The Rotterdam Film Festival

DURING THE LAST TEN DAYS of January, anyone wandering the rainy streets of Rotterdam at night could savor the spectacle of Isabella Rossellini being electrocuted, repeatedly and ecstatically, in a seven-minute looped film projected onto the top four floors of a skyscraper. Conceived collaboratively by Rossellini and director Guy Maddin, Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair, 2009, was among the large-scale projections commissioned by the Thirty-Eighth International Film Festival Rotterdam as part of “Size Matters,” one of its many themed sections of adjunct programming. More substantially than other

Chris Marker, Paris, April 2006, 2006, black-and-white digital image. From the series “The Revenge of the Eye,” 2006.

print Summer 2006

CHRIS MARKER: THE REVENGE OF THE EYE

FOR SIX DECADES Chris Marker has borne witness to the great social upheavals of his day, memorializing through film the legacies of the Russian Revolution and the Great War, World War II, the end of colonialism, Vietnam, and May ’68. No wonder, then, that he would take a longer view than many of the mass protests that roiled cities around France this past spring, when the conservative government of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin pushed through a spectacularly ill-advised First Employment Contract (CPE) designed to encourage firms to hire young workers by permitting employers to fire them