. In this lyrical cine-poem, Chris Marker uses modern Japan, with its electronic games, its age-old obsessions and atomic bomb memories, as a gameboard for a complex system of references connecting such diverse subjects as the poverty of Africa, the open spaces of Iceland, and the vertigo of memory as perceived by Hitchcock in San Francisco. Marker explores memory as an alternative reality; his Japan is one of captured movements and absurd moments, of rituals and inadvertent theatrics. Japan, Africa, San Francisco: it is a disassembled whole which the filmmaker reassembles in a storyless story. Eventually a metamorphosis is achieved: what was memory becomes fiction.