Sunday in Peking

Jason

I have seen a great many of Chris Marker's films and videos (even owned that CD-ROM he did), but this was nonetheless as bracing as a face-full of ice water. That's too gentle. This went off in my life like so much ordnance. A truly disarming machine gun loquacity at play here. It comes flying at you, and this is stuff as brilliant and profound as anything to come out of France post-Montaigne.

Abraham

Les débuts du maoîsme. Avec une belle fraicheur.

Ma-rewind

« Rien n’est plus beau que Paris sinon le souvenir de Paris. Rien n’est plus beau que Pékin sinon le souvenir de Pékin." Wooooooow ! Merci Mubi pour cette retrospective qui débute ! (Ces couleurs, bon sang, ces couleurs ! )

James Roth

A beautifully shot window into a world that I would have never experienced otherwise with the personal sentiment of the filmmaker as an undercurrent throughout

FilmEdie

Do we say: he wryly portrayed China as spectacle, as a subtle comment on the impossibility of his ever achieving anything but an outside-in perspective? Because it's Chris Marker? I dunno. It felt like exoticism and exploitation... I wish the audio had been in French; that didn't help. This strange American; part mid-Atlantic radio narrator, part auctioneer - probably trying to sell me something. But the Kodachrome!

Stefan Drees

Well filmed and colorful snapshots and fragments of a city that has changed dramatically during the last decades.

Slow Immersion

The qualities and colours of Kodakchrome are exquisite, but too bad it is wasted on Marker's mediocre framing, and mind numbing monologue.

Rafael Zen

Those colors! Marker stablishes a cut in time that survives time itself. Watching this today, a feeling of nostalgia remains: there's no space in contemporary life for this slow pace living. It's subtle and naive, as if we - the viewers - could not stop time from the edge of our seats. This film may seem a bubbly portrait of China, but it's more than dreamy scenes. It's a kind of reality none of us can alter anymore.