In Memoriam: Chris Marker, Cinéaste (1921–2012)
Filmmaker Chris Marker has passed away one day after his ninety-first birthday. Marker (born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) was one of the world’s most highly regarded and experimental figures in cinema. His classic fiction film and best-known work, La Jetée, was made in 1962; his first feature-length documentary was produced a decade before. Marker’s documentary work includes profiles of the artists Matta and Christo, and film directors Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. Marker’s film works make deliberate use of a restricted visual palette, adopting the techniques of cinema’s silent era, using dissolves, subtitles and montage effects.
In the 1990s, he began working with new technologies, reworking elements from his earlier film and television for the video installation Zapping Zones (1992). Marker’s video works range from idiosyncratic documentaries to poetic meditations. Among his most recent projects are an interactive CD-ROM entitled Immemory (1998) and the feature film Level Five.
Writes Bill Horrigan, curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio: “Although Marker is widely regarded as one of the few indispensable, inimitable figures of post-World War II international cinema, it becomes clear that, for him, cinema is simply one expressive domain, one ‘zone’ and perhaps, at that, an interim or intermediate one. Having recently written, ‘I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan a long time ago,’ the genuinely self-critical Marker continues to experiment with new technological frontiers…”
Workspace Marker: An Exhibition of Immemory
Chris Marker, Experimental CD-ROM. 1998. Platform: CD-ROM for MacOS and Windows PC Editions du Centre Pompidou (Paris)
“In our moments of megalomaniacal daydreaming, we tend to view our memory as a kind of History Book: we have won and lost battles, found and lost whole empires. At the very least we are characters from a classic novel (‘my life is such a novel!’). A more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach would be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life, we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae. From this memory we can draw the map, extract images with more ease (and truth) than do stories and legends. That the subject of this memory is found to be a photographer or a filmmaker does not imply that his memory is more interesting than that of any passing gentleman (or moreover, than that of the lady), but simply that he has left traces with which one can work, and contours to help draw up the map….. ….My working thesis was that every somewhat extensive memory is more structured than it seems — that photos taken apparently at random, postcards chosen following momentary whims, begin given a certain accumulation to sketch an itinerary, to map the imaginary land that stretches out inside of us….
….’The art of memory’ is a very ancient discipline, fallen (that takes the cake!) into oblivion as the divorce between physiology and psychology came to pass. Certain antique authors had a more functional vision of the twists and turns of the mind, and it is Filippo Gesualdo, in his Plutosofia (1592) who proposes an image of memory in terms of ‘branching’ that is perfectly “softwary”, [softwarian?] if I dare use this adjective.” – Chris Marker
A MARKER-THON OF SHORT FILMS BY CHRIS MARKER
Remembrance of Things to Come
dir. Chris Marker & Yannick Bellon, France, 2001, video, 48 mins, b/w
Chris Marker, master of the cinema-essay, is joined by Yannick Bellon, daughter of photographer Denise Bellon, whose images from the period of 1935-1955 are the backbone of this rumination of the photographer’s life as well as the beginning of the modern age, the history of Surrealism, the atrocities of WWII, and Marker’s love of cats, women, Paris and much more. “A small masterpiece of montage, Remembrance of Things to Come is from moment to moment reminiscent of Resnais, Ivens, even Kubrick, but in its deployment of still photographs (as in La Jetée), its theme of history and memory, its subject-skipping montage and rapid shuttle of wit and philosophy, Remembrance is pure, marvelous Marker”. – James Quandt
Chris Marker’s Bestiary: Six Short Films about Animals
Animals in Chris Marker’s films often function as cultural or political metaphors (“A cat is never on the side of power,” Marker has explained). In this anthology of short films, however, Marker avoids the commercial cinema’s tendency to anthropomorphize animals in favor of a simple celebration of their exotic beauty, primal nature and mystery.
Cat Listening to Music
dir. Chris Marker, France, video, 2006, 3 mins, color
An Owl is an Owl is an Owl
dir. Chris Marker, France, video, 2006, 3 mins, color
Zoo Piece
dir. Chris Marker, France, video, 2006, 3 mins, color
Bullfight in Okinawa
dir. Chris Marker, France, video, 2006, 5 mins, color
Slon Tango
dir. Chris Marker, France, video, 2006, 5 mins, color
Three Cheers for the Whale
dir. Chris Marker, France, video, 1972, 30mins, color
Chronicles the history of mankind’s relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry. Chris Marker’s co-director, Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986), descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, had been a journalist, painter, and ethnologist before discovering his vocation as a documentary filmmaker. In the sixties he became one of the founders-along with Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, and Chris Marker-of the “direct cinema” movement, pioneering in the use of new lightweight cameras and synchronous
sound recording equipment. Ruspoli’s eclectic filmography includes documentaries on medical, scientific, anthropological and historical subjects.
The Koumiko Mystery
dir. Chris Marker, France, 16mm, 1967, 54 mins, color
Set against the backdrop of the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo, the film becomes a microcosmic encapsulation of the romance between subject and object, between filmmaker and filmed. Koumiko Muraoka, a young woman whom Marker claimed to have picked out of the stands, is painted as an elusive Godardian nymphet for whom pop culture and philosophy exist on the same level. Marker’s approach is kaleidoscopic, impatient, frequently digressing into narrated history lessons or seeming tangents, but always returning to Koumiko, who remains as tantalizingly impenetrable to Marker as Tokyo itself. It’s worth noting that in French, the word “Mystery” precedes Koumiko’s name, since such mysteries as are even defined are not about her so much as they are her, and she is them. The Koumiko Mystery remains somewhat impenetrable itself, but it’s possible to love it without fully understanding it.
La Jetée
dir. Chris Marker, France, 1962, 16mm, 28 mins,b/w, French w/ English subtitles
Constructed almost entirely from still photos, La Jetée tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. In a devastated Paris in the aftermath of WWIII, the few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world for food, supplies and maybe a solution to their dire position. One man is haunted by a vague childhood memory that will prove fateful. Print courtesy of Paul Lewis.
…A Valparaiso
dir. Joris Ivens, France/Chile, 1962, video, 34 mins,b/w and color, w/ English subtitles
In 1962 Joris Ivens was invited to Chile for teaching and filmmaking. Together with students he made …A Valparaiso, one of his most poetic films. Contrasting the prestigious history of the seaport with the present, the film sketches a portrait of the city, built on 42 hills, with its wealth and poverty, its daily life on the streets, the stairs, and the rack railways and in the bars. Although the port has lost its importance, the rich past is still present in the impoverished city. The film echoes this ambiguous situation in its dialectical poetic style, interweaving the daily life reality (of 1963) with the history of the city and changing from black and white to color, finally leaving us with hopeful perspective for the children who are playing on the stairs and hills of this beautiful town. Commentary text by Chris Marker.
Our Chris Marker retrospective continues with three more screenings in the coming months:
Saturday, 2/23 @ 2:00pm: Chris Marker: Réalisateur – A Grin without a Cat (Le Fond de l’air est rouge)
Saturday, 2/23 @ 7:00pm: Chris Marker: Réalisateur – Level Five
Saturday, 3/16 @ 5:00pm: Chris Marker: Early Marker – Collaborations Featuring Les Astronautes, Toute la mémoire du monde, Les Statues meurent aussi, and Night and Fog – Nuit et brouillard
