Ein Brief aus Sibirien

I have been curious to see Letter from Siberia for several years, ever since I read that it was one of Werner Herzog's favorite films. Unfortunately, Chris Marker's work has often been hard to find on home video. Thanks to Soda releasing, Letter from Siberia is now available as part of a Region 2 DVD box set of Marker movies. While I am still working my way through the set, Letter from Siberia justifies the whole purchase.

In some ways, Letter from Siberia is like a travelogue that runs on PBS where an experienced traveler (Marker edited travel books) ventures to an exotic land and shows us armchair bound the sights. Letter from Siberia differs from these shows in two very important ways.

First, the choice of destination is Siberia, which admittedly is exotic but not a place that would be called a tourist spot. For most viewers in 1957, Siberia was a barren wasteland where prisoners in Russian literature (and in life) were sent. Who lives there? This documentary shows the viewer some of the 8,000 free people who lived in Siberia in 1957. We are immersed in their cities, in their work, and in their customs. We even get to see a pet bear being walked through a town on a leash.

Second, none of those PBS travelers, as entertaining as they may be, are Chris Marker. He is a natural born filmmaker and storyteller. His images, captured on 16mm film, are vivid and texturally rich. The viewer feels like he can reach into the screen and feel the bark of the birch trees. In addition, Marker is not just a journalist; he is a poet. Marker draws on what the viewer thinks he or she knows about Siberia. Marker calls it "the land of childhood" because of its setting in youthful adventure stories, a place of Tartar raids and intrigues on the Trans-Siberian railroad. He then both refutes and adds to the mystique of Siberia, drawing history, culture, and geography into the unique portrait he is painting.

Poetic is not meant as a synonym for dull. Marker's wry comments keep the film from ever getting too heavy. For instance, Marker interrupts his documentary with a satirical advertisement "selling" the many uses for reindeer. In addition, there is an animated short film about mammoths. All of Marker's observations, visual and aural, make for a viewing experience that is both entertaining and illuminating.

Some might complain about Marker's choice to ignore Siberia's history as an internment site for prisoners. My response would be that there are several interpretations of Siberia which address this. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denosovich, published just five years after Letter from Siberia, is an excellent document of that aspect of Siberia. I think Marker means for his documentary to counter such views. Marker loves Siberia, its people and its terrain. After seeing the film, the viewer should have a change of heart about Siberia.

It's all here; film as memory, as letters sent back to us with a cache of images attached, then arranged and rearranged in effort to probe into the reality of fictions. Viewers within viewers relating to us. It's not a simple question of what is real and what not, with Marker everything is because captured by the eye, but what notions do we bring with us that clout the image?

He would return to this again and again, in Soleil, in Koymiko, in Le Tombeau d'Alexandre. But it's all here, as always tied to a flow of life that reveals a little of the fabric of the larger world. His essay is distinctly French, but as diffused by Soviet notions about the cinematic eye - that film tradition so deeply revolutionary they built movie trains that scoured the countryside filming the people then showing them to themselves. Here the very fabric is Soviet, the background a blank canvas from the corner least traveled.

French essay, which is to say a little dry, nonetheless filled with Marker's characteristically wry whimsy. He splices in the middle of it, a makeshift advert about reindeers. Godard borrowed so much from Marker, but he could never afford this gentleness of spirit.

Back to the essay though. At one point we see the same footage repeated three times; each time a different voice-over imprints them with different meaning. Are the workers tireless symbols of the revolutionary spirit, or poorly-trained peons slaving away? Marker insists we go beyond this clout of interpretation; could it be that we are simply watching workers work? That this man passing by the camera is not a symbol of this or that ideology, but this man?

Elsewhere, we see the Siberian wilderness of life imagined as a western; the dusty towns, the people on horseback. Imagined, the word itself says it all. How the image shapes understanding.

So, is is really that the filmed image is so malleable that it can accommodate almost anything. Yet we implicitly trust it to reveal truth, it's how we function with cinema. Marker instead calls for us, the external viewer, to investigate our own meaning in the face of this uncertainty. To be as detectives in film. How to trust the eye that sees the picture behind the manufactured notions. The true world of images behind the notion of that world cobbled from notions of them. It's all an effort for true perception really, disguised as this travelogue.

A poetic narrative with an educational and captivating style, this documentary elegantly addresses social, societal, and ethnic issues in an artistic manner, never veering into discomfort or adopting a didactic tone. The use of music and the pacing of the editing are masterfully executed, with time being optimized to perfection. With both his directorial and literary talents, Chris Marker emerges as a compelling figure, and this documentary inspired me to explore his books. The screenplay serves as essential viewing for anyone interested in writing essays or making documentaries, offering valuable insights that deserve careful consideration.

A mostly dull documentary about a mostly dull place, ill served by narration that strives to be cute, rather than informative. The art of the indigenous people is the "good stuff." Chris Marker wastes no time in ridiculing a Soviet made automobile, that, according to the same footage shown over and over again, does what any automobile does: moves forward as the wheels turn. In 1958, one supposes that Marker might have been considered "pink" if he had failed to affect this mocking tone.

Travelogues were long a feature -- or short subject -- in the movie theaters. Here's, years after MGM's Traveltalks had ceased production, came this short feature about Siberia. Beginning as a series of pan shots, or perhaps post card pictures, this continues in a variety of forms, including animation discussing mammoths and so forth and a trip to find a mammoth's frozen remains.

Perhaps this is more akin to the "City Symphony" films that flourished, most notably in the 1920s. The landscapes it offers don't really show people, so much as the bleak Siberian landscape, even as they narration tries to convince the listener that it has its own beauty: birches on a plain, hawks, wolves, geese in flight, even trains roaring along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Perhaps. The print I saw showed a land that was washed out.

In the end, though, Chris Marker produces a self-referential parody of travelogues which mocks the idea that he can produce a work that will show you the reality of Siberia. It is, he makes clear, too large, too diverse, and every frame of his movie is open to endless interpretation. So look at the pretty images and take what you will.