lettre de sibérie (d. chris marker)

In the end I got to Letter to Siberia, as it seems Cinemateca discovered the print or restored it or something. It’s highly playful Marker, with jokes and cartoons and a beautifully executed version of the Kuleshov effect. The film is a voyage through Siberia as revealed from found footage. It takes us irreverently through the traditions, history, palaeontology and architecture of a region which is larger than the USA and scarcely known. A place where wooly mammoths can emerge whole from the permafrost, where the reindeer is source of nutrition, transport and much more. The film tells us a lot about Siberia, but it tells us just as much about the possibilities of the documentary, a medium that so often feels po-faced and awash with its own seriousness. We might detect the influence of Marker in the work of Varda, Herzog, Adam Curtis and Mariano Llinás, to name some whose use of the documentary seeks to go beyond the talking heads of pseudo authenticity.

la jetee (chris marker) & la sixiéme face du pentagone (chris marker & françois reichenbach)

I receive a phone call from an unknown number which turns out to be Cinemateca advising me that due to the state of the print of Lettre de Sibérie, they have had to change the program and will be showing La Jetée and La Sixiéme Face du Pentagone. This is the kind of personal service one could come to expect from one’s local cinema.

In truth I am delighted to be able to watch La Jetee, a film I have probably seen but never concentrated on. The breathtaking modernity is breathtakingly modern. The humour is a surprise. The existential chic is both vapid and profound as all the best existential chic should be. Marker constructs a story from stills, (there is one moment when the image moves), and in so doing he challenges our idea of what a film might be, whilst also taking us back to a pre-modern language of painting, where stories were assembled on walls to be read as a sequence. The technique allows the storyteller to include so much detail that it’s like reading a Borges story via a Godard movie via Pierro de la Francesca. Flashbacks, flash forwards, romance, terror, existential dread, jokes, they’re all there.

The Sixth Face of the Pentagon is a documentary about the day the hippies tried to storm the Pentagon. Marker’s film is about protest, the specific protest of that day, but it is also about change, and how even seemingly omnipotent organisations can be resisted. It is assembled from footage of an anti-Vietnam protest on October 21st, 1967, mostly filmed from behind the protestors’ lines, which gets right into the thick of the action. The police wear ties and wield clubs, but they seem light years away from the 21st robocops. The hippies, as well as chanting in a bid to make the Pentagon levitate, succeed in almost storming the main doors of the Pentagon, and one’s initial reaction is to think that this could never happen now. Now the hippies and the protestors would be mercilessly driven back and be kettled or clubbed to death before they even got in sight of the Pentagon. Then of course one thinks of the events of 06/01/20 and the laxness that permitted whatever the fuck happened there to happen, and perhaps one concludes that the right is now more of a revolutionary force than the left.