Letters from Siberia - Chris Marker
French documentarian, writer, multimedia artist, and film essayist Chris Marker was once referred to as the “first 21st century man” by his contemporary Alain Resnais. His 1956 feature film, the documentary “Letter from Siberia,” exemplifies why this characterization is oh-so suitable. With its highly literary narration, and spliced shots of animated shorts and faux commercials – that in today’s artistic jargon would be referred to as “postmodern pastiche” – “Letters from Siberia” surpasses far beyond the parameters of an ordinary documentary, and is stylistically several decades ahead of its time. In this visual poetic ethnography, Marker attempts to capture the essence of the socialist collectivization in Russia’s far east. His highly self-reflexive, and playfully ironic narration paints and endearing portrait of the Siberian locals, while simultaneously providing insight into Marker’s own mode of thinking. Marker’s voice strongly echoes that of a Westerner observing the tenets of a socialist state with fresh eyes. While his narration uses metaphors and reference frames almost exclusively relevant to a Western audience, the visual and musical content of the documentary paints a highly idiosyncratic portrait of the Soviet state, featuring soviet folk hymns, intimate shots of the locals applying their efforts to build the Soviet state, and the practices of Siberian tribes. Pastiche television commercials of Soviet peculiarities are sporadically cut within the film with the intent of mocking American mass culture. Animated shorts, as well as pictures from Alfred Neuman’s Mad Magazine create a wildly entertaining collage that fuses the capitalists and socialist spheres.
