have the potency to both create and destroy, to beautify and to horrify, to document and to change. He argues that these are the instruments capable of changing and redefining history and it is the weakness of the mind that hinders the possibility.”

Marcel, who had ‘created’ the small film with Shoshanna, is the one who would be setting fire to the pile of nitrate films. Tarantino, too, highlights his hand as he flicks the cigarette on to the heap – the hand that went from mere documentation of reality to direction of reality.

Brandon Colvin is of the opinion that Inglourious Basterds is primarily a comedy. I’m going to take a diametrically opposite path and say that this movie, when reduced to its human elements, stripped of all its film references and modernist facets, is a tragedy with a martyr called Shoshanna at its heart. The word ‘tragedy’ is often used loosely and seems to denote every tale that has a pathetic, miserable and depressing outcome. But, surely, Tragedy does not base itself upon emotions. In fact, it is quite the opposite. A tale is said to be tragic when two morally unquestionable and righteous forces are made to clash and a situation evolves when one of them has to let go of its stance, despite all convictions and emotions for the greater good. Tragedy is always the result of a choice that calls for a great sacrifice to go with it. As they say, it is our choices that define us. And a tragic choice defines us for life – either as a hero or as a coward (“merely human” would be the euphemism). Sansho the Bailiff (1954), even with its heavy pathos, is a melodrama whereas The Dark Knight (2008), despite its uplifting upshot, remains a tragedy. Shoshanna could well have married Zoller and led a very content life. Instead, she repudiates that path and takes up the task of liberating the Jews at the cost of her own life. Tarantino, apart from using Ennio Morricone’s moving piece Un Amico, employs mythological and historical iconographies to underline the magnitude of this tragedy.

The final chapter of Inglourious Basterds has got to be the densest that Tarantino has ever filmed. The chapter is ambiguously titled “Revenge of the Giant Face” as if recalling some B-movie from the 50s. But more than that, it seems to me now, it tries to allude to two of the most iconic “giant faces” of women that we know. The first would be that of Maria Falconetti in Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) – a film that is constructed out of hundreds of such giant faces. The tale of Joan of Arc by itself is a tragedy in which Joan sacrifices a normal life for the good of her people, much like Shoshanna, who, too, goes down in flames at the end of her journey. Only that Shoshanna doesn’t just suffer and prefers to take all of them down along with her. And then there is the most dreaded giant head in Greek mythology – that of Medusa the Gorgon – a mere gaze into whose eyes is supposed to petrify you. Daniel Ogden (source: Wikipedia) describes this stare of Medusa’s as “seemingly looking out from its own iconographical context and directly challenging the viewer”. Now, the Nazi officers in the final chapter are watching a fictional film, seated safely away from real life action, without any apparent threat from the images on the screen. When Shoshanna slips in her own film, with her gaze directed towards the Nazis, she essentially “looks out of context of the movie”, challenging, literally, the viewers, in a manner in which the modernist director used their actors, and petrifying them by dragging them out of their passive state.

But then, our ideas about these two iconic characters are derived only through images and shadows – through paintings, through Dreyer’s film and through textual accounts. As George Steiner put it, “It is not the literal past that rules us. It is images of the past.” With the passage of time, history and mythology mingle to such an extent that it becomes virtually impossible to separate them. In Chris Marker’s magnum opus The Owl’s Legacy (1989), Jean-Pierre Vernant illustrates the mythos behind this practice of image (which is a word that referred to doubles, miniatures, copies and ghosts in general in Ancient Greece, the land of tragedies) creation. He tells us that images, for Ancient Greeks, were a means of facing man’s worst fears by reducing them down to caricatures. In Medusa’s case, this meant that they could see her directly in the eyes (a la Perseus who used a mirror – an image creating device – to slay her) and subsequently use these images to intimidate enemies. In Vernant’s own words: “So there is a way, though images and through stories of disarming the horror of death that the monstrous face expresses and which the image carries out so that what can’t be seen can be depicted in many ways” (recalling Godard’s quote about movies in History of Cinema: “How marvelous to be able to look at what we cannot see.”)

In the final chapter of Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino absorbs these images of dead characters from tragedies in mythology and history, blends it with the “image” of the tragic Shoshanna, who too is now dead, and, in essence, creates a mythology (Shoshanna the martyr) and history (Shoshanna the WW2 hero) of his own. Now, this is not far from what he does with his other characters in his movies, wherein he imbibes mythos and facts from within cinematic history to create new ones for his own characters. Only that, in Inglourious Basterds, his canvas seems to have expanded, with his universe transgressing boundaries defined by the history of cinema.  Furthermore, Tarantino uses the images of the movie – his Medusa mask – to “look at what he cannot see” in reality. Throughout the movie, he keeps attacking Hitler’s “image”. He depicts Hitler as a weak and paranoid individual with vermin like attributes. When he kills him in the final shootout, it is the “image” of Hitler that he wants to kill (much like the mentality behind voodoo and effigy-burning practices), for he can’t kill him in reality – exactly the same thing that Florya (Aleksei Kravchenko) does in Come and See (1985) when he fires at a photograph of Hitler in an attempt to undo the images of history, if not history itself.

In The Conformist (1970), Bertolucci equates the fascists with Plato’s prisoners of the cave, suggesting that they are blinded by fake ideologies fuelled by personal insecurities. In The Owl’s Legacy, Marker equates the audience in the cinema hall (citing Simone Weil) to those prisoners, proposing that they are blinded by images they see on screen and take them for reality. In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino combines both these notions and presents us Nazis watching movies in a cinema hall. These “blind” Nazis enjoy the massacre that Zoller is doing on the screen, assuming that this is how it was. Zoller, on the other hand, is the only person there who knows it wasn’t so and leaves the cinema hall, breaking free from one of the captive caves he is occupying. Additionally, Tarantino does not forget to free his audience from the chains of their cave. Like it was done in Bertolucci’s film, he keeps reminding us that we are watching a movie and whatever we are seeing is a mere paining on a plastic canvas (contrary to what other films on historical subjects want us to believe). In chapter two, Raine, seated at the centre of an arrangement that resembles a Greek theater, tells the captured Nazi officer that “watching Danny beat the Nazis to death is the closest we ever get to going to the movies”. Raine seems to know that he is just the shadow of a man placed on a simple image. And because he regularly attempts to remind us of the fakery of it all, Tarantino’s violence also helps to serve the same purpose – to try to disengage us from whatever is depicted on cinema screen even when it is unmitigated and concrete. As the movie’s title confesses, its all a fraud and a very beautiful one at that.

[The Conformist (1970)]

[The Owl's Legacy (1989)]

(Images Courtesy: Imaginary Year, Hellenica)

Pour le profane il est bon de dire que contrairement à ce que son nom pourrait laisser supposer (il s’agit en réalité d’un pseudonyme), Chris Marker est bel et bien français. Aujourd’hui âgé de 88 ans, notre ami Christian Bouche-Villeneuve (de son vrai nom, beaucoup moins glamour je vous l’accorde) est un touche-à-tout génial qui a surtout opéré du côté du documentaire dont Une journée d’Andreï Arsenevitch que j’ai évoqué dans Un monde de cinéma récemment. La jetée a rapidement suscité l’engouement des cinéphiles par l’originalité de son approche et assura à son auteur une renommée internationale.

Ce qu’il faut préciser d’emblée avant d’aborder la film en lui-même c’est que La jetée est un court-métrage d’une durée légèrement inférieure à la demie heure. Mais la notoriété du film ne réside bien entendu pas là. Composée (quasi) uniquement à partir d’images fixes, cette Jetée joue  donc sur un registre extrêmement audacieux. Cela commence ainsi, une voix-off lit le texte suivant: “Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance. La scène qui le troubla par sa violence, et dont il ne devait comprendre que beaucoup plus tard la signification, eut lieu sur la grande jetée d’Orly, quelques années avant la début de la Troisième Guerre Mondiale”. Cette guerre a bien eu lieu et les survivants vivent désormais sous terre. Les scientifiques ennemis, que l’on entend guère que marmonner (en allemand pour faire très original), expérimentent sur les prisonniers. Notre héros est retenu grâce à ce souvenir très distinct évoqué plus haut. Il effectue plusieurs voyages dans le passé et retrouve la femme dont l’image l’a marqué à jamais. Ils discutent, sympathisent tout en étant étrangers l’un à l’autre. L’homme disparaît au gré des envies des scientifiques. Alors qu’on lui propose un voyage dans l’avenir, il refuse, arguant qu’il préfère vivre dans le monde de son enfance, celui d’avant-guerre. Il se retrouve adulte sur la jetée d’Orly, celle de son souvenir. Il cherche la femme, la voit puis court vers elle. Et Négroni, la voix-off, de conclure: “Lorsqu’il reconnut l’homme qui l’avait suivi depuis le camp souterrain, il comprit qu’on ne s’évadait pas du Temps, et que cet instant qu’il lui avait été donné de voir enfant, et qui n’avait pas cessé de l’obséder, c’était celui de sa propre mort”.

L’audace de Chris Marker et l’originalité de l’histoire concourent toutes deux à faire de La jetée une œuvre majeure. Cette science-fiction tragique a inventé un nouveau langage cinématographique qui lie économie (maximale) de moyens à la force du récit et prouve s’il en était besoin que jamais un budget ne fait le film. On suggère aux oreilles, on assène aux yeux. C’est proprement à pleurer, beau comme jamais. Ce film inspira le 12 Monkeys de Terry Gilliam dont on retrouve la quasi-totalité des éléments parmi lesquels l’hommage non dissimulé à Vertigo. La jetée ou comment faire d’une œuvre d’une demie heure constituée uniquement d’images fixes un poème noir, épique et renversant.

Talk about shooting a picture. Is this what they mean when they say  Cinema can be used as a weapon? Who knows, this may just make its way into the next Tarantino movie!

“This may be the only working example of Medvedkin’s camera which he invented while working at the front. He’d had this extraordinary idea. He needed soldiers who’d agree to serve as cameramen. He chose volunteers from the disciplinary battalions. Choosing these battalions was a shrewd move since, like Stalin’s camps, they recruited mostly educated people: Civil engineers, teachers, lecturers… people who already had the basics of technical knowledge. Teaming up in twos or threes, they would sneak up the rear of the German lines and achieve some incredible feats: Two men would capture a German as the third would film the operation.”

- Nikolai Izvolov explaining Medvedkin’s wartime invention in The Last Bolshevik (1992).