CHRIS MARKERS LEVEL FIVE The Hungarian philosopher and critic György Lukács, in his 1910 book “Soul and Form,” gave what is still today one of the simplest and most concrete understandings of the literary essay: “The essay is always concerned with something already formed, or at best, with something that has been; it is part of its essence that it does not draw something new out of an empty vacuum, but only gives a new order to such things as once lived. And because he only newly orders them, not forming something new out of the formless, he is bound to them; he must always speak ‘the truth’ about them, find, that is, the expression for their essence.” Eighty-two years later, Susan Sontag wrote: “An essay is not an article, not a meditation, not a book review, not a memoir, not a disquisition, not a diatribe, not a shaggy dog story, not a monologue, not a travel narrative, not a suite of aphorisms, not an elegy, not a piece of reportage, not a — No, an essay can be any or several of the above.” The work of French writer and director Chris Marker, the most formidable of cine-essayists, can be looked at in a similar manner. While his films, long and short and made over a 62 year period — he died in 2012 — always look and feel like nothing else that has come before or after, they exist within a long tradition of unclassifiable work. They stand outside of everything else, wandering in the shadows watching, giving a new order, as Lukács says, to things as once lived. Marker’s extraordinary work can be seen in a near complete retrospective at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, beginning August 15. The series opens with his 1996 film “Level 5,” screening in the United States for the first time. It is structured around the video testimonies of a character named Laura (Catherine Belkhodja), who sits in a studio surrounded by computer screens and books, and reflects on her relationship with a former lover, who disappeared while working on a video game based on the Battle of Okinawa. (It should be noted that Marker, who typically made films with very little money, seems to have filmed these testimonies in his own legendary studio, a glorious mess of detritus with wires sputtering in every direction, which Agnes Varda called “the secret threads of the labyrinth of his art.”) She dives into his research, including interviews and archival footage, and shuffles through what remains of the game. Her lover, it seems, was horrified by the tragedy at Okinawa, and was attempting through technology to burrow into our collective memory of images and recollections and make it out the other side with a new and more engaging understanding of the historical past. This is the major theme running through all of Marker’s work: How do we remember the past? Images survive and a narrative is constructed, but is there a way to take another look at those images, reconfigure them, and somehow arrive at a greater truth? Marker constructed his films like deep puzzles with crisscrossing pathways, and “Level 5” is one of his most engaging mysteries, oblique and not without its frustrations. But following Marker down whatever path he forges is always illuminating, even if you can’t put the pieces together right away. Who said films were supposed to be easy anyway?
Posted on: Sun, 14 Sep 2014 12:49:13 +0000