Letter from Siberia

Chris Marker goes to Siberia and describes what he sees in the form of a letter. The images belong to a travelogue: mines, roads, reindeer herds, Yakutsk, towns under construction. The commentary is not a travelogue; the narrator keeps objecting to his own account, making jokes and changing the subject. Marker directs and wrote the text. Its best known passage repeats one street shot three times. The same footage is described first in the language of Soviet propaganda, then in that of western criticism, then in a supposedly neutral register. The image is identical in all three and you see something entirely different each time. It is among the most frequently cited demonstrations that documentary commentary cannot be objective. The film also counts as a founding instance of what is called the essay film; the narrator stands not as a source of information but as a person thinking. Animation and mock advertisements are cut in; the film plays constantly with its own form. Marker was sympathetic to the Soviet Union and the film is not a defence; admiration and mockery sit inside the same sentences. Who it is for: anyone interested in the history of documentary and in essay films. Who it is not for: there is no narrative, the text is very dense, and the film offers a point of view rather than information.