Level Five

Laura is working on a computer game. Its subject is the Battle of Okinawa, and the person who designed it has died; she has taken the work over. To finish it she has to learn the battle. The more she looks the more a problem with the design appears: history cannot be changed, and the game arrives at the same outcome every time. Laura describes the process talking to camera. Chris Marker writes and directs. Catherine Belkhodja plays Laura. The film joins fiction to documentary: Laura's sections are invented, while those about the battle are made of real footage and interviews conducted in Japan. The Battle of Okinawa took place in 1945 and civilian losses were extraordinarily high. Many civilians on the island took their own lives or were killed by their families as a result of instructions not to surrender. The film puts that at its centre and shows how long it went undiscussed in Japan. Marker designs a network inside the film: an information network before the internet, a structure users move through and in which knowledge is lost. It was made in 1997, and for that time the guess is striking. The telling is close to an essay; there is no plot, and voice and text are its real instruments. Who it is for: anyone interested in Chris Marker, essay film and the history of the war. Who it is not for: the structure is demanding, it is dense with talk, and the film offers no straight narrative anywhere.