not that one.
this one:
and while she's busy "opening to grace" using her "inner spiral" and "organic muscle energy", i decided (like any good would-be intellectual) to watch Chris Marker's documentary on Aleksandr Medvedkin, The Last Bolshevik:
a communist, stone-faced and decapitated
my love for Marker's work is well-documented, and The Last Bolshevik is formally stunning: the letter-writing premise, the intermission, the alternate endings that precede the film's final conclusion. Marker interrogates the image, sound, and history of the Soviet Union by examining a man who not only helped to film it, but also whose life itself (1900-1989) coincided so perfectly with the dream of a communist state.
there is something still sticking with me, however, something i can't quite name, something that makes me think back to 1997, when i took a class entitled "The History of Socialist Thought." i remember the professor (whom i dismissed as a washed-up revolutionary), the well-read anarchist (who pronounced "bourgeoisie" with a flair that has yet to be equaled), and his dreadlocked girlfriend (for whom i felt the unrivaled admixture of political and carnal desire).
but this is beside the point.
the point is what i don't remember, the words of the men (and women – Rosa Luxemburg was there indeed) who i engaged only topically, one of the many half-hearted intellectual affairs that marred my undergraduate studies.
i sometimes wonder what i missed, what might have been if i had looked one way rather than another, or even if i had just looked a little more closely. how much is forever lurking below the surface? i suppose that may be what speaks to me so strongly in Marker's films – they underscore the fact that even the most solid of images is always perforated with all the things we didn't see. and, even is we spent a lifetime looking, how could we know how to make sense of all the things we saw?
image from Medvedkin's Happiness
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