Posts from — December 2008

“Travel between the extremes.” – Daedelus to Icarus [Ovid, Metamorphosis, Book VIII]

Once focused on the lofty institutional market, Icarus Films, located in Brooklyn, New York, has followed the destiny of its name and opened its Home Video online shop, with a high concentration of Chris Marker DVDs. The CM page is located at homevideo.icarusfilms.com[...]. This site is currently offering the following:

1. The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004)
2. Remembrance of Things to Come (2001)
3. The Last Bolshevik (1993)
4. The Sixth Side of The Pentagon (1967)

In addition, these titles are listed but not as yet available, confirming rumors of important upcoming DVD releases:

1. One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999)
2. A Grin Without A Cat (1977)
3. À bientot, j’espère (1968)

The Case of the Grinning Cat includes Chris Marker’s Bestiary (1994) and Three Cheers for the Whale (1972). The Sixth Side of the Pentagon includes The Embassy (1973). Sale prices for DVDs currently range from $24.95 to $29.95. The site also includes short video excerpts.

By the good graces of M. Bookmite, we have received scans of an article that emerged around the time of the release of Immemory in the journal artpress. So here we offer a first on the site—a pdf. No big deal, really, but perhaps the beginning of an archive within an archive, built the way bees would build—hexagonally. We’ll see. In any case, we offer you Louis-José Lestocart, “CHRIS MARKER cinéaste du je et de la vérité / Truth, First Person Singular,” artpress 224 (May 1997), 48-51, in French and English.

The ocular and mental vertigo of La Jetée: a man navigates from past to future, around a central point to which the editing brings him constantly back, into a world of fixity, of the partitioning of space which, visually, by its immobility (the filmed still photographs) refuses Time. [...] Immemory is a CD-ROM containing the history of a character who is none other than Chris Marker himself. In this relating of his personal history, Marker goes one step further with the experiment begun in Zapping Zone, a series of videos of people he knew and loved, a Mnemosyne divided up into zones that were like islands, archipelagos, deserts, overpopulated lands, continents and terra incongnita. Immemory is a laboratory of the future and of survival and, as in La Jetée, constitutes a profoundly involving experience for the user.

For those interested in pursuing further the long & esoteric history of the art of memory—touched on by Marker in the “liner notes” to Immemory and explored a bit more in this article—may we suggest you visit our recently updated page “Documemory: A Bibliography [§ E: Rhetoric & the Art of Memory].

“Moscow on the Move” will present a “slightly modified version” of Chris Marker’s installation The Hollow Men at the Garage Center for Contemporary Arts in Moscow. More information (for those who read Russian – ours is so rusty it won’t run right now and is therefore parked in the aforementioned garage) is available at garageccc.com.

Other artists on the program include Dziga Vertov, Doug Aitken, Cao Fei, Yang Fudong, Douglas Gordon, Alexander Kluge, Sarah Morris, Phillippe Parreno, Artavazd Peleshian, Pipilotti Rist and Agnes Varda.

P.S.: Thanks to Tom Luddy for the news.

Pacific Film Archive Notes

A woman, a computer, an invisible contact: this is where Marker’s new film begins. Laura’s job is to design a video game based on the battle of Okinawa, a tragedy little known in the West but which played a determining role in the outcome of World War II, in the postwar period, and even in our own day. But unlike classic strategy games, where the goal is to change the course of history, the aim of this game is to recreate the events of history exactly as they happened. Working on "Okinawa," Laura meets informers and actual witnesses of the battle (among them filmmaker Nagisa Oshima) on a mysterious Internet-like network. She gradually assembles pieces of the puzzle until one day they begin interfering with her life.

Written by Marker. Photographed by Marker, Gérard de Battista. With Catherine Belkhodja, Kenji Tokitsu, Nagisa Oshima. (106 mins)

Argos / Arte VHS Notes

LEVEL FIVE
un film de Chris Marker avec Catherine Belkhodja, la participation de Oshima Nagisa, Tokitsu Kenji, Ushiyama Ju’nishi et le témoignage du Révérend Shigeaki Kinjo

Une femme (Laura), un ordinateur, un interlocuteur invisible : tel est le dispositif à partir duquel LEVEL FIVE se construit. Cette femme a “hérité” d’une tâche : terminer l’écriture d’un jeu vidéo consacré à la bataille d’Okinawa – une tragédie pratiquement inconnue en Occident, mais dont le déroulement a joué un rôle décisif dans la façon dont la Deuxième Guerre mondiale s’est achevée, et même, on le verra, dans ce que fut l’après-guerre, dans ce qu’est notre présent.

Singulier jeu en vérité. A l’inverse des jeux de stratégie classiques dont le propos est de renverser le cours de l’Histoire telle qu’elle s’est accomplie. Mais en travaillant sur Okinawa, en rencontrant par l’intermeédiaire d’un mysterieux réseau parallèlle à Internet des informateurs et même des témoins de la bataillle (parmi le cinéaste Nagisa Oshima), Laura accumule les pièces de la tragédie, jusqu’au moment où elles commencent à interférer avec sa propre vie.

Comme tous les jeux vidéo, celui-ci avance par “niveau”. Laura et son interlocuteur, intoxiqués par leur entreprise, ont fini par en faire une métaphore de la vie elle-même, et distribuent des levels à tout ce qui les entoure. Atteindra-t-elle LEVEL FIVE ?

1997 · COULEURS · 106 MIN

For a perceptive essay on Level Five, see Andrew Tracy’s piece on Reverse Shot, from which we have gratefully borrowed the image used above.
«“I’ll have to give these images to my friend Chris one day, see if he can make any sense of them,” says Laura (Catherine Belkhodja), the protagonist of Level Five; “Chris, the editing wunderkind,” she slyly adds.»