“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined" 
                                     - Chris Marker

Observers

Measures of Distance (1988) 
by Mona Hatoum

  The filmmaker never appears in the film, however, the voice she reads her mother's letter on the sound track. In the video Hatoum attempts to narrate and represent the distances between safety and unsafety, mobility and confinement as the images of the mother’s flesh and her words do not provide us with a world outside of the mother. The film has very personal\political video pieces which began as a performance installation with the artist herself before it was put in a form, a videotape, whereby it could travel without its author and creator, granting Hatoum another distance from her internal landscape of war and loss. 

The Hour of the Furnaces (1968) 
by Octavio Getino and Fernando Solanas

  The montage-based self reflexive analytical work by the Grupo Cine Liberacion. The film addresses the politics of the 'Third worldist' films and Latin-American manifesto of the late 1960s. 
Part1: neo-colonial violence as having several manifestations, and after   
       enumerating them, we are told in an intertitle that under neo-colonialism,
Part2: Act for Liberation
Part3: Violence and Liberation

Reassemblage (1982) 
by Trinh T. Minh-ha

  The filmmaker explores how she can avoid a top-down perspective on the Senegalese women who are the main subject of the film. The voice-over of Trinh says: I do not intend to speak about. Just speak nearby. Trinh does not want to be an objective outsider explaining to the viewer how the Senegalese women spend their daily lives. She wants to get closer, but at the same time she realises that she is different and cannot be one of them. Trinh reflects on these concerns in the film, thus turning it into a source for alternative ideas for ethnographically inspired documentary filmmaking.

Sans Soleil: Sunless (1983) 
by Chris Marker

  A film about time travel that has elements of science fiction like Marker's earlier La Jetée (1964). The present day of Tokyo is projected in Marker's pov at the start of the 1980s. via his narrator, he delivers an endless stream of grand, airily magisterial pronouncements on the Japanese character. Sun Less is a jumble of images and words – most of the footage is shot in Tokyo, but we also have several detours to Guinea-Bissau, Iceland and, as previously mentioned, San Francisco. There is no direct sound – instead we have an almost non-stop narration from Alexandra Stewart, in which she tells of receiving various letters and images from an unseen, unidentified traveller we presume is Marker himself: the observer.

Tarnation (2003)
by Jonathan Caouette

  The filmmaker's auto biography documentary on growing up with his schizophrenic mother - a mixture of snapshots, Super-8, answering machine messages, video diaries, early short films, and more culled from 19 years of his life.

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