This film is best-known today as "the one that inspired 12 MONKEYS," unless you're an art-house devotee who enjoys pretentious but ultimately empty foreign films. I've been waiting to see it, assuming that it would have to be something extraordinary, but it was a let-down.
Basically, it's a comic book on screen, with moody b/w still photos accompanied by a narrator and a mish-mosh of music including Russian choral pieces (presumably to set a gloomy mood). There are also eerie Germanic whisperings every time the scientists are doing something nefarious. The English-narrated version I watched featured a voice that sounds like he would be perfect for narrating books-on-tape versions of medical or accounting textbooks. Not only that, but the quality of the voice recording was poor and noisy.
To me, this looks like the director had a general idea for a story but didn't have the patience to work it out as an actual film, so instead he gave us a filmed storyboard. Gilliam's expanded version is much more memorable visually, and actually breathes life into the characters, who in Marker's film just seem like friends posing for funny pictures on a weekend trip. I wish it had been an actual comic book, because then I would have been able to get through it in 10 minutes or less, rather than a dreary half hour.
Basically, it's a comic book on screen, with moody b/w still photos accompanied by a narrator and a mish-mosh of music including Russian choral pieces (presumably to set a gloomy mood). There are also eerie Germanic whisperings every time the scientists are doing something nefarious. The English-narrated version I watched featured a voice that sounds like he would be perfect for narrating books-on-tape versions of medical or accounting textbooks. Not only that, but the quality of the voice recording was poor and noisy.
To me, this looks like the director had a general idea for a story but didn't have the patience to work it out as an actual film, so instead he gave us a filmed storyboard. Gilliam's expanded version is much more memorable visually, and actually breathes life into the characters, who in Marker's film just seem like friends posing for funny pictures on a weekend trip. I wish it had been an actual comic book, because then I would have been able to get through it in 10 minutes or less, rather than a dreary half hour.