I’ve seen this film twice. The first time, I was deeply unaffected by it. The second time, I liked it a bit more, and I admired a lot of what it does, but all the qualms I had on my first viewing remained. First, I just found it aesthetically off-putting. I tried to ignore the narrator’s voice, but I still couldn’t help finding it irritatingly soft and subdued—a kind of syrupy affectlessness. Also, counter to what I remembered from my first viewing, I found the imagery entirely bland and unengaging. While it fits with the home-movie/travelogue idea, the cinematography shares the kind of flat lifelessness of the narration. The ‘transcendent’ image of the Icelandic children walking seemed, especially, to demand more evocative or striking photography. This bland aesthetic is presumably intentional, since Marker explicitly questions the reality of his images and his ability to communicate their meaning to his audience. So maybe he doesn’t want the audience to be spellbound by the image of transcendence; maybe he wants to put us at a distance to consider what he’s saying about what he’s showing. Or maybe it’s just me who isn’t spellbound.
The editing is better, and I suspect that it’s really the heart of the film, what people find most fascinating. The juxtapositions are occasionally quite striking, moving between disparate types of images, different types of constructed realities. And that brings me to what I actually like about the film, which is the basic philosophy that it expounds. Its intertwining of time with images is pretty good stuff: we build the past and future with our images, with our stories, signs and symbols. They create a common myth of history, of a meaningful reality outside the present, an underlying dreamscape of symbols. People asleep on the subway dream of images from television. The segments of the film set in Japan are the most interesting, casting it as a land where reality is explicitly constructed from a plethora of outward signs. And Marker is quick to remind us that these images, memories, historical time, are only ever a representation, never containing lived reality (for how can one remember thirst? as Marker questions); they are a tempting illusion that obscures the elusiveness of time itself; they exist only as a part of lived reality, as a staging ground for both personal and communal life. There’s some other pretty good stuff in the movie (though it’s a bit dim in my mind a month later). And Marker’s techniques of exploring his multitude of images do a pretty good job of simultaneously exploring his ideas.
Unfortunately, all that is sullied by a few things. The film tends to exoticize foreign cultures, and even specific people, way too much, forcing them to play the roles of symbols. And the narration too often strives for poeticism: turns of phrase like “I’ve hunted it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter,” “to repair the web of time,” and “a temple consecrated to cats” just come off as twee to me, preventing me from really being interested in what the film’s exploring. I just don’t want to listen to somebody who talks about his “most beloved animals: the cat and the owl.” But beyond this tone of poeticism, and much more irksome to me, was the stream of risible, striving-for-pithiness comments. For example, “All women have a built-in grain of respectability”; and far worse, “The unsurpassable philosophy of our time is found in Pac-Man. He’s the most perfect graphic metaphor of the human condition. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment.” This faux-losophy occasionally teeters on the edge of obnoxious New-Ageism, such as when the narrator says he is surprised by his two dogs being unusually rambunctious on a beach, until he realizes that for the first time in 60 years, the year of the dog is meeting the year of water in the lunar calendar. Bleh. I don’t know how seriously it’s intended to be taken (hopefully not very), but it’s just kind of irritating.
Anyway, yeah, I definitely admire enough of it to like it overall, but it’s fraught with things that I strongly dislike.
