I don’t know what Chris Marker was smoking when he assembled this film, but Jesus Christ, the archaeology of our disposable souls rendered in busted transistors and cracked plastic, every discarded thing a little tombstone for the five minutes we thought it mattered before we needed the new thing, the better thing, the thing that would finally make us whole, which it never did, which it never could, because we’re all just temporary arrangements of matter pretending we’re not headed for the same heap.
What really destroys me about this whole thing: Marker understood. That crazy French genius with his camera and his obsession with memory, he’s basically saying HEY LOOK THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON EVERYTHING and we’re all too busy, too distracted to notice we’re already IN the junkyard, we’re PART of it, we’re the junk AND the people throwing it away simultaneously. And there’s something almost tender in how he frames it, not mourning, not celebrating, just looking. Really looking at the detritus like it’s a language we forgot how to read, like these mountains of discarded civilization are speaking in tongues about who we really are when nobody’s keeping score.
This is poetry without the pretension, man. Rock and roll without the guitars. The truth we spend our whole lives running from, shot through with this weird, fierce compassion for all of it, the garbage, the ghosts, the whole beautiful fucked-up human project of making and breaking and forgetting and trying again.