Disc World

Play it again, Sam

by Sam Adams

MASK APPEAL: Dancers crowd the Toyko streets in Chris Marker's Sans Soleil. (CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

In an interview on Criterion's La Jetée/Sans Soleil disc, Jean-Pierre Gorin, a longtime associate of the elusive cineaste Chris Marker, calls Marker a "hijacker," which is his way of describing how Marker reuses images for his own ends. For Marker, as perhaps for no other filmmaker whose work can loosely be called "documentary," an image is not a fact but a gateway, a noble but doomed attempt to master the fluidity of space and, especially, time.

In plot terms, Marker's 1962 short La Jetée is the story of a post-apocalyptic time traveler trying to save humanity from itself. But the film announces its true subject with its opening title: "This is the story of a man marked by an image of childhood." Represented, like (almost) all of the film's shots, by a still photograph, his attachment to the image of a woman, her hair tousled, her fingers pressed tentatively to her mouth, is so powerful it allows him to travel through time.

All films are a succession of still frames, but La Jetée exposes the process of image-making. It takes the movement out of moving pictures, the better to question the unconscious complicity with which we accept a string of images as a pretense to truth. Perhaps the image fixed in the hero of La Jetée's mind is real, and perhaps a fantasy, but either way, it is untouchable, and any attempt to approach or explain it can end only in failure. The film's not-quite-circular narrative is disrupted just before the two ends meet; a memory can be approached, but never grasped.

In Sans Soleil, filmed two decades later, Marker approached the ideas of memory and loss without the safety net of an overarching narrative. There is no onscreen protagonist, just the even, affectless voice of a narrator (Alexandra Stewart in the English version) reading the letters of a globe-trotting cameraman. (The end credits identify the author as one Sandor Krasna, but then Marker is fond of pseudonyms; his surname itself is an affectation.) Traveling to Japan and the Cape Verde islands, the film's narrator strays between "the two extreme poles of survival," often cutting from one far-off locale to another as visual matches suggest themselves. One moment, the bleached skull of a horned mammal in the Sahara desert; the next, a Tokyo street festival whose dancers wear papier-mache bull heads.

Marker is hardly the first or the last filmmaker to try to mirror his own mental processes on film, but no one before or since has made the elusive associations of thought so lyrically resonant. Sans Soleil is the rare film that not only grows richer with each viewing, but in between them, as well. Years go by, and I find myself drawn back to its densely packed ideas, which fly by at a pace that belies their complexity. (The complete script awaits a languorous perusal at www.markertext.com.) Like memory itself, the movie changes each time you watch it, or perhaps it changes you. Criterion's invaluable disc comes with just enough supplementary material to begin unraveling the two movies' secrets without beginning to exhaust them.

An essay film of an equally personal but decidedly less genteel stripe, Dusan Makavejev's WR: Mysteries of the Organism (1971) links socialist revolution and orgasmic release, via the theories of psychiatrist Wilhelm Reich. Reich believed in the orgasm as a liberating force, and in the presence of orgone energy, a kind of primordial static electricity that could be channeled into the body via "accumulators" made of plywood and metal. Although the commentary track, taken from a book by the late Raymond Durgnat, refers to Reich as Makavejev's "hero," the movie's attitude toward Reich's bizarre theories seems to be ambivalent or at least tongue-in-cheek. How else to square the growing intrusion of an antic Yugoslavian menage a quatre in which a Soviet ice-skating champion named Vladimir Ilych takes a sharpened ice skate to the neck of a socialist libertine? For all of its free-love rhetoric and onscreen copulation, the movie seems as much a warning of the perils of unchecked impulses as a libertarian manifesto. Sweet Movie

, released three years later, revels even further in the demolition of social mores. Mixing blood, urine and other bodily fluids (albeit with a notable lack of orgone secretions), the movie is a constant howl of emancipation, a Sadean cartoon that reaches its stomach-churning climax at a Viennese commune whose members purge from every orifice and communicate in pre-verbal grunts. Not for nothing is one character named for Mikael Bakunin, the Russian theorist of the "Carnival of Anarchy."

On a more palatable if no less quizzical note, Warner Bros.' Cult Camp Classics 4: Historical Epics brings together curiosities from Sergio Leone and Howard Hawks, as well as one by Hollywood journeyman Richard Thorpe. Filmed before Leone discovered the deserts of Almeria, Colossus is a wonderfully strange take on the sword-and-sandal genre, one more suggestive of science fiction than historical. Here, as with Hawks' Land of the Pharaohs, the extras are worth more than the film itself: the Colossus commentary by Leone biographer Christopher Frayling is both witty and insightful, and Peter Bogdanovich's Pharaohs track is enhanced by excerpts from interviews with Hawks himself.

(s_adams@citypaper.net)