Thoughts on the film by Chris Marker
A video camera operated by the filmmaker encircles the
woman, the actor Arielle Dombasle. She asks her
companion, filmmaker Chris Marker, what lens he's using. He responds:
"35mm." The actor complains that the perspective with a 35mm lens
will look awful. "Marlene Dietrich refused everything under 100mm",
she jokes.
Already the subject is the image. How the image, its
presentation, the choice of lens, can flatten or change perspective, altering
reality. Most amateur or hobbyist photographers don't think about lenses or
their effect. It's more about capturing the image; recording what is there in
front of them. Even here, it's the actor who voices a concern, rather than the
filmmaker. But why? Because the actor isn't playing a role but playing herself.
She wants to be seen the way she is, as she was at the time Marker turned his
camera upon her. Or is this a part of the act?
There is a question of reality verses perception here.
Several images throughout the film seem chosen specifically to show how reality
can be transformed into an unreality by the way it's captured and recorded. These
images include: a burlesque of a tree top canopy, warped and distorted when
seen as a reflection in the polished brass of a musical instrument; three young
men on a video recording, their faces obscured by deliberate pixilation; an
escalator replicated ad infinitum by the mirrored walls of a shopping complex,
and so on.
Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:
It's often been said that there was something almost
extra-terrestrial about Marker. Something not quite human. He approached his
role as a filmmaker as if he were an alien anthropologist attempting to make
sense of humanity and how it works. Cultures and sub-cultures recorded, not as
a means of promotion or celebration, but almost as an effort to understand how
humans work; their differences and foibles picked apart and juxtaposed against
images that depict realities, but also figurative interpretations of reality.
The unreality of life exposed as a social construct.
In this context, it seems fitting that the film begins
with automatons; robot mannequins "performing" in a shop window. In
these first few shots we have a thread of objectification; the subject
displayed and exhibited for an audience, who, like us, stare at these objects
of curious interest through the glass.
Spectatorship is close to voyeurism. Like watching a
film or series, either at the cinema, or at home on a television or mobile
device, we remain passive and inert. We watch from a position of remove,
trapped behind the glass. The automatons for Marker aren't merely lifeless
objects programmed to perform, but something else. They provide a
self-reflexive function, expressing in both a real-life and cinematic sense the
Guy Debord-ian notion of the society of the spectacle. Their performance is an
imitation of human behavior. Behavior that Marker will later contrast against
actuality footage of real people working, but also, in a sense, performing.
Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:
Film, like all art, is essentially a lie. Though it
may succeed in revealing some personal or universal truth, it does so through
manipulation and contrivance. Marker understands that if he shows interior
shots of commuters travelling by train and then cuts to an exterior shot of a
different train travelling along an elevated platform, the audience, versed as
we are, consciously or not, with the "rules" of conventional montage,
will make an association, connecting the interior to the exterior as if one and
the same, even if the reality may be something else.
For Marker, his focus, his discreet observation, at
least in the context of the title and presentation, seeks to find an element of
truth or reality. But even this is being constructed, consciously or
unconsciously by the filmmaker. Every edit, every choice of shot, every
juxtaposition of sound and image, is a construct, and as such belies the
reality. Marker plays with this notion in the juxtaposition between robots
programmed to perform a retail function and the human beings conditioned into
performing a role as part of their day-to-day lives. By simply contrasting
images, manufacturing in the process a layer of commentary, or even criticism,
Marker shows how life, work, experience, etc., have become a performative
ritual; a simulacrum, more programmed than truly felt.
On the train, Marker pans his camera between images of
two women. The first looks like a woman from the then present; her clothes and
hair representative of 1980s fashions. The second woman seems to have been
transported from the distant past. Her hair and clothing, from what we can see
of it, belongs to a different age. Is this observation an actuality? Was this
the reality as Marker saw it? Or is the contrast contrived? Are the women real
people, caught by Marker's intrusive, objectifying lens as they go about their
daily commute, or are they actors or models hired by the filmmaker to create
this sense of time overlapping; of one generation seeing itself reflected
through a window into the past?
Tokyo Days [Chris Marker, 1988]:
At a slim twenty-minutes in duration, Tokyo Days feels
at times like a postscript to Marker's earlier monumental film essay, Sans Soleil (or Sunless, 1983). There, the filmmaker again captured
everyday scenes of Japan, and found within the comparative unreality of its
culture, in contrast to the staid traditions of western Europe, the foundation
for a far greater meditation on consciousness and human memory. By comparison,
Tokyo Days feels relatively slight; its montage of observational imagery
recalling something of a vlog or travelogue. Less a documentary, as the
critical categorizations of the film dictate, than a precursor to Instagram
stories; where short clips and images are curated by the user to create a kind
of narrative.
While not as deep or insightful as Sans Soleil, or
other films by Marker – such as The Grin Without a Cat (1977) or the prescient
Level Five (1997) – the experience of Tokyo Days does eventually build to
something that seems quietly profound. In its final images, Marker turns his
camera on a string quartet performing for an impromptu audience. As the
musicians play, Marker cuts first to shots of passengers on a ship: migrating
souls travelling like the filmmaker between dimensions of time and space. As
the public performance, impassioned and beautiful in its sensitivity continues,
Marker then cuts to nature footage recorded off a video monitor. Here, we see
images of whales, lizards and of course the filmmaker's avatar, cats. This
juxtaposition of forms works to underpin the expression of the film and its
observation on modern existence.
The sequence here is as casual and spontaneous as any
other sequence in the film; however, its placement at the end of things is
deliberate. Once again, Marker is bringing the film back to the notion of
performance: of society as spectacle. The musicians and their performance speak
to one of our greatest achievements; the ability to express through art something
fundamentally human; something that comments on and enriches the human
experience. But even this is in direct competition with those earlier
automatons, who performed for absent shoppers behind their wall of glass. As
Marker travels around Tokyo gathering these images and scenes, he seems to be
observing a society that exists simultaneously between the boundaries of past,
present and future.
