The film-essayist and poet Chris Marker wrote one of his finest commentaries for Joris Ivens' film on the visually spectacular Chilean port of Valparaiso. Marker wrote not on location but in Paris, based on notes taken by Ivens during the filming. A Valparaiso has been described as "a film of brilliance and tragic beauty...Belying the tragedy of the poor, faces and forms, streets and shacks are pinioned in beauty by the bright light and the film's art." La Jetée remains Marker's best loved short work. Constructed from still photographs and frozen shots (belied by one luminous, life-affirming blink of the eye), its science-fiction narrative explores memory, time-travel, and emotions in a post-scientific age. Marker's hero is a helpless astronaut emanating from post-World War III Paris in search of a radioactivity-free future. Through sheer will of emotion-the vivid memory of a childhood image-he turns back in time instead of forward, for a brief moment of perfectly ordinary love. Les hommes de la baleine (The Whale Men) by Mario Ruspoli is a beautifully shot account of whale hunting around the Azores, which continues "just like in the good old days of Moby Dick" (André Bazin). "Invoke(s) Melville's great authority without ever being pedantic...make(s) us admire man, nature, and, upon leaving, cinema, which sings the greatest of both so well" (Eric Rohmer).