Level Five (1997)

I get anxious when sitting down to watch a Chris Marker documentary for the first time because my life has been forever altered on more than one occasion by doing so. L5 shook me, but only time will tell if it went deeper than that.
The topic is Marker’s favourite obsession: memory. In a broader sense, it’s the memory/collective amnesia of an entire country, Japan, in response to the Battle of Okinawa that took place in 1945.
Documentary narrations are typically scripted, but L5’s is more than just narration; it’s a decisive reliving of an event from a point in time aware of its own latitude in relation to what it comments on. The temporal distance isn't a direct removal; it’s a connection of causality that we as viewers share with Marker and his proxy, the female computer programmer.

4 playthings of a mad god out of 5