Chris Marker
Level Five

It is absurd to note how, in the vast Debaserian archive, there is not even the artist profile of Chris Marker, an author often forgotten by academies and cinephiles, yet at the same time the creator of two essential groundbreaking films: La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982). These are two films that would certainly make it onto a hypothetical list of films to see before you die, revolutionary in the history of cinema. The first is a masterpiece, even just for being an extremely complex and at the same time gripping story of a time travel, love from the past, and obsession with images, resolved (without cuts, but with exceptional control of time) in only 30 minutes of duration. But that's not all: the film eliminates the basic filming phase to be made up of simple still photographs: exaltation of the frame and total cancellation of movement, where the only moment of life (an imperceptible blink of a woman's eye) seems to be an extraordinary miracle.

The second stands as a masterpiece of a genre theorized by Marker himself: the essay film (or essay film, if you prefer). A way of thinking about cinema as a flow of philosophically themed images, often accompanied by a significant commentaire. A blissful and immersive journey between Africa and Japan, where the compositional beauty of the images takes on a hypnotic and undeniable rhythm.

Poet of memory, Marker also created a lesser-known but equally important work: "Level Five" (1996).
The artistic testament of the French director and the last full-length film proper, before experiments in the field of computing and short films took over the author's interest, a man who was always avant-garde, a great theorist of cinema (he was one of the first to predict the failure of cinema vérité, capturing that the genre could be a means but never an end: in cinema, but in audiovisual media in general, the truth can NEVER be told. The very conception of framing implies the exclusion of a portion of space, and therefore the medium does not determine absolute truth).

"Level Five" is the first fictional film after "La Jetée", where Marker seems to abandon the structure of the cinematic essay (without really doing it, obviously) to tell a story that, for the first time, is embodied by a professional actress.
The brilliant Catherine Belkhodja plays Laura, a woman who has just suffered the traumatic loss of the man she loved. All that remains of him is a video game on which the young man worked days and nights and which the woman must complete. As an act of love, despite not being a computer expert and not knowing the themes of the video game at all, Laura agrees.
The video game is based on the Battle of Okinawa (1945), a terrible event of World War II concealed by both American and Japanese history for its shocking impact. A battle where many Japanese civilians, rather than be captured and tortured, organized mass suicides and murders. A context where, out of love, one was forced to kill even their own children, their own parents, their own boyfriend, their own girlfriend, and everyone they cared about. Laura is shocked by what she discovers and embarks on a path of self-destruction that will lead her to align her own loss with the universal one of Okinawa.

An essay film on war and memory, where fiction oscillates with the documentary (in the video game there are "extras": testimonies and interviews with witnesses and intellectuals like Nagisa Oshima) and where, above all, there is reflection on cinema.
Truth does not exist if not documented: we are not capable of surpassing the imaginative and evocative force of the image, to the point that we will never remember anything that is not filmed.
It is no coincidence, in fact, that the event of Okinawa has been forgotten through the destruction of every possible visual evidence.

Laura is Marker's alter-ego: a woman without psychology, cold, austere, and suffering. The woman (always one of the key elements of Marker's cinema) is a screen, a camera, a director, and a catalyst of time (even in "La Jetée" the woman was the one who forced the protagonist to return to the past and face death). Among the machines, computers, and archives, the woman (Laura, remember, devoid of psychology: she is not a deliberately memorable character) is the Marketer author in his study. When, instead, archival materials are shown, it is Marker himself who speaks to us in the inevitable commentaire.
Man as a human being is imperfect: he is either body without voice (Laura) or voice without body (Marker).

Perfection is reached at level five, the highest level of the video game, but at the same time the last level possible to achieve: the absolute. The absolute coincides with death. Man reaches his perfect balance only by dying.

A film with a typically Markerean structure, yet at the same time original, capable of keeping attention high despite its atypical structure, where the director (remember... "Level Five" is Marker's artistic testament), embodied by Laura, is destined to self-destruct once the universal (Okinawa) overlaps with the personal (the mourning). This self-destruction is embodied in a finale of rare pain and rare cinematic beauty: a progressive blur that erases the actress's face, turning her into an amorphous blotch.

An impressive document and, at the same time, a great film that leaves emptiness and reflection in the stunned viewer.