February 5-11, 2004

screen picks

by Sam Adams

Two By Marker (Fri.-Sun., Feb. 6-8, $6, International House, 3701 Chestnut St., 215-895-6542) Agnès Varda described herself as a cinematic "gleaner," but the term fits her contemporary, Chris Marker, even better. Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve (apparently in France, though he's been known to say Mongolia), Marker is a trash-picker rescuing images from the dustbin of history, a magpie constructing his nest of a thousand fragments. For Marker as no other filmmaker, an image is not a fact but an invitation, a gateway. Ostensibly the story of a futuristic time traveler trying to save his society from itself, Marker's La Jetée (1962) is really the story of a man chasing after an image. It's the potency of a single childhood memory -- represented, like nearly all of the film's shots, by a still photograph -- which allows him to travel back in time, to an instant that turns out to be that of his own death, witnessed by his younger self. That memory, that picture, is both the beginning of his consciousness and its end, a flashbulb of recollection too intense to be looked at directly, at least without suffering the same fate as Icarus.

In 1982's Sans Soleil (Sunless), one of two Marker movies to be shown this weekend in new 35mm prints, Marker substitutes himself for La Jetée's image-obsessed hero, but with the knowledge that memory is best examined out of the corner of one's eye. Here, the sight of three children in the Icelandic half-light, "the image of happiness," is Marker's grail, yet he knows that its significance lies neither in the footage or in himself, but somewhere elusively in between, as untouchable as air.

Traveling to Japan and Africa's Cape Verde Islands, "the two extreme poles of survival," Marker is always a stranger, but he seems to cherish the opportunity to look in from the outside. In that respect, contemporary Tokyo serves Marker well, since no matter how well he fancies he knows it, it always seems to serve up something newly strange to his eyes: a shrine for the spirits of lost cats, or an animatronic JFK hawking the latest fashions. If Marker's appreciation of Tokyo is profound, it remains dispassionate, as if he were leaving the first footprints on an alien planet. He cherishes his alien-nation as a way to see things anew, as Herzog did in Lessons of Darkness. His self-consciously occidental perspective is the flip side to Lost in Translation's lazy entitlement.

In a voice with the even timbre of a voice-mail prompt, Alexandra Stewart reads the overlying narration, framed as a series of letters from the fictitious Sandor Krasna (an alter ego for Marker's alter ego). Each attempt to construct meaning out of Marker's grab bag of images is thus mediated several times over, a process that hardly ends when the film does; its aural-visual collage is so dense that multiple viewings and hours of reflection make only the merest dent. Sans Soleil, a masterpiece if ever there was one, unquestionably rewards such scrutiny, even if it must ultimately frustrate it. The closest thing in cinema to a crystallization of the thought process, Marker's impossible, beautiful film is as ultimately unknowable as another person's heart. But to quote the nonexistent Sandor Krasna, "Not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure."

Sans Soleil's two screenings (Fri., 8 p.m.; Sun., 1 p.m.) bookend a showing of Marker's Grin Without a Cat (Sat., 8 p.m.), a sprawling yet intimate history of the New Left that was completed (as Le fond de l'air est rouge) in 1977, retooled with English narration in 1992 and made its belated U.S. premiere two years ago. Marker gleans images from multiple sources, from newsreels to Eisenstein's Potemkin, circling in on the film's central betrayal: the abandonment of the revolutionary left by the Communist Party, which left them as disembodied as the title would suggest. (The more apposite metaphor that precedes it is "a spearhead without a spear.") Without a detailed knowledge of Communist Party history, not to mention French politics, the internal struggles that Grin details, particularly in its second half, may seem almost petty, the kind of internecine squabbling that still cripples the left. Beginning with the words "I never saw Potemkin when it came out," Grin painfully enumerates the danger of trying to re-create history ("We thought 1968 would be our 1905," laments one Berkeleyite radical), but its elegiac tone verges on nostalgia, muffling its final cry of defiance to a muted squeak.

Guimba the Tyrant (Thu., Feb. 5, 7:30 p.m., $6, International House) Though a mite disjointed, Cheick Oumar Sissoko's satire still has plenty of bite. Set in a fictitious African country that transparently doubles for the filmmaker's native Mali, it's the story of a tyrant so foul he can't bear the touch of sunlight; he's so evil it's stunted his son's growth. Full of riotous, off-color humor (said son is a well-endowed midget with a thing for "big women with big rumps") and simply but evocatively expressed magic (shotguns that fire dust storms), Sissoko's 1995 film has become a landmark in recent African cinema. Shown with the latest of Filmon Mebrahtu's "Rencontrer: Africa" documentaries, finely crafted mini-narratives that distill the history of Philadelphia's African immigrants into five-minute nuggets.

The Godfather Trilogy (Sun., Feb. 8, noon, 3:30 and 7 p.m., $8.50-$12, Prince Music Theater, 1412 Chestnut St., 215-567-9700) The Prince's Coppola series closes out with this all-day affair. Make it all the way through III's operatic climax and receive a free dead fish.

The Edge of the World/Man of Aran ($29.99/$29.95 DVD) In How the Myth Was Made, the admirably critical documentary included on Home Vision's disc of Man of Aran (1934), George Stoney details the ways in which Robert Flaherty, sometimes called the "father of documentary," twisted and even bent the truth. Intent on showing the Aran Islanders as rural traditionalists battling against inimitable nature, Flaherty filmed around the islanders' burgeoning settlements, sent their boats needlessly into storm-tossed waters and even convinced them to revive the long-dead practice of harpooning massive (and thus cinematic) basking sharks. Stripping Flaherty of his paternal claims, Stoney christens him "our first film poet," a title befitting Man of Aran's stunning imagery, and a clever way of rehabilitating Flaherty's reputation.

No less stunning are the images in Michael Powell's The Edge of the World (1937), shot on the Shetland Island of Foula. Powell, however, cops to his own constructions, mixing documentary footage with a terse melodrama of generational conflict. Apart from the fluttery Belle Chrystall, Powell's actors mix seamlessly with the locals, and the film's climactic mountain-climbing sequence is every bit as elemental as Man of Aran, without the unpleasant moral aftertaste. Image's DVD includes two Powell shorts, the retrospective Return to the Edge of the World and the haunting An Airman's Letter to His Mother, and insightful master-class commentary.

Waco: The Rules of Engagement ($29.95 DVD) With its low-grade production values and TV-cheesy music, William Gazecki's documentary seems at first like a cheap attempt to exploit the Waco tragedy, a careless churning of conspiracy muck. But overcoming prejudices is what Gazecki's film does best, and it proves to be a sobering, even damning piece of investigative journalism. Offering convincing evidence that federal ATF agents either deliberately provoked a confrontation they knew would lead to a massacre, or else acted so recklessly as to make bloodshed inevitable, Gazecki marshals testimony, documents and footage, much of it taken from the official record but previously underexamined. Rather than seeking balance, the film presents itself as a rebuttal to the official record, which means, for example, that the four ATF agents killed in the initial confrontation with the Branch Davidians barely rate a mention. But given the government's maddening whitewash, and the fact that the incident remains a gaping wound for untold numbers of Americans, it's a badly needed corrective.

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