The End of the World Seen by the Angel Gabriel (1947)

Overview

This film is considered lost. Chris Marker described it as his first film, shot in Berlin on an 8mm movie camera purportedly borrowed from André Bazin. A decade and a half later, Marker would recycle some of Berlin photographs in a montage sequence in La Jetée evoking a post–­World War III Paris. In Abrahamic religions, Gabriel is an archangel with power to announce God’s will to men. He is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran. It is Gabriel who announces to the Virgin Mary that she would have a child. Alain Resnais recalled: “It was a sequence of images that weren’t always identifiable, he used a lot of out of focus shots and techniques like that, but the commentary was fabulous and I was completely swept away by this film”.

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