Well, my first encounter with Chris Marker, the voiceover wunderkind that I’ve always heard so much about and was so excited to dive into, has happened. Now, I’m skeptical enough when it comes to lessons-of-the-world-told-in-pictures films like Baraka and Koyaanisqatsi. The practice of setting stock footage and photos to music or voice over rarely eclipses IMAX movie-of-the-week superficiality and didacticism, but at least it always looks nice and is hardly boring. Chris Marker has finally entered my life to let me know that yes, it is possible to make one of these films and have it be mindnumbingly tedious and boring. The film crawled along for me, with no sense of development and no chronology of ideas. I got excited at one point when I got the idea to check my DVD player’s display clock so that I could see how much longer was left, but I was deflated to find that that first hour and a half that I thought I’d already sat through was only the first thirty-three minutes.
I can’t say that I have much to write here because it all went in one ear/eye and out the other. I do remember some Icelandic girls walking in a rural area, and some cats, the fake kind shown on the left side of the poster. I remember that a woman was speaking throughout the film and I found her to be pretentious. My first encounter with My Dinner with Andre when I was in high school came to mind, a similar experience for me. Even a five-minute cameo by Vertigo in the film’s latter half couldn’t hold my attention. I thought ‘ooh, Vertigo’ but it went nowhere and I didn’t know why they were talking about the things they were talking about. I’m just not at Marker’s level, I guess. I’ll give it another shot in 5 years.
We’ll be looking forward to the rendezvous in five years!