by ·Comments Off on A Story of Floating Weeds (1934, Yasujiro Ozu)

My first mid-30’s silent film. Chaplin’s Modern Times doesn’t count, and the Russian Happiness was two years earlier. Japan still had union narrators in theaters, so their cinema stayed silent longer than most.

Traveling actor Kihachi brings his troupe to the town where his ex-girl and illegitimate son live. K. has made himself scarce, sending money whenever he can, so the boy (Shinkichi, now 20) could grow up without the burden of a no-good father, and whenever Kihachi’s in town he stays with the mother and sees the boy.

Kihachi’s current woman in the troupe suspects something is up, finds out the story through bribery and sets up younger girl Otoki to go after the boss’s son. The two fall in love, and Kihachi tries to break it up, leading to the revelation that he is Shinkichi’s father. Meanwhile, constant rain means the troupe can’t perform, and finally they’re out of work long enough to have to sell off their stuff and break up. After an emotional climax, the young lovers stay behind, and Kihachi and his girl make up at the train station, heading off to form a new troupe.

Great movie, slow-building, ends up as emotional and true-feeling as the other Ozus I’ve seen. I ought to watch at least one per year. They are refreshing. Kihachi somehow stays sympathetic even though he hits everyone in the movie at some point. That’s just how he communicates, I suppose. Definitely different kinds of families here than in Tokyo Story or Equinox Flower.

This was something like Ozu’s thirtieth movie, and it’s said to be the beginning of his mature style. It’s an uncredited remake of Hollywood’s oscar-winning part-talkie The Barker from 1928, which was also remade twice in Hollywood (with Clara Bow in ’33 and Betty Grable in ’45).

Half these actors had been in Ozu’s Passing Fancy the year before. The kid had later roles in Kon Ichikawa and Seijun Suzuki movies, and his father appeared in Ozu’s own 1959 color remake Floating Weeds. Maybe Katy will watch that with me next year – Masters of Cinema’s N. Wrigley calls it the most beautiful Ozu film.

by ·Comments Off on Loft (2005, Kiyoshi Kurosawa)

I had to interrupt this movie the first night I watched it, and I finished it the next night. In between, I was at Acapella and picked up the book on K.K. by Jerry White and flipped to the back, where he calls this movie an utter failure of storytelling. I didn’t read any more, wanted no spoilers, but I hope White at least found something to like about this one, if not the story, because I liked it quite a lot, and thought it was better than Kurosawa’s follow-up Retribution.

Starring Miki Nakatani of the Ring series and Chaos, title star of Memories of Matsuko
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It’s similar to Retribution… a ghost-revenge story with only a few characters set in old, run-down buildings with sudden shocks and supernatural occurrences in broad daylight. Atmosphere and cinematography (by the same guy as Retribution) are ace. Movie is horror, but it doesn’t seem to know that it’s horror. As with all of Kurosawa’s movies, the genre cliches aren’t there, the music and camera and lighting and characters don’t do what you’d expect. They do get panicked and frightened, but they’ll also walk knowingly into danger and stare at the ghosts, looking slightly sad or tired, not necessarily afraid. Very cool movie, not one of Kurosawa’s very best but it’s got me looking forward to Tokyo Sonata again.

At right, Reiko’s book editor Hidetoshi Nishijima, star of License to Live, Bug House and Kitano’s Dolls
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The story is a little baffling, but KK also wrote Charisma, so baffling ain’t unusual. Reiko’s editor gets her a quiet place in the country where she can write her next book. She meets her neighbor Yoshioka, a university professor with a 1000-year-old mummy (which moves by itself occasionally) in his room. The professor isn’t sure if this is the same mummy that was dug up 80 years ago, but he watches a time-lapse film of that previous mummy just to confuse us a little more. We’re not sure if he’s dangerous or just a crappy professor, but he seems nice enough to Reiko.

The anthropologist is Etsushi Toyokawa of The Great Yokai War and Boiling Point
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Besides the mummy moving about, Reiko is being haunted by the ghost of a young girl. Graves are dug, bodies are carried around, a foggy pier is discovered, Reiko is vomiting black mud (this was happening before she even moved into the house) and somehow Reiko gets her book written. Her editor shows up and terrorizes her for no clear purpose until it turns out he rented the same place to a previous writer (the young ghost-girl) and murdered her. Reiko would be next but the cops bust him just in time. She burns her book and Yoshioka burns the mummy. Then they go for a walk to the foggy pier, where the ghost knocks Yoshioka into the swampy water for some reason!

Spooky loft
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The ghost/girl isn’t in every scene, she’s just somehow in all of my captures
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by ·Comments Off on Noriko’s Dinner Table (2005, Sion Sono)

I’d heard this was a sequel to Suicide Circle, so I assumed it was a horror movie. A natural assumption, since Suicide Circle is very much a horror movie. But by no means is this a horror movie, nor is it any good at all, and it is almost three hours long, which means I could have watched two short, good horror movies instead of this one. Tragedy!

Lots of steadicam, with the low-budget video look of MPD Psycho. First hour is a bunch of teen girl crap, with Noriko getting tired of her family and wishing she was as accepted in real life as she is online, where her screen name is Mitsuko. The online community is related to the Suicide Circle cult (it’s the website with the colored dots), but besides a couple flashbacks to the intro train scene of that movie, some “Desert” posters on a wall and some dodgy explanations at the end by a group member, there’s no real mention of the events of the other movie. Instead, we are presented with a wholly different view on Sion Sono’s ideas of group and individual identity, life and death, and the social problems of modern Japan. Maybe it’s deep if you think about it long enough, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting movie, with its amateurish cinematography, excessive length and dull repetitive voiceovers about the boring family problems of teen girls.

Happier times. But WERE they really happy? Are the kids smiling? ARE THEY?
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So, right, Noriko/Mitsuko runs away and meets her online buddy Ueno Station 54 (named after a locker full of junk she found). That’s #54, as in the 54 kids who jumped from the train station… you can look for explanations all day long, but it’s not gonna solve anything. Noriko’s sister Yuka runs away a few months later, changes her name to Yoko, and the sisters meet up in the city. With US54 they work for a family-rental business pretending to be family members of lonely people for an hourly fee. Meanwhile, their real parents are crazy with grief over their disappeared daughters, and after a year the mother kills herself so the father (Ken Mitsuishi of The Pillow Book, Chaos, Eureka, Audition, Invisible Waves) starts combing their rooms for clues and finally comes to the city to find them.

Death is no big thing in Japan
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All is well in the family rental business. Sometimes a client kills a “family member”, as above, but there’s Kumiko/US54 on the left taking his money as if nothing special has happened. The dad gets a friend to help, moves all his stuff from the old house and sets up a new place just like it, then gets the three girls to come over, climactically bursts out of a closet and… stands there like a damned fool. Um, some cult dudes show up and pummel the friend, but dad kills ’em all with a knife. Finally the girls somewhat snap out of it, and go oh yeah it’s our dad. I think Noriko runs away again at the end. I’m probably forgetting something, but whatever.

Separated by sun
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Hints:
– the suicides kept going after the last movie ended… they did not stop with Dessert’s final performance.
– “What about the suicide club – it’s the result of Kumiko’s grudge, right?”
– “The world is the suicide club, with far more suicides than our circle.”
– “Being close to death gives living value”
– Dad is told by a club dude at a diner: “Feel the desert. Survive the desert. That’s your role.” Get it – Desert? Dessert? Get it?? Phthhhht!

What, no floss?
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If this was better lit you’d see “Kiyoshi Kurosawa wuz here” on the windowframe
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by ·Comments Off on Suicide Circle (2002, Sion Sono)

“Are you connected to yourself?”

Watching for the second time (and reviewing the plot on wikipedia), I abandoned the thought that the plot would make any sense or come together in the end (the writer/director is apparently a poet, so that explains that) and enjoyed it for what it is, a bloody and effective horror movie. Movie features high-school kids dying en masse as a muddled critique of society, which I guess is why it gets compared to Battle Royale. What with the unexplainable deaths around the country, mysterious websites and themes of interconnection, I’d say it’s more similar to Pulse.

The wiki does a good job on plot, so I’ll make this quick. Pop group Dessert (aka Dessart, Desert) has annoying hit song. Backstage at their concerts, fans who are connected to themselves have patches of skin shaved off and mailed to the police, then a few days later the fans kill themselves. Female internet informant The Bat is kidnapped by flamboyant male “suicide club” leader Genesis, but I’m not sure that either of them have anything to do with anything. The cops fail to figure anything out, but a girl named Mitsuko does. At the end, instead of throwing herself under a train, she enigmatically steps aboard it, smiling at a cop, as Des(s)aert announces their final performance.

left: Ryo Ishibashi, star of Miike’s Audition, also in Big Bang Love, Kitano’s Brother, and that Masters of Horror called Dream Cruise. right: Kimiko Yo of Hou’s Café Lumière
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Akaji Maro’s distinctive face has appeared in movies by Miike, Beat Takeshi and Seijun Suzuki, as well as the Maiku Hama trilogy and he is Ichi the Killer’s (the actor’s) dad.
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Masatoshi Nagase is Mike Hama, also in The Hidden Blade, Pistol Opera and Mystery Train.
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skinbag:
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sega genesis:
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by ·Comments Off on House (1977, Nobuhiko Obayashi)

Tonight we will be Liveblogging the Japanese horror movie House!

2 Minutes In: Already I have seen editing tricks I have never seen in a movie before (maybe because they are a bad idea), an animated opening title sequence, continuity problems, poor (or poorly translated) dialogue, and music that emphatically does not fit the action. Only 85 minutes to go!

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10 Minutes In: Cruising the IMDB… director has made forty movies since House. This is kind of like when I discovered Takashi Miike with Ichi the Killer and realized there are FORTY more things like this somewhere in the world. Only this is much stupider. Woman who plays the grandmother (below) used to be in Imamura and Mizoguchi films, and now she’s in this.

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20 Minutes In: Holy crap is this music ever awful. So far I am not buying that this is a horror movie. If there’s any “horror” here, it’ll be extremely goofy and everyone will turn out okay (and best friends) in the end. The visual style, editing and sound mixing are all crazed. Wipes and irises all over. And there’s cat tossing!

30 Minutes In: Definitely not a horror. I feel ripped off.

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40 Minutes In: yep, the goofy horror has begun… but it’s SO goofy it puts Sleepaway Camp to shame. It puts The Great Yokai War to shame! This one might out-goof even Princess Raccoon!

Dead fat girl’s head, mistaken for a watermelon, flies through the air and bites another girl on the butt in front of crazy-fake backdrop:
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50 Minutes In: I wonder if Sam Raimi might’ve seen this before making Evil Dead 2. Hmmm, and I just found an unauthorized pseudo-sequel to Evil Dead 2 from Italy called House 3/Ghosthouse. So one could rename ED2 “House 2” and form a whole new trilogy. Then we can use the American House IV to finish it off… fitting, since there was no actual House 3 in that series.

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60 Minutes In: Movie gets tiring after a while. It’s still super goofy, I’ll give it that… not quick bursts of stylistic flourishes – they are ever-present. Must have taken an age to make, with all the insert shots and models and effects and editing nonsense going on. There was some nice piano music earlier but now it’s back to the ol’ spastic theme song. Should we be seeing nude high school girls? Is that okay?

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70 Minutes In: They just found some sort of leather-bound book of the dead, giving credence to my sequel theories. Also, a piano just ate someone. Maybe we can replace House IV with Death Bed: The Bed That Eats. Hmmm, blood spraying out of a hole in the wall and filling the room… definitely Evil Dead 2-ish. One girl you can tell is the smart one, because she wears glasses, has her hair in no-nonsense ponytails, and knows what to do when they find a book (she reads it).

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80+ Minutes In: I think the movie just ended, but there’s another 15 minutes on the file. Oh good, here’s a music video. Are they burning the girl’s stepmom’s head? Some voiceover craaaap about the nature of love, then illustrated credits, which I always appreciate.

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Whew, so what was that? Some kinda teen comedy horror, I suppose. There’s an intro bit where a girl is sad that her dad is remarrying, then she tries going to camp but camp is cancelled. So she and her camp friends go off to her gramma’s house instead. But gramma is an evil witch who gains power from killing children in hilarious ways. I’m not sure who is still alive at the end because I was sleepy, but apparently the stepmom shows up at gramma’s house there, and I think maybe the main girl takes control of the witch activities and something bad happens to gramma. Whoa, I made 221 screenshots… hold on and I’ll sift through them looking for plot clues. No, it’s no clearer. But needless to say, I highly recommend this movie.

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The director is still alive and working, but the executive producer, Tomoyuki Tanaka, creator of Godzilla?? Dead, dead, dead.

by ·Comments Off on A.K. (1985, Chris Marker)

Behind the scenes on Akira Kurosawa’s Ran. I didn’t believe the hype that this would be one of Marker’s best films, but the hype was right! Gorgeous movie, more following general daily activity on-set than Kurosawa himself, to the great annoyance of the IMDB reviewers. Besides CM, praise to cameraman Frans-Yves Marescot (no other credits) and the great Tôru Takemitsu whose music is used extensively.

Tôru Takemitsu visits the set looking for musical inspiration:
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“In this kind of shooting the first pitfall to avoid is appropriating a beauty that does not belong to us, to play up the lovely backlit shot. Of course some of that borrowed beauty will come through anyway. But we shall try to show what we see the way we see it, from our eye-level.”
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On the TV is The Horse, the last movie Kurosawa assistant-directed before beginning to make his own films
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Movie was shot around Mt. Fuji, but apparently the mountain isn’t seen in Ran.
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“When cement has been added to the black earth of Mt. Fuji so that the horses’ hooves can kick up clouds of dust, the assistant director and the script girl pitch in as enthusiastically as the grips. It’s as though each person, however great his or her professional qualifications regarded the film as a whole, as a collective endeavor in which there is no such thing as a noble or a menial task. We saw, for example, Kurosawa’s closest aide helping with makeup, the head electrician cutting the grass side by side with the art director, the clapman rehearsing stunts. Most unusual.”

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Sound recordist Fumio Yanoguchi, who died during the editing of A.K., had worked with Kurosawa since the late 40’s:
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Ishiro Honda himself – director of Mothra, Rodan and the original Godzilla:
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Fallen warrior, or an extra taking a nap?
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“The sensei is he who, by achieving technical perfection, has got a sort of spiritual bonus out of it. The aura of respect that surrounds and protects Kurosawa is nothing like the reign of terror that some lesser directors impose on the set. And just like the great sword masters of the past, sensei has no time for abstraction. When he speaks of his work he reflects on factual experiences. When asked why he did this or that he says “I simply make a film as I want it to be”.

Sensei:
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by ·Comments Off on Chris Marker round-up, 1986-1993

This page from the Catherine Lupton book gives a good intro to this post on three Chris Marker movies I just watched, and this other post on some Chris Marker movies I did not watch.

Marker has also continued to engage directly with contemporary political events and debates. In The Last Bolshevik and in Berliner Ballade (1990), a report produced for a French television current affairs strand, Marker reflects on the political ideals that collapsed at a stroke with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of Communist rule over the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, and attempts to hold open a space for those who still believe in the founding principles of Socialism. Coinciding with this abrupt shift in the political landscape of Europe, the welter of savage inter-ethnic conflicts triggered by ultra-nationalist movements in the former Yugoslavia during the early 1990s (and again more recently in Kosovo) has focused Marker’s attention through a series of candid engagements with people caught up in the long drawn-out war. Les 20 heures dans les camps (1993, Prime Time in the Camps) focuses on a group of Bosnian refugees who are producing their own television broadcasts. Casque bleu (1996, Blue Helmet) is an extended interview with a French soldier who served with the UN peacekeeping force in the former Yugoslavia, and now voices his disillusion with UN policy towards the region. Two as yet unreleased works, Un Maire au Kosovo (2000, A Mayor in Kosovo) and Avril inquiet (2001, currently unfinished, Worried April), are built around interviews with Kosovans involved in the most recent stage of the conflict. This cluster of short, pointed, interview-driven videos is the direct descendant of Marker’s unsigned political films of the 1960s and ’70s, and retains the same ambition: to give a voice to people who are spoken about, but never heard, in mainstream news reporting.

Tokyo Days, 1986

Twenty minutes long, seems very much like outtakes from Sans Soleil. We watch people dreaming on the subway, check out Japanese television… all very familiar. Of course I’m not complaining. There’s always room for more Sans Soleil. Wish this had been an extra on its DVD, instead of a hyper-obscure oddity on a bittorrent site.

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No dialogue except in this part – French, of course, so I’m not sure what she said. This girl is Arielle Dombasle – an actress in the films of Raoul Ruiz, Eric Rohmer and Alain Robbe-Grillet (she’s the one labeled “one goofy actress” in my La Belle Captive entry), who also appeared in Sans Soleil and The Owl’s Legacy. I think we hear Marker himself talking to her in this segment.

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–
Berlin ’90
I thought this was the same film as Berliner Ballade but apparently this is its sequel which accompanied Tokyo Days in the installation project Zapping Zone. I wasn’t always sure what was going on… yeah, the Berlin Wall and elections, but I didn’t get as much out of it as other viewers have. Nothing wrong with it, just some news/reportage footage.

EAI:
“Berlin 1990 travels the streets and the political landscape of the recently re-unified Berlin. In the tumultuous atmosphere of 1990, we watch Berliners walk through check points manned by soldiers, past street vendors selling sausages and “actual” pieces of the Berlin Wall, and watch as they watch the election results come in for another “new” Germany.”

Frieze:
“Berlin (1990) records daily life by the Berlin wall during its dismantling. Formerly capitalism’s outer limit and the most striking emblem of world economic division, the wall itself became just another commodity, as pieces of it sprayed with fake graffiti were sold next to East German police uniforms and frankfurters. Though Marker documents the optimism of the first East German elections, a stunning montage to the lilting melody I Can Hardly Wait for Spring suddenly evokes the darker memories hiding behind German reunification: flowers strewn along the streets for Hitler, and the burning of Berlin.”

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–
Prime Time in the Camps, 1993

In the Bosnian refugee camps during the war in Sarajevo, some amateurs take over a TV station, dedicated to collecting the news, sorting out the truth and re-broadcasting along with their own reportage to fellow refugees. “They are young people who never imagined that one day they’d be behind a television camera or holding a microphone.” One of the reporters: “People had a particular model in their heads of what television was. So we had to make the news look like the news, which meant making it look like what people are used to seeing. It was then that it became credible.”

At the end we see people watching the show that their neighbors had just finished assembling, a la Medvedkin on his train. If there was a topic in ’93 more custom-made for the interests of Chris Marker, I can’t think of it. Peter Watkins should have been there too (see Frieze quote below).

Wikipedia: “The Siege of Sarajevo was the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, conducted by the Serb forces of self-proclaimed Republika Srpska and Yugoslav People’s Army (later transformed to the Army of Serbia and Montenegro), lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996.”

BFI: “Documentary on the Ruska refugee camp in Ljubliana (Slovenia), where a group of Bosnian refugees present news every night on VHS video. Documentary on the making of the news.”

Frieze Magazine: “The amateur journalists sift information from three or four news sources: ‘I ask myself who might want to lie, and who might have the ability.’ Ordinary people, they have slowly come to realise that television news is a vast form of manipulation.”

Frieze 2: “Marker was Resnais’ assistant on Night and Fog (1955), one of the first films to document the Nazi death camps. This early moral imperative to remember is echoed in the Bosnian conflict. News, for those who live within violent struggle, is part of the work of mourning.”

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Katy asked why I like Chris Marker movies so much. I told her that Sans Soleil is one of my very favorite movies, and that everything else he has made connects with it in some way, that more than most other filmmakers he seems to be making one long work, rather than a bunch of disconnected movies, and I hope to see as much of that work as possible.

Songs heard:
Tokyo Days: Good Morning from Singin’ in the Rain
Prime Time in the Camps: Leonard Cohen’s Everybody Knows
Berlin ’90: The Air That I Breathe

by ·Comments Off on Red Angel (1966, Yasuzo Masumura)

An ugly, gray horrors-of-war movie. The twist here is that instead of simply running through all the reasons why war is hell, this one brings sex into the picture – not just the usual love and desire stuff, but a variety of situations dealing with sexual need during wartime.

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Our titular heroine (Nishi) is a nurse in an army hospital in 1939 during Japan’s war with China. She spends some of her time at a base hospital where men with illnesses and minor injuries rest up before they are sent home or back into combat, and the rest of her time at an understaffed camp hospital at the front dealing with a constant flow of critically wounded men, fatalities and amputations. She is raped by a soldier who is sent back into combat to his death as punishment. She sexually services a man who lost both arms and can’t take care of himself anymore (but he commits suicide soon afterwards). Then she ends up at the front in love with a morphine-addicted surgeon, in a platoon where the local “comfort women” are spreading cholera to the troops, but the troops keep visiting them anyway. Mishi manages to get Dr. Okagi off the morphine so he can make love to her, but the place is destroyed in a Chinese raid a few hours later, everyone killed but Nishi. She finds Okagi’s body on the ground. The end!

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A pretty interesting movie, definitely not the kind of war film I’ve seen before. Compassionate, but also somewhat hopeless given the surroundings and situations. I liked it, but can’t say I’m itching to watch it again.

Nishi is played by Ayako Wakao, who starred in a bunch of Masumura’s films (Seisaku’s Wife, Manji, A Wife Confesses, A False Student, Afraid To Die) as well as Mizoguchi’s Street of Shame (played the money-lending girl who opens her own shop at the end) and A Geisha, Ozu’s Floating Weeds, and Kon Ichikawa’s An Actor’s Revenge. Dr. Okagi appeared in Suzuki’s Underworld Beauty. And the armless guy starred in Oshima’s Naked Youth.

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J. Rosenbaum:
“Roughly contemporary with M*A*S*H (as in Altman’s film, scenes of war-front surgery provide a corollary to Vietnam), it sometimes suggests a less comic treatment of the same theme–how to preserve one’s humanity amid impossible circumstances–but its ethics are considerably more developed.”

J. Sharp for Midnight Eye:

Made for Daiei Studios, Masumura’s stark wartime drama, an adaptation of a novel by Arima Yorichika, is one of the handful of films made in the mid 60s dealing with the personal experiences of those involved in the war, including the same director’s previous Hoodlum Soldier (Heitai Yakuza, 1965) and Seijun Suzuki’s Story of a Prostitute (Shunpuden, 1966). Both Masumura and Suzuki had been active towards the end of the war, and both used their experience to examine the conflicts and interpersonal dramas that arose on the frontline in order to question such concepts as duty and loyalty to their country. To this end both directors approach their subject using strong female protagonists whose role in the war is often forgotten, with Story of a Prostitute focusing on a group of prostitutes sent out to the frontline to service the soldiers, and Red Angel almost making analogous use of the nurses (although Masumura’s film does feature a group of prostitutes and takes pains to point out that the nurses duty is not the same as theirs!) In a world gone mad it is these female characters who provide the only source of stability and comfort, even morality, whilst the shell-shocked, emasculated walking wounded dream of returning home to their families.

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by ·Comments Off on Sans Soleil (1983, Chris Marker)

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
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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.