Friday | November 8, 2013 9:15 pm

Level Five

Directed by Chris Marker.
France, 1997, digital video, color, 110 min.
English, Japanese, French with English subtitles.

A spectral truth-seeker named for Otto Preminger’s Laura (1944) navigates a networked computer game designed to reconstruct the memory of the Battle of Okinawa. Linking between shards of fact and memory, including film shot by Nagisa Oshima and John Huston, Laura follows Marker’s advice that in travelling one must accept “the rhythms, waves, shocks, all the buffers of memory, its meteors and dragnets.” Explicitly positioned as a cyberpunk equivalent to Alain Resnais’ classic trauma narrative –“Okinawa mon amour,” Laura says – Level Five is alive to fresh possibilities for storytelling in the information age while remaining in the debt of historical memory.