Five level

Level Five is a documentary-fiction realized in 1996 by Chris Marker interpreted by the actress Catherine Belkhodja (Laura), Kenji Tokitsu and Nagisa Oshima.

Data sheet

Title: Level Five
Scenario: Chris Marker
Realization: Chris Marker
Image: Yves Angelo, Gerard de Battista, Chris Marker
Sound: Florent Lavallée
Interpretation: Catherine Belkhodja (Laura) and the participation of Kenji Tokitsu and Nagisa Oshima
Coming out date: 1996
Country: France
Lasted: 1:46
Format: 35 Producing mm/color
: Anatole Dauman, Francoise Widhoff and Catherine Belkhodja
Productions: Argos Films/Films of Apostrophe KAREDAS
Distribution: Knowledge of the cinema

Synopsis

In the part of an apartment, transformed into studio, a woman, Laura, and a computer. Laura is addressed to an invisible interlocutor who is perhaps the man that she likes and which is disappeared. Him, she inherited this task: to finish the writing of a Video game devoted to the Battle of Okinawa, the end of the Second world war. This one is limited to the only reconstitution of a tragedy ignored in Occident. Contrary to the other strategy games, it is impossible to reverse the course of the History. Laura accumulates with parts of the drama, but runs up against the cold logic of the machine. To its questions, the computer returns its messages without heart to him: " error of the 14" type; , " access denied" or " request denied".

While working on this project, the young woman discovers the truths and the horror of the large latter battles. A film of the Japanese realizer Nagisa Oshima underlines the suicide of thousands of civilians, inhabitants of the archipelago, imposed by the imperial army. But in front of the complexity of the problems, Laura decides to call upon the services of Chris, have assembly, which is at one time of its life where the images of the others interest it more than them his. Laura remembers these " conversations" , via the computer, with his/her companion. It evokes these anonymous meetings, masked, by the means of Internet and of network OWL, capable lira in the thoughts of others. They had become a play and the unknown ones were seen allotting a level of increasing interest, from 1 to 5. But none of these new contacts reached the " however; level 5".

Documents of today. Parents, brothers and sisters throw bouquets of flower with the sea to comfort the heart of hundreds of dead children drowned in 1944, because a boat which was to put them at the shelter was cast. In a cave, photographs of 206 pupils and professors who perished there, probably burned alives with the Lance-flammes. Other images on the war and their false reality. Those of a man burning, called Gustave, which one saw in current events on Philippines, Okinawa, or even, well later, on Vietnam. Ceremony of Marine planting the American flag on the ground of Iwo Jima, reconstituted scene, with other participants, for the needs for the files and the posterity. And then, there is also the testimony of Kinjo, child of the islands Kerama, close to Okinawa, forced by the Japanese soldiers to assassinate his parents, like his young people brother and sister before giving death. Captive fact, it could not lead to its term its appalling mission. Be sorry, he became Pasteur, like others, into Occident, convert himself with Buddhism.

Laura took again its dialogs with the masks on the network; but it is not any more one play. Its work does not succeed. Itself does not include/understand any more very well what arrives to him. On its return, Chris finds the part empty. Laura left. Questioned, the screen is unaware of even until the name of Laura.

Comments

Laura finishes the writing of a video game devoted to the battle of Okinawa, an island of the Japan which knew collective suicides masses some with the advertisement of the defeat. While meeting via a mysterious network of the advisers and even of the witnesses of the battle, Laura accumulates the parts of the tragedy, until the moment when they start to interfere with his own life. Level Five is a film installation, continuation in the traditional device of the dark room of this Silent Movie that Marker arranged in 1995 in museums for the centenary of the cinema. Split up and discontinuous, this film plunges us in inextricable problems: relationship between reality and virtual, history and its lies, the handling of the images, memory against the lapse of memory. Marker hustles our certainty there, by facing the unvoiced comment and the overflow of images. With the crossing of the technological and cinematographic expressions, it works out a bewitching Rubikube narrative and esthetic.

References

Congress around Level five on the Questions of mediation and representation of the war at Chris Marker , Congress of the Canadian Association of Comparative literature (ACLC) and of the Canadian Association of cinematographic studies (ACEC)

Communications:

Sarah Roy, On the construction of the memory of the history: how to distinguish the memory from the lapse of memory?.
Marianne Villeneuve, Level Five : the image in the center of a theory of the multiplicities.
Andre Habib, " which play play-you one when one plays war? Deciphering of the history by the play in Level Five .

File (S) and production (S) scientific (S)

Vincent Bouchard, “a reading of the concept of medium at Chris Marker”, January 2004, Electronic article.
Sarah Roy, “Reflection on the memory and the lapse of memory in Level Five (or why Chris Marker does return its accounts auratic?) ”, April 2004,
Marianne Villeneuve, “For a cinematographic thought. Representation of virtual in films of Marker”, April 2004
Andre Habib, “which play does one play when one plays history with Chris Marker?

External bonds

Around the film '' Level Five ''
* * *critic of Five Level by Telerama

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