Abstract

In Chris Marker’s essay film "Level Five" a vast outline of our contemporary condition is proposed. Everything is linked—a continuous flux of images, visions, information, and memories, is shaping our actual understanding. Are we able to properly read this boundless form giving social and cultural identity to human beings? How do we manage with these fast, confusing transformations in the field of images and visions? Marker questions art’s contemporary condition by making his own journey through a network between ending cinema, new images, facts and virtual world, history and memory of World War II and contemporary oblivion. Are networked images a better way of remembering our past and understanding it or are they simply carrying us to a generalized forgetfulness? “Level Five” is a movable archive where everything circulates; it shows how cinema has changed his nature, becoming a dynamic cross-roads between history, vision, anthropology, thinking, and understanding. This essay outlines a film-maker's new challenges and some big changes in art forms. If all images are part of this vast archive, cinema is looking for his new identity between the digital world and the unavoidable presence of reality, of facts, of history and memory.