No Marker film without risks. That also applies to Level 5, in which the film poet feels out the boundaries between the old medium film and the new digital media. Made almost entirely in the studio on digital equipment, the film tries to link several story forms together. The minor human drama of a woman who is deserted is linked by a computer game to the tragedy that took place at the end of World War Two on the island of Okinawa. Computer graphics are interspersed with film and video, eye-witness accounts with computer menus. Underneath it a narration by ‘editing whizzkid, Chris’ (Marker, no doubt). The result is a strange mixture of mourning for the lost one (the lover, thousands of lives, the power of the film image) and hope for what could emerge. Level 5 may not be an unqualified success, but that does not make Marker’s attempt to create a new, hybrid form of art and knowledge any less interesting.
