Several films by legendary French experimental filmmaker Chris Marker are being released for the first time on DVD. Best known for works such as his 1962 film La Jetée (which inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys), his body of work is full of unusual discoveries, as this new series of DVDs from First Run/Icarus Films indicates.

Included are The Sixth Side of the Pentagon, Marker’s powerful reflection on the 1967 protests against the Vietnam War in Washington. This October show of opposition to the war drew over 100,000 people, and Marker captures the fervour and anger of the hippies and liberals who showed up to storm the steps of the Pentagon; the crowd had been further enraged by the loss of Che Guevara, who had been killed but two weeks earlier. Included on this disc is The Embassy (1973), one of Marker’s fiction shorts, in which a filmmaker holes up in an embassy after a coup d’état in an unnamed foreign country, an intriguing collision of dramatic and documentary film techniques. Political history freaks will love The Last Bolshevik, Marker’s profile of Russian filmmaker Medvedkin, who witnessed the beginning and end of the Soviet Union. Pauline Kael once called The Last Bolshevik “a great film that almost no one has seen.”

This disc also includes one of Medvedkin’s own short films, the 1934 comedy Happiness, never before available on home video—a film Eisenstein himself referred to as “exceptional.”

This week also sees the release of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood on DVD, a film many argue to be the best of 2007. Daniel Day Lewis clearly earned his Oscar; you can see the veins rippling in his forehead as he descends into one of his disturbing, brutal mental fits. It struck me that his breakdown was the serious version of one of those made famous by John Cleese, who used to melt down so flawlessly on Fawlty Towers.