Unfinished
This post will be structured by the release of the Icarus Films DVD package of the short films named above. I don't want to trivialize these films, which add up to a brief but revelatory 47 minutes combined, as sovereign works of art, but I find it important to acknowledge the way in which they were viewed. Icarus Films appears quite proud to have released these and other Chris Marker films, and I appreciate their enthusiasm for such an important artist. It's no news that many film auteurs are under-represented in the realm of home viewing, but it seems particularly unfortunate that Marker's collected works are so difficult to come by (and not just because the democratization of film availability seems perfectly suited to Marker's democratic cinema). Marker's films could be labelled "challenging" in that they do not rely on historically familiar filmic structures to elicit viewer response. Leave behind those conditioned responses, though, and most will find that their intuitive leaps of fancy can be followed by honest interaction with the films' guiding intelligence(s). The Criterion Collection's landmark release of SANS SOLEIL / LA JETÉE set the standard for widespread Marker film availability, and indeed these two fan favorites are among Marker's most stunning achievements. But with Criterion's valuable attention directed elsewhere for the moment, it's fallen on Icarus Films to handle the remaining and lesser-known filmography. That filmography's slow but ongoing penetration into the outer world is a cause for celebration, and in this sense it feels symbolically significant that a cinephile in southeastern Pennsylvania was able to view them so easily. I don't know how Marker's films will be seen in a more technologically advanced future, but while DVDs and distribution companies remain important factors in the availability of marginalized cinema, it feels worthwhile to make a note of my own good fortune in being able to see these films at all.
THE EMBASSY, made by Marker in 1973, is a rueful commentary on Chile's recent political catastrophe. Six short years after the comparatively optimistic THE SIXTH SIDE OF THE PENTAGON, Marker seems all too aware that the global left was under vicious attack. It was no longer enough to patiently observe as the left worked out its own contradictions. As such, THE EMBASSY takes as its subject the aftermath of a political coup. Refugees gather and take shelter, and a voiceover haltingly informs us of the rapes and executions occurring outside the sanctuary. We learn the names and brief histories of the embassy's inhabitants. They have arrived as exiles fleeing a rising fascism, but this fragile community is soon disrupted by differences in political opinion.
Intriguingly, this is not a documentary. Marker has instead fictionalized what perhaps was beyond his scope of understanding. While Patricio Guzman and company meticulously documented the fall of Chile under Marker's sponsorship, Marker himself took the specificity of Chile's disaster and used fiction to diagnose a pernicious leftist failure. By taking for granted the triumph of fascism, by now less a political bogeyman than a real consequence of reactionary reprisal, Marker looks backward instead of forward for answers. How could fascism seize a country so decisively when politics were thought to have moved beyond its near-primitive brute force? For Chile there are real answers based in its unique situation, but in the abstract political ruin depicted in THE EMBASSY, we see a left unable to control its warring impulses even as atrocities occur outside its very windows. If this is our left, Marker seems to be saying, what were we to expect?
As ever, Marker's eye for film form is sharp and discerning. Even with no diegetic sound and an affectless narrator, the constructed nature of this fiction soon assumes a life of its own. The actors exist comfortably in their shared space, and the imposition of commentary begins to convey an interiority to their actions. As the situation worsens, the dynamic between the actors registers as credibly similar to that of real world leftists. Acquarello aptly points out that Marker is drawing a parallel here between the May '68 student riots and the leftist failure THE EMBASSY fictionalizes. This is the unique power of Marker's film. By creating associations between two historical events with fictional connective tissue, we can see the problems of the past reappearing in the present. Though I have not yet seen it, I understand that Lizzie Borden's BORN IN FLAMES attempts this style of fictionalized documentary to explore political conflict (Acquarello cites Peter Watkins as another maker of "docufiction" in this vein). BORN IN FLAMES also concerns the struggle of leftist organizing after a coup, though in that film the coup is a socialist-feminist one rather than fascist. This type of docufiction strikes me as an effective means of interrogating leftism's ability to respond to the challenges it's meant to address. Since leftism is often a reaction against existing conditions, fiction serves equally well as an arena in which leftism can be put to the test.
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THE SIXTH SIDE OF THE PENTAGON is a title worthy of Marker's irreverent intelligence. As a Zen proverb informs us shortly after a rapid succession of credits, the best way to attack an impenetrable pentagon is to target its sixth side. In this case, it is the metonymic US Department of Defense Pentagon to which the film refers. Here we have a riddle that, like many others Marker introduces across his filmography, seems to promise answers while simultaneously occluding them. The association is drawn, so now what? In the next 26 minutes, we will see plenty of anti-war attempts to infiltrate the Pentagon, both metaphorically and literally. By this opening criterion, have they been successful? Are Marker and Reichenbach (his co-director) even expecting success? Judging by the prominence given to the 15-year-old girl who claims it was she herself who had changed in the course of the Pentagon demonstrations, this may be the most we can reasonably expect in the face of such stern opposition. Does that make us the sixth side?
I would be inclined to say so, but my own interpretation runs up against the film's somewhat dispassionate presentation of the protesters. Marker and Reichenbach have no problem filming too close for master shots, cutting off speeches midway, or even laying non-diegetical narration over the students speaking directly to the camera. No person rises to the forefront of the movement, and even big name attendees such as Peter, Paul, and Mary appear only briefly. This seems in keeping with the ideology behind such pointedly collective demonstrations. It's also unlikely that any one soundbite or participant could clarify the situation any more than what we and the directors already know. No one perspective can truly claim ownership, after all. How, then, to reconcile the poetic conclusion which posits us, not the literal or symbolic Pentagon, as the ones who will change through political action?
The interior lives of the participants, at least in this film, remain a mystery to us. But Marker and Reichenbach achieve an effect reminiscent of another documentary I adore, the Maysles' GIMME SHELTER. Both that film and this one seem to give full voice to the ideas behind Direct Cinema. The affective strangeness and non-authoritative perspectives of these two films communicate something I might precariously label as the "energy" behind social movements. Not to be mistaken with whatever a zeitgeist might be, the energy behind social phenomena is less sociological than experiential. We can exhaustively compile the intersecting chronologies that lead up to an event, but cinema is uniquely suited to capture, without troublesome claims of omniscience, each second as it passes in the midst of an event. The camera simply records, even as its presence and the presence of its operators cause ripples in the ontology of a given space.
If there's a cultural or historical reason for the Pentagon demonstrations taking place, Marker and Reichenbach have not explained it to us in this film. It is enough to simply watch, sometimes from privileged spectatorial positions and sometimes amidst roiling crowds, what happens on this day in history. In fact, our own viewership mirrors that of the protesters'. If the protesters are changed through the act of witnessing, are we not also witnessing and, therefore, also changing? If simply showing up is enough to produce change in a person, then it follows that we, by "showing up" to this capturing of the Pentagon demonstrations, might end up changing as well. It may be a mediated experience, but if cinema is to exist at all, we as viewers are required to have a certain faith in the belief that even a secondhand act of witnessing can lead to such change. Marker and Reichenbach seem to have a double confidence in that faith: first in the idea that the protesters will experience a change; and, second, in the idea that cinema can meaningfully impart to us the event as it was experienced by its participants so many decades ago. We are free to believe or disbelieve as we choose. And more than most, Marker makes me want to believe.
