Marker’s experimental documentary,
Sunless, was heralded by critics and admirers as a return to personal filmmaking after a decade of radical, collectively produced films. Ostensibly a documentary about Japanese culture,
Sunless blasts apart the realist documentary tradition, continuing the radical aesthetic ideology of Vertovian cinema. Marker’s revival of Vertov’s montage techniques are used in this film to study the ontology of truth in documentary images and narrative films from the past.
Sunless features sequences from Tokyo, the Il de France, Cape Verde, Guinea Bissau, and outer space much in a way that resembles how Vertov combined images taken from opposite ends of the Soviet Union that compressed space-time in their montage. Vertov did it in the service of creating agitprop films that were meant to buttress the Leninist political program and Marker did it to explore connections between various practices, rituals, objects, nations, and cultures that were already co
The Untouchables (1987)
TV stations have been doing sterling work in keeping the memory of Sean Connery alive since he died during the summer, and this weekend sees another double bill courtesy of BBC Two. Sidney Lumetâs intense Second World War drama The Hill (1965)Â is generally considered among Conneryâs finest films, made at the peak of his Bond stardom and offering an altogether starker and more severe entertainment. Before that, however, the Beeb is dusting off The Untouchables, the irresistible period crime movie from the starâs latter-day renaissance that saw him picking up the Oscar for best supporting actor. Set in Chicago during the 1920s Prohibition, this was Brian De Palmaâs big-screen rejig of the 1959-63 US TV series about crime-fighting agents led by Eliot Ness and their efforts to bring down Al Capone. Early into his own stardom, Kevin Costner plays Ness, while Robert De Niro is Capone and Connery goes Irish-American as veteran cop Jimmy Malone