The globetrotting life

Chris Marker is a delicate talent: a cinema essayist. This 1983 film, revived at the ICA, constitutes his testament to a globetrotting life spent in exotic places, the characteristics of which he sums up with a camera-eye that makes them intimate without loss of individuality.

Among the lifetime's passions and travels he chronicles, in brief flashbacks or longer reveries, is a portrait of Tokyo.

From the perspective of contemporary Japan's most enduring economic crisis, Marker's photographic inventory of Nipponese customs and communities makes it look positively nostalgic.

I know of only one other work of similar spirit and sensibility by a major cinema talent, Michelangelo Antonioni's seven-hour reportage of Mao's China, which stands comparison with Marker's vision in concentrated essence and meditative overview.

Both, interestingly, make a feature of the oriental skill of endowing manmade objects with the eerie presence of artificial life - puppet orchestras in Antonioni's case, robots in Marker's. Both men began their cinema lives as committed Marxists: their curiosity freed them to be humanists.

Sans Soleil (Sunless)
Cert: 15