Prime Time in the Camps
Le 20h dans les camps
FRANCE / 1993 / French / Color / Video / 28 min
Director: Chris Marker
Production Company: Antenne 2
Source: Les Films du Jeudi
As a means to build a network in their refugee camp, young refugees from Bosnia Herzegovina launch a news program. Marker turns his camera to their experiment, asking whether amidst their lives of instability, if these refugees are not in some way confronting isolation and oblivion.
The Last Bolshevik
Le tombeau d’Alexandre
FRANCE / 1993 / French, Russian / Color / Video / 118 min
Director, Photography, Script, Editing: Chris Marker
Production Companies: Les Films de l’Astrophore, Michael Kustow Productions, Epidem OY, La Sept / ARTE, CNC
Source: Athénée Français Cultural Center, Documentaire sur Grand Ecran
A long-form documentary dedicated to the Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin, who passed away in 1989. Through narration styled from six letters Marker had written to Medvedkin, a friend, Medvedkin’s life work and Soviet history intertwine, in a film full of nostalgia for a lost utopia.
Three Video Haiku Thaika / Owl Gets in Your Eyes / Petite Ceinture
FRANCE / 1994 / French / Color / Video / 1 min each
Director: Chris Marker
Source: Les Films du Jeudi
Thaika contains images of a seagull soaring above the Seine River in Paris. In Owl Gets in Your Eyes, an image of a flying owl is superimposed over an image of Level Five actress Catherine Belkhodja smoking a cigarette. Petite Ceinture depicts Paris’s Petite Ceinture railway in an homage to the Lumière brothers.
Blue Helmet
Casque bleu
FRANCE / 1995 / French / Color / Video / 25 min
Director: Chris Marker
Production Company: Point du jour
Source: Les Films du Jeudi
This film documents the testimony of François Crémieux, who participated in the U.N. Peacekeeping Forces during the Yugoslav Wars. By devoting himself to listening to the war experiences of a single person, Marker voices protest against a style of television reporting that uses directed performances to pull in viewers. “Blue helmet” is a nickname that comes from the helmets that U.N. Peacekeepers wear.
Level Five
FRANCE / 1996 / French, Japanese / Color / 35mm (Original: Beta SP) / 105 min
Director, Photography, Editing: Chris Marker
Photography: Gérard de Battista, Yves Angelo
Cast: Catherine Belkhodja
Soundtrack: Michel Krasna
Production Companies: Les Films de l’Astrophore, Argos Films, La Sept Cinéma
Source: Tamasa Distribution
Laura, a computer programmer played by Catherine Belkhodja, steps in for her dead lover to complete a computer game about the Battle of Okinawa. Documentary images and testimony appear in computerized space, bringing up themes of reality and imaginary space, the truth and lies of history, memory and forgetting.