L'Ambassade, 1973

Betacam numérique, PAL, couleur, son


L’Ambassade by Chris Marker is presented as a "Super 8 film found in an embassy". It takes the form of notes taken day by day, in the manner of a carefully composed logbook, with gleaned anecdotes that explain the bitter and bleak daily lives of so-called political refugees, shut up in a diplomatic shelter transformed into solitary confinement.


As though animated by a need to tell the story, a voice is placed over this gallery of men and women whose voices have not been recorded. At no time is there any direct sound. On screen, close-ups of tense faces, and hands, those of Florence Delay[1] and of Carole and Paul Roussopoulos.[2] Their eyes appear to be glazed over, immobilised by the void. The voice comments the images of a weeklong confinement, a life away from the outside world, which is however only a transitory moment in history.


            L’Ambassade is an essay/film in which Chris Marker is much more a writer than he is a filmmaker; the commentary is placed over the images – intense writing work is engaged from the first moments and affirms the singularity of his style – the commentary strives to create a memory. André Bazin wrote: "[...] for [3] The image does not relate to the shot that precedes it, or that follows it, but collaterally, to what is said about it. The commentary, in Chris Marker's work, oscillates between testimonial and fiction, between remembrance and invention. It is used to supplement the images, to deliver its essential content and provide poetic reflection on a series of non-events. There is no exaltation of the present moment; the repressed anxiety is related over suspended images.


Chris Marker presents us with a limping, doubtful sense of time that is never stable, "without being definitively tamed[4]" as Jean-André Fieschi puts it. This Super 8 film documents history-in-the-making, as it is being experienced and from the inside, in its very indecisiveness. It is a 'recovered' time that is always ticking away in the present. One single element escapes the exhaustion of this suspended time – the little tortoise, the one sitting on laps. It fascinates us, possibly because "it has its own tortoise ideas, and no cop in the world can make it change them." This tortoise represents poetic openness, and as François Niney writes: "The voice has a face in Marker's films, that of images.” [5]


 


Chris Marker took special care to ensure that the end of L’Ambassade was left unsaid.[6] Moreover, there is no ending – the story "turns itself inside out like a glove.”[7]


 


Lou Svahn







[1] Florence Delay, a French writer, would later provide the voiceover for Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil in 1982. She played the role of Joan in Robert Bresson’s 1962 film Le Procès de Jeanne d’Arc.



[2] Carole Roussopoulos is a documentary film director. She is the first woman to have worked with a portable video camera. With her husband, Paul Roussopoulos, she founded the first militant video collective: Video Out. In 1982, she created the Centre Audiovisuel Simone de Beauvoir with Delphine Seyrig and Iona Wieder, with the aim of conserving and disseminating audiovisual documents relating to women’s struggles.



[3] André Bazin, Le cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1945-1958), Paris, Cahiers du Cinéma, 1998.



[4] Jean-André Fieschi, “L’Ambassade”, Trafic, n°19, 1996.



[5] François Niney, “L’éloignement des voix répare en quelque sorte la trop grande proximité des plans” [The distancing of voices somehow compensates for the exagerrated proximity of the shots], Théorème numéro 6, Revue de l’Institut de Recherche sur le Cinéma et l’Audiovisuel – Université de Paris III), Recherches sur Chris Marker, under the direction of Philippe Dubois, Paris, Éditions des Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002.