Saturday | June 24, 2000 9:15 pm

The Last Bolshevik
(Le Dernier Bolchevik ou le Tombeau d'Alexandre)

Directed by Chris Marker.
France, 1993, video, color and b&w, 120 min.
French with English subtitles.

Marker’s video is a tribute to the Soviet director Alexander Medvedkin, who operated the famous “agitprop” train in the 1930s and made the classic comedy/allegory Happiness (1935), a remarkable fantasy on the theme of collective farming. Marker presents the film in the form of letters to his now deceased friend, with words and images that evoke the man, his works, the history of the Soviet Union, and the disciple’s own tender interest in the subject. The film includes rare footage from Medvedkin’s works, which were surely a model for Marker, especially during the years of his own collective filmmaking activities.