New films by David Cronenberg and Chris Marker share a fascination with computer games and their metaphors. Jonathan Romney plugs in to Level 5
It's often a distinguishing mark of the absolutely modern work that it can look strangely archaic. Take Jean-Luc Godard's video series Histoires du Cinema - as formally radical and non-linear a proposition as you can imagine, yet consumed with nostalgia for old movies and oddly scrappy, even primitive, in its image-mixing techniques. When it comes down to it, this provocative, wildly multiple video-poem is about an old man, his editing suite and his cultural lamentations.
Chris Marker's Level 5 is similarly futuristic-atavistic. It's akin to Godard's work in that it uses computer and video technology not as recording media but as channels for thinking and writing. Yet it feels curiously archaic in the computer imagery it evokes - a science fiction vision of a future space in which history is consecrated on CD-Rom, people communicate masked on VDUs and machines hysterically flash "Access denied" warnings accompanied by robot bleeps and honks. While very much immersed in 1990s Internet culture, Level 5 feels in some ways as quaintly anachronistic as a 1950s dream of rocket-science utopia. Even its opening reference to the science fiction guru William Gibson feels somehow demode, although his image of the information universe as a Sargasso Sea glowing with "binary algae" still resonates beautifully.
The born-again techie Marker could be considered Godard's shadowy double, the only other committed essayist of his European generation. He's the elusive Pimpernel, or Flying Dutchman, of the nouvelle vague generation, with which he's generally associated, although he started his career in 1952. He made his best-known film - the philosophical science fiction photo-story La Jetee - in 1963, and since then has staked out a defiantly marginal career as a traveller and traveloguist, and an essayist on world politics, culture and the image.
Level 5 is a free-ranging meditation that plumbs the unfathomable depths of the historical archive, the CD-Rom game and an apocryphal Internet system called OWL, while periodically surfacing to have the actress Catherine Belkhodja talk to camera in the here and now. Her character, code-named Laura, is at once addressing us and, it seems, an absent or dead lover. She also invokes a roving correspondent, Chris, who files reports from Japan in the gravelly, sepulchral voice of (I think) Marker himself.
Belkhodja's tender, plaintive monologue provides a stable strand of human presence. Elegant and extremely literary, her text is sometimes concrete, sometimes as vaporous as Marguerite Duras, but Belkhodja gives us the impression that we're witnessing a very intimate theatrical performance, an oasis of immediacy in this desert of electronically mediated imagery.
There isn't so much a narrative as a pretext for a verbal and pictorial discourse. Laura is working on a computer game devised by the ghostly lover, its aim being to re-enact the American invasion in 1945 of the Japanese island of Okinawa, which preceded the Hiroshima bombing. A third of the island's population died in the invasion, largely in an outbreak of mass suicide. Marker provides documentary imagery of the battle and its legacy, sometimes tarted up digitally, sometimes presented raw in newsreel form. The director Nagisa Oshima discusses his own documentaries about Okinawa; the missionary Kinjo Shigeaki recalls dispassionately how, as a boy, he was one of the many islanders to kill his own family out of love.
Why a film about Okinawa? Or rather, why a film about a game about Okinawa? One of Marker's concerns is the way that computers have superseded film as a commemorative medium; Level 5 examines digital technology's claim to be a more adequate vehicle for memory, not simply recording events but offering a more dynamic, fluid and imaginative access to them. If Level 5 has a central theme, it is the problem of memory: Japan, it's suggested, suffers from a cultural amnesia, as if the war had never happened.
The theme of memory extends beyond Okinawa itself. There's a disquisition on the practice of editing newsreel to make images more pointed, thereby forging enduring but questionable icons. There's an analysis of the famous faked image of US marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima, and newsreel of a hypnotised American soldier trying to retrieve his own repressed memories of Okinawa: shot by John Huston, the film wasn't seen for 35 years and was itself the subject of amnesic repression. Laura also worries about forgetfulness, and tells a story about Otto Preminger's 1944 film Laura, after which she's named - a "ghost story" with a profoundly mnemonic theme tune.
Level 5 owes its byzantine thought processes at once to video-editing systems and to the sort of multidimensional surfing capacity supposedly offered by the web. The piece is itself a game, melding together many different types of discourses, each of which can only really exist in its own medium: newsreel, video, the human voice, the computer screen. Marker's undertaking is to measure each one against the others, even at the risk of finding them incommensurable.
There isn't necessarily a "point" to the work, a place you have to get to, a master vantage point from which it might all make sense - even if the title does allude to a nirvana-like goal, akin to the top level attainable in computer games. But Level 5 operates, thrillingly and frustratingly, as both game and initiation to the game. As with any computer game or flashy Internet distraction, there's a degree of mystification and science fiction hokum, but that shouldn't obscure the game's seriousness or its sheer sense of adventure.
"Level 5" runs at the ICA, The Mall, London SW1 (0171-930 3647) until 6 May
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