In a sea of binary algae: Marker’s <i>Level Five</i> as non-representational documentary

Abstract

Setting aside the short prologue, to which we return later, Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997) begins with the character Chris (voiced by Marker) telling us that a young writer and friend named Laura (Catherine Belkhodja) has recently made contact with him. Her lover, who was also Chris’s friend, has died, and Laura is hoping that Chris can help her to make sense of the project he left behind. This project is a computer game about the Battle of Okinawa in June 1945. Laura has recorded a series of video-letters to her deceased lover in which she explores the game, the battle more generally, and her own state of mind; she passes this material on to Chris. He is, as she says, ‘the ace of montage’, so if anyone can make sense of the material it must be him. As Nora Alter writes, Level Five thereby becomes another epistolary film, like Marker’s earlier Letter from Siberia (1957) and Sans Soleil (1983).1 Chris notes that he is at a point in his life where he is ‘more interested in other people’s images than my own’, so he accepts the invitation, edits the material, and thereby composes the film that we watch. Like Laura, Chris adds reflections and images of his own through a characteristically dense voice-over and his use of montage. Towards the end of the film we see Laura becoming increasingly distraught; in a last video-letter she switches herself off, and Chris brings the film to a close.