Si j'avais quatre dromadaires

This is, foremost, a film about the photographer as psychopomp.

How the camera liberates one from the bounds of time and space.

Allows one to transgress boundaries, and immortalize those whose gaze it sets upon.

Revealing the banal connections between everyone, and everything...everywhere, across all of time.

The single existence we- and all things- experience subjectively, from our particular point within this time/space continuum in which we perceive ourselves to exist as individuals.

Though, really, we are boundless- limited only by the scope of our imaginations.

To create, is to emulate the creation in which we exist. To become like Gods.

You can see this on the streets; or wherever art is displayed, when groups begin to congregate around an orator, piece, or performer; orbiting them, like little planetary systems, forming anew.

A microcosm of the macrocosm.

It's during these moments of expression and engagement, that the goodness in each and every person is exposed.

And one can capture these moments with the lens, even if that moment is subtle or fleeting.

And this can influence the narrative of history.

Art may be ephemeral, but memories are forever.

Encoded into the collective consciousness of mankind and the universe.

Here, Marker gives an amateur photographer and his two friends a chance to define the narrative of history.

As they see it. As they see fit.

Quite literally, portrayed through his lens.

Exposing all the nooks and crannies, normally hidden from the world.

This gives us a manner in which to interpret what we are seeing in the world today, when confederate and statues of slaveholders are torn down and defaced.

As the narrative changes, so does the perspective shift, and things begin to take on new meaning as a result of this new gaze.

This is why the narrator places more value on the crude (as opposed to high) forms of art, because they are grounded in a context that is real and accessible to the lower classes.

To the poor masses.

The gaze of 3 classes are explored throughout the film: the poor, animals, and children.

Followed by a philosophical look at the nature of work- is it a burden or neccessity? does it give meaning to ones life or just break people down?

Considering that the film is organized based on the principles of dialectics, this brings us to the topic of revolution.

For when one views the concept of work through the gazes of the aforementioned three, one can truly understand the nature of revolution.

It's allure. It's neccessity. And why it would bring a smile to the faces of these poor, working stiffs.

When nothing else changes.

"Information. Demonstration. Cremation", becomes the cycle of life.

However, like with all great experiments, the great socialist revolutions (in China and Russia, even Cuba) have played themselves out, and reverted to fascist nightmares.

One must, thus, look to places like Sweden for a socialist experiment in it's most successful form.

But even this has it's limits, for it lacks the passion that sparks the light of humanity.

All of these ruminisms are generally applied back to Mother Russia, for our protagonist and narrator is a Russian photographer, enacting the revolutionary gaze through a Russian lens from the perspective of the aformentioned three.

Inserted here, is an homage to La Jetee, in the form of the story about the Hungarian man who "lived his own death" (by the hands of the police or military), though, surviving to tell the tale and spread the propaganda of revolution to democracies around the world.

A tale of warning, like is this film, itself.

In the end, they offer a suggestion as to how to make our way out of this devil's game that we find ourselves caught up in...

Through the natural courage and moral qualities of the divine feminine.

By letting the women's gaze define the narrative, and act as the lens to focus our way forward.

So that we can all escape the confines of the castle and enter back into the garden, together.

And be happy.

10 out of 10.

We may know Chris Marker as the elusive recluse, the question mark of the question posed by New Wave. If the image is a representation of reality, merely a pointer to the truth and not the truth itself, what can we surmise through an examination of this illusive nothing?

This is the New Wave effort. A way of creating a cinema in which another cinema plays out, usually in New Wave some trivial story which may involve crime or a love affair, as meant to show how little cinema can be (as known until then) and how big in opening up to the world in which these stories unfold. When attention is called in these films to the artifice of cinema, it is both as recognition that something is being viewed and a reminder that we are viewing it. Which is a way of ecstacy finally, a way to expand the consciousness of cinema outside of its then narrow limits so as to examine both the mechanisms of that cinema and of the consciousness that regards it, the human gaze.

Chris Marker excels in this, the creation of one narrative upon which another is imprinted. And then a third one, which is ours. In Godard there are usually films within films. In Marker, viewers within viewers.

We get here, in one of his more obscure works, a new set of pretexts and premises snapped with a camera around the globe, a headfull of divergent forms in which, by the click of a button, some kind of life has been arrested for a moment, or forever. Soviet Russia, a collective factory in Korea, the monasteries of Mount Athos in Greece, Cuba, the gravestone of Tchekhov, we stop in these places among others to ponder on what kind of world they comprise.

Not merely the travelogue of a curious bystander, although it offers a valuable capsule of the time when revolutions were beginning to decompose, this like other of Marker's works, facilitates a shift of our gaze. With its wonderful title evoking deserts and wanderings, it is a platform for our gaze to wander in thought.

Marker show us how. As a viewer of these images himself, he narrates them in one way out of the many possible. One consciousness having captured them through the artificial eye of the camera, another one rearranges them, imprints on them various inroads to meaning and sense. He would perfect this in Sans Soleil, but the beginnings stretch farther back, in his collaborative efforts with Alain Resnais in the late 50's. The quote that opens this, in fact, is borrowed from their joint short subject Statues Also Die.