Level Five
This week we are showing Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997) on Thursday, March 19th, at 7 PM.
Here is the link to RSVP. Doors will be at 6:50 and we’ll start the show at 7:10!
Chris Marker’s Level Five is a heady film, chock full of incredible 90s computer graphics and video art, which blends fiction and documentary to tell the story of a French programmer, played by Catherine Belkhodja, hired to complete a video game that recreates the Battle of Okinawa, a decisive moment near the end of World War II that has a complicated legacy in Japan and is not thought of much at all in western accounts of the War. In short, Okinawa—the southernmost island grouping in Japan—wasn’t annexed by the empire until the 19th century, and the massive loss of civilian life in the Battle of Okinawa, many through mass suicide coerced by the Japanese military rather than being captured by American troops, is ignored and downplayed in Japanese textbooks, indicating the ‘lesser than’ status of colonized subjects. As Marker says, “The islanders weren’t true Japanese but were Japanese enough to die.”
Marker’s film delves headfirst into questions of historical memory and the ethics of artistic representation, right at the precipice of revolutions of media that have recast our relationships to truth and narrative as more interactive, more fungible, and more open to manipulation and corrosion. In that context, what does it mean to make a video game where you can’t change history, but only relive it, again and again? Level Five plays well in dialogue with the screening of Missile, from earlier this month; both take different angles on the increasing digitization and alienation of war from the reality of its lived effects. As Howard Hampton writes in his review, “Level Five encompasses the passage of time, wherein the latest machinery of the late 20th century feels right on the cusp of seeming as antediluvian as the hand-cranked cameras of The Great Train Robbery, and a set of displacing circumstances that foretell the shocks of our own accelerating social-cyberspace odysseys.”
If you missed last week’s screening and report on the Prairieland defendants, we want to keep that discussion ongoing as well. In case you are unfamiliar, 19 people were arrested last July related to a noise demonstration outside a Texas ICE facility. Many of them are facing federal terrorism charges and have been locked in solitary confinement in dire conditions for months. Many people rightfully argue that this trial is a crucial pivot point for setting precedent regarding surveillance, the criminalization of dissent, and the brutal repression of resistance to state violence. You can donate here to help fund the committee cobbling together legal teams and support networks to help the defendants who continue to show extreme resilience in their refusal to cooperate with the state prosecution. You can follow along and read more background information on their website. As the support committee writes, “the defendants face a federal trial…against outrageous charges, abysmal jail conditions, a prejudiced judge and prosecution, all for the mere act of showing solidarity with immigrants.”
Death to imperialism,
Charlie, Stefan, Stark