FEBRUARY 8, 2008 - VOL. 1, ISSUE 1

"It is not the past that rules us—it is images of the past.”

"When the cost of making a film is as much as a pencil and paper, then you'll find the true artists."

A hand turns off the lights. "Play" is pressed on a VCR, the tracking sounds, a dull glow is thrown on pale faces in the darkness and for two hours they are struck numb, hypnotized on their couches and chairs by the curved and distorted image on their television. Who are these people? What are they watching? It could be me in my living room, but it’s actually a description of Andre Tarkovsky and Sven Nykvist watching The Sacrifice for the first time. What has just transpired is a key moment in the film, A Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich, an amazing working of art and hour-long broadcast made by Chris Marker for the French television program, "Cinéma, de notre temps."

Does it seem strange that such an astounding film could come from television? After all, Ingmar Bergman made two of his best for the small screen, Scenes From a Marriage and Fanny and Alexander, as did Peter Watkins with Edvard Munch and R.W. Fassbinder with Berlin Alexanderplatz. Utilizing television is one of several ways in which Chris Marker defies the conventions of ‘serious’ filmmaking. He is trailblazing through ‘lesser’ technologies and in the process he is informing us about the state of cinema, its past, its future, and is making his best work along the way.

These films are his "movies about movies." They are essay films, though "diary entry" films is more appropriate, they are about other filmmakers and their works. On the brink of idol worship, they never are simple biography or explanations of other films. They are ponderings, meditations on the nature of film, yet it is through the aesthetics Marker employs that make his most interesting points about the movies.

Marker has made three such films, all of which are unique, stand-alone works. However, they all share a thread of his aesthetic, a visual style that is best likened to the atmosphere of sitting in a dark living room watching a movie on your television. The films are The Last Bolshevik, a feature film broken into six letters addressed to the late Aleksandr Medvedkin. AK is a seventy-minute feature that photographs Kurosawa Akira making Ran on the slopes of Mount Fuji. A Day In Life of Andre Arsenevich is more or less an introduction to the seven films of Tarkovsky and takes place during the final days of making The Sacrifice.

Apart from the movies, these films portray the radical evolution of the industry. They reflect the transitional status of cinema in the 1980s where, for the first time ever, films could be seen outside of theaters and could be seen anytime the viewer wished. The first format wars were taking place. Soon VHS would win out, and VCRs sprang up in every home and video rental stores in every town. Amateur video was becoming commonplace with inexpensive camcorders and recordable blank tapes. For better or worse, the cinema was coming home, and for a very low price.

Marker’s films capture this impact. Movies are cropped to fit television screens, destroying a directors vision. Colors are boosted or dulled to fit the palate of a cathode ray, and an audience no longer had to go out of their way to view a masterpiece, if desired, they could press pause and go do something else. Home video had disrupted the purity of the movie-going experience, but rather than sit in judgment, Chris Marker embraced this change, he has acknowledged its existence and turned it into art.

This mode of film going is the only mode I know. As a child of the 80s and 90s, I was reared on VCRs and Friday night rentals and I find the atmosphere of Marker’s films instantly relatable. In AK, Marker has set up a mock screening room where his camera records a television monitor and tape decks playing a scene from Throne of Blood. This flies in the face of conventional documentary aesthetics, which is to show film clips that attempt to preserve the aspect ratio and quality of film. Yet here we are watching on television a camera filming a television screen that is playing a movie. This mock room is dark; the equipment is visible only in the glow of the screen, in the shadows cast by Mifune Toshiro. Again he does this in The Last Bolshevik by showing several clips of Medvedkin’s Happiness that are straight off of a television. Occasionally there is a distracting glare or reflection, but that’s just part of the experience. The greatest of these moments is the one mentioned earlier in A Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich where Tarkovsky and Nykvist are completely mesmerized by what they see on the little screen. I am elated to see that these two figures, for whom I have immense respect, saw The Sacrifice the same way I did.

The Last Bolshevik displays a plethora of little details that flesh out this aesthetic. The most interesting being the entre act entitled, "A Cat Listening to Music." What follows is ten minutes of camcorder footage of Marker’s cat sleeping on a Yamaha keyboard. What does this have to do with Aleksandr Medvedkin or Soviet Cinema or the USSR? I don’t think is has anything to do with it, but rather than being a lapse of self-indulgence, I found this to one of the most poignant moments in the film. The cat is whimsical, but the moment serves to unite all modes of cinema, all types of moving images. The film itself is comprised of television and newsreel footage, film clips, interviews, and home video. All are placed on the same level; there is no hierarchy of established image values that holds film at the top and camcorder footage at the bottom. Chris Marker is a one man National Film Registry, he posits us to acknowledge all types of moving images, to give each our consideration and scrutiny.

Still, these three films have more to offer. They not only embrace this new era, but Chris Marker is also capturing the death of the last one. His subjects are the fading figures of the movies, captured at the moments of their deaths, like Tarkovsky in A Day in the Life of Andre Arsenevich on his literal and symbolic deathbed. Like Stanley Kubrick, he was fated to die as soon as his last film was completed. Medvedkin is turned into a symbol of a bygone era, both the Soviet Union and of Soviet Cinema, a movement that has sculpted and forged world cinema in its wake. Even Kurosawa, who was full of life during the filming of Ran, had not much left in him after the moments of AK. Despite his three feature films of the 1990s, Ran was to be his critical swan’s song.

What Marker has done is photograph an emotion, the feeling of loss. Chronicling this closing chapter of yesteryear's giants is tricky business. The pitfalls include overt sentimentality and an "E! True Hollywood Story" style of sensationalizing. Last year we saw the deaths of Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Ousmane Sembene, and Edward Yang, but we also saw newer directors coming into their prime, like David Cronenberg, whose 1983 Videodrome most resembles the television glow aesthetic of The Last Bolshevik. This strange period of cinema, that we are still experiencing now with the digital revolution and internet distribution, has been immortalized by Chris Marker.

The movies about movies are treasures. They are works of beauty that capture the death and life that is cinema. No other filmmaker has done this so spectacularly made tributes to great directors and left an indelible stamp on cinema history at the same time. Chris Marker is film truth, he is marveling at the bygone past of the movies, leaping into the future, and chronicling everything along the way. He embodies both the best characteristics of a moviegoer and the discipline of a great filmmaker.