L’Ambassade (1973)

I’ve been watching, pausing, rewatching and generally swimming around in Chris Marker’s incredible 1973 film, L’AMBASSADE today. Coming in at 21mins, a glance shorter than his much more well known “science fiction” short LA JETÉE, L’Ambassade (The Embassy) sits in a similar speculative space with a besieged Paris its backdrop and the intellectual freedom of its people its subject. In this case it plays cipher to Pinochet’s coup d’etat in Chile, but perhaps more relevant to our rapidly evolving political landscape today than I’d prefer to admit.

It tells the story of five days of asylum within an unnamed embassy spent by a group of political activists, academics and artists. It’s voiced by a single narrator, no dialogue, and shot masterfully on handheld Super 8 — verité style. It punches as a doc, but is wholly, brilliantly scripted.

This “transmission” from the newly empowered regime retold by Marker’s narrator hits almost a little too directly:

“At 8pm, the television came to life: anonymous bulletins gave way to real images, and real discourse. Obviously the new power feels assured enough to show himself in the limelight. We got everything: explanations, congratulations, admonitions and threats. “These people don’t even try to brush up. Terror of the Marxist cancer. Country running to its doom. Plots orchestrated from abroad. Sound the trumpets.”

“This bullshit is interspersed with announcements considerably more to the point: Forbiddance of all political parties without exception. Dissolution of all unions without exceptions. Calls for denunciations, reward included. Declaration of principles for a new constitution, whose broad lines are obviously chauvinistic, racist and corporatist.

“What strikes me most is that this lingo doesn’t belong to the conservative bourgeoisie. Not even to the classical right. It displays the favourite themes of the f*cistoid groups, of the less read newspapers, the ones we were joking about because they were historically one century behind. Well, the military did read them. The ruling classes have unleashed the dogs to take the power back, but now the dogs hold the power and they won’t leave it.”