Chris Marker 1921-2012

Experimental French director acclaimed for his
post-apocalyptic film La Jetée


Ronald Bergan
guardian.co.uk,
Monday 30 July 2012

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2012/jul/30/chris-marker

The essay film, a form pitched between documentary and
personal reflection, exploring the subjectivity of the
cinematic perspective, has now become an accepted genre.
Jean-Marie Straub, Daniele Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Errol
Morris and Michael Moore are among its main recent
exponents, but Chris Marker, who has died aged 91, was
credited with inventing the form.

Marker's creative use of sound, images and text in his
poetic, political and philosophical documentaries made him
one of the most inventive of film-makers. They looked
forward to what is called "the new documentary", but also
looked back to the literary essay in the tradition of
Michel de Montaigne. Marker's interests lay in
transitional societies - "life in the process of becoming
history," as he put it. How do various cultures perceive
and sustain themselves and each other in the increasingly
intermingled modern world?

He was born Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve, most
likely in Neuilly-sur-Seine, on the outskirts of Paris,
although one source gives the place of birth as Ulan
Bator, the capital of Mongolia - a legend that Marker did
nothing to dispel. His pseudonym is said to have been
taken from the Magic Marker pen.


Chris Marker, left, with Alain Resnais. The pair
collaborated on the propaganda film Far from Vietnam.
Photograph: Getty Images/Gamma-Keystone
Marker fought in the French Resistance and supposedly with
the American armed forces during the second world war. He
emerged from the Parisian Left Bank intellectual climate,
coming under the influence of two postwar figures, Andre
Malraux and Andre Bazin, working with the latter on the
theatre section of the magazine Travail et Culture, then
under the aegis of the French Communist party.

He wrote a novel, Le Coeur Net, published in 1950 and
translated the following year as The Forthright Spirit; a
book of criticism on the playwright and novelist Jean
Giraudoux; poems and short stories; and film reviews for
Cahiers du Cinema. But it was his lucid and committed
leftwing documentaries, all of which he wrote and many of
which he photographed, made from 1955 to 1966, that
established him as a major film-maker. It was during this
period that the poet Henri Michaux proclaimed: "The
Sorbonne should be razed and Chris Marker put up in its
place."

"I write to you from a far-off country," begins Marker's
Lettre de Siberie (Letter from Siberia, 1958), which uses
cartoons, texts and voiceover. In the film, Marker
questions the objectivity of documentaries by repeating
one sequence three times, each with a different
commentary. Depending on the commentary, Soviet workers
building a road were either "unhappy", "happy" or "noble".

The passionate and influential Cuba Si! (1961) contains
two interviews with Fidel Castro. It ends with the Bay of
Pigs fiasco, which took place in April 1961, during the
editing of the film, which had been shot a few months
previously. The anti-American tone of the ending caused
the French government to ban the film until 1963, but
Marker published the text and stills before then. However,
this could not amply communicate the expert use of sound,
image and text that makes his films so special.

Marker brought the same foreigner's eye view to bear on
his own city in Le Joli Mai (1963), which he compiled from
55 hours of interviews with the people of Paris (boiled
down to around two and a half hours) with a linking
commentary spoken by Yves Montand (replaced by Simone
Signoret in the English version). The interviews assume
the form of a dialectic during which Marker's tone is
often ironic and judgmental. For example, when one
interviewee says he wants material success, Marker remarks
that his view of life is "a trifle limited".

Marker's La Jetee (The Pier, 1962), a roughly 30-minute
post-third world war story, is made up entirely of stills,
except for one brief moving shot of a woman opening her
eyes. This futuristic photo-novel film, semi-remade by
Terry Gilliam as 12 Monkeys in 1995, abstracts cinema
almost to its essence in bringing to life the story of a
post-apocalyptic man obsessed with an image from his past.

Set against the backdrop of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, Le
Mystere Koumiko (The Koumiko Mystery, 1965) consists of a
series of conversations with an attractive,
French-speaking Tokyo resident named Koumiko Muraoka.
Through her, and modern Tokyo, Marker is able to comment
on the loss of identity in the face of globalism. Koumiko
considers her own features too Japanese, while the
director interprets the aesthetics of contemporary
Japanese fashion as a subconscious desire to neutralise
Asiatic features and erase the otherness that attracts
Marker himself to the culture (and to the heroine).

In 1966, Marker set up a company, Societe pour le
Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles, to produce new work. It
financed Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam, 1967), a
timely propaganda piece with contributions directed by
Godard, Agnes Varda, Alain Resnais, Joris Ivens and Marker
himself.

Le Train en Marche (The Train Rolls On, 1971) was a
documentary focusing on the director Alexander Ivanovich
Medvedkin, and his CineTrain of the 1930s, on which film
crews travelled through the Soviet Union making
documentaries. Using archive footage and photographs,
Marker illustrates how the CineTrain functioned as the
means by which films could include and educate the masses
in Russia at the start of the revolution. More than 20
years later, after the fall of Soviet communism, Marker
returned to Medvedkin in Le Tombeau d'Alexandre (The Last
Bolshevik, 1992). The film is a series of video letters to
Medvedkin (who died in 1989) and provides a broader,
incisive meditation on the nature of reality, fiction,
art, ideology and history.

Taking an even wider perspective was his 1977 film Le Fond
de l'Air est Rouge (a slogan from the May 1968 protests).
It was given the English title The Grin Without a Cat.
Divided into two 90-minute parts, it tells the story of
the New Left activist movement, from its birth as a
byproduct of the Vietnam war to the CIA's ousting of
Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, which sounded the death
knell for ideological hope. For Marker, truth is always a
matter of an individual's point of view: history does not
exist apart from through our personal experience and
interpretation of it.

"You never know what you're filming until later," remarks
one of the film's many narrators, summing up Marker's
distinctive way of working both within the moment and out
of it. In Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983), a fictional
cameraman (a Marker surrogate) tries to make sense of the
cultural dislocation he feels in Japan, West Africa and
Iceland. Using diverse images, letters, quotes and
musings, Marker continued to extend the limits of the
documentary, making use of new video technology and
image-processing by Hayao Yamaneko, credited with special
effects. The result is a film that Marker described as
like "a musical composition, with recurrent themes,
counterpoints and mirror-like fugues".

"I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather, I
remember the images I filmed of the month of January in
Tokyo," says the narrator. "They have substituted
themselves for my memory. They are my memory ... the act of
remembering is not the opposite of forgetting."

Apart from the Medvedkin documentaries, Marker made
further films on directors. AK (1985), profiling the
location shooting of Akira Kurosawa's Ran on the slopes of
Mount Fuji, included an interview with its 75-year-old
director. This reverential impression of the Japanese
master at work is revealing about Kurosawa's methods and
his relations with his crew. Marker also uses the subject
for his own brand of poetic-philosophical celluloid essay
on the Japanese and on the making of a film. For the
French TV programme Cineastes de Notre Temps, Marker paid
homage to Andrei Tarkovsky in Une Journee d'Andrei
Arsenevitch (One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich,
2000).

In the 1990s, Marker expanded into multimedia installation
work such as Zapping Zone for the Pompidou Centre. In the
film Level Five (1997), he made use of the new video
technology and paid homage to Resnais' films on memory and
the unconscious. Gradually, a woman called Laura (named
after the eponymous heroine of the Otto Preminger film)
attempts to reconstruct a true historical event through
information derived from a global virtual network known as
Optional World Link (or Owl, a wry reference to Marker's
production company Argos Films and its emblematic mascot).

That decade, Marker, always the innovator, made a CD-Rom
called Immemory, composed of stills, film clips, music,
text and fragments of sound. It is over 20 hours long and
can be viewed in many different ways.

Throughout his career, Marker, who was notoriously
secretive about his private life, was rarely interviewed
or photographed, often responding to requests for his
photograph with a picture of a cat - his favourite animal.

* Chris Marker (Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve),
film director, born 29 July 1921; died 30 July 2012

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