Afterword : paranoia, or, assassins on the run

Released two years before his death when he was ninety years old, Chris Marker’s Stopover in Dubai (2011) encapsulates a paranoid vision of the world. Composed of edited closed-circuit television footage, the video is ambiguous and distorted, familiar and banal. The tapes were apparently produced by the Dubai State Security service in a reconstruction of the Mossad assassination of Hamas founder Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. In a gesture resonant with the Situationist tactic of détournement, Marker adds an atmospheric layer to the surveillance footage. Henryk Górecki’s ominous score, performed by the Kronos Quartet, provides a narrative arc and structure to what otherwise appears as a bricolage of airport and hotel scenes without clear intention. The sonic dimension supplies the organizational logic for the video as a whole, or at the least the intimation or semblance of coherence. Here we see the paranoid logic at work: all that’s required is suggestion to trigger anxiety, conspiracy, fear, delusion, or a general pervasive sense that things are somewhat awry, out of kilter.