The Embassy

Marker the writer.
Marker the activist.
Marker the distant observer, poet-analyst of diverse realities, ultra-sensitive alien from a distant future who trains his camera with a sad fascination on the agita of companions from another time. Marker the melancholy, who has loved and hoped so much and now watches with sorrow as his dream landscapes fall to pieces.

The Embassy is a “found film”, one that occupies an unusual position within Marker’s filmography. A kind of fictionalized propaganda or social science-fiction documentary filmed as part of the first Super 8 film festival held in Paris in 1973, this featurette is a veritable time capsule of the generalized disillusionment of the early 1970s. It sits at the crossroads of Marker’s works: a testament of a living environment, a forgotten message in a bottle, a last gasp of 1960s idealism.

Intellectuals, activists and “political professionals” gathered in an embassy the day after a coup d’état. In September 1973, mere weeks before filming began, Allende gave his tragic last speech. Marker uses inventive techniques to connect time and space, creating an effect that leans toward an unknown future, the crossing of a border.

“As in all prisons, we feel as though we are talking about another place when talking about before.”

The city they had once known as free, now the city of their trampled dreams. Now the dogs of the bourgeoisie are in power, and they have no plans to relinquish it.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director