I have always felt an indefinable kinship towards Chris Marker’s films that were not particularly related to the overt intellectuality of his work or his espousal of left-leaning ideals. However, it was not until the first chapter in Catherine Lupton’s book on the filmmaker, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future that this gravitation took on […]
A visual essay into – or more appropriately, a thoughtful process of signification for – a montage of photographs from Denise Bellon’s photo-reportage from the period between the two world wars (as the “grand illusion” of a lasting peace during the mid 1930s after the Great War gradually unraveled to reveal an inexorable path towards […]
Exploring similar territory as Russian filmmaker Aleksandr Sokurov on the continuity of collective history, spiritual desolation, and immanence, Level Five also serves as a thoughtful and reverent homage to Alain Resnais’ films on the interpenetration of memory and the subconscious. Presented as a series of video feed confessionals by a woman (Catherine Belkhodja) to her […]
The Last Bolshevik opens to an insightful and relevant excerpted passage from author and critical thinker George Steiner’s book, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture: “It is not the literal past that rules us [save, possibly, in a biological sense]. It is images of the past.” Composed in the structure of […]
An early episode in Sans soleil shows a series of porcelain cats – some intact while others, weather worn or cracked with missing appendages – curiously lining a shrine in a Japanese temple that, as the unseen narrator (Alexandra Stewart) reveals, has been consecrated in memory of these benevolent creatures. In a subsequent, unrelated musing […]
An off-screen narrator (speaking in first-person narrative for the filmmaker) recalls early memories of Battleship Potemkin as a series of images from the film converge towards the moment of the sailors’ call to arms – and revolution – with the singular word “Brothers!” before the order to fire from the bridge of the battleship is […]