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Level Five

Chris Marker

This video is no longer available

Chris Marker, Level Five (still)1997

 

e-flux presents True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films Level Five
Chris Marker
1997

110 Minutes
Courtesy Icarus Films

Date
Tuesday, February 23–Monday, March 8, 2021

Join us on e-flux Video & Film for an online screening of Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997), on view from Tuesday, February 23 through Monday, March 8, 2021.

A programmer, Laura inherits the task of making a computer game featuring the Battle of Okinawa that took place in Japan during WWII. She searches the internet for information on the battle, and interviews experts and witnesses while trying to get to the most difficult level of the game,—level 5—of the computer program left behind by her husband. The extraordinary circumstances of the Battle of Okinawa lead Laura to reflect deeply on her own life and on humanity facing its traumatic history, mediated by screens. Level Five addresses digital exteriorization of memories and alteration of intersubjective connections in the early age of virtual communication.

Level Five is presented here as one of four films in Part Two | Virtually Yours, the second of five programs in the online series True Fake: Troubling the Real in Artists’ Films programmed by Lukas Brasiskis for e-flux Video & Film.

True Fake runs from February 9 through April 19, 2021. The films in each part will screen for two weeks. Subsequent parts will follow bi-weekly, with new films screened every other Tuesday.

Level Five is presented with kind permission of Icarus Films, a founding content partner of Ovid TV, currently featuring a collection of Chris Marker titles. A free trial subscription is available here.

For more information, contact program [​at​] e-flux.com.

Category
Film, Internet
Subject
Trauma, Historicity & Historiography, Games & Play, Video Games, Affect, Experimental Film
Return to Part Two | Virtually Yours

Chris Marker (1921-2012) was a cinematic essayist and audio-visual poet. After World War II, he worked as a writer, publishing his first book, Le coeur net, in 1949. In the 1950s, he turned to documentary filmmaking; among his many significant works from this period are Letter from Siberia, Cuba Si!, La Jetée, and Le Joli Mai. In the 1960s and 1970s, Marker was involved with SLON, a filmmaking collective dedicated to activist productions. He began making films under his own name again in 1977 with A Grin Without A Cat. During the ’80s and ’90s, Marker’s work included several films about fellow filmmakers, including One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999), an homage to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky. He also explored video and computer-generated imagery with a continued emphasis on the intersection between personal and political themes in films such as The Case of the Grinning Cat. An original voice in world cinema for over fifty years, Marker passed away on his 91st birthday, on July 29, 2012.

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