Perhaps the most celebrated maker of what has come to be known as the “essay film” — a genre he more or less invented and all but perfected over decades of wide-ranging, eccentrically personal yet probingly philosophical filmmaking — Frenchman Chris Marker was already a legend in his own time, particularly in his home country, when he died in 2012. In recent years his reputation and influence in the English-speaking world have grown considerably. The upshot? Our great good fortune! Marker films hitherto unavailable here in translation are being shown in our very own theaters.

Case in point: seventeen years after its initial release, yet somehow right on time, Marker’s LEVEL 5, a beautifully strange, semi-dated but wholly prescient discourse composed in a quasi-SF mode, has finally arrived stateside. It proves to be a characteristically elusive and compelling meditation, semi-fictional in nature, on video games, virtuality, and the Battle of Okinawa. For fans it is an unmissable opportunity to catch a “new” Marker on the the big screen. For everyone else, it will make a fine initiation into the master’s methods and mysteries. The blessed MFA will screen it tonight and on several other occasions in the near future.

9/18 7:30pm
9/21 – 9/28 various times
106 minutes

Museum of Fine Arts
Avenue of the Arts
465 Huntington Avenue
Boston, Massachusetts 02115