This French documentary chronicles a sobering and little known event that occurred during the Battle of Okinawa, the final bloody man-to-man struggle between American and Japanese troops before the A-bombs were dropped. The event is framed by the story of a woman in the process of creating a computer program about the tragic event in which Japanese soldiers and officers killed their own families and then themselves en masse in hopes of frightening the American troops with the shock of it all. Unfortunately, the horrific gambit failed; the Americans misunderstood and this made it easier for them to justify using the bomb.
Like his fellow recluse Godard, Marker is forever concerned with the meaning of the image, but where Godard’s palimpsests overload those images with meaning both visual and aural, the meaning of Marker’s images is being forever stripped away, and any trace of his “authorship” with it. Recall in Sans Soleil “the Zone,” his friend’s image device which renders the political struggles of the Sixties as abstract images of colored electronic movement, creating an impression of struggle, an emblem which Marker says is “more honest” than the traps of context and explanation. Material and metaphor: the Zone is both an active transformation and intervention into the image and a representation of the operations of time—a relentless process to which Marker blissfully consigns his own images at the end of the film.
Yet Marker is not indulging in some postmodern vanity about the absence of meaning. Meaning is the structuring absence of his entire project—the grin of his images is merely the meager visual evidence of the unseen cat. Marker is not a “creator” but an arranger, ordering the trace remnants of a felt but invisible past with the tools presented to him in the present. “I’ll have to give these images to my friend Chris one day, see if he can make any sense of them,” says Laura (Catherine Belkhodja), the protagonist of Level Five; “Chris, the editing wunderkind,” she slyly adds. Marker’s last feature, and his first on video, divorces him even further from the visual and verbal text he’s devised. Ostensibly the video records of Laura’s attempts to reach her dead lover by completing his computer program reenacting the Battle of Okinawa, the last and most ferocious conflict of the Pacific War, Level Five forgoes any idea of cinema as a “pure” medium, placing it instead as one element within a vast media interface, a resource to be accessed within a larger project of memory reclamation.
Yet even as it opens with a quotation from Gibson’s Neuromancer, the ubiquitous ur-text of such speculative fictions, Level Five’s vision of ultramodernity has a charmingly musty air about it. The menu screens, multiple monitors, and overlaid graphics that delineate Laura’s physical and virtual workspace seem like visions of a future conceived in the past. Rather than inadvertent quaintness, however, the bluntness and functionality of the instruments at her command retain a seductively mythic quality: a dream of labyrinthine interiors, of unending possibilities for connection and evolution seems to lurk within the unadorned casings and matter-of-fact command functions.
Marker understands the romance of technology even as he slyly undermines it. Laura likes to taunt the computer by substituting nouns for verbs in her command orders, leading to such perplexed declarations from the poor unit as “I don’t know how to shoe,” “I don’t know how to baguette,” and so on. The expanding media universe in which Marker situates his perpetual concerns provides no answers, but rather sharpens the pertinence and pathos of the questions. Just as in Sans Soleil he fantasized about a visitor from the future whose total recall makes him nostalgic for forgetting, Marker’s ventures into new media simply provide more means of entry to the unrecoverable, unalterable, and unknowable past that fascinates him. Marker’s “future” is not a projection of speculation and fantasy, but an abstract space shorn of the necessities of living in the present: a space literally out of time, a space whose removal from the helplessly chronological experience of time allows the possibility of accessing that already passed time which is the sole source of meaning.
-Andrew Tracey / reverseshot
http://rapidshare.com/files/119311855/Five.part1.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/119321544/Five.part2.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/119332037/Five.part3.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/119345411/Five.part4.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/119350844/Five.part5.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/119354694/Five.part6.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/119365554/Five.part7.rar
http://rapidshare.com/files/119375640/Five.part8.rar
Language: French/Japanese/English [hardcoded English subs]
Rar Password: None
0 comments:
Post a Comment