Primer (Shane Carruth, 2004)(Magdalen Auditorium, 7:30pm Monday 20th Nov)

La Jetée/Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1962/1983) (Magdalen Auditorium, 8:55pm Monday 20th Nov)

Shane Carruth's 2004 release 'Primer' harks back to the days when a sci fi flick was all about the shoe-string budget and the ideas. Here, a group of four scientists/fledgling entrepreneurs are working frantically on a device in a suburban garage, but when two of the men discover that it in fact also works as a time machine, they realise it is too valuable to market, which strains the limit of their trust in the other two men, each other, and themselves (or, rather, their 'future' or 'alternative' selves). If you find the scientific gadgetry conversations difficult to follow at the start, just wait til the time travel sets in and there are several versions of the two men wandering around (some of which are hypothetical versions), meaning the two men's relationship is made immensely more complicated by always having to frantically second guess themselves; then of course there are all the usual ramifications such as 'don't go back in time and kill your own mother'. Stylishly cheap, if confusing; you won't follow all of the plot twists in spite of the fact that you realise how crucial they are – in the end probably best just to let the whole thing slide past and laugh at the odd genius line of dialogue like 'Are you hungry? I haven't eaten since later this afternoon.'

This is followed by Chris Marker's two films on the theme of 'remembrance of things to come' (thus making it a time-travel triple-bill), first the short new wave classic 'La Jetee' (The Pier, 20 minutes) and then the feature length 'Sans Soleil'. Marker worked as a travelling photographer and political journalist in the 1950s, and 'La Jetee' is itself 'un photo roman', a montage film made of black and white still photographs. It also has a haunting musical score and an unsettlingly deadpan, but poetic, narration. Terry Gilliam – who remade it as the big budget 'Twelve Monkeys' – described the editing as so extraordinary that 'it works on a musical level'. The plot revolves around a soldier who is used as a guinea pig for time-travel experiments in post-apocalyptic Paris, where "the victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats". He is the first successful subject in these experiments, which have otherwise driven people to death, disappointment and madness, because he has a strong mental image of a moment before the Third World War, and thus he has a stronger link to the past. (As a traveller in his own memories, he encounters a woman in peace-time - in the unreal world somewhere between past and present and imagination - an idea which you might have seen more recently in 'Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind'). Without ruining the poetic revelation of what it is that is so significant about the moment on the pier to which he keeps returning again and again, this one second of the man's life which he is so fixated on, the narrator warns early on that "Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance on account of their scars." (The film is also a play on Hitchcock's Vertigo with the theme of 'remembrance of things to come' – think of the doubling of Kim Novak's tower scene – but again I don't want to give too much away).

'Sans Soleil' again takes the character of a fictional world-traveller, in this case a cameraman. An unknown woman reads out his letters, sent while he was travelling to produce a study of 'the dreams of the human race', discussing the images that he creates with women in Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco. The cameraman, we realise, is impossibly travelled in distance and time; he has been around the world several times. Of the passengers on a train to Tokyo he remarks "waiting, immobility, snatches of sleep – curiously all of that makes me think of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fall out shelters – small fragments of war enshrined in everyday life". He puts forward one short image at the start of the film as "an image of happiness"; later he returns to the area and it has been destroyed by a volcano and the ground has risen over hundreds of years, leaving it unrecognisable. Documentary, narrative, essay, work of art – it is hard to know how to place Marker's work, but it is certainly personal, full of the things he himself has found (for instance, footage he has taken of a Japanese couple lighting a candle for their dead cat). 'Sans Soleil' is also, confusingly, full of proposals from the cameraman for a film that in fact he never made, made up from his memories of travel; yet we are indirectly watching this non-existent film.

Marker's talent is the personal, poetic way he can approach documentary evidence: his latest work, 'Chats perches', describes the political events in France during the Iraq war by following the strange graffiti of a yellow cat which starts appearing on walls around Paris. His treatment of the European wasteland that resulted from the First World War, a nineteen minute film called 'Owls At Noon', is a prelude to T.S. Eliot's 1925 poem 'The Hollow Men'. His films are studied accounts, half fictitious, half focused on actual societies, yet also giving great significance to the passing moments in an individual life – as he remarks, 'I dream of a world where each memory could create its own caption.'

For more information on Chris Marker see http://www.silcom.com/~dlp/Passagen/cm.home2.html , and as trivia it also might be of interest that Kode 9 + SpaceApe's recent album, 'Memories of the Future', may or may not be named after a Chris Marker film (but apparently is actually based on 'The Drowned World', by J.G. Ballard).

Amy Cutler (Magdalen FilmSoc Committee)