Word: markers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Certain similarities between Chris Marker's The Koumiko Mystery and the American documentaries seem to imply a common basic premise. The choice of "real" subject matter, the use of television programs and political commentary, the inclusion of footage which could not have been preplanned (the Tokyo Olympic Games for example), and the apparently random way Marker orders his material suggest the same realities as do the Americans...
Koumiko Muroaka is a woman, who, we are told, Marker "met by accident" when he was filming the Tokyo Olympics. She is apolitical, extremely beautiful, highly independent, and, Marker insists, representative of nothing other than herself. The film consists of Marker's visions of Tokyo, his visions of Koumiko, his visions of Tokyo as tempered by Koumiko, and Koumiko's visions of herself as interpreted by Marker. Instead of treating these sequentially, Marker intercuts these segments, making sure to indicate clearly which point of view is being given. Multiple points of view, equally valid and independent, destroy any direct causal...
...OTHER films, Jean Rouch's "Garedu Nord" is perhaps equally stunning and disturbing. Rouch who, along with Chris Marker, invented Cinema-verite (the difference between Maker and Rouch and the recent American copies is roughly that between the incredible Hitchcock of Vertigo and the bankrupt Polanski of Repulsion) is a master at forcing an audience to change their sympathies. Fantastically aware of the possibilities of a frame, Rouch can totally confuse a complacent viewer by having an actress turn her body about thirty degrees and in so doing undermine her earlier sympathetic position. In "Gare du Nord" these abrupt shifts...
...conception of film comes from Neo-Realism (Antonioni, visconti, Rossellini, de Sica, Fellini). Neo Realism's original choice of social reality for subject-matter and its tendency to documentary as method had a tremendous influence in France, giving rise to a large school of French documentarists (Jean Rouch, Chris Marker) and a larger consciousness of film as more that a purely fictional narrative medium. Andre Bazin, father of modern film criticism, stressed the integrity of the photographed event, the virtue of films which preserve a measure of reality's implicit ambiguity instead of analyzing reality for perfect clarity. Indeed...
...which each person's behavior is laid down by tradition. A fight scene in The Searchers (1956), for example, gives participants and spectators secure roles. The tension generated when one man picks up a stick of wood turns into warmth and humor when he sets it as a boundary marker. No such security comes from the sequence in How Green: Ford cuts from one face to another, showing his characters straining to create song as if for the first time. All the film's shots of masses of men have a specific emotional direction. Lines of men coming from...