Level Five, a 1997 film by Chris Marker – the experimental French filmmaker best known perhaps for his 1962 film La Jetée, later adapted into the American film 12 Monkeys with Bruce Willis – is an incredibly odd and unique film. It was rereleased recently and I saw it at Cinema Village here in New York.

The film is centred around Laura (Catherine Belkhodja) as she tries to complete a computer game left her by a lover now gone. The point of the game is to recreate the battle of Okinawa, one of the most brutal battles of WWII between America and Japan. The battle is also notable for the deaths, many by suicide, of 42,000-150,000 civilians, instructed to kill themselves rather than be captured by the enemy.

As Laura tries to work on or through the game, she is reflecting, in a series of vlog-like clips, on the loss of her lover. Along with this, the film also serves as a documentary about the battle of Okinawa, with interviews with survivors and historians.

Unsurprisingly, its something of a schizophrenic film, dealing with a hugely important historical event as well as the sadness of a personal loss, the subjects connected only tenuously by a video game. It’s as if making a simple documentary was too simple a task for the visionary Marker, who uses all the subjects of the film to compose a strange, often techno-nightmarish collage for the purpose of exploring aspects of the human psyche and experience.

Though a very ugly film, Level Five‘s visual style, full of awful 90s computer graphics and VHS grain, was oddly ahead of its time, now resembling something of a full length film tumblr account devoted to such images. I’m not sure if at the time Marker consciously made it so ugly, or the graphics had yet to acquire the cultural cache they now have and were considered futuristic-looking or something. If the film were made today, it would be obvious what the director was going for, but it’s hard to say if in 1997 the intention was similar.

By the end of Level Five, the viewer has had a lot of ideas and emotions impressed upon them, and to wrap it all up, we’re shown an interview with an elderly man named Kinjo, who, as a 19-year-old Japanese soldier in the war, killed his mother and two of his siblings with the help of his brother to prevent them from being captured and tortured by American forces. Following this, Laura zooms the camera in on herself till all we see is her out of focus lips, as she elucidates further on her sadness. Hardly a happy ending. But it does feel conclusive, as though we’ve heard this story – told slowly – to its right conclusion, and have to understand that not everything is ‘alright in the end’. “None of them ever reached level five,” as Laura tells us earlier in the film. And maybe that’s just something we have to accept.

Vancouver’s Flash Palace put out this wonderful album, Ceiling All, back in January. Ten tracks of hazy, hypnotic instrumentals. I’m just getting word of it now via Weird Canada.

Off The Map was originally a zine of two punk girls from Olympia, Washington, Hib and Kika, detailing their adventures travelling across Europe. Publisher (and “decentralized anarchist collective”) CrimethInc came across it and began distributing it, but apparently it was so popular that they could only continue to do so if they turned it into a book. I found it at the anarchist bookfair in Toronto a couple weeks ago and since I’m currently writing my own little road trip zine/book, I thought it’d be cool to check out this one.

Nothing too crazy happens in Off The Map, there’s no sex or romance or drugs or anything. Hib and Kika go from town to city to country looking for punk squats, meeting interesting people they like, meeting some they don’t like, talking about capitalism, social/political change, feminism…The right word would be “leisurely”; it’s not about getting somewhere or doing something, but just moving and taking things in, processing them, contemplating them.

There are times when the feminism is a little much, like when one of them tries to interpret Medusa as just a really strong woman that men couldn’t deal with. (And this is coming from someone who read Men Explain Things To Me, The Purity Myth and Girls To The Front without ever thinking they were ‘a little much’.) And they never really get in-depth with their politics – though, depending on what you’re looking for when you pick up the book, that could be considered either a good or a bad thing. But the quality of the writing is excellent, especially when you consider that this was originally just a photocopied zine.

Cool stuff.

Happy Dagger is the euphoric bedroom-recording project of Portland’s Jesse Robertson, who, it seems, is a big fan of psych bands like Tame Impala and Dungen. His self-titled EP has a bit of a goofy cover, but the music’s legit.

Technically, Matt Wolf‘s TEENAGE is a documentary, but more accurately, it’s a document. Or more accurately than that, it’s an incredible presentation of documents in a way never quite seen before in film.

Inspired by Jon Savage‘s book Teenage: The Pre-History Of Youth Culture 1875-1945, Wolf explores the birth and early evolution of what we now know as adolescence (or teenage-hood) between the beginning of the 20th century and the end of the second world war.

Over video clips and photographs of the youth of the period, actors like Ben Wishaw (I’m Not There, Cloud Atlas, Skyfall) and Jenna Malone (Donnie Darko, Into The Wild), among others, read diary entries from the teenagers of America, England and Germany while Bradford Cox‘s (Atlas Sound, Deerhunter) beautiful, ethereal, sampler-heavy score coos along, giving everything a dreamy, hypnotic feel. There’s no narrative, but a clear, basic picture emerges of Western youth before the baby boom generation.

The youth of the day wasn’t all that different from the youth of ours or our parents’. They pushed social boundaries and upset their parents, explored their sexuality, and fell in love with new sounds (jazz, swing) from other parts of the world. One very big difference, though, between our generation and theirs, is how much greater the impact of the political world was upon the youth of the age, with mandatory conscription in all three countries, all of which were involved in the two world wars.

TEENAGE is not a movie you watch casually – you have to sit down and experience it with the lights off. Let it wash over you. But if you give yourself over to it, you’ll get to see something beautiful in return.

It’s currently streamable on Netflicks.