Chris Marker | |
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| Born | Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve (1921-07-29)29 July 1921 Neuilly-sur-Seine, France |
| Died | 29 July 2012(2012-07-29) (aged 91) Paris, France |
| Occupation(s) | Film director, photographer, journalist, multimedia artist |
Chris Marker (French:[maʁkɛʁ]; 29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) (bornChristian-François Bouche-Villeneuve) was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director,multimedia artist andfilm essayist. His best known films areLa Jetée (1962),A Grin Without a Cat (1977) andSans Soleil (1983). Marker is usually associated with theLeft Bank subset of theFrench New Wave that occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s, and included such other filmmakers asAlain Resnais,Agnès Varda andJacques Demy.
His friend and sometime collaboratorAlain Resnais called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man."[1] Film theoristRoy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique... French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."[1]
Marker was bornChristian François Bouche-Villeneuve.[2] He was always elusive about his past and known to refuse interviews and not allow photographs to be taken of him; his place of birth is highly disputed.[1] Some sources and Marker himself claim that he was born inUlaanbaatar, Mongolia.[3] Other sources say he was born inBelleville, Paris, and others, inNeuilly-sur-Seine.[1] The 1949 edition ofLe Cœur Net gives his birthday as 22 July. Film criticDavid Thomson has said, "Marker told me himself that Mongolia is correct. I have since concluded that Belleville is correct—but that does not spoil the spiritual truth of Ulan Bator."[4] When asked about his secretive nature, Marker said, "My films are enough for them [the audience]."[1]
Marker was a philosophy student in France beforeWorld War II. During the German occupation of France, he joined theMaquis (FTP), a part of theFrench Resistance. At some point during the war he left France and joined theUnited States Air Force as a paratrooper,[1] although some sources claim that this is not true.[5] After the war, he began a career as a journalist, first writing for the journalEsprit, a neo-Catholic,Marxist magazine where he met fellow journalistAndré Bazin. ForEsprit, Marker wrote political commentaries, poems, short stories, and film reviews.
During this period, Marker began to travel around the world as a journalist and photographer, a vocation he pursued for the rest of his life. The French publishing companyÉditions du Seuil hired him as editor of the seriesPetite Planète ("Small World").[6] That collection devoted one edition to each country and included information and photographs,[1] and would later be published in English translation byStudio Vista andThe Viking Press.[7] In 1949 Marker published his first novel,Le Coeur net (The Forthright Spirit), which was about aviation. In 1952 Marker published an illustrated essay on French writerJean Giraudoux,Giraudoux Par Lui-Même.[1]
During his early journalism career, Marker became increasingly interested in filmmaking and in the early 1950s experimented with photography. Around this time Marker met and befriended many members of theLeft Bank Film Movement, includingAlain Resnais,Agnès Varda,Henri Colpi,Armand Gatti, and the novelistsMarguerite Duras andJean Cayrol. This group is often associated with theFrench New Wave directors who came to prominence during the same time period, and the groups were often friends and journalistic co-workers. The termLeft Bank was first coined by film criticRichard Roud,[8] who described them as having "fondness for a kind ofBohemian life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of involvement in literature and theplastic arts, and a consequent interest inexperimental filmmaking", as well as an identification with the politicalleft.[8]Anatole Dauman produced many of Marker's earliest films.
In 1952 Marker made his first film,Olympia 52, a 16mm feature documentary about the1952 Helsinki Olympic Games. In 1953 he collaborated with Resnais on the documentaryStatues Also Die. The film examines traditionalAfrican art such as sculptures and masks, and its decline with the coming of Western colonialism. It won the 1954Prix Jean Vigo, but was banned by French censors for its criticism of French colonialism.[1]
After working as assistant director on Resnais'sNight and Fog in 1955, Marker madeSunday in Peking, a short documentary "film essay" in the style that characterized Marker's output for most of his career. Marker shot the film in two weeks while traveling through China with Armand Gatti in September 1955. In the film, Marker's commentary overlaps scenes from China, such as tombs that, contrary to Westernized understandings of Chinese legends, do not contain the remains ofMing dynasty emperors.[1]
After working on the commentary for Resnais's filmLe mystère de l'atelier quinze in 1957, Marker continued to refine his style with the feature documentaryLetter from Siberia.[9] An essay film on the narrativization of Siberia, it contains Marker's signature commentary, which takes the form of a letter from the director, in the long tradition of epistolary treatments by French explorers of the "undeveloped" world.Letterlooks at Siberia's movement into the 20th century and at some of the tribal cultural practices receding into the past. It combines footage Marker shot inSiberia with old newsreel footage, cartoon sequences, stills, and even an illustration ofAlfred E. Neuman fromMad Magazine as well as a fake TV commercial as part of a humorous attack on Western mass culture. In producing a meta-commentary on narrativity and film, Marker uses the same brief filmic sequence three times but with different commentary—the first praising the Soviet Union, the second denouncing it, and the third taking an apparently neutral or "objective" stance.[1]
In 1959 Marker made the animated filmLes Astronautes withWalerian Borowczyk. The film was a combination of traditional drawings with still photography. In 1960 he madeDescription d'un combat, (Description of a Struggle) a documentary on theState of Israel that reflects on its past and future.[1] The film won theGolden Bear for Best Documentary at the1961 Berlin Film Festival.[10]
In January 1961, Marker travelled to Cuba and shot the film¡Cuba Sí! The film promotes and defendsFidel Castro and includes two interviews with him. It ends with an anti-American epilogue in which the United States is embarrassed by theBay of Pigs Invasion fiasco, and was subsequently banned. The banned essay was included in Marker's first volume of collected film commentaries,Commentaires I, published in 1961.The following year Marker publishedCoréennes, a collection of photographs and essays on conditions inKorea.[1]
Marker became known internationally for the short filmLa Jetée (The Pier) in 1962.[11] It tells of apost-nuclear war experiment intime travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as aphotomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects. In the film, a survivor of a futuristic third World War is obsessed with distant and disconnected memories of a pier at theOrly Airport, the image of a mysterious woman, and a man's death. Scientists experimenting in time travel choose him for their studies, and the man travels back in time to contact the mysterious woman, and discovers that the man's death at the Orly Airport was his own. Except for one shot of the woman mentioned above sleeping and suddenly waking up, the film is composed entirely of photographs by Jean Chiabaud and stars Davos Hanich as the man,Hélène Châtelain as the woman and photographer-film directorWilliam Klein as a man from the future.
While makingLa Jetée, Marker was simultaneously making the 150-minute documentary essay-filmLe joli mai, released in 1963. Beginning in the spring of 1962, Marker and his camera operator Pierre Lhomme shot 55 hours of footage interviewing random people on the streets of Paris. The questions, asked by the unseen Marker, range from their personal lives, as well as social and political issues of relevance at that time. As he had with montages of landscapes and indigenous art, Marker created a film essay that contrasted and juxtaposed a variety of lives with his signature commentary (spoken by Marker's friends, singer-actorYves Montand in the French version andSimone Signoret in the English version). The film has been compared to theCinéma vérité films ofJean Rouch, and criticized by its practitioners at the time.[1] The term "Cinéma vérité" was itself anathema to Marker, who never used it. Instead, he preferred his own term "ciné, ma vérité," meaning "cinéma, my truth."[12] It was shown in competition at the 1963Venice Film Festival, where it won the award for Best First Work. It also won the Golden Dove Award at the Leipzig DOK Festival.
After the documentaryLe Mystère Koumiko in 1965, Marker madeSi j'avais quatre dromadaires, an essay-film that, likeLa Jetée, is aphotomontage of over 800 photographs Marker had taken over the previous 10 years in 26 countries. The commentary involves a conversation between a fictitious photographer and two friends, who discuss the photos. The film's title is an allusion to a poem byGuillaume Apollinaire. It was the last film in which Marker included "travel footage" for many years.[1]
In 1967 Marker published his second volume of collected film essays,Commentaires II. That same year, Marker organized the omnibus filmLoin du Vietnam, a protest against theVietnam War with segments contributed by Marker,Jean-Luc Godard,Alain Resnais,Agnès Varda,Claude Lelouch,William Klein, Michele Ray andJoris Ivens. The film includes footage of the war, from both sides, as well as anti-war protests in New York and Paris and other anti-war activities.
From this initial collection of filmmakers with left-wing political agendas, Marker created the group S.L.O.N. (Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles, "Society for launching new works", but also the Russian word for "elephant").[13] SLON was a film collective whose objectives were to make films and to encourage industrial workers to create film collectives of their own. Its members included Valerie Mayoux, Jean-Claude Lerner, Alain Adair and John Tooker. Marker is usually credited as director or co-director of all of the films made by SLON.[1]
After the events ofMay 1968, Marker felt a moral obligation to abandon his own personal film career and devote himself to SLON and its activities. SLON's first film was about a strike at a Rhodiacéta factory in France,À bientôt, j'espère (Rhodiacéta) in 1968.[1] Later that year SLON madeLa Sixième face du pentagone, about an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C., and was a reaction to what SLON considered to be the unfair and censored reportage of such events on mainstream television. The film was shot byFrançois Reichenbach, who received co-director credit.La Bataille des dix millions was made in 1970 with Mayoux as co-director andSantiago Álvarez as cameraman and is about the 1970 sugar crop in Cuba and its disastrous effects on the country. In 1971, SLON madeLe Train en marche, a new prologue to Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin's 1935 filmSchastye, which had recently been re-released in France.[1]
In 1974, SLON became I.S.K.R.A. (Images, Sons, Kinescope, Réalisations, Audiovisuelles, but also the name ofVladimir Lenin's political newspaperIskra, which also is a Russian word for "spark").[1]
In 1974 Marker returned to his personal work and made a film outside of ISKRA.La Solitude du chanteur de fond is a one-hour documentary about Marker's friendYves Montand's benefit concert for Chilean refugees. The concert was Montand's first public performance in four years, and the documentary includes film clips from his long career as a singer and actor.[1]
Marker had been working on a film aboutChile with ISKRA since 1973. Marker had collaborated with Belgian sociologistArmand Mattelart and ISKRA members Valérie Mayoux and Jacqueline Meppiel to shoot and collect the visual materials, which Marker then edited together and provided the commentary for. The resulting film was the two and a half-hour documentaryLa Spirale, released in 1975. The film chronicles events in Chile, beginning with the1970 election of socialist PresidentSalvador Allende until hismurder andthe resulting coup in 1973.[1]
Marker then began work on one of his most ambitious films,A Grin Without a Cat, released in 1977. The film's title refers to theCheshire Cat fromAlice in Wonderland. The metaphor compares the promise of the global socialist movement beforeMay 1968 (the grin) with its actual presence in the world after May 1968 (the cat). The film's original French title isLe fond de l'air est rouge, which means "the air is essentially red", or "revolution is in the air", implying that the socialist movement was everywhere around the world.[14]
The film was intended to be an all-encompassing portrait of political movements since May 1968, a summation of the work which he had taken part in for ten years. The film is divided into two parts: the first half focuses on the hopes and idealism before May 1968, and the second half on the disillusion and disappointments since those events. Marker begins the film with theOdessa Steps sequence fromSergei Eisenstein's filmThe Battleship Potemkin, which Marker points out is a fictitious creation of Eisenstein which has still influenced the image of the historical event. Marker used very little commentary in this film, but the film's montage structure and preoccupation with memory make it a Marker film. Upon release, the film was criticized for not addressing many current issues of the New Left such as the woman's movement, sexual liberation and worker self-management.[1] The film was re-released in the US in 2002.[14]
In the late 1970s, Marker traveled extensively throughout the world, including an extended period in Japan. From this inspiration, he first published thephoto-essayLe Dépays in 1982, and then used the experience for his next filmSans Soleil, released in 1982.[1]
Sans Soleil stretches the limits of what could be called a documentary. It is an essay, amontage, mixing pieces of documentary with fiction and philosophical comments, creating an atmosphere ofdream and science fiction. The main themes are Japan, Africa,memory and travel. A sequence in the middle of the film takes place in San Francisco, and heavily referencesAlfred Hitchcock'sVertigo. Marker has said thatVertigo is the only film "capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory."[1] The film's commentary are credited to the fictitious cameraman Sandor Krasna, and read in the form of letters by an unnamed woman. Though centered around Japan, the film was also shot in such other countries asGuinea Bissau, Ireland andIceland.[1]Sans Soleil was shown at the1983 Berlin Film Festival where it won the OCIC Award. It was also awarded the Sutherland Trophy at the 1983British Film Institute Awards.
In 1984, Marker was invited by producerSerge Silberman to document the making ofAkira Kurosawa's filmRan. From this Marker madeA.K., released in 1985. The film focuses more on Kurosawa's remote but polite personality than on the making of the film.[15] The film was screened in theUn Certain Regard section at the1985 Cannes Film Festival,[16] beforeRan itself had been released.
In 1985, Marker's long-time friend and neighborSimone Signoret died of cancer. Marker then made the one-hour TV documentaryMémoires pour Simone as a tribute to her in 1986.[1]
Beginning withSans Soleil, Marker developed a deep interest indigital technology. From 1985 to 1988, he worked on a conversational program (a prototypical chatbot) called "Dialector," which he wrote inApplesoft BASIC on anApple II. He incorporated audiovisual elements in addition to the snippets of dialogue and poetry that "Computer" exchanged with the user. Version 6 of this program was revived from a floppy disk (with Marker's help and permission) and emulated online in 2015.[17][18]
His interests in digital technology also led to his filmLevel Five (1996) andImmemory (1998, 2008),[19] an interactive multimediaCD-ROM, produced for theCentre Pompidou (French language version) and fromExact Change (English version). Marker created a 19-minute multimedia piece in 2005 for theMuseum of Modern Art in New York City titledOwls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men which was influenced byT. S. Eliot'spoem.[20]
Marker lived in Paris, and very rarely granted interviews. One exception was a lengthy interview withLibération in 2003 in which he explained his approach to filmmaking.[21] When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offered a photograph of a cat instead. (Marker was represented in Agnes Varda's 2008 documentaryThe Beaches of Agnes by a cartoon drawing of a cat, speaking in a technologically altered voice.) Marker's own cat was namedGuillaume-en-égypte. In 2009, Marker commissioned anAvatar of Guillaume-en-Egypte to represent him inmachinima works. The avatar was created by Exosius Woolley and first appeared in the short film / machinima,Ouvroir the Movie by Chris Marker.
In the 2007Criterion Collection release ofLa Jetée andSans Soleil, Marker included a short essay, "Working on a Shoestring Budget". He confessed to shooting all ofSans Soleil with a silent film camera, and recording all the audio on a primitiveaudio cassette recorder. Marker also reminds the reader that only one short scene inLa Jetée is of a moving image, as Marker could only borrow a movie camera for one afternoon while working on the film.
From 2007 through 2011 Marker collaborated with the art dealer and publisher Peter Blum on a variety of projects that were exhibited at the Peter Blum galleries in New York City's Soho and Chelsea neighborhoods. Marker's works were also exhibited at the Peter Blum Gallery on 57th Street in 2014. These projects include several series of printed photographs titledPASSENGERS,Koreans,Crush Art,Quelle heure est-elle?, andStaring Back; a set of photogravures titledAfter Dürer; a book,PASSENGERS; and digital prints of movie posters, whose titles were often appropriated, includingBreathless,Hiroshima Mon Amour,Owl People, andRin Tin Tin. The video installationsSilent Movie andOwls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men were exhibited at Peter Blum in 2009.[22] These works were also exhibited at the 2014 & 2015 Venice Biennale, Whitechapel Gallery in London, the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, the Moscow Photobiennale, Les Recontres d'Arles de la Photographie in Arles, France, the Centre de la Photographie in Geneva, Switzerland, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota, the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California. Since 2014 the artworks of the Estate of Chris Marker are represented by Peter Blum Gallery, New York.[23][24]
Marker died on 29 July 2012, his 91st birthday.[25]
La Jetée was the inspiration forMamoru Oshii's 1987 debut live action featureThe Red Spectacles (and later for parts of Oshii's 2001 filmAvalon) and also inspiredTerry Gilliam's12 Monkeys,Christopher Nolan's "Memento", (1995) andJonás Cuarón'sYear of the Nail (2007) as well as many ofMira Nair's shots in her 2006 filmThe Namesake.[26]
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