the turn
by Douglas Messerli
Chris Marker (screenwriter and director) L’ambassade (The Embassy) / 1973
Chris Marker’s short film The Embassy of 1973 begins with a few
intellects fleeing to an Embassy for protection. Others soon follow, and in
this pseudo-documentary, the grim and worried asylum seekers realize that they
have been saved from what appears to be wholesale slaughter simply because they
lived nearer to the embassy than did the workers.
At first, despite their fears, the group bands together. The Ambassador
of the unknown country to whose embassy they have fled, not only finds rooms
for them and is graciously willing to feed them, but joins in on everyday tasks
such as vacuuming their rooms, demonstrating a deep sense of commitment to
their cause and for their protection.
Group games, played to pass the time, grow into conversations that turn
into serious political debates, some arguing for more involvement, others for
less; some criticizing the others for their political actions, others praising
themselves for their positions. And soon they all begin to perceive that, in
some senses, they have been part of the problem.
Gradually, through the jerky cinéma-vérité scenes portrayed in the film,
we begin to realize that, perhaps, it is the very fact that these leftist
refugees have not worked together in the past that has enabled the right to
take over, killing so many of their countrymen.
As critic Dennis Grunes observes, the situation becomes similar to “the
sixties U.S. Twilight Zone episode in which Agnes Moorehead wars with tiny
alien invaders, who it turns out are the
Marker brilliantly tricks us in other ways as well. Since we do not know
who these people really are or in what country they live or even at what
embassy they have sought refuge, we can only speculate on the situation. Marker
himself, in his personal life and films spent a great deal of time with the
Chilean refugees in Paris after the 1973 coup, resulting in his 1975 film The Spiral. Accordingly, we might not be
mistaken in imagining that this may be the French Embassy in Chile,
particularly since the refugees continue to express their shock that the city
has turned silent, that news has disappeared, that even what they can see from
their windows reveals no signs of human life. Clearly, we must be in an
internationally lesser-known capital city.
Yet, here again, the director shifts the reality, as, when the refugees
are permitted to be spirited out of the city, it appears that they are really
in France, and that, in this fiction, it is Paris itself which is the location
of the coup. The smugness of the left—to which I see myself aligned—is yet
another “turn” or “spiral,” to use Marker’s title of his 1975 film, which has
allowed its own destruction.
Seeing this film during a year in which the American right had taken
over, attempting to destroy all progressive Democratic advances achieved by
President Obama, I could not help but shutter a bit when seeing Marker’s
political parable. Surely, we (those of us who argue, often bitterly against
one another, for liberal policies) have helped to allow the barbarians to take
over our cities and to rule our estate—even despite our majority.
Los Angeles, August 2, 2017
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2017).
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