L'ambassade (1973) User Reviews

an interesting and occasionally brilliant politically charged short

[framptonhollis · 6/10 · 6 July 2017]

There is no denying that Chris Marker was a master of cinema, one of the finest filmmakers working in documentary/avant garde/short movie-making; however, this does not necessarily mean that the man could "do no wrong". while I most certainly appreciated and liked "The Embassy", I still feel the need to criticize it to an extent. Yes, I know, I, myself, am no Chris Marker and I will probably never in my future years even match his brilliance as an artist, but all artists are flaws and this is my opinion so let me be-have I not already stated that I love Marker and his works?!? (also, I am aware that I'm basically talking to a nonexistent straw-man but still). Anyway, the main thing this film has going against it is the narration. Now, I did not listen to this in the original French and instead watched the film in English, and the narrator was so boring that I nearly rolled my eyes every time he spoke. And the narration itself was quite decent and well written too, which is a real shame. Otherwise, this short is pretty great despite having its fair share of slow moments. The documentary like style Marker uses in this fictional drama is convincing and brilliantly pulled off. Intentional scratches scrape across the filmstrip as Marker's intelligent work of political cinema is presented in all of its brilliance and tediousness. If it sounds interesting to you, definitely check it out, it's only twenty minutes and, despite its flaws, it is a genuinely well made, unique, and smart short that I'm extremely glad I saw.

Astonishing, Haunting

[dylanfan-2 · 9/10 · 22 February 2009]

This very short movie (21 minutes), shot on Super 8mm, is quite painful to watch. The surface of the film is (deliberately?) filled with scratches and dirt. The quality of the cinematography resembles nothing more or less than a bad home movie, with overly-lit shots alternating with ones of near-twilit obscurity, even those shot during daytime. (Although Marker narrates the film, he is playing a character here -- a refugee who decides to film the events described, perhaps for lack of anything better to do; thus, the amateurishness is appropriate.) Lastly, the sound quality -- which includes narration only: the images are silent, so none of the characters shown is heard speaking -- is quite poor, and, though the narration is in English, Marker's heavy accent makes his words often hard to decipher. But the film is painful also for an entirely different reason, one that perhaps only someone on the political Left could fully appreciate. It describes all too convincingly the terror, confusion and hopelessness of political progressives caught in a fascist coup. These refugees are in limbo: they can neither change the situation, nor escape; they can only try to figure out what is happening to them (from phone calls from allies, from TV broadcasts) and deal with it somehow. As the film goes on, we slowly realize that the desperate people in this very modern hell are the *lucky* ones: many of those who did not try to escape, or perhaps did try but didn't make it to a place of safety like an embassy, have been arrested, and some have been rounded up and executed by the new authorities in a stadium (as actually happened in Chile). As their tension mounts, the leftists turn on each other, each blaming the others' political factions for bringing on the disaster: according to some, by compromising too much with the powers-that-be, according to others, by not compromising enough. At last, the refugees are offered the only solution to save themselves: exile, an option they gratefully take. As they climb into a van that will take them away forever from their country, a panning shot over the city they are escaping reveals... that the audience is not where it thought it was. This work, a reaction to the right-wing coup in Chile, is a somber corrective to the revolutionary optimism of Marker's earlier work. (Interestingly, this film is included on the same DVD as The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (La Sixieme Face du Pentagone), a short 1968 film, showing the October 1967 anti-Vietnam War March on the Pentagon, which perfectly embodies that earlier optimism.) And although The Embassy (utterly unlike the elegant La Jetee or Sans Soleil) appears utterly artless, even crude, seeing it twice reveals subtle symmetries: the film begins and ends with the vapor trail of a jet, and the face of a woman, the first refugee who enters the embassy, is the same face we see in close-up as the refugees leave. (I think I'll remember the face of that woman -- confused, haunted, despairing -- until I die.) The movie works above all because the Left, at least at the time the film was made, had the same types all over the world: the lawyers, the folk singers, the student radicals, etc. They are all instantly recognizable, and universal. Marker would recount his journey from revolutionary optimism to pessimism and back again in a much longer and more ambitious film: The Base of the Air Is Red (Le Fond de l'Air Est Rouge). For now, this extraordinary 1973 work records a left-wing intellectual's dismay at the death of the 'Sixties' dream.