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DVD Description
From visionary director Chris Marker comes Level Five, the story of Laura, a computer game designer. Whilst working on a new World War II game following the epic battle of Okinawa, Japan she searches the internet for background information and finds harrowing eye witness accounts, disturbing pictures and upsetting interviews. This discovery leads her to look deeper into the reasoning behind the war and in turn allows her to look at her own life in a new way.
Product Description
United Kingdom released, PAL/Region 2 DVD: LANGUAGES: French ( Dolby Digital 2.0 ), English ( Subtitles ), SPECIAL FEATURES: Interactive Menu, Scene Access, SYNOPSIS: This French documentary chronicles a sobering and little known event that occurred during the Battle of Okinawa, the final bloody man-to-man struggle between American and Japanese troops before the A-bombs were dropped. The event is framed by the story of a woman in the process of creating a computer program about the tragic event in which Japanese soldiers and officers killed their own families and then themselves en masse in hopes of frightening the American troops with the shock of it all. Unfortunately, the horrific gambit failed; the Americans misunderstood and this made it easier for them to justify using the bomb. ...Level Five ( Level 5 )
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
This film by Chris Marker is a filmic essay by one of the left bank filmakers as opposed to one of the New Wave directors.Marker is not an auteur director like them,he merely `conceives and edits' his films.Like Godard Marker is concerned with the meaning of the image,but whereas Godard overloads the image with meaning,visually and aurally, the meaning of Marker's images is being forever stripped away,and any trace of his `authorship' with it. The images are like the grin of Macavity the mystery cat whose structuring remains invisible.Marker is not a `creator' but an arranger, ordering the trace remnants of a felt but invisible past with present tools.He continues explorations of the interactions among history,memory and the visual image.
Presented as a series of video feed confessionals by Laura(Catherine Belkhodja)to her recently deceased lover, frustrated over her inability to reconstruct a video game left unfinished by the deceased,a computer artist,in whom she continues to relate within the computer.Laura struggles with the game because she knows she cannot truly reconstruct the Battle of Okinawa without living through it.We get her monologue,we see documentary footage, newsreels,menu screens,monitors,graphics of a clunky variety.Laura begins to reconstruct a true historical portrait of the decisive battle through information derived from a virtual global internet,Optional World Link (OWL),uniting her personal grief with a haunting reflection on war and human tragedy;not only the memories people have of such events,but on the memories technology stores on such events.We learn that civilian casualties out numbered military casualties,things like mass suicides and hara kiri were the piece sacrificed by the Japanese high command to offset a greater tragedy,in which it failed:the Atom bomb.
This is a hard film to understand,making several allusions to Resnais' films and its internet-fixated musings on the fate of historical memory and the heroine's memories of her partner are eroding daily.We explore the slippery border between computer, film and video work-all simply extensions of our attempts to interrogate images via new media an unknowable past.Total immersion into a perfect assimilation of the past leads to Laura's final recording: she increasingly magnifies the camera focus to the point of indeterminate abstraction,the ambiguity of an existential present state.Catherine Belkhodja gives a fascinating central performance,addressing the camera as she plays the game and the narration by an uncredited Chris Marker,is well delivered,informative and supplements the
'game' extremely well.
Presented as a series of video feed confessionals by Laura(Catherine Belkhodja)to her recently deceased lover, frustrated over her inability to reconstruct a video game left unfinished by the deceased,a computer artist,in whom she continues to relate within the computer.Laura struggles with the game because she knows she cannot truly reconstruct the Battle of Okinawa without living through it.We get her monologue,we see documentary footage, newsreels,menu screens,monitors,graphics of a clunky variety.Laura begins to reconstruct a true historical portrait of the decisive battle through information derived from a virtual global internet,Optional World Link (OWL),uniting her personal grief with a haunting reflection on war and human tragedy;not only the memories people have of such events,but on the memories technology stores on such events.We learn that civilian casualties out numbered military casualties,things like mass suicides and hara kiri were the piece sacrificed by the Japanese high command to offset a greater tragedy,in which it failed:the Atom bomb.
This is a hard film to understand,making several allusions to Resnais' films and its internet-fixated musings on the fate of historical memory and the heroine's memories of her partner are eroding daily.We explore the slippery border between computer, film and video work-all simply extensions of our attempts to interrogate images via new media an unknowable past.Total immersion into a perfect assimilation of the past leads to Laura's final recording: she increasingly magnifies the camera focus to the point of indeterminate abstraction,the ambiguity of an existential present state.Catherine Belkhodja gives a fascinating central performance,addressing the camera as she plays the game and the narration by an uncredited Chris Marker,is well delivered,informative and supplements the
'game' extremely well.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
1 review
Okinawa mon amour
16 Mar 2012
This film by Chris Marker is a filmic essay by one of the left bank filmmakers as opposed to one of the New Wave directors.Marker is not an auteur director like them,he merely `conceives and edits' his films.Like Godard Marker is concerned with the meaning of the image,but whereas Godard overloads the image with meaning,visually and aurally, the meaning of Marker's images is being forever stripped away,and any trace of his `authorship' with it. The images are like the grin of Macavity the mystery cat whose structuring remains invisible.Marker is not a `creator' but an arranger, ordering the trace remnants of a felt but invisible past with present tools.He continues explorations of the interactions among history,memory and the visual image.
Presented as a series of video feed confessionals by Laura(Catherine Belkhodja)to her recently deceased lover, frustrated over her inability to reconstruct a video game left unfinished by the deceased,a computer artist,in whom she continues to relate within the computer.Laura struggles with the game because she knows she cannot truly reconstruct the Battle of Okinawa without living through it.We get her monologue,we see documentary footage, newsreels,menu screens,monitors,graphics of a clunky variety.Laura begins to reconstruct a true historical portrait of the decisive battle through information derived from a virtual global internet,Optional World Link (OWL),uniting her personal grief with a haunting reflection on war and human tragedy;not only the memories people have of such events,but on the memories technology stores on such events.We learn that civilian casualties out numbered military casualties,things like mass suicides and hara kiri were the piece sacrificed by the Japanese high command to offset a greater tragedy,in which it failed:the Atom bomb.
This is a hard film to understand,making several allusions to Resnais' films and its internet-fixated musings on the fate of historical memory and the heroine's memories of her partner are eroding daily.We explore the slippery border between computer, film and video work-all simply extensions of our attempts to interrogate images via new media an unknowable past.Total immersion into a perfect assimilation of the past leads to Laura's final recording: she increasingly magnifies the camera focus to the point of indeterminate abstraction,the ambiguity of an existential present state.Catherine Belkhodja gives a fascinating central performance,addressing the camera as she plays the game and the narration by an uncredited Chris Marker,is well delivered,informative and supplements the
'game' extremely well.
Presented as a series of video feed confessionals by Laura(Catherine Belkhodja)to her recently deceased lover, frustrated over her inability to reconstruct a video game left unfinished by the deceased,a computer artist,in whom she continues to relate within the computer.Laura struggles with the game because she knows she cannot truly reconstruct the Battle of Okinawa without living through it.We get her monologue,we see documentary footage, newsreels,menu screens,monitors,graphics of a clunky variety.Laura begins to reconstruct a true historical portrait of the decisive battle through information derived from a virtual global internet,Optional World Link (OWL),uniting her personal grief with a haunting reflection on war and human tragedy;not only the memories people have of such events,but on the memories technology stores on such events.We learn that civilian casualties out numbered military casualties,things like mass suicides and hara kiri were the piece sacrificed by the Japanese high command to offset a greater tragedy,in which it failed:the Atom bomb.
This is a hard film to understand,making several allusions to Resnais' films and its internet-fixated musings on the fate of historical memory and the heroine's memories of her partner are eroding daily.We explore the slippery border between computer, film and video work-all simply extensions of our attempts to interrogate images via new media an unknowable past.Total immersion into a perfect assimilation of the past leads to Laura's final recording: she increasingly magnifies the camera focus to the point of indeterminate abstraction,the ambiguity of an existential present state.Catherine Belkhodja gives a fascinating central performance,addressing the camera as she plays the game and the narration by an uncredited Chris Marker,is well delivered,informative and supplements the
'game' extremely well.
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