Brandon’s movie memory

I was hoping for another inventive cult-classic a la Brain Damage or writer Larry Cohen’s The Stuff, but I got your standard, straightforward, low-budget horror-thriller with no invention or visual flair whatsoever.

There’s even nothing special about the performances, which is a real crime considering it stars Bruce Campbell (between Evil Deads 2 and 3), Tom Atkins (the cop in Night of the Creeps!), Richard Roundtree (Shaft!) and, um, Laurene Landon (It’s Alive III: Island of the Alive). Robert (”oh, z’no!”) Z’Dar is the titular cop and Sheree North (starred in Frank Tashlin’s The Lieutenant Wore Skirts 30 years earlier) is his crazy caretaker.

A maniac cop is terrorizing the city! Cop Bruce Campbell is cheating on his wife with a fellow cop, but surprisingly this is okay with the movie and Bruce’s wife is killed instead, the killer (actually his smarter mother-figure who works at police headquarters and tells him what to do) attempting to pin the murders on Bruce. There’s a making-of-the-monster backstory, lots more people are killed, then Bruce busts out of jail and chases the maniac cop, who accidentally kills himself… but is he really dead??? Spoiler alert: no.

Bruce Campbell didn’t do it, nobody saw him do it, you can’t prove anything

Tom Atkins’ gun is a tiny film projector

Sam Raimi, reporter

The only novelty death: man’s face shoved in wet concrete

This was huge-faced Z’Dar’s big break, landing him the highly desirable role of Joe Estevez’s sidekick in Soultaker two years later

Ronny Yu’s entry is my first dip into Fear Itself, aka Masters of Horror season 3. As before, I’m counting them as movies even though they’re obviously not. Don’t know if I’ll be watching more of these until either the promised uncut DVDs come out, or it becomes apparent that they never will. Yu, who brought the Freddy, Jason AND Chucky series to new heights (but whose Jet Li retirement film was so bad, Jet Li had to cancel his retirement) brings no style at all to this slightly gruesome but otherwise standard twilight-zoney story.

A guy from Tigerland and the new Star Trek is a bad criminal who murders families, and a guy from some show called Eureka is the perfect church-going dad, then as they both lay dying in a hospital, they switch bodies and our good dad is in prison being tried for the death penalty while the bad guy is trying to deal with work and family.

Written by a guy who did some Carnivàle episodes. Not really a horror story, just an identity-swap thing with a twist ending: dad escapes from prison, there’s a fight, they switch back into their real bodies, but the criminal has murdered dad’s family as dad, so now dad will go back to prison, haha. John Landis’s season-two Family beats this by a mile. This ep was an okay time-waster, not worth watching again on the DVDs… can’t imagine what would’ve been cut out.

Made thirty years ago, opened at the New York Film Festival when I was two weeks old. Director Truffaut died in the 80’s, cancer got star Denner in the 90’s, AIDS got DP Almendros in the 90’s, co-writer Suzanne Schiffman (Out 1 colllaborator) died in 2001, aged cameo-appearers Jean Daste and Roger Leenhardt are dead, but most of the actresses are alive except for Nelly Borgeaud, who died only recently.

Movie seems a teeny bit dated. Charles Denner is a man who works in a wind tunnel, lives alone, and loves women. He wanders around loving women for a while, finally gets the idea to write a book about how much he loves women and all the women who he loves. His book gets published, but due to a woman-love-related car accident, our man doesn’t live much longer. Movie opens and closes on his funeral and the long line of lovely women attending:

Our guy Bertrand at his wind tunnel - Charles Denner of Chabrol’s Bluebeard, Costa-Gavras’s Z and two or three other Truffauts.

Our guy’s mom in flashback. She used to walk around in her underwear ignoring her son and dating lots of men. Could this have somehow contributed to our man’s uninhibited love of women? Marie-Jeanne Montfajon, no other movie credits, alas.

Mistaken identity girl whom Bertrand chases down at the start of the movie, to set the whole woman-loving theme: Nathalie Baye (Le petit lieutenant, Truffaut’s Green Room and Day For Night, Godard’s Slow Motion, Chabrol’s Flower of Evil)

After the whole mistaken identity thing, Bertrand takes home the rental car girl as a consolation prize. Sabine Glaser hardly appeared in anything after this.

Lingerie store woman (Geneviève Fontanel) has always been flirty with Bertrand, so he asks her out to dinner and is shot down. She only likes younger men.

Former waitress (Nella Barbier) who loses her job while Bertrand is around, so he gets her hired as his company’s receptionist. Never makes a play for her, for some reason.

Wakeup-call girl: Aurore. Bert has to convince her to go out with him without ever seeing each other first. Doesn’t work.

The typist who transcribes Bertrand’s novel, until she quits for moral reasons.

The publisher who stands up for Bertrand’s book, and later lies down for Bertrand: Brigitte Fossey (the little girl in Forbidden Games 25 years earlier)

Sad girl on the stairs who gets cheered up by Bertrand. At first seems like a scene to gain our not-always-totally-likeable lead man some sympathy, but later we revisit it as Bert edits his novel to tweak details. Rather than making himself look better, he changes the color of this girl’s dress.

Ex-girlfriend who dumped Bertrand years ago: Valérie Bonnier, of Madame Claude (a Just Jaeckin call-girl movie with Klaus Kinski) and Spermula (a “sci-fi/horror sex comedy” with Udo Kier).

Another ex-girlfriend who he runs into at a restaurant: Leslie Caron, star of Lili, Gigi, An American In Paris, Is Paris Burning?

Married woman who has a not-so-secret long-term affair with Bertrand, attempts to kill her husband, goes to prison, is released a few years later, and shows up mysteriously in Bert’s apartment for a menage-a-trois: Nelly Borgeaud of Truffaut’s Mississippi Mermaid and Resnais’s Mon oncle d’Amerique

The last pair of legs our man ever chased.

Special appearance by Jean Daste:

Katy and I both kinda liked it!

MAR 20, 2008
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Saw on 35mm for the first time. I do not know this movie as well as I think I do… lots of forgotten parts (the town in Iceland buried in ash) and mis-remembered bits. I was grateful to see it projected, but don’t feel that it loses too much on television - gonna keep happily watching the DVD for years to come. If I have a favorite movie right now, this is it.

A new favorite line: “At nightfall the megalopolis breaks down into villages, with its country cemeteries in the shadow of banks, with its stations and temples. Each district of Tokyo once again becomes a tidy ingenuous little town, nestling amongst the skyscrapers.” This is the impression I got from some Japanese movies.

Checked out the DVD again and watched some of the extras. The Chris Darke short didn’t teach me much, just strengthened my belief that nearly all video-art installations consist of too-small TV screens in too-large white rooms full of uncomfortable folding chairs.

DEC 30, 2006
————–
A reminder of the attempted Chris Marker Marathon begun in late August. Showed it off to Jimmy & Dawn.

A movie about memory, images, directing and editing, making pictures, turning life into art and vice versa.

“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.”

Explanation for the electronically processed images: “He showed me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.”

Owls and cats! Digitally processed images. Tarkovsky’s Stalker. Three children on a road in Iceland. Apocalypse Now. Sacred symbols at Macy’s. Teens dancing in the streets. The same scene in Vertigo that Marker references in La Jetee. Kamikaze. An image. A memory. A glance.

Even better than I remembered, and I remembered it as a masterpiece. Such a good documentary that it may not be a documentary at all. The best travelogue ever.

If this site didn’t already exist, I may have felt compelled to create it myself.

Dawn loved it. Jimmy too, I hope?

The Chris Marker Marathon will continue someday. Got some Rivette to watch first, I think.

Medvedkin:

[working on the film train] I came across a very interesting type of peasant, the sort who’d entered a kolkhoz [communal farm] but didn’t feel the true power of it and wasn’t happy there. For such a peasant, life was hard. No one liked him much, he was laughed at, and he was very unhappy. I was thinking of him when I made Happiness. Every man is seeking happiness. Some see it in wealth, but the Russian peasant who struggled in poverty dreamt of it in his own way. … I tried to show the tragedy of such a man, and the effort he makes to find his ideal life. His dreams couldn’t be very elaborate, of course, they were on his own scale but in his own way he was looking for happiness. And in this film I tried to tell a story that’s funny, sad and tragic, the story of a peasant like him, Khmyr, for whom nothing goes right. His life is a struggle… and totally unexpected to him, at the end of the film he finds that there are others who care about him, friends, neighbors, the government too. And in a collective farm he comes close to happiness.

Funny movie, with good performances by the lead actors (first screenshot), some real surprising moments (second screenshot), some scenes that deserve to be well-known Classic Moments in film-school montages (third screenshot) and a good Ivan The Terrible beard shot (fourth screenshot).

It’s the late 60’s, early 70’s, and Chris Marker has got himself a Great Cause. Inspired by Aleksandr Medvedkin (Alexandre Medvedkine) and by political and social unrest in France and elsewhere, Marker and his friends have decided to read lots of Lenin, to try to make films that change the world, and ultimately to try putting film production into the hands of the people, the workers.

Marker hadn’t been greatly involved with the French New Wave movement, but he was present at the end of it, contributing to the 1967 omnibus film “Far From Vietnam”, wherein Marker, Resnais, Godard, Ivens, Lelouch, Varda and Klein voiced their support for the communist north vietnamese, while Rohmer, Rivette, Truffaut and Demy stayed out of it, pursuing their own romantic ideals.

Marker, Godard and others started making purely political works and stopped putting their names on their films, using collective names. I can’t find copies of some of these films (Cinetracts, Battle of the Ten Million) and can’t find English subtitles for most others (Far From Vietnam, Sixth Face of the Pentagon, À bientôt j’espère, Les Mots ont un sens), so it’s pretty much just these two, The Train Rolls On and Embassy. I’m filling out the rest of the timeline by quoting heavily from Catherine Lupton’s amazing book on Marker.

1967-1977
Marker goes “beyond the privileged status of the auteur-director into the humbler and less visible functions of producer, fund raiser, editor, facilitator and general fixer, ensuring the exposure through [production company] SLON of other people’s work while continuing to make his own (unsigned) films.”

FAR FROM VIETNAM, 1967
“Under the auspices of SLON (which also happens to be the Russian word for elephant), Marker instigated, edited and wrote the commentary for Far From Vietnam, a collective portmanteau film made to protest against American military interventionism in Vietnam.”

A BIENTOT, J’ESPERE, 1968
In support of striking workers in southeast France, they started on “a film about the strikes, entitled A Bientot, j’espere (’Hope To See You Soon’).” Workers complained that the film was pessimistic, that they came off as victims. “Marker’s response to these criticisms was that he and Marret would always be outsides to the workers’ lives, and that the logical step forward was for them to begin making their own films.” And so the Medvedkin group was born.

CINETRACTS, 1968
After the May ‘68 business, “The Estates General of the Cinema sponsored a series of collective short documentaries recording the May events from the perspective of students and striking workers. Following an idea suggested by Chris Marker it also produced the Cinetracts. These were a series of anonymous, combative and often strikingly eloquent visual pamphlets, filmed on silent black and white 16mm-negative stock using easily assembled materials - still photographs, collages and texts - in order to respond quickly to unfolding events. Marker, Godard, Resnais, Jean-Pierre Gorin (who formed the Dziga Vertov Group with Godard), Philippe Garrel and Jackie Raynal were among the better-known contributors to the series alongside young militants with no prior experience of film.”

LES MOTS ONT UN SENS, 1970
“Number 5 in the [SLON counter-information newsreels] series, On vous parle de Paris: Maspero, les mots ont un sens (’Maspero, Words Have Meaning’), is an affectionate portrait of the left-wing publisher and bookshop owner Francois Maspero, who was a contributor to Far From Vietnam and would later publish the commentary to Le Fond de l’air est rouge. Maspero is one of the most satisfying and likeable of Marker’s films from this period, achieving an exemplary balance of quirky human warmth with a clear and inventive form of political argument.”

1970-71
Marker worked as a still photographer on Costa-Gavras’s film The Confession, then made a film about the shoot called Jour de Tournage, and a film on the controversy surrounding The Confession, number 6 in the newsreel series, Le Deuxieme proces d’Artur London.

BATTLE OF THE TEN MILLION, 1970
“Both [Les mots & Artur London] consider the question of how committed socialists and revolutionaries can acknowledge past mistakes, undergo productive self-criticism and still maintain their basic political beliefs, in a climate where their political opponents on the right take such criticism as proof of the total failure of communism. … This dilemma comes sharply to the fore in The Battle of the Ten Million, a clear-eyed account of the failure of Fidel Castro’s ambitious project for Cuba to achieve a 10-million-ton sugar-cane harvest in 1969-70.”

LE TRAIN EN MARCHE, 1971
“The French version of Happiness was accompanied in cinemas by Le Train en marche, an introduction to Medvedkin, Happiness and the film-trains based around an animated interview with Medvedkin filmed in a train depot in the Paris suburd of Noisy-le-Sec. Its core motifs are the eye, the hand and the train.”

A 10-min intro about trains in the 1920’s traversing russia/asia acting as bookmobiles, then a change of narrator voice when Medvedkin is introduced, and his story takes us away. His crew watched and filmed the techniques of successful and unsuccessful farmers and showed the films to each other to help increase production, then moved on to steel plants.

Medvedkin: “We realized that the cinema could be not just a means of entertainment, a way of arousing aesthetic emotions, but also a great and forceful weapon capable of reconstructing factories, and not just factories but the world, making it a better place. Such a cinema in the hands of the people was a powerful weapon.”

In the last bit, he talks about his motivation for filming Happiness, which makes sense now that i know Le Train en marche was screened as an introduction to that film.

A pretty straightforward documentary with english voiceover rather than subtitles on my copy, using archive footage (but none from the actual cine-trains, which had all been lost). No cats or owls or tricks, though halfway through the movie, Marker reveals the camera crew filming Medvedkin.

From the sound of it, Marker’s Medvedkin Group has at least partially succeeded. In CM’s own words: “I think that it’s this fabled and long forgotten bit of history… that underlies a large part of my work - in the end, perhaps, the only coherent part. To try to give the power of speech to people who don’t have it, and, when it’s possible, to help them find their own means of expression. The workers I filmed in 1967 in Rhodesia, just like the Kosovars I filmed in 2000, had never been heard on television: everyone was speaking on their behalf, but once you no longer saw them on the road, bloody and sobbing, people lost interest in them. To my great surprise, I once found myself explaining the editing of Battleship Potemkin to a group of aspiring filmmakers in Guinea-Bissau, using an old print on rusty reels; now those filmmakers are having their films selected for competition in Venice.”

VIVA LA BALEINE, 1972
“Ecological politics are not usually mentioned as being among Chris Marker’s preoccupations, but they are at the heart of a short film he co-directed with Mario Ruspoli in 1972, Viva la baleine / Long Live The Whale… a sharply politicized re-take on Ruspoli’s anthropological study, which now sets the archaic practices of the Azores whaling communities in the context of a pointed condemnation of industrialized whaling.”

CHILE & PATRICIO GUZMAN, 1973-75
Marker traveled to Chile to make a film about the new socialist government under Salvador Allende but “discovered that the Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzman and his colleagues already had the job in hand” so CM instead helped bring their films to France and contributed financial assistance for Guzman’s later three-part The Battle of Chile, 1975, after the government’s 1973 takeover by a military dictatorship.

EMBASSY, 1973
In late ‘73, “Marker transposed recent events in Chile into a remarkable fictional document, L’Ambassade (Embassy). As a fictional commentary on the contemporary political world, Embassy invites comparison with La Jetee. Despite their evident differences, the films share a measured, inexorable narration, and a catastrophic transformation of Paris that leaves a small group of survivors trapped.

“Wednesday, 2 days after the coup”

Lupton’s notes: “An unexpected response to Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’etat in Chile. A Super-8 film apparently found in an embassy -as it’s written in the original title-, where political activists had taken refuge after a military coup d’état. But the events -and their setting- are not what they first appear to be.”

8mm film with no direct sound. Also English voiceover rather than subs on this one, a bored-sounding reporter voice.

“You are all motherfuckers as dumb as corpses quarrelling in the grave. The only lesson to draw is that all political directions have gone bankrupt.”

I admit I snickered at the ending. Shades of Cradle Will Rock as the “truth” behind the film is revealed: “From a window of the embassy I took my last shot, the van that was leading them into exile from that city we had known when she was free: Paris.”

THE LONELINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE SINGER, 1974
“La Solitude du chanteur de fond fused personal friendship and the pressing political concern of the moment by filming the rehearsals and final performance of [Yves] Montand’s one-man benefit concert for Chilean refugees, held at the Paris Olympia on 12 February 1974 and his first stage appearance for six years. … [Loneliness] was released in December 1974 with the dormant If I Had Four Camels [completed in '66], but it was the Montand film that attracted critical accolades, as a fond and revealing homage to one of France’s best-loved film actors and popular entertainers. … Loneliness is a minor masterpiece of observational documentary…”

SPIRAL, 1975
Marker helped initiate and wrote the commentary for the film Spiral, helmed by a French sociologist expelled from Chile, Armand Mattelart, and editors Jacqueline Meppiel and Valerie Mattelart. “The title of the film, Spiral, derived from its proposed spiral structure of seven successive phases of right-wing reaction leading up to the coup of 1973, many of which also delved back in history to consider, for example, the past roles of the military and the United States in Chilean affairs.” The film was largely edited from archive footage, then matched to a 3-hour Marker-written commentary and edited to 155 minutes for final release. “Although Marker was not involved at every point of the film’s production, Spiral nonetheless stands as an instructive precursor to Le Fond de l’air est rouge. It develops the same intricate marshalling of archive resources as Marker’s later film, representing the arraignment of conflicting social forces at a given moment in history by playing off film extracts informed by different political perspectives against each other.”

Hope I’m able to see more of the above films sometime. Learning French would help. Meanwhile I’m either tackling Grin Without a Cat next, or taking a Patricio Guzman or Alexander Medvedkin sidetrack before heading boldly forth into the 1980’s.

A suicidal man haunted by memory is picked by a massive computer system as the ideal candidate to send to the past in a time-travel experiment. But enough about La Jetee, here’s a full-length full-motion movie from six years later.

I don’t know if the computer was aware that the man had killed his woman on vacation in Glasgow by turning up the gas while she slept, or if the scientists were aware that the man would be able to re-experience his past having no free will to change it. The results are, of course, a fragmented Resnais film jumping back and forth willy-nilly through the last 2-5 years of this guy’s life.

Star Claude Rich, who looks like a blending of McThingy from Grey’s anatomy and Michael Showalter from The State, was in Jean Renoir’s final film “The Elusive Corporal” and would later play the offscreen cranky father in “Coeurs”.

Rich is with this girl Wiana (Anouk Ferjac from The War Is Over) sometimes, but mostly he’s with young Catrine (Olga Georges-Picot, who wasn’t in many memorable films before she killed herself in ‘97). He is happy with Catrine, but he cheats on her and she knows it.

Now I’m told that some of the “past events” that Claude experiences are actually dreams he had. Wonder if the hot girl in the mirrored bathroom asking him to wash her back was one of those.

Just a dream? Carla Marlier (Zazie’s aunt):

After being trapped for who knows how long bouncing through time and memory (90 minutes as the movie’s running time, or infinitely longer?), Claude finds himself reliving his attempted suicide by gun. Does he manage to affect his past this time by succeeding where before he had failed? His body appears on the hospital grounds, and the technicians run out to collect him, with a final shot of Claude’s mouse companion still caught inside his glass dome in the machine.

The mouse appears earlier, running across the beach right around the moment that Claude was supposed to be sent back (it was to be one year ago, for a duration of one minute).

The time machine:

This idea of time travel doesn’t seem like it’d be very useful to the scientists, rather more like traveling through your own memory than actually moving in time… though it does show that Claude’s body disappears when he travels. And the scientists, besides having invented/created the thing, don’t seem very capable of handling the machine or Claude.

I liked the movie, maybe not as much as the others by Resnais, but then I haven’t seen it as many times… would gladly watch again.

Holm says “it was a weird film that was openly laughed at in the States.”

Andy says “If we become stuck in our own time loop of visiting the past the memories can become too overwhelming. Suicide in context of the movie becomes a means to end or break the flow of time and memory.”

Me: Maybe this movie is a self-reflexive statement on the cinema, ooooohhhhhh…!!!

Resnais: “There are absolutely no flashbacks or anything of the sort.”

Watched again June 2008 with a group, so now I know that it’s not just me who has trouble telling the women in this movie apart. Very plain look to the sets, clothes… not a visually stylish movie except in the editing. I like it more the second time around. Would like to watch a higher quality copy next time.

Starts with a Jean Cocteau quote and animated/drawn images on TV. It’s “un film de Chris Marker”, no fooling around with that. Music by Toru Takemitsu (uncredited on IMDB) who scored a bunch of classics like “Double Suicide”, “Kwaidan”, “Pitfall” and “Ran”. Co-produced by “Le chat Pompon” (hmmm).

Marker meets “by chance” a young girl at the ‘64 Tokyo Olympics, quickly loses interest in the Olympics themselves and instead follows her around the city, pondering shops and trinkets, symbols and national and personal identity as in Sans Soleil. Halfway through the picture, Marker “disappears”, goes back to France, and the narration is taken over by Koumiko, tape-recordings of her answers to his interview questions about current events, beauty, love, animals, and finally WWII. Catherine Lupton’s book notes that “this premise enables Marker to synthesize all the widely disparate methods and idioms explored in his films so far: a light-hearted personal travelogue, the investigative interview and the melancholy and disquieting fiction.”

Koumiko stops under a billboard for “The Umbrellas of Cherbourg”, then the camera follows pedestrians with umbrellas while the theme song from that film plays… nice.

Marker’s trademark animal appearances: a googly-eyed owl on an outdoor sign, a whole cat montage, and Koumiko imitating both animals.

Beautiful movie, just as essential as the other Marker films I’ve managed to see. I ended up liking it a lot more than I thought I would, despite the horrid video quality.

“Marker’s fond and playful homage to the French New Wave… The fluid roles that Koumiko plays for the camera mesh with the presentation of Japan as a ‘world of appearances,’ as Marker would later call it in Sans Soleil”.

The long-awaited continuation of my Marker-a-thon!

Dedicated “to the happy many”

“The Lovely Month of May”, in two parts:
Part 1, “prayer from the top of the eiffel tower”
Part 2, “the return of fantomas”

“It happened in may 1962. For some it was the first springtime of peace.”

A series of interviews with Parisians at/about the end of the Algerian War. A little provocative, but more of an inquisitive survey than a personal statement.

Marker as interviewer recommends “Cleo from 5 to 7″ to a guy who sells suits, then tries recommending “Marienbad.” Guy replies “but it’s something you’ve gotta understand.” “Don’t you understand things?” “Sure, but why should I take the trouble? I pay, don’t I? Sitting in a movie to rack my brains?”

Narration: “The mayor of Paris would have a lot to do, but there is no mayor of Paris”

Someone petting the head of a baby owl, narration untranslated.

Sometimes there are whole sections that aren’t subtitled or translated. Sigh…

The interviewees are asked about money, politics, world events, their daily lives. Some prodding to get the more apolitical citizens to talk about politics, or to talk about why they don’t want to. There’s a shift to more specific issues in part two. More about racism and prejudice, poking around about the Algerian War. This is the same year Alain Resnais was making a very different film concerning the Algerian War, “Muriel”.

Not very cinematically interesting, I guess, but today it’s a fascinating look back at a certain time and place (May ‘62, Paris) and a general survey on people’s thoughts, hopes, fears and prejudices. I wonder what Parisians thought when the film came out. Can’t imagine they raved about it. He’s asking questions that lots of people didn’t want to be asked, seems like he’s throwing social problems into the faces of the Parisian viewer. I’ll bet foreigners were more intrigued.

A long interview with an Algerian ends with spoken statistics about that particular May over time-lapse photography of the busy streets. “But for the 5,056 people in the prisons of Paris, each day of May was exactly the same.”

“As long as poverty exists, you are not rich. As long as despair exists, you are not happy. As long as prisons exist, you are not free.”

A surprisingly affecting movie… I liked it more than I thought I would. Movie ran only 1:58, forty-five minutes shorter than the IMDB runtime, so that’s further incentive to see a more complete and better translated version if/when I can find one.

Marker: “What I wanted to come out of the film is a sort of call to make contact with others, and for both the people in the film and the spectators, it’s the possibility of doing something with others that at one extreme creates a society or a civilization… but can simply provide love, friendship, sympathy.”

From Catherine Lupton’s book:
“Immersing himself in groundbreaking new developments in camera and sound equipment that allowed human encounters to be filmed with greater ease and spontaneity, Marker brought the interview centre stage in the filming of Le Joli Mai, a less-than-flattering depiction of French social attitudes at the close of the Algerian War.”

“Marker stated that one of his ground rules was to avoid selecting the participants or manipulating the interviews… in order to confirm a ready-made conclusion… Another was to refuse to regard participants as stock examples of social or character stereotypes. ‘People exist with their complexity, their own consistency, their own personal opacity and one has absolutely no right to reduce them to what you want them to be.’ Le Joli Mai does grant its participants the space to be themselves, and to speak fully on the topics and questions proposed by the interviewer, without reducing their contributions to caricatured soundbites. Even when the film makes pointedly critical montage interventions into a discourse that it evidently regards as misguided or fatuous, it still retains the texture and substance of the interviewee’s speech, so that it is possible for the spectator to measure Marker’s reaction against the statements or attitudes that have prompted it.”

Marker produced this film and “Le Jetee” simultaneously, a film which turned “the documentary adventure of Le Joli Mai inside-out, distilling its subterranean fears and anxieties about the future into an elegaic masterpiece of speculative fiction.” His new filmmaking identity “might be the critical conscience of contemporary France, or the cosmonaut of human memory.” “In his self-curated retrospective at the Cinematheque Francaise in 1998, the earliest of his films that Marker elected to show were La Jetee and Le Joli Mai. He went on record to state that he regards his earlier films as rough and rudimentary drafts and no longer wishes to inflict them on the cinema-going public.”

“The camera operator Pierre L’homme is credited as co-director in recognition of his central role in creating the film’s mobile, responsive visual images.” Pierre later shot “Army of Shadows”, “Mr. Freedom”, a Bresson feature, a Godard short, and “The Mother and the Whore” before working with Marker (and Yves Montaud) again on “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Singer” in 1974. Narrator Yves was in “Let’s Make Love”, “The War Is Over”, “Tout va bien” and “Le cercle rouge”, and narrator Simone Signoret I know from “Army of Shadows” and “La Ronde”. Composer Michel Legrand did a James Bond movie, “F For Fake”, some Jacques Demy (incl. the musicals!), some Varda and Godard.

Marker’s third movie, the one he made right before “Letter From Siberia”.

Nice to have a fast-paced English voiceover so I can actually tell what is being said, unlike with the washed-out subtitles of “letter from siberia” and “description of a struggle”.

Movie is short, poetic and comical. We reeeally needs a nice dvd set of these travelogues to go with the great current releases of “Sans Soleil.”

“this isn’t an absent-minded surgeon; it’s a townsman protecting himself against the dust

The narrator remarks that dust, germs and flies are the enemies of the revolution, so there may still be capitalists in China, but there are no more flies. Catherine Lupton: “This remark neatly commends the energy put into overcoming problems, while taking ironic note of the obstacles that may have been overlooked in the rush to cleanliness. This hint of light-hearted subversion wholly escaped the selection committee for the Berlin Film Festival of 1957, who refused to screen Sunday In Peking unless the comment about the vanquished flies and a number of other remarks deemed to be Communist propaganda were removed.”

“shops covered with characters as if they were huge boxes of tea”

Nice line: “the harsh price of the picturesque”… and history remembers “legendary wars that still resound through the peking opera house today.” Images and writing about the past and future, history meeting present day, the nature of time.

“the chinese people celebrating their bastille day, their day of revolution”

I don’t remember any owls, and cats were (entirely?) restricted to the title cards, but there was a Siberia-reminiscent bear:

These movies are all still good, worth watching for enjoyment, not just as academic exercise to probe Chris Marker’s beginnings in film. Wish they’d get a little more attention.

Catherine Lupton says the film “examines the identity of the state of Israel by reading it as an accumulation of signs, marks of the multiple conflicts that have carved out its twelve years of existence as a nation.”

Signs:

Movie is a “Letter From Tel-Aviv” then, exploring Israel, Palestine, Jerusalem, Haifa, with the humorous and intelligent commentary as in Marker’s other early docs. Of course I’ll need to see it again sometime whenever possible, since my copy has nearly unreadable white subtitles and tiny, crappy picture quality. I’m not even sure what language is being spoken by the narrator.

Marker’s owls are present:

And cats as well… a man who feeds them calls in hungarian “to all hungarian-speaking cats”

Electronic sound effects and filming an oscilloscope predate the technological curiosity in Sans Soleil by more than 20 years.

Cinematography by Ghislain Cloquet, who later shot Mouchette, Balthazar and Jacques Demy films, won an Oscar for a Roman Polanski film, then died during the production of Sans Soleil.

“born in camps, crushed by camps… us, germany, with our crimes,” fragments of a whole unexpected section of accusatory comments against Europe. This could be a more-hopeful sequel to “Night and Fog.”

Store signs at the beginning read: samson, delilah, varda and ali baba

Definitely some plays on words like in Letter From Siberia but harder to tell what’s being said… some play with editing and sound effects (announcer and crowd cheering while camera follows a kid skating downhill through the streets, as if he is inaugurating a new Olympic sport).

A scene of quiet study brings to mind the library short “Toute la mémoire du monde”.

I miss every third or fourth line so not always sure what points he’s trying to make, especially during a section composed of stills and zooms in the orthodox quarter.

We get a favorite theme from “Sans Soleil” discussing pictures/images vs. reality in the photographs taken home by tourists and in the ancient biblical paintings of this land.

The Jewish Saturday has a “mood of general strike”… he calls the kibbutz meeting an “absolute democracy” then describes a communist “Utopia”. His purposely combining terminology of communism and democracy during the kibbutz meeting scene must’ve incensed some people when this came out.

The young artist who Marker chooses to represent the Israeli state in the final scene:

Mad:

Cat windows:

Children:

A pretty goofy look at space travel. A precursor to Terry Gilliam (the animator) and Asteroids (the video game). Awesome movie, funny. Would show this one off to other people. There’s a snail (escargot de venus) and an owl (movie is “in collaboration with” Chris Marker).

Our guy, with hat and pipe, examines the designs of different inventions and creatures and builds himself a spaceship. He and his pet owl go for a little ride. Of course the first thing he does is stop at an apartment tower and peep on some woman. He visits space, saves a troubles spacecraft, eventually gets shot down and possibly dies, but it’s all in good fun. All done with cut-out animation. Won a bunch of awards.

Same old gorgeous La Jetee. No longer makes me think of 12 Monkeys while watching it (a good thing). I spotted cats and a bird (below), but no owls. Watched out on the porch - Katy enjoyed it, but never mentioned the motion part. Thanks again for my poster.

One of my favorite movie stills ever:

Great picture quality on my downloaded copy, but forgot it had no subtitles. Movie seemed to show statues and masks in a museum setting, then as part of daily life, and finally in a large storeroom in a government building. Half an hour long.

Harvard Film Archive, or someone they’ve quoted, says: “This collaborative film, banned for more than a decade by French censors as an attack on French colonialism (and now available only in shortened form), is a deeply felt study of African art and the decline it underwent as a result of its contact with Western civilization. Marker’s characteristically witty and thoughtful commentary is combined with images of a stark formal beauty in this passionate outcry against the fate of an art that was once integral to communal life but became debased as it fell victim to the demands of another culture.”

Chris Marker wrote the commentary, not a bit of which I understood. Actually I got the word “mask” a few times. Don’t think this will help Katy’s research any, but she graciously watched it with me anyway.

More straightforward and less poetic than it usually gets credit for, pretty much a straight half-hour documentary about the holocaust.

More educational, more heartbreaking, more shocking, more horrible and a far better movie than any of the 60-minute PBS documentaries I’ve seen on the subject, any two-hour fictionalized concentration-camp movie, any three-plus-hour Steven Spielberg feature.

The poetic parts are mostly at the start and end, and in the juxtaposition between the 50’s color film and the 30’s-40’s b/w stock footage. Must be hard to craft an artistic film against this sort of imagery. Jean Cayrol (Muriel ou Le temps d’un retour) wrote the commentary and Chris Marker was assistant director.

Katy, if I seemed a little depressed on Sunday night, this is why.