CHRIS MARKER a Stylistic Analysis of His Film and Media Work Lynne Broad

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CHRIS MARKER

A Stylistic Analysis of his Film and Media Work

Lynne Broad

Degree of Master of Arts by Research

School of English, Media and Performing Arts

University of New South Wales

December 2008

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ABSTRACT

This thesis explores the poetics of editing in the films and multimedia works of Chris

Marker. From his first essay films of the 1950s to his 1998 CD-ROM Immemory, the director’s work has attracted critical attention for its beauty and originality of expression.

Much existing analysis engages with this work in terms of its subject matter and themes and their relationship with its associational, rather than linear, narrative form, with relatively little focus on the stylistics of Marker’s editing. While questions of the director’s thematic concerns also arise in my study, I argue that Marker’s contribution to cinema and the visual arts cannot be fully appreciated without a systematic understanding of his stylistics—his expressive use of cinematic forms and patterns. In developing such an understanding, this thesis utilises the work of a number of film writers explicitly concerned with the expressive use of cinematic space and time. From André Bazin, I take the idea of rapprochement to mean the way the comparison between two juxtaposed events or images suggests or expresses the meaning of their juxtaposition. From Jean-André Fieschi, I draw on the idea that the dialectical interaction of the plastic, formal and narrative elements of a film gives meaning to its cinematic space and time. My approach synthesises and builds upon both ideas for its account of the stylistics of Marker’s work.

Starting with a preliminary analysis of one cinematic comparison in The Case of the

Grinning Cat (2004), I then consider Marker’s exploration of the imaginative potential of a single image sequence in The Last Bolshevik (1993). After this, I explore examples of the stylistic figure of rapprochement in Letter from Siberia (1958), and the stylistic figure of transformation in Sunless (1982). The thesis then studies articulations of rapprochement iv

and transformation in the museum installations Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary

Television (1991), Silent Movie (1995) and the CD-ROM Immemory.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In considering the importance of others to the completion of this work, I first want to thank my sister, Susan Cornwell, for initiating me into the intriguing world of documentary films. It was my involvement in this world that led to my fascination with film stylistics, particularly with regard to essay films.

I also thank my husband, Robert Broad, for sharing my life, cheerfully, while I wrote this thesis.

Finally, I thank my thesis supervisor, George Kouvaros, for his conscientious mentoring and advocacy of clear thought and expression, which helped me attain long- sought insights into film stylistics.

For my mother, Rosemary Le Breton

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

ABSTRACT ii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iv

INTRODUCTION Creating a World both Familiar and Strange 1

CHAPTER 1 Path to the Stylistics of an Imaginary Space-time 16

CHAPTER 2 Mapping the Imaginary Land in Space and Time 37

CHAPTER 3 Sunless as Sea change 64

CHAPTER 4 Locating the Past in the Present 93

FILMOGRAPHY 112

BIBLIOGRAPHY 114

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INTRODUCTION

Creating a World both Familiar and Strange

This thesis is about the poetics of editing in the film and media work of a remarkable

French filmmaker and visual artist known as Chris Marker. Born Christian-François

Bouche-Villeneuve in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1921, Marker has used several pseudonyms throughout his long career—including the most widely known, Chris Marker. For Ross

Gibson, ‘marker’ is the French infinitive form of an English verb ‘poised to become active’ which also connotes survey and cultural reference.1 The director is much-admired in the

English-speaking world for just two films made twenty years apart—the black-and-white science-fiction film La Jetée (1962) and the poetic essay film Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1982).

However, his extensive oeuvre spans several media: from print and radio in the 1940s through documentary film essays of ever-increasing complexity to museum installations and the CD-ROM Immemory (1998).2 The appeal of Marker’s work lies not only in the beauty of its images, its engaging alliance of poetry and humour, the importance of its topics, but also the sheer intelligence with which he creates his worlds ‘both absolutely

1 Ross Gibson, ‘What do I know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema,’ Filmviews, 134, Summer 1988, 28. Paper presented to forum on The Line between Documentary and Fiction, Australian Film Television and Radio School, 1987. 2 The titles of Marker’s work are given initially in the original French and subsequently in the English translation. The exceptions are those films released in English with their French titles and commonly referred to by same, such as La Jetée. 1

familiar and completely strange.’3 In speaking of this intelligence (both logical and imaginative) I mean not only the intelligence driving his selection of words and images but also the intelligence behind the unexpected and intriguing ways he joins both sounds and images with those following. In other words, the fascination of a Marker work lies in the ingenuity of his editing, whose secrets this thesis attempts to unravel.

Baghdad to Paris: Metaphor, or Comparison in Space and Time?

The ingenuity of Marker’s editing is clearly illustrated by his treatment of one sequence in his recent documentary Chats Perchés (The Case of the Grinning Cat, 2004). A preliminary analysis of this sequence is given here as the first step in developing an understanding of the poetics of Marker’s editing. The film follows the reactions of Parisians to French and international politics after the Al-Qaeda attack on New York’s twin towers. One strand of the film documents the filmmaker’s search for graffiti images of a grinning yellow cat. This graffiti first appeared on Parisian rooftops late in 2001 when many nations were united in sympathy with the Americans. The voice-over declares that there’s no one to blame for the fact that this unity didn’t last—‘certainly not the cats.’ The search for graffiti of the cheerful cats moves from the rooftops to the streets. The film frames the cats as helpful beings whose tasks include comforting those who are lost. When the cat image is washed off the wall outside the church at St-Germain-des-Près, the narrator likens this to the

Taliban’s destruction of the giant Buddhas at Bamian in Afghanistan. The search for cat images moves to the Metro. One scene shows people using a moving footway beneath a large advertisement featuring a young cat. Elsewhere, children play, buskers perform the

3 Chris Marker, Giraudoux by Himself (Giraudoux par lui-même), Paris, 1952, 43. Marker’s claim that Giraudoux believes the cinematic image creates a miraculous world ‘in which everything is both absolutely familiar and

largo from a Bach concerto to appreciative commuters and we meet a real cat named

Bolero.

These early Metro sequences show Parisian life at its most peaceful, in contrast to the scenes of strikes, election campaigns and political demonstrations taking place in the streets. But when the United States begins its invasion of Iraq, Marker’s treatment of the next Metro sequence brings the political developments above ground down into the peaceful heart of the city. This sequence is introduced about halfway through the film, through President Bush’s television announcement of the start of the Iraq war. This is followed by a shot looking up at people descending a stairway into a dark interior. The sound of trains nearby indicates that we are in the Metro—although the nature of the image suggests a bomb shelter. British Prime Minister Blair’s voice-over, and text on black, tells of missiles which can reach anywhere within 45 minutes. As a train pulls into a Metro station, we see a close-up of a chalked image of the twin towers and the phrase ‘I love NY’ on the platform.4 From this point, images from the Metro alternate with narration delivered by a combination of voice-over and text on black. The narrator states that although the U.N. inspectors found no trace of chemical or biological weapons a popular

French spokesperson contradicts this and adds that the people of Baghdad want to be protected by the Americans and Britons. The narrator asks: ‘Who said all Frenchmen are traitors?’ The final combined appearance of text and voice-over gives the date, 20 March, and announces the bombing of Baghdad. The sequence that is the subject of this discussion begins at this point.

From the start of the sequence until its end less than one minute later, all we see are images from the Metro. But these images are different to those in earlier sequences. Gone

completely strange’ is quoted by Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, Reaktion Books Ltd, London, 2005, 32. 4 In this phrase, the word ‘love’ is rendered by a drawing of a heart. 3

are all traces of children, cats and musicians. In their place are quick shots of people walking swiftly along a moving footway. The lighting is sombre and the images are intercut with short moments of black screen. Flash-pans add to a sense of urgency. In addition to these differences in the nature and form of the images, this sequence also differs in its treatment of sound. In the earlier sequences, the voice-over, children’s laughter and music intermingle with the other location sounds. In this sequence, the only sound is of nearby bombing—presumably of Baghdad. Deep booms are heard from bombs destroying buildings and infrastructure. There’s the whine of a shell passing overhead. The people in the images appear to respond to these sounds. Some glance up, as though listening to them. Two lovers stand close, holding each other tenderly. One man gazes fixedly behind.

In viewing this sequence, one’s first response is to wonder whether these Parisians would be safe if similar bombs were falling on Paris. Then one realises that Baghdad has no

Metro. Here, Marker has created a sequence that haunts the viewer long after the rest of the film has faded in the mind. But what interests this viewer most is the question of how

Marker’s editing has created this moment with its intellectual, emotional and poetic power from such disarmingly simple documentary material. What formal procedures are involved and, in particular, what poetic figure is in use here?

In responding to these questions, one might begin by borrowing from the field of literature, as film theory has often done, and propose that the Metro sequence works through the use of metaphor in the way its combination of the sound of the Baghdad bombardment with the vision of normal Parisian life poetically suggests a common vulnerability in the face of armed force. But this borrowing of a literary term poses a problem not only for the understanding of the poetics of the sequence but also for the development of a cinematic poetics generally. For a start, the term ‘metaphor’ has a specific meaning in literature—it defines the grammatical comparison which poetically

expresses a similarity between two things without the prosaic use of the word ‘like.’ So its use in film studies is based upon the idea of an analogy between poetic comparisons in literature and film.

This practice is problematic because it doesn’t acknowledge the material differences in expression of the two media. Literary ideas are expressed in abstract terms and received intellectually and imaginatively. By contrast, cinematic ideas are expressed concretely through the interaction of language with other elements in a constant flow of music, sound and image, which are perceived through the emotions and senses. Speaking of the specific qualities of the film form, André Bazin notes that the filmed image records both the space occupied by its subject as well as the duration of its existence.5 In effect, film is both a spatial and temporal medium. Therefore, its poetic figures are expressed through its use of the formal elements of space and time. (The term ‘space-time’ encapsulates this idea.)

So the problem with approaching the poetics of a film sequence through the use of a literary analogy is that it leaves unexamined the way the material or physical elements of the film’s form help shape its meaning. Moreover, because this borrowing from literary poetics appears to provide an answer to the poetics of a sequence, it actually obscures the need to address the precise cinematic elements responsible. This can be illustrated through an analysis of the formal elements of the Metro sequence.

Throughout, we see only images from the Metro and hear only the sound of the bombardment of Baghdad. This juxtaposition might give the impression that the sequence is simply a documentary record of events happening simultaneously except that both the plastic and formal elements of the Metro images suggest urgency and anxiety. (The plastic

5 Bazin speaks of the cinematic image as a record of the duration of the subject in ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’ in André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. I, transl. Hugh Gray, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1967, 15. In this volume, Bazin also speaks of the way the presence of the film subject is conveyed through the time-space of the cinematic image. ‘Theatre and Cinema—Part Two: The Concept of Presence,’ 96-97. 5

elements are the rapid pace, direction of gaze and general posture of the Metro commuters while the formal elements consist of the flash-pans and moments of black screen as well as the montage of quick shots of serious commuters.) Adding to the sense of unease created by these visual elements is the audio quality or presence of the sound which indicates the bombing is nearby. The combination of these sounds and images gives an emotional intensity to the scene, suggesting that the commuters fear they are the target.

Here, Marker’s juxtaposition of documentary material from two different places creates one ambiguous space and time, at once documentary and imaginary, which displaces onto the images of the Parisian commuters the sound of the bombing experienced by the people of Baghdad. On the one hand, the images show the Parisian commuters aren’t under attack. (In addition, the likely source of the sound has been clearly identified before the bombing begins.) But, on the other hand, the combination of the visual and sound elements suggests otherwise. This suggestion provokes the viewer to move from imagining how these commuters might fare under such an attack to considering how the people of Baghdad really did fare during this particular bombardment. So it’s this association and combination of cinematic elements that enables Marker to poetically express the idea that we are all vulnerable in the face of armed force. This cinematic comparison expresses its combination of similarity and difference specifically through its use of the spaces and times conveyed by its sounds and images. For this reason alone, the literary term of metaphor is unlikely to be as useful in analysing the poetics of this sequence as a term that defines or describes its specifically cinematic figure of speech. Accordingly, this thesis explores ways of thinking and talking about the film equivalent of literary figures such as metaphor. The nature of this investigation places the thesis within the field of film poetics that David Bordwell terms stylistics.

The Origins of Film Poetics

For Bordwell, poetics concerns the problem of how artworks are constructed to have certain effects and uses. In this respect, the artist’s craft, including both abstract principles and particular practices, is the main focus.6 Bordwell’s analysis draws from the Russian formalists, active between about 1915 to 1930. As the first theorists to deal with film poetics, the formalists conceived a ‘scientific’ poetics of film theory along the lines of their earlier poetics on linguistics and literature.7 In this earlier work, the Russian formalists looked for the specific properties inherent in a literary work, such as its structures and systems, that functioned independent of other cultural orders. Literariness ‘inhered in a text’s characteristic ways of deploying style and convention, and especially in its capacity to meditate on its own formal qualities.’8 The formalists prized two literary devices in particular. These were defined by Viktor Shklovsky as ostranenie (‘defamiliarisation’ or

‘making strange’) and zatrudnenie (‘making difficult’).9 Defamiliarisation explains the way art heightens perception and short-circuits automatised responses to aspects of life. (As one example, Shklovsky cites the way Tolstoy explains property rights from the point of view of a horse.) Making the subject difficult to understand also extends the reader’s involvement in the aesthetic process of perception. For the formalists, this is an end in itself. Shklovsky states: ‘In art, it is our experience of the process of construction that

6 For Bordwell, poiesis is a Greek term for the activity of creation or production aimed at an end. David Bordwell, Ozu and the poetics of cinema, British Film Institute, London, Princeton University Press, New Jersey, 1988, 51. 7 According to Robert Stam, the Russian formalist movement revolved around two groups, the Linguistic Circle of Moscow and OPOYAZ, the Society for the Study of Poetic Language. Robert Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Massachusetts/UK, 2000, 47-52. Vlada Petric states that OPOYAZ included some of the most significant formalist poets and theorists, such as Yuri Tynianov, Osip Brik, Boris Eikhenbaum, Victor Shklovsky and Vladimir Zhirmunsky. Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film: The Man with the Movie Camera, A Cinematic Analysis, Cambridge Uni. Press, 1987, 42. One collection of their essays was published under the title of Poetika Kino (Poetics of the Cinema), ed., Boris Eikhenbaum, Moscow, 1927. 8 Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, 48. 9 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique,’ 1917, translators, Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis, 1965, reprinted in Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, ed., David Lodge, London, Longmans, 1988, reprinted online at http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/Shklov.htm (accessed August 29, 2008). 7

counts, not the finished product.’10 The insularity in this approach was criticised at the time by Pavel Medvedev. While praising the formalists’ focus on the craft of the artwork,

Medvedev argued that they missed the social influence upon the work’s form and content.

For instance, the reason Tolstoy uses the horse’s point of view, according to Medvedev, is to find a more effective way of commenting on social conditions.11

Despite such criticism, various aspects of Russian formalism have been highly influential in film theory. Formalist theorists such as Roman Jakobson and Yuri Tynyanov approached film as a system of signs and conventions rather than the registration of natural phenomena. They sought to apply Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics to cinema in order to systematise ‘the apparently chaotic world of filmic phenomena.’12 Medvedev criticises the formalists for applying linguistics to literature in the first place. He contends language acquires poetic characteristics only in the concrete poetic construction. Even the most mundane expression can be seen as artistic in certain circumstances.13 Despite Medvedev’s criticism, the linguistic approach to film was later drawn upon by Christian Metz and others working with semiotic theory.

Formalism was later modified by Jakobson, Jan Mukarovsky and the Prague

Structuralists to take into account both aesthetic and communicative functions in the work.

It also considers social and historical aspects of film aesthetics, such as its norms and

10 Shklovsky, ‘Art as Technique,’ translator of this quote, Robert Scholes, http://social.chass.ncsu.edu/wyrick/debclass/Shklov.htm (accessed August 29, 2008). 11 Medvedev argues that the content of literature reflects and refracts emerging ideas of and about other ideological spheres (ethics, epistemology, political doctrines, religion, etc.) ‘That is, in its “content” literature reflects the whole of the ideological horizon of which it is itself a part.’ (17) Further, Medvedev contends that content and form are inseparable because content becomes form in the process of creating the constructive unity of the work. Mikhael M. Bakhtin and Pavel N. Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship: A Critical Introduction to Sociological Poetics, translator Albert J. Wehrle, Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore and London, 1978, 17, 60. [Cambridge-London: Harvard University Press, 1985] Medvedev is now acknowledged as the sole author of this work, formally ascribed to Bakhtin and Medvedev. See Yury P. Medvedev and Daria A. Medvedeva, ‘Pavel Medvedev,’ in Gallery of Russian Thinkers: selected by Dmitry Olshansky, transl. David Shepherd, http://www.isfp.co.uk/russian_thinkers/pavel_medvedev.html (accessed September 1, 2008). 12 Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, 49. 13 Medvedev, The Formal Method in Literary Scholarship, 84. 8

‘schemas.’14 Bordwell defines schemas in film as formularised devices that solve perennial editing problems. A schema invented for a particular film becomes a convention as other filmmakers adopt it. In this way, the poetics of filmmaking undergoes change over time.15

David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson drew on the ideas of the Prague structuralists as a basis for a historical poetics (loosely termed neoformalism).16 This poetics aims to explain the historical changes in the devices, techniques or schemas used by filmmakers to create films in their various styles. Bordwell sees Bazin’s ‘The Evolution of the Language of

Cinema’ as a model of stylistic history.17

For Bordwell, film stylistics deals with the specific ‘materials and patterning of the film medium as components of the constructive process.’18 Stylistics is one of three distinct domains within the field of traditional poetics. The other domains are thematics and constructional analysis. While thematics studies the work’s subject matter and themes, constructional analysis studies the work’s overall form by using terms and concepts (such as narrative form) that are common to other media. Each of these domains tends to overlap the others. While contemporary film stylistics considers the expressive potential of a film’s cinematic forms and patterns, thematics focuses on the film’s subject matter and themes as components or effects of its constructive process. Much existing analysis of

Marker’s poetics focuses on the relationship between each work’s thematics and overall form. Several writers with this focus argue that the director’s work articulates its themes through the use of digression and associational form rather than through a linear narrative.

Missing from this thematic approach is a detailed consideration of the formal basis of the stylistic figure or figures that enable this associational form to express meaning

14 Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, 53. 15 David Bordwell, On the History of Film Style, Harvard University Press, USA, 1999, 152. 16 David Bordwell, ‘Historical Poetics of Cinema’ from The Cinematic Text: Methods and Approaches, ed., R. Barton Palmer, NY: AMS Press, 1989, reprinted as David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema (accessed July 17, 2008).

cinematically. This thesis aims to establish the theoretical framework to supply such information.

Stylistic Analysis of Marker’s Poetics

As noted above, Bordwell sees film stylistics as dealing with the specific materials and patterning of the film medium as components of the constructive process. In his poetics, the term ‘materials’ includes film stock and the objects before the camera as well as the film’s themes, subjects, received forms and styles.19 In contrast, as my discussion of the stylistics of the Metro sequence indicates, my understanding of the term ‘materials’ focuses closely on the physicality of film. By analysing the way particular sequences in Marker’s essay films, installations, and CD-ROM speak poetically through their use of cinematic space and time, I hope to contribute to a stylistics of cinema informed, in the first instance, by the writings of Bazin.

Bazin argues that every structural aspect of filmic representation is always a result of the filmmaker’s search for a form with which to express their subjective intentionality. ‘To make present and give a meaning to, can only be, in an artist, one and the same action, since the presence is only justified in terms of the meaning he gives it.’20 As a phenomenologist, Bazin contends that filmmakers have a partial view of reality, informed by their subjective experiential intentionality (their understanding of their experience) and can never portray reality without sacrificing part of it. The style of realism, for instance, is never more than one aesthetic rendering of reality, combining elements of abstraction,

17 David Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, NY, London, 2008, 19. André Bazin ‘The Evolution of the Language of Cinema,’ What is Cinema? Vol. I, 23-40. 18 Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 18. 19 Bordwell, Poetics of Cinema, 23.

convention, and indexical or recorded reality.21 However, as noted earlier, film is always a temporal segment because it records both the space and time of its subject. Consequently, the filmmaker’s understanding of the subject is articulated around registering the duration of time and the filmmaker’s response to it.22

In discussions of his works, Marker states that he begins with the independence of the events or facts he encounters and films, followed by their selection and editing. This editing not only expresses the moment of the encounter but also extends this event or fact

‘beyond the immediate time’ he wanted to represent.23 This thesis explores the ways in which Marker uses visual and aural representations of space and time to express his subjective responses to the world. My study is primarily informed by Bazin’s stylistic analyses, including his review of the stylistics of Marker’s first important essay film Lettre de

Siberie (Letter from Siberia, 1958). Although this approach has been largely unexplored since

Bazin’s time, I contend that Marker’s contribution to cinema cannot be fully appreciated without a systematic analysis of the innovatory stylistic construction of his work. This thesis aims to assist in developing a comprehensive stylistics of the director’s work. In addition, I hope the ideas developed here will also contribute to a larger project on the stylistics of the essay film.

Chapter 1, ‘Path to the Poetics of an Imaginary Space-time,’ outlines the theoretical issues relating to the study of the origins and nature of Marker’s poetics. It begins with

Marker’s early search for a form of filmmaking whose poetics best expresses his creative intent, resulting in his 1950’s adoption of the essay form. For filmmaker and theorist Hans

20 Bazin, ‘On L’Espoir, or Style in Cinema,’ French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance: The Birth of a Critical Esthetic, transl. S. Hochman, Frederick Ungar Publishing Co Inc, USA, 1981, 150. 21 Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality: Cinematic Realism and the Italian School of the Liberation,’ What is Cinema? Vol. II, transl. Hugh Gray, University of California Press, 1971, 27. 22 George Kouvaros, Seminar in Crossings: Rethinking Film and Performance, THF14000, March 15, 2004. 23 This is the director’s explanation of his working method for Le Joli mai (1962). Wolfgang Gersch, ‘An interview with Chris Marker (1964),’ reprinted in Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker, University of Illinois Press, Urbana and Chicago, 2006, 132. 11

Richter, the essay film is a subgenre located between the documentary and artistic or experimental film. Where the documentary aims to present facts about its subject, the essay film aims to express the idea of the subject under discussion. This aim liberates the essay film from the need to represent external appearances and chronological time or to represent some kind of truth. Thus freed, the essay film is able to use any and every formal means to help visualise its ideas.

Chapter 1 considers the range of existing theoretical approaches to the poetics of

Marker’s essay films. Contemporary film writers respond to the allusive complexity of

Marker’s later film essays by focusing on each work’s themes and overall form. For instance, several writers argue that Sunless employs an associational form of cinematic presentation that approximates the associative faculties of memory—the film’s major theme. But this approach doesn’t provide a detailed explanation of how this approximation of memory is achieved cinematically or whether each example of this approximation is articulated by the same or different methods or stylistics.

In contrast, Bazin’s review of Letter from Siberia closely examines one sequence in particular—the celebrated roadworker sequence. By analysing the innovative interaction of sound and image within it, Bazin demonstrates its stylistic expression of diverging ideologies on the Soviet Union. This thesis adopts Bazin’s close focus on Marker’s stylistic means of expression in its attempt to understand the stylistic figures in his essay films.

Chapter 1 also considers the origins of Marker’s stylistics in ideas held by avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s, whose films had a crucial impact on Marker’s early experiences as a cinema-goer. These avant-garde filmmakers’ understanding of the expressive potential in the film image influenced their formal use of the medium. For instance, French

Impressionist filmmakers such as Jean Epstein discuss the way the photogénie or photogenic qualities in the indexical image draws the viewer’s attention to the image for its intrinsic

qualities and away from its role in the unfolding of the narrative.24 These filmmakers praised photogenie for assisting in countering the classical aesthetic of coherence and unity in the artistic work and contributing to a modernist film aesthetic with its emphasis on discontinuity. I compare the idea of photogenie with Marker’s memory of the exhilaration he felt when first viewing the close-up of Simone Genevois in La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc (The Marvellous Life of Joan of Arc, 1928).

Jean-André Fieschi contends that F.W. Murnau’s horror film, Nosferatu (1922) is the first film to use the formal and plastic qualities of its images to create a narrative undercurrent of the imagination. I present Jean-André Fieschi’s analysis of one edit in this film, which shows how the montage subverts the convention of the shot/reverse shot to create an imaginary space or connection between two characters in different locations. In this manner, Murnau creates a stylistic figure constructed around what Fieschi terms the

‘narrative space-time of the imagination.’25 Murnau’s innovatory use of the image enabled filmmakers such as the Surrealists and the Soviets to use the editing structure of parallel action to create imaginary spaces and set up ‘networks of the wish, not of the “real”… woven between the characters.’ To Fieschi’s list of filmmakers that have taken up and built upon Murnau’s innovation, I add Marker.

Chapter 2, ‘Mapping the Imaginary Land in Space and Time,’ discusses the manner in which Letter from Siberia speaks poetically through its creative use of space and time.

Discussing the formal means whereby Marker ‘writes’ his essay, Bazin singles out the ways in which the director’s innovative use of montage differs from the montage in the traditional documentary. According to Bazin, the role of the voice-over or commentary in traditional documentary is to supplement the information conveyed by the images in order

24 From this point, the French term photogénie is anglicised in the text as ‘photogenie.’ 25 Jean-André Fieschi, ‘F.W. Murnau,’ Cinema: a critical dictionary, ed. Richard Roud, Vol 2, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., London, 1980, 710. 13

to complete the argument. By contrast, the montage style in Marker’s essay film creates a dialectic between word and image that completely alters their relationship to one another.

Chapter 2 also incorporates the stylistic figure of rapprochement first proposed in Bazin’s earlier review of André Malraux’s avant-garde narrative film, L’Espoir (1945). Bazin defines rapprochement as a cinematic comparison expressing a combination of similarity and/or difference through its use of space and time.26 I argue that the figure of rapprochement is

Marker’s key stylistic figure. In addition, the chapter draws upon Fieschi’s ideas about the way Murnau creates networks of the imagination within Nosferatu through the dialectical interaction of its plastic, formal and narrative elements. The synthesis of ideas from Bazin and Fieschi enables the chapter to establish the means by which Marker creates his stylistic figures.

Contemporary film writers generally agree Sunless employs an associational form of cinematic presentation that approximates the associative faculties of memory. Chapter 3,

‘Sunless as Sea change,’ establishes the formal basis of the stylistic figure involved in this approximation of memory. The figure of transformation is suggested by the film itself when the voice-over states: ‘We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.’ For some writers, the clearest example of this figure is provided by Hayao

Yamaneko’s ‘Zone’ in which images are transformed by solarisation. Chapter 3 considers how this process of transformation operating within the image can be read as an engagement with the image’s photogenic qualities. Read accordingly, the figure of transformation is allied with the activity of rapprochement.

Chapter 4, ‘Navigating Space-times Past and Present,’ considers the stylistics of three of Marker’s multimedia works. These are the museum installations Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television (1991) and Silent Movie (1995), as well as the CD-ROM Immemory

26 André Bazin, ‘On L’Espoir, or Style in Cinema,’ 149. 14

(1998). In Zapping Zone, Marker’s construction of ephemeral random rapprochements between his film and video works gives a retrospective view of the director’s past concerns.

However, this electronic prototype of memory lacks the guiding voice-over of his films. In

Silent Movie, photogenic images from early films, freed from their original context, are brought together in a manner that mimics the associative faculties of the mind, while also producing a sense of disorientation that echoes the feeling of disorientation the director remembers from his childhood encounter with the close-up of Simone Genevois in La

Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc. In Chapter 4 I discuss the way Immemory’s digital treatment of Genevois’ image transforms the momentary film presence of her gesture into an onscreen digital presence of undefined duration, free of the time constraints of projected film. In the process, the CD-ROM reconfigures the early 1920s’ idea of photogenie for the modern era. This new treatment of space and time enables the Genevois sequence to extend Marker’s recounting of his memory into an homage for early film and its influence on his own life of filmmaking. Finally, the chapter considers the effect of Immemory’s digital basis on the representations of space and time within each of its memories and asks whether these representations further develop the stylistic figures of rapprochement and transformation so crucial to the director’s essay films.

As Marker’s contribution to the world of the essay film is so extensive, this thesis concentrates on those works most relevant for this study of the director’s stylistics. Even in this area, this study cannot claim to be a comprehensive analysis. My aim is to assist in the development of a stylistics of Marker’s work—a subject relatively unexplored since its beginnings in Bazin’s review of Letter from Siberia. I hope that this thesis will contribute to a larger project on the stylistics of essay film in the light of the ideas developed here.

CHAPTER 1

Path to the Stylistics of an Imaginary Space-time

Only the amateur film achieves—paradoxically, thanks to the poverty of its means—a liberty of expression that the heavy machinery of commercial filmmaking does not allow. André Bazin

Marker’s Early Search for Form

Beginning as a visually-informed writer in Paris in the late 1940s, Marker’s work has embraced, in turn, photography, film, video, gallery installation, television, and digital multimedia. But this cross-media movement has been more a process of accumulation and consolidation rather than a serial progression from one medium to another, partly because it has enabled him to continually address and recontextualise images, themes and forms of abiding concern to him.

Marker’s love of images has never been in doubt. Richard Roud refers to Marker’s

‘life-long fascination with the image, in whatever form it appears.’27 Several of his works discuss the role played in their creation by inspirational images from his childhood. This fascination is also evident in the way Marker intermixes images from different media where it’s technically possible to do so. One example of his eclectic style in the print medium is

27 At the time, Roud was writing about the ‘calligraphy’ of Marker’s films, which contained, apart from filmed images: ‘music, animation, poetry, colour: every technique, every effect conjugated,’ resulting in a kind of ‘one-man total cinema.’ Richard Roud, ‘Chris Marker’ in Cinema: A Critical Dictionary, vol. 2, Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd., London, 1980, 668. 16

the Petite Planète series of guides to different countries which he edited and illustrated from 1954 to ’58. These guides combine images from a multitude of sources such as etchings, photographs, advertising, cartoons and postage stamps. In addition, the material is presented with film-editing principles in mind. The layouts employ cinematic principles of montage, with image sequences implying movement and progressive accumulation of meaning.28 In the medium of film itself, Marker combines and discusses images from many different sources and degrees of seriousness. These include Sergei Eisenstein’s landmark black-and-white film Battleship Potemkin (1925), late-night Japanese television programs and children’s animation. Regarding the latter, Raymond Bellour argues that ever since Letter from Siberia, where cartoon sequences are woven amongst otherwise photographically-realistic location footage, Marker has done more than most other filmmakers to dissolve the gap between the recorded image and the drawn or constructed one.29

Marker’s manner of address typically combines serious political purpose with playfulness and fantasy. Catherine Lupton cites Marker’s 1952 essay on the French novelist and playwright Jean Giraudoux to argue that Marker’s approach owes much to

Giraudoux’s ideas: for instance, that absolute seriousness is the basis from which to use humour and joy, and that one’s imagination is an important part of reality.30 She contends that the seriousness with which both Marker and Giraudoux approach their subject is expressed in their love of lists ‘of the most banal and overlooked aspects of the world’ whose ‘seemingly haphazard drift reveals patterns of deeper harmony and significance.’31

28 Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 45. 29 Raymond Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth,’ in Qu’est-ce qu’une Madeleine? A propos du CD-ROM Immemory de Chris Marker, ed. Y. Gevaert, Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997, 137. 30 Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 31. 31 Ibid., 30. 17

Marker’s work is also noted for its critical stance on important historical, social and political themes. This aspect of his work appears to have developed as a result of his extensive world travels (begun when he was a child), his participation in World War II, and his writing days with André Bazin as mentor. Lupton argues that Marker’s iconoclastic views were influenced by his involvement in the 1940s with the leftist Catholic review

Esprit, particularly in its Journal à plusieurs voix (Journal of Many Voices). Providing a voice to Roman Catholics dissociating themselves from the Church’s wartime collaboration with

Vichy, Esprit was edited by Emmanuel Mounier, the main intellectual force behind personalism.32 Mounier’s editorial policy of eclecticism, inclusiveness and open debate appears to have suited Marker’s temperament and interests. His contributions to the magazine, though brief, range ‘from religious questions to cinema, chanson to Cold War ideology, cat shows to literary scandals,’ with current affairs often transposed into fantasy.33

Michael Chaiken and Sam DiIorio, discussing Marker’s short pieces called ‘Newsreels’ which satirised current events, note that his comic approach to topical issues predates Letter from Siberia and reveals his ‘fascination with the historicity of the often absurd minutiae’ of daily life.34

At the same time as his involvement with Esprit, Marker worked for Travail et

Culture (Work and Culture) and Peuple et Culture (People and Culture), two government- supported leftist cultural organisations attempting to ‘bring culture to the people and the people to culture.’ Both groups worked together to revitalise and democratise French culture in the aftermath of the war. Nora Alter states that along with Alain Resnais, theorist Alexandre Astruc and actor Roger Blin, Marker and Bazin formed the core of

32 Personalism was a philosophical and social movement begun in the 1930s which attempted to reconcile Catholicism with left-wing political ideals. Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 16. 33 Ibid., 18. 34 Michael Chaikin and Sam DiIorio, ‘Printed matter – the author behind the auteur: pre-Marker Marker,’ in Film Comment, May/June, 2003, 42. 18

Travail et Culture. With its divisions of theatre, music, literature and film, Travail et

Culture subsidised and supported projects by left-wing artists, writers and filmmakers.35

Bazin’s cinema office in Travail et Culture became the magnet for the cinephile community of Paris.36 While assisting Bazin in running the film section, Marker also edited texts for

Peuple et Culture, including some early issues of the cultural review, DOC.37 In these issues, Marker combines letters, reports, factory regulations, songs, poems, street cries, logical sections; his editorial practice arranges texts like cinematic montage, with a theme or idea introduced in one text carried through other extracts. The style of the issues is significant, partly because it gives voice to ways of speaking otherwise not thought of as cultural. It’s also a precursor of the eclectic style of Marker’s filmwork, his ‘collage-based aesthetic,’ with its constant interplay of levels and types of articulation furthering his questioning of its images.38

Marker began working in film at a time when a fortuitous combination of circumstances enabled new filmmakers to get a start in the industry. During World War II, the Vichy government required cinemas to screen short films with each feature instead of the previously accepted two-feature screening. Lupton states that although the aim may have been to produce shorts promoting Vichy objectives it actually led to an appreciation of short filmmaking as an aesthetic form in its own right.39 When the post-war French government attempted to abolish the screening rule in 1953, it provoked a strong response from short filmmakers who were virtually locked out of the feature film industry. The

Declaration of the Groupe des Trente (Group of Thirty) argued for a continuation of the

35 Alter, Chris Marker, 6. 36 Jean Douchet, French New Wave, Distributed Art Publishers, Inc., in association with Editions Hazan/Cinematheque Francaise, 1998, 50. 37 Marker resigned after censorship by the communist PCF, which vetted the magazine’s editorial line. Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 26. 38 Chaikin and DiIorio, ‘Printed matter—the author behind the auteur,’ 42. 39 Some notable postwar documentary makers included Georges Rouquier, with Farrebique (1947) Alain Resnais, Van Gogh (1948) and Georges Franju, Le Sang des Bêtes (1949). 19

system that had fostered the particular ‘style, quality and ambitious subject matter’ of

French films under 30 minutes.40 The group’s manifesto equates the short film with the poem, short story or essay in literature and asserts that, in the same way as formal experiment in short literary works revitalises the longer form of the novel, so formal experiment in the short film revitalises the longer form of the feature film. Thus, if the short film were to die, so would the feature film ‘since an art that ceases to change is a dead art.’41 This claim echoed that of the writers in journals such as Cahiers du Cinéma, who saw the French film industry as stagnant. Many of these writers were young, aspiring filmmakers then locked out of the feature film industry by its rigid hierarchy and restrictive hiring practices. The government response to the ensuing outcry was to retain the requirement for screening short films, thereby ensuring a ready demand.

In addition, a combination of government grants, commissions from cultural bodies and corporations, as well as investment by sympathetic producers, enabled Marker and others to establish themselves as filmmakers outside the feature film industry.42 Along with his Left Bank colleagues, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda, Marker sought to discuss political and social problems within innovative film forms.43 In 1953, Marker and Resnais collaborated on Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die). The film was banned until 1965 for its stance against French imperialism.44 Two other films solely directed by Marker include Sunday in Peking (1956) and Letter from Siberia. While provocative in their idealistic

40 Lupton asserts that the Group of Thirty was referring to a tradition of idiosyncratic, Surrealist-inspired, poetic, and frequently critical, avant-garde short films dating from the 1920s and ’30s and maintained by the postwar filmmaker-signatories of the declaration. Dating from Jean Vigo’s A propos de Nice (1930) which he declared to be ‘a documented point of view,’ this French tradition valued short films and documentaries that expressed the filmmaker’s attitude, sensibility and personal style. Lupton compares this French tradition with the British tradition led by John Grierson, in which the filmmaker’s individuality of expression was subordinated to the requirements of the commissioning body—usually one supported by the Government. Lupton, 48. For more extensive discussion of the British tradition see Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: the Griersonian documentary and its legitimations, British Film Institute, London, 1995. 41 Alter, Chris Marker, 14. 42 Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 47. 43 Alter, Chris Marker, 14.

championing of the people in these Communist regimes during the Cold War, the films avoid serious discussion of the regimes’ totalitarian politics.45 This may be one reason that some of Marker’s acknowledged filmographies begin in 1962, when Marker made La Jetée back-to-back with Le Joli mai (The Merry Month of May), although Marker states that his earlier films were rudimentary in comparison.46

Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961) appeared just before Le Joli mai. Several critics identify a competition or, at least, dialogue between the two films on the level of both method and topics. Taking advantage of relatively lightweight handheld cameras and sound recorders, both films rely heavily on sync-sound interviews with Parisians that range across the effect of politics, capitalism and consumerism upon people’s happiness, the class struggle, racism, colonialism and the

Algerian war. Both films are regarded as important forerunners of the documentary genre of cinéma vérité.47

But these points of similarity exist alongside important differences between the two films. Where Chronique d’un été brings together a small group of people previously unknown to each other and films their subsequent interaction over the summer, Le Joli mai documents the opinions of a wide cross-section of Parisians interviewed within their own milieu during May, 1962. In Chronique d’un été, the camera’s presence serves as a catalyst, provoking the film’s subjects into revealing aspects of themselves that would otherwise have been inaccessible. At the end, the directors discuss the effect of their presence and the filmmaking process on the behaviour of their subjects. Le Joli mai aims for something

44 Most of France’s African colonies gained their independence in 1960. Algeria’s independence came in 1962, after eight years of armed struggle. Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 36. 45 Of this omission, Raymond Bellour comments: ‘One dreams of a China becoming the Sunday of the Earth, of a Siberia without the gulag, of Israel becoming a country of righting an injustice, of a Cuba of an always exemplary revolution, of an interminable merry month of May’ (my translation). Raymond Bellour, ‘Eulogy in B Minor’ transl. Joan Oliver, in Passages de l’image, Barcelona: Fundació Caixa de Pensions, 1991, 190-194. 46 C. Darke, ‘Eyesight: Chris Darke unearths Marker’s “Lost Works,”’ Film Comment, May/Jun 2003, 48. 47 Alter, Chris Marker, 77. 21

else entirely, something much closer to the type of discursive movement around a topic that is seen as characteristic of the essay film. This can be seen in the way Marker intersperses the interviews with location footage over which the voice-over gives the film a historical and cultural context. After the dedication ‘to the happy many,’ the narration ranges from the poetry and humour in Giraudoux’s ‘Prayer on the Eiffel Tower’ to the sober final challenge to consider the limits to happiness in an unequal society.

Whereas Rouch and Morin are content to allow the participant’s responses to generate the flow of the reflective argument, Marker guides the viewer’s responses through the context in which each sequence is placed. One example is the juxtaposition of close- ups of caged cats, yawning and alienated, within a philosophical discussion by three very earnest speakers. Another is the way the interview between two happily insular young lovers is followed by scenes from a drunken wedding party. Overall, the differences between Chronique d’un Été and Le Joli mai indicate that, like each of Marker’s earlier films,

Le Joli mai is better understood as an essay film, a genre exciting much interest among both filmmakers and film theorists at the time.

Essay Film, ‘Written by a Poet’

Nora Alter nominates the German avant-garde filmmaker Hans Richter as the first to classify the essay film as a subgenre located between documentary and experimental or artistic filmmaking, combining elements of both documentary and fiction. For Richter, the documentary film differs from the essay film in that the task of the documentary is to present facts and information about its subject, while the task of the essay film is to render

‘the idea of the thing.’ (Richter points to his own short film, Inflation (1928) as an

experiment in this direction.)48 To fulfil its task of representing abstract thought, the essay film must make perceptible the invisible world of imagination, thought, problems and ideas, to ‘render visible what is not visible.’49 The essay film isn’t bound by the conventional requirements of traditional documentary practice to represent external appearances and to present time chronologically. Nor is it bound by the documentary’s claim to represent the truth. Like the literary essay, the film essay gives free reign to the imagination, with all its artistic potential. And like its literary counterpart, its unfettered rhetorical style may encompass an unlikely combination of modes of discussion—in turn

‘transgressive, digressive, playful, contradictory, and even political.’50 Formally, the essay film may use any and every means to help visualise its ideas. For instance, it may incorporate elements from other cinematic genres such as animation and fiction film. In this, the essay film has available an incomparably larger reservoir of expressive means than the documentary film. Following Richter, Marker’s colleague Alexandre Astruc argues that this cinematic form of writing, in which the writer is also the director, could feasibly tackle any subject or genre, including ‘philosophy, psychology, metaphysics, ideas and passions.’

Further, Astruc nominates 16mm film as the contemporary medium of choice for philosophical discussion.51

Ross Gibson ascribes Marker’s facility with the essay form to his inheritance of the

French philosophical tradition associated with the works of Michel de Montaigne. Writing at a time of widespread uncertainty about many basic tenets that had previously been thought settled, Montaigne’s response to this state of uncertainty was to embrace the adventure of both being in, and writing from, a position of doubt. Further, Montaigne’s

48 Hans Richter, ‘The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary Film.’ Excerpt in Readings: The Film Essay, http://ww.unc.edu/courses/2007spring/germ/060/001readings.html (accessed July 22, 2008). Inflation can be viewed on YouTube. 49 Richter quoted by Alter, Chris Marker, 17. 50 Alter, Chris Marker, 18. 23

examination of doubt was grounded in the phenomenological belief that the world can only be known subjectively. His essays take the writer’s attitude to the topic into consideration to the extent that this attitude may even become the subject itself.52 Gibson contends that, in addition to speaking subjectively, Marker’s film essays proceed through association rather than through a linear argument. In this, their style equates metaphorically with the director’s longstanding wanderings across the planet. Gibson argues that Marker’s motto can be found in Letter from Siberia when the voice-over states: ‘a hiker walking in a straight line is always certain to get lost in the forest.’53 So the viewer of a Marker film encounters a rambling intellectual journey through its heterogeneous ideas and images as the director articulates the questions and problems arising from his encounters and experiences in the world.

Gibson’s focus on the affinity between Marker’s essay films and the French philosophical tradition of literary essay writing highlights the way both forms of essay proceed through association rather than linear argument. While other contemporary writers also note Marker’s use of associational form, they engage with the director’s work primarily in terms of its subject matter and themes as components or effects of the constructive process. Inspired by the complexity of Marker’s later works—their intricate construction and themes, the poetry, beauty, pathos and humour of their reflexive, allusive narration—these writers undertake a philosophical discussion of the works’ themes of time, place, memory, history and representation. Although their discussion includes the subject of film form, the emphasis of their poetics lies within the domain of thematics rather than the domain of stylistics. For instance, on the poetics of Sunless, Jon Kear states that Marker’s concern is to find a form of presentation that ‘approximates the associative

51 Alexandre Astruc, ‘The birth of a new avant-garde: la caméra stylo’ transl. from Ecran Français, 144, 30 Mar 1948, in The New Wave, ed. Peter Graham, Secker & Warburg, London, 1968, 17,18. 52 Ross Gibson, ‘What do I know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema,’ 27. 24

faculties of memory.’54 Similarly, Daniel Potter speaks of its montage as serving the

‘multiple return of memories to the surface-screen of the mind.’55 Catherine Lupton states that Sunless ‘manages to synthesise and transcend its component obsessions into a virtuoso meditation on time, place, memory, history and representation.’56 While clearly important to an understanding of the way time, place and memory operate in Marker’s films, these discussions bypass a detailed consideration of the formal basis and stylistic figures through which this approximation of memory is achieved.

The first step towards an understanding of Marker’s stylistics was taken by André

Bazin in his 1958 review of Letter from Siberia. Bazin defines the film as ‘an essay documented by film… an essay that is both historical and political, though written by a poet.’57 Discussing the formal means whereby Marker ‘writes’ his essay, Bazin singles out the ways in which the director’s innovative use of montage differs from the montage in the traditional documentary. According to Bazin, the role of the voice-over or commentary in traditional documentary is to supplement the information conveyed by the images in order to complete the argument. By contrast, the montage style in Marker’s essay film creates a dialectic between word and image that completely alters their relationship to one another.

This dialectic, which Bazin terms Marker’s ‘horizontal montage,’ subordinates the relationship between images to the relationship between image and narrative, here conveyed by the voice-over. So, Bazin proposes, the principal material in this essay film is its intelligence or ideas, conveyed primarily through language, with the images referring

53 Gibson, ‘What do I know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema,’ 28. 54 Jon Kear, Sunless/Sans Soleil, 15. 55 Daniel Potter, ‘Wounded time: Viewing notes on Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil.’ This review is part of Potter’s intricate spiderweb-like net site, silverthreaded presents Chris Marker, http://www.silcom.com/~dlp/Passagen/sansoleil.html (accessed April 16, 2004, 5). 56 Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 152. 57 André Bazin, ‘Lettre de Siberie: Chris Marker, A documentary essay,’ Les Nouvelles Littéraires, October, 1958, partial English translation in Douchet, French New Wave, 111. 25

laterally in some way to what is said. Thus, the ‘intelligence flows from the audio element to the visual.’58

For Bazin, as noted earlier, every structural aspect of filmic representation is always a result of the filmmaker’s search for a form with which to express their subjective intentionality. ‘To make present and give a meaning to, can only be, in an artist, one and the same action, since the presence is only justified in terms of the meaning he gives it.’59

Thus, Bazin’s study of Letter from Siberia involves the consideration of both its ideas and their formal realisation. In its focus on the specific materials and patterning of the film medium as components of Letter from Siberia’s construction, Bazin’s approach falls within the domain of film stylistics defined by Bordwell.

Up to this point, my focus on the director’s intellectual base in the essay film has bypassed the subject of Marker’s formal realisation of his ideas. Particularly relevant for a close study of his works is an understanding of the director’s use of the imaginative potential of the film image—either as an individual image or as part of the film’s montage.

The inspiration for this aspect of Marker’s stylistics lies in ideas that were first put into practice by avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s. The following section considers the influence upon the director of the films of his childhood.

Making Ideas Visible: The Potential in the Indexical Image

The first theorists to consider the imaginative or expressive potential in the indexical film image were the avant-garde filmmakers of the 1920s who made the silent films of Marker’s

58 André Bazin, ‘Lettre de Sibérie: Chris Marker, A documentary essay,’ full English translation, Dave Kehr, ‘Bazin on Marker,’ Film Comment, July/Aug 2003, 44-45. (Film Comment claims Bazin’s review was first published in France Observateur, October 30, 1958.) 59 Bazin, ‘On L’Espoir, or Style in Cinema,’ 150. 26

childhood. Their understanding of this potential influenced their formal use of the medium. Apart from presenting images in fast, slow or reverse motion, 1920s’ film stylistics includes the use of looping, freeze frames, split-screens and double exposures.

One celebrated image from Dziga Vertov’s virtuosic The Man with the Movie Camera (1929) superimposes the camera lens over a close-up of the cameraman’s eye (in which the cameraman is reflected). This double exposure enables Vertov to suggest that his ‘film-eye’ method provides an exciting new way of seeing and representing reality.60

Marker refers to his shadowy memories of black-and-white images from the silent era as emanating from an early state of perception, ‘a state of perception anterior to understanding, anterior to conscience, anterior by millenniums to film critics and analysis.

A kind of Ur-Kino, the cinema of origins, closer to Aphrodite than to Garbo.’61 This suggests that, for Marker, cinematic images have a magical appeal existing outside of, or anterior to, logical analysis. Lupton argues that Marker ascribes to Jean Giraudoux his own belief in the value and power of the cinematic image to create a world both familiar and strange. When combined with the imagination, this ‘miraculous disorientation’ promises a world ‘shaped according to human capacities and desires,’ in effect, ‘the only kind of utopia worth having.’62 Marker himself discusses the exhilaration he felt as a seven-year-old boy upon seeing, on a 44 x 33-ft screen, one image in particular: a close-up of Simone Genevois from de Gastyne’s La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc. This exhilaration he understood only later as ‘the true symptoms of Romance.’63

60 See Petric, Constructivism in Film, 128. 61 Chris Marker, ‘The Rest is Silent’ in Chris Marker, Silent Movie, Wexner Centre for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1995, 17. 62 Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 32. 63 Marker, ‘The Rest is Silent,’ 16. 27

Figure 1. Blurred image of Genevois as Jeanne d’Arc, which becomes part of her composite image in Immemory.

If the French Impressionist filmmakers of the 1920s had known the term ‘miraculous disorientation,’ they would have attributed it, in part, to the effects of photogenie. Richard

Abel contends that for Louis Delluc, the first to use the term, the concept of photogenie assumes film representation is based on something real that is transformed by the camera or screen in such a way that although it retains its reality it also becomes something entirely new in the process.64 (Or in the words of the Russian Formalists, the filming process

‘defamiliarises the familiar.’65) Jean Epstein predates Marker’s youthful sensibility by his assertion that photogenie describes ‘the almost godlike importance assumed in close-ups by parts of the human body’ or even inanimate objects isolated from their context, which thereby become something other than a simple representation of themselves because they are ‘elevated to the status of characters in the drama.’66

For Epstein, photogenie is also involved when the images move in space-time: ‘the photogenic aspect of an object is a consequence of its variations in space-time.’ One example is the image held on screen beyond the length of time enabling its immediate

64 Richard Abel, ‘Photogénie and Company,’ in French Film Theory and Criticism, Vol. 1, 1907-1929, ed., Richard Abel, Princeton, New Jersey, Princeton University Press, 1988, 110. 65 Stam, Film Theory: An Introduction, 48. 28

documentary meaning to be read. Here the extended duration of the image begins to suggest something more. This suggestion, although not made explicit, is readily understood by viewers. For example, Viktor Shklovsky criticises Vertov’s One Sixth of the

World (1926) for one such image: ‘The man who departs on broad skis into the snow- covered distance is no longer a man but a symbol of the departing past. The object has lost its substance and become transparent, like a work by the Symbolists.’67 Here, the formal aspect of the image—its duration in space and time—can be read as a series of textual meanings: first, a man departing, and second, the departure of a previous order or way of life.

Abel contends that the French Impressionist filmmakers valued photogenie for the way it disrupted the smooth unfolding of the narrative by drawing attention to specific elements in it, thereby ‘privileging the play of discontinuity’ and countering the ‘classical aesthetic of coherence and unity in an artistic work.’68 For the French Impressionist filmmakers, the formal means of photogenie and discontinuous narrative contained the potential for a modernist film aesthetic akin to that then occurring in French literature and art. For instance, in Duchamp’s futurist Nude Descending a Staircase, the repetition of the incomplete nude figure, which depicts the entire descent in the one image, could be described in film terms as exploring the elements of photogenie, discontinuous narrative and representation of the passage of time. But the film image, unlike the painted or photographic image, cannot be seen in isolation from its context. Therefore, a study of the imaginative potential of the film image is incomplete without a consideration of the contribution made by the image’s context in evoking the imaginary and extending the

66 Jean Epstein, ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie’ in French Film Theory and Criticism, ed., Abel, 315, 316. 67 Viktor Shklovsky, ‘The Cine-Eyes and Intertitles’ in The Film Factory: Russian and Soviet Cinema in Documents 1896-1939, eds., Richard Taylor and Ian Christie, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1988, 153-4. Symbolism was a stylistic trend attacked by the Communist Party as a bourgeois hangover. See Herbert Marshall, ‘Notes,’ Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1983, 237. 29

meaning of the image beyond its first literal sense. In this respect, the relationship between images—the editing, in other words, plays a crucial role.

Jean-André Fieschi contends that the montage in F.W. Murnau’s horror film,

Nosferatu (1922) is the first to use the formal and plastic qualities of its images to create a narrative undercurrent of the imagination. Unlike the formal articulation in conventional narrative films (where the narrative element dominates all the other elements) in Nosferatu the narrative, plastic, and formal elements of the image ‘trigger a specifically cinematic system of forms and meanings whose components are used dialectically.’69 Fieschi’s analysis scrutinises the film’s sequences of formal elements and reads them as a series of textual meanings. This approach not only reveals the way Murnau’s editing creates a network of the imagination within the film but also highlights the material difference between cinema and other expressive mediums such as literature or theatre.70

The edit in question occurs at a key moment in the film. The story of Nosferatu, up to this particular edit, is about the journey of an unwitting clerk, Hutter, to the castle of

Count Orlok alias Nosferatu (a vampire) to complete a property deal. Nosferatu is about to attack Hutter and drink his blood when, far away, Hutter’s wife becomes agitated in her sleep—crying out and reaching ‘toward’ them.

Figure 2. Nosferatu turns back from Hutter when Ellen Hutter reaches toward them.

68 Abel, ‘Photogénie and Company,’ 111. 69 Fieschi, ‘F.W. Murnau,’ 705, 710, 714. The quote refers to both Nosferatu and Tartuffe (1925). 70 For instance, Fieschi argues that Murnau was the first to treat the film frame as the cinematic equivalent of the theatre stage. 30

Fieschi proposes that in this edit Murnau is the first to create an imaginary space-time. He does this by subverting the newly established convention of the cut-on-eyeline match from its realistic function as a liaison in order to indicate a logically impossible, imaginary connection between the characters of Nosferatu and the heroine. Although she is spatially separate from him and supposedly unaware of either his person or his focus upon her, the cut-on-eyeline match creates an imaginary space between them in which each can be seen as responding to the other.71

To explain the mechanism of this edit in Fieschi’s more abstract terms: Murnau combines the narrative, plastic and formal elements interdependently rather than in a graduated fashion with the narrative taking precedence. The narrative elements to this point are the threat to Hutter, his wife’s concern for him and Nosferatu’s desire for her.

The plastic element is the way Nosferatu and Ellen are gazing in opposite directions within the frame, seemingly beyond the frame itself. Her gesture is also part of the plastic element. The formal element is the cut between the two shots. The combination of the plastic and formal elements, combined with the convention of shot/reverse shot, suggests that Nosferatu and Ellen are gazing toward each other, with Ellen reaching toward him.

When all three elements are taken into account, the edit creates an imaginary space or connection between Nosferatu and Ellen that will be actualised and resolved within the film’s narrative. In this way, the interaction of the formal elements suggests a ‘narrative space-time of the imagination.’72

Fieschi’s analysis provides the means to explore the expressive effects of specific graphic details within the montage. He argues that Murnau’s innovatory use of the image enabled filmmakers such as the Surrealists and the Soviets to use D.W. Griffith’s editing

71 Fieschi, ‘F.W. Murnau,’ 710. 72 For Fieschi, this suggestion of desire between Ellen and Nosferatu is one key to the story’s ‘sexual mechanism.’ Fieschi, ‘F.W. Murnau,’ 710. 31

structure of parallel action to create imaginary spaces and set up ‘networks of the wish, not of the “real”… between the characters.’73 The following section considers the importance of Murnau’s innovation for Marker’s stylistics. It does this by applying Fieschi’s idea of an imaginary space and time to Marker’s adaptation within Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last

Bolshevik, 1993) of one shot from Esfir Shub’s pioneering compilation documentary, The

Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (1927).74

Questioning the Image: Marker’s Imaginary Space-time

In The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, Shub combines images originally shot for different purposes into a new narrative. As one example, documentary shots of the royal family at play are followed by images of workers, perhaps from a fiction film, along with a connecting narrative of intertitles.

Figure 3. Royalty frolic as workers dig ditches.

The first image shows the young Romanovs dancing on board a ship, band in background.

Intertitles state: ‘Their “honours” were pleased to dance the mazurka with their

“highnesses”…/ until they perspired.’ The next shot shows workers digging a ditch. One pauses, spits on his hands before continuing. This sequence, with its ironic intertitle and parallel edit courtesy of Griffith, draws attention to the class differences in the characters’

73 Fieschi includes Murnau’s innovatory use of mise-en-scène, (with the space within the film frame as the new theatrical stage) as part of this accomplishment. Fieschi, ‘F.W. Murnau,’ 710.

ways of life. The sequence meets Eisenstein’s definition of a montage of attractions (where the combination of narrative, formal and plastic elements in the edits emphasises conflict or collision).75 But more pertinent for this thesis is the way the sequence demonstrates

Shub’s most important formal innovation, namely her unacknowledged juxtaposition of already-constituted images from different sources.76

Marker refers to the above sequence by including the shot of the dancers in The Last

Bolshevik, a cinematic letter from Marker to the Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (the

‘Last Bolshevik’ of the title). Marker also uses the shot to compare the life styles of the aristocracy and the peasant class before the revolution, just as Shub did. But despite this reference to Shub’s earlier work, Marker’s compilation is more complex. For a start, his discussion of the fall of the Romanovs is inserted into a larger narrative about Medvedkin’s life and turbulent times. (In this, of course, he has the advantage of a voice-over track that carries much of the narrative information.)

The particular sequence in which the shot appears compares the destinies of Prince

Yusupov, who later killed Rasputin, and Medvedkin, a peasant’s son who became a

Bolshevik and filmmaker. Here, Marker sets the archival images within a frame to separate them from the more contemporary images, signalling that his understanding of the larger subject owes much to images previously created during those times, as presaged by the

George Steiner quote which prefaces the film: ‘It’s not the literal past that rules us: it is

74 Esfir (Esther) Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty includes the Tsar’s ‘home movies,’ newsreels, etc in order to contrast conditions of the aristocracy and upper classes with that of peasants and workers. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real, 166. One shot from the film reappears in Chris Marker’s television program, Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1993). 75 Eisenstein linked his montage of attractions to the Marxist formula of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Sergei Eisenstein, ‘Montage of Film Attractions’, 1924, in The Eisenstein Reader, ed., R. Taylor, translators, R. Taylor and William Powell, BFI publishing, London, 1998, 35, 36. 76 With this technique, the film led the way for compilation documentaries and essay films generally, as well as Marker’s use of a heteroglossia of images (images of diverse styles and sources) within each film. 33

images of the past.’77 This idea is reinforced early in the film by the voice-over stating ‘My work is to question images.’

The shot of the dancers, like the other archival images in the sequence, is set in a white frame with a green surround that distinguishes the shot from the director’s own contemporary footage. He adds to the sense of otherness induced by this graphic separation by manipulating the image and slowing the movement of the dance.78

Figure 4. Three frames from Marker’s slow-motion reproduction of the shot.

Each frame shows the dancers’ positions from several frames combined into one. This manipulation creates a blurred trail of dancers across the frame, into which their bodies appear to dissolve. This effect, combined with the slowing of the image, carries ominous overtones, extending the meaning of the images beyond their first literal sense. Here, the formal and plastic elements of the manipulated images create an imaginary space-time in which the dancers’ imminent end is contained within the present moment of their dance.

This enables the film to express the ephemeral, tenuous nature of the Romanovs’ hold on the present and presage their impending demise in the Revolution.79 In giving retrospective meaning to the dance, the imaginary space-time also allows the director to

77 In this quote, the reference to images is not meant to be taken in its narrow sense, as Marker has done. However, Marker’s use of the term is compatible with its original meaning of the ways we imagine or picture our past, which ‘are often as highly structured and selective as myths.’ George Steiner, ‘1. The Great Ennui,’ In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes towards the Redefinition of Culture, Reproduction of Steiner’s notes. 0-300-01791-3 Yale University Press © George Steiner, 1971, http://www.anti-rev.org/textes/Steiner71a/html (accessed April 16, 2006). 78 Here, Marker reprises the film stylistics of slow motion and superimpositions first employed in films such as Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera. 79 This impression of diminishment is reinforced by the rest of the sequence, which suggests that the worlds of Prince Yusupov and Medvedkin finally came together with the overthrow of the Romanov dynasty—the result of the Romanov’s hubris and contempt for the rest of the population which included, in Marker’s compilation, not only the peasants but also those more educated and worldly. 34

draw attention to his representation of the Romanovs’ fate. Marker’s manipulation of the

Romanov image, while acknowledging Shub’s earlier film, gives it a reflexive, retrospective focus. Paul Arthur contends that the purpose of Marker’s reflexivity is to both prevent reification of historic images and also to transform the representation of historical time to give it materialist flexibility and multivalence.80

Shortly after making The Last Bolshevik, Marker wrote ‘Wouldn’t it be wonderful if this century ended as it began, with a Russian avant-garde?’81 But while the influence of those early filmmakers is evident in Marker’s stylistics, the reflexivity in his work ensures that it displays a distinctive mode of engagement with the image, particularly in its relationship with the soundtrack of his films. In the following chapters, my focus will be on the way the director’s stylistic figures both build upon and surpass those of the 1920s’ avant-garde filmmakers to express complex ideas in the contemporary film essay.

My discussion will draw upon the ideas of two theorists in particular—Bazin and

Fieschi. The film poetics adopted by this thesis is based on Bazin’s understanding of film as a spatial and temporal medium contingent upon the moment of its filming. This poetics seeks its stylistic figures within specific uses of cinematic space and time, or space-time.

On one level, cinematic space and time consists of the interaction of its sound track and the flow of images. Thus, Bazin’s analysis of the formal construction of Letter from Siberia focuses on the innovative relationship between sound and image within its ‘horizontal montage.’ On another level, cinematic space and time can be understood as being created by a complex formal network consisting of the film’s plastic, formal and narrative elements.

Thus, Fieschi’s analysis of Murnau’s Nosferatu focuses on the way the film creates imaginary

80 For instance, Marker reworked Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977) into the English version A Grin Without a Cat (1988) which, with the benefit of hindsight, was a more sober view of the possibility of success of popular revolutions large and small. Paul Arthur, ‘Kino-Eye: the legacy of Soviet cinema as refracted through Chris Marker’s always-critical vision,’ Film Comment, July/August 2003, 34.

spaces by its innovative dialectical interaction of these elements. The ideas of these two theorists are fundamental to the way this thesis will think about Marker’s stylistics. Chapter

2 will attempt a synthesis of their approaches in its search within Letter from Siberia for the basis of Marker’s key stylistic figure.

81 Chris Marker, Letter to Bill Horrigan, October 12, 1994, in ‘Foreword and Acknowledgments,’ Chris Marker, Silent Movie, 5. 36

CHAPTER 2

Mapping the Imaginary Land in Space and Time

Because I know that time is always time And place is always and only place And what is actual is actual only for one time And only for one place. T.S. Eliot

Letter from Siberia: Introduction

Marker begins Sunless with the first two of the above lines from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Ash

Wednesday.’ I use them here, along with the two that follow, because of the tension between Eliot’s idea of time and place as both specific and immutable and Marker’s deployment of sound and image to represent the fluid, evanescent space and time of the imagination. In this chapter, I begin my investigation into the stylistics of Marker’s editing in sound films with his early essay film, Letter from Siberia. In both its stylistics and the way its epistolary structure and incorporation of complementary material (both aural and visual) enables a dialogue on cinematic representation, Letter from Siberia is a precursor, although in nascent form, to Sunless.

Letter from Siberia will be approached via two reviews by Bazin, starting with his review of the film itself. Also relevant is Bazin’s review of Andre Malraux’s avant-garde narrative film, L’Espoir. Here, Bazin coins the term rapprochement to mean the reconciliation

or connection of the film’s ‘discontinuous choice of instants.’82 (Laurent Roth later redefines rapprochement as ‘the art of bringing together the distant.’83) In addition, the chapter will draw upon Fieschi’s detailed understanding of Murnau’s innovative stylistics in

Nosferatu. Of particular relevance for this study is the dialectical interaction of plastic, formal and narrative elements in Nosferatu and the way this creates networks of imaginary spaces within its narrative. Following Fieschi, the chapter will scrutinise the interaction of these elements in several sequences of Letter from Siberia. The purpose behind this synthesis of ideas is to gain a better understanding of Marker’s stylistics.

Bazin’s review of Letter from Siberia mentions that several other French travellers had recently made films on Russia, while asserting that Marker’s ‘essay documented by film’ is like none of them.84 In seeking to establish the reasons for this difference, the first element

Bazin notes is Marker’s use of sound. The second is Marker’s incorporation of ‘any and all filmic material’ that furthers his argument. With regard to sound, Bazin notes Marker’s

‘incisive, powerful texts, in which cutting irony plays hide and seek with poetry.’ In the way his narration works with the image, Marker has already made a substantial contribution to short filmmaking, ‘currently the liveliest fringe of the French cinema.’ By creating a new method of montage, namely ‘horizontal’ montage, Marker has ‘profoundly altered’ the conventional visual relationship between text and image.85 (As earlier noted, this form of montage subordinates the relationship between images to the relationship between image and voice-over.)

82 Bazin, ‘On L’Espoir, or Style in Cinema,’ 146. 83 Laurent Roth, ‘A Yakut Afflicted with Strabismus,’ Qu’est-ce qu’une Madeleine? A propos du CD-ROM Immemory de Chris Marker, 53. 84 Bazin, ‘Lettre de Siberie: Chris Marker, A documentary essay,’ 111. 85 Bazin, ‘Bazin on Marker,’ 44-45. 38

Letter from Siberia is a 60-minute essay film shot in both black and white and colour.

It was filmed by Marker and a small team in 1957.86 At that point in the Cold War, the nuclear arms race between the USSR and the USA had evolved into a space race. With its

1957 launch of Sputnik, followed by space flights containing dogs, the USSR gained the advantage. The anxiety caused by these advances was exacerbated when the Soviet Union achieved the capacity to launch long-range missiles to anywhere in the world. With the

USA scrambling to catch up, the space race became a race to the moon, which Marker alludes to in the film’s final sequence. Marker’s trip was made soon after Nikita

Khrushchev denounced Stalinism and eased several restrictions on Soviets’ human rights.

But it also followed the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary, and, no doubt, the Soviet government’s desire for positive media coverage in the West favoured Marker’s proposed film.

From the start, Letter from Siberia presents Siberia as a country in the process of transition from a traditional to a contemporary society. The drive to modernise and industrialise Siberia is presented not as part of a competition between East and West but as a necessary transformation of a backward but resource-rich society into a modern communist state. Topics include: Siberia’s history and geography; the ways its people cope with its extreme climate and conditions; the treatment of native animals and other natural resources; Siberia’s incorporation of old and new technology; and the interweaving of traditional and contemporary life and beliefs.

Despite the context of the Cold War, the film is anything but sombre, and this is partly due to the manner in which Marker’s filmic letter weaves the often-fanciful tales and points of view of others into his own impressions of Siberia. The epistolary form gives him the freedom to play—both with ideas and their means of expression. The voice-over

86 With Marker were his camera operater Sacha Vierney, documenter Armand Gatti and executive producer 39

notes that the mammoth ‘had its portrait painted’ by the ‘most popular artists’ of its day

(cave painters), while Father Breuil, writing about 20th-century discoveries of cave art, was the mammoth’s ‘publicity agent.’ Another way Marker plays with expression is in the film’s constant interplay of cinematic forms, including documentary footage, archival images, an animated sequence on mammoths, and a Western-style commercial for reindeer as a wonder product for the home. Into this, he mixes poetry, doggerel, traditional song and opera.

The epistolary form allows the director to present several ways of thinking about

Siberia, framed within his own perspective. The film’s opening titles appear letter by letter, accompanied by the sound of a portable typewriter. The first images are of a vast landscape of sky and grasslands bisected by a line of distant trees. The haunting strains of a traditional song soon give way to Georges Rouquier’s opening words: ‘I’m writing you this letter from a distant land – its name is Siberia.’ By presenting his impressions in the form of a letter home, Marker positions himself as one in a long line of Westerners travelling through this ‘distant land,’ starting with Marco Polo, who described Siberia as a ‘land of darkness.’

It’s clear from the start of Letter from Siberia that Marker approaches his subject in ways designed to encourage viewers to see it sympathetically. With the mention that the telegraph workers are ‘booted like Mikhail Strogoff,’ Jules Verne’s envoy of the tsar, the director reprises the romanticism of earlier Western writing about Siberia.87 Later he writes from the ‘land of childhood’ where ‘we were chased by wolves, blinded by Tartars and carried away on the Trans-Siberian Express,’ yet he debunks this Western romanticism of

Siberia by ending the sequence with a low/angle shot of migrating birds followed by a cut to a man firing his rifle at the birds.

André Pierrard. Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 54. 40

As a Frenchman, he finds common cause between the citizens of both countries:

Siberian ducks demonstrate naval manoeuvres on a freezing morning—‘out of sympathy for the cameraman and friendship between peoples.’ The admiration felt by Soviet citizens for France is demonstrated by a Russian song linking Yves Montand, Paris and romance.

Marker applies Western terms to Siberian events: a reindeer race is likened to a Kentucky

Derby and Siberia’s Lena River, its ‘Main Street,’ is compared with the Seine. In an animated sequence, he delights in the tale that early Russians and Chinese believed that mammoths were a kind of giant mole dwelling underground, but then counters this by mentioning that 18th century Westerners mistakenly appropriated mammoth bones as

Christian relics. Later, he gives short shrift to other, less sympathetic travellers such as the early Jesuit priests, whose failed attempt to impose Christianity resulted in Siberia’s

Shamanic culture adopting the figure of Jesus Christ as ‘one more evil spirit’ in its legends.

Looking for parallels between East and West, Marker finds common elements in the gold rushes of both North America and Siberia. Both had buckboards, steamers and trains for transport, as well as ‘Indians,’ cowboys, rustlers, trappers, gunfights and romances.88

And rather than explaining Siberia’s contribution to the space-race within the strategic terms of the Cold War, the director frames its role in the space-race in terms of its cultural trajectory from an earlier society whose mythical Olonkho-Yakutsk hero, Niurgun Bootor, overcame the forces of nature to liberate humanity. Russia’s present-day astronauts and its forays into space flight are likened to mythical attempts by the knights of old to rescue the

Yakutsk heroine imprisoned under the ice of the North Pole. Where the knights had

Niurgun Bootor’s arrow to guide them like a star, today’s Yakuts have the Sputnik, which had been expected in the Northern constellations ‘since the dawn of time.’ And the

87 Mikhail Strogoff was an envoy of the Tsar in Jules Verne’s Mickhail Strogoff or From Moscow to Irkutsk. 88 In print, this sequence is presented in the form of a sporting event – ‘a battle of the banjo and the balalaika.’ Chris Marker, ‘Letter from Siberia,’ Commentaires 1, Paris, Editions du Seuil, 1961, 68. 41

Siberian dogs that once would have pulled the sleds to the Pole are now the Laïkas, the first living creatures to be sent into space. Marker does, however, indirectly acknowledge the competition inherent in the space race with his final comment that Siberia is ‘somewhere between the Middle Ages and the 20th century, between earth and the moon, between humiliation and happiness.’

Marker refers directly to the antagonism between the USA and Russia only once in the film—in the Yakutsk roadworker sequence—where he uses parody at the level of the narrative in order to highlight the prevailing paranoia and propaganda of both sides.

Remarkable enough for its open expression of antagonism between the major powers in contrast to the film’s overall expression of rapprochement between East and West, this sequence is also celebrated for its formal structure. For instance, Bordwell and Thompson discuss the way the different versions of the voice-over, music and sound effects direct the viewer’s understanding of the images.89 However, existing analyses imply rather than articulate the specific structural means whereby the sequence conveys its meaning.

Accordingly, in order to provide an understanding of the major stylistic figures in Marker’s work, I propose the following close analysis of the sequence’s structure.

Men at Work: Roadblock in Space-time

The sequence begins unannounced about halfway through the film, following another sequence with cameo shots of people in the street, apparently listening to an outdoor broadcast of a Russian song about Yves Montand. The earlier sequence ends with a zip pan from a loudspeaker on a pole down to the puddle at its foot. The first shot of the next

89 David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction, University of Wisconsin, McGraw Hill, 2005, 348, 349. 42

sequence is of roadworkers cheerfully shovelling soil, smiling to camera. We hear the narrator’s voice-over, with contemporary jazz playing behind: ‘As I listen to this tribute to

Yves Montand I looked around me.’ Following this is the sequence of images that will appear four times in succession, each time with a different voice-over.

Figure 5: The visual sequence appears four times, each time with different voice-over.

The first voice-over, normal tone of voice: ‘Undeniable energy, enthusiasm and the will to work. A faith that the future will be as bright as the past was dark; huge gaps and a firm determination to fill them. While recording these images of the Yakutsk capital as objectively as possible, I frankly wondered whom they would satisfy, because of course you can’t describe the Soviet Union as anything but the workers’ paradise, or as hell on earth. For example…’

The second voice-over, more enthusiastic: ‘Yakutsk, capital of the Yakutsk autonomous Soviet socialistic republic, is a modern city, in which modern buses made available to the population share the streets with powerful Zims, the pride of the Soviet automobile industry. In the joyful spirit of socialist emulation, happy Soviet workers, among them this picturesque denizen of the Arctic reaches, apply themselves to making Yakutsk an even better place to live!’

The third voice-over, with dramatic tone and music: ‘Yakutsk is a dark city with an evil reputation. The population is crammed into blood-coloured buses as members of the privileged caste brazenly declare the luxury of their Zims – a costly and uncomfortable car at best. Bending to the task like slaves, the miserable Soviet workers, among them this sinister-looking Asiatic, apply themselves to the primitive labour of dragging with a dragbeam.’

Final voice-over, normal tone resumes: ‘In Yakutsk, where modern houses are gradually replacing the dark, older sections, a bus, less crowded than its equivalent in London or New York at rush hour, passes a Zim, an excellent car reserved for public-utilities departments, on account of its scarcity. With courage and tenacity under extremely difficult circumstances, Soviet

workers, among them this Yakut with an eye disorder, apply themselves to improving the appearance of their city, which could certainly use it.’

We see other workers, a boy on horseback, pedestrians, a horse-drawn cart, and new buildings.

The voice-over persists: ‘But objectivity isn’t the answer either. It may not distort different Siberian realities but it does isolate them long enough to be appraised, and consequently distorts them all the same. What counts, is the drive and the variety. A walk through the streets of Yakutsk isn’t going to make you understand Siberia. What you might need is an imaginary newsreel, shot all over Siberia.’

The imaginary newsreel that follows imparts a mix of cultural and demographic information. For example, ‘the season of dying water’ is the Siberian poetic term for a winter that falls to minus 69 degrees in the Verkhoyansk Mountains. The understanding and management of the country’s resources changed with geological discoveries. For centuries, furs and the forest were the only resources known. Now, diamonds and gold are included. The newsreel mentions that the contemporary Yakutsk people include artists, surgeons, writers and bards. It then shows spring festivals with dancers and songs from old Shamanic poems. Finally it depicts the ‘Kentucky Derby’ run in the last days of winter, where everyone wins because the prize is the return of summer.

On its first appearance, the image sequence of the roadworkers seems to do no more than attest to the actuality of the filmed events, due to the way it’s supported by a conventional sound track and explanatory voice-over about the esprit de corps of the city’s inhabitants. But this impression is quickly overturned when the narration employs irony to criticise its own approach for its lack of political commitment, ‘because of course you can’t describe the Soviet Union as anything but the workers’ paradise, or as hell on earth.’ As though in obedience, the image sequence promptly reappears unchanged—starting with the earlier shot of the bus passing the camera, and ending again with the frontal shot of the workers with their drag beam. This time the images are supported by an enthusiastic sound track and voice-over promoting the benefits of socialist life with such hyperbole that 44

its sentiments sound quite silly. The effect is the same with the next repeat of the image sequence, this time with its overly dramatic denunciation of everything we see. Following this, the final repeat of the image sequence is accompanied by a commentary with a milder, more logical view of the scene. But as the street scene breaks from its time warp to depict other workers and inhabitants of Yakutsk, the voice-over criticises the assumption of omniscience underlying this last, ‘objective’ commentary and suggests, instead, that greater understanding of Siberia may follow the viewing of an imaginary newsreel, ‘shot all over

Siberia.’ At the end of this newsreel, the voice-over asserts that now, when we return to

Yakutsk, we can better understand the victory of simple achievements of shelter, culture and survival in the face of the difficulties posed by Siberia’s harsh climate.

After witnessing the way the same events take on different connotations—first, through the repetitions of the street scene with its alternative sound tracks, and then through the context provided by the following imaginary newsreel—we are now in a better position to understand Bazin’s claim that, with Marker’s horizontal montage, ‘the intelligence flows from the audio element to the visual.’ For Bazin, as noted earlier, the image is normally regarded as a documentary’s principal cinematic material. Therefore the intent of a documentary is usually expressed through its montage of images with the commentary supplementing the information they convey. By contrast, Marker’s technique creates a dialectic between word and image that alters this relationship. We see this, first, when the conventional sound/image relationship is forsaken soon after the sequence begins, with the voice-over wondering who the ‘objective recording’ of the images would satisfy. Following this, the image sequence seems to reappear each time at the behest of the voice-over so that new interpretations may be applied to it. Then, when the voice-over says that what counts is to show ‘the drive and the variety,’ the image sequences go on to provide this in the imaginary newsreel. This sequence demonstrates Bazin’s contention

that the principal material in a Marker essay film is its intelligence or ideas, expressed primarily through language and then through the image. However, this doesn’t confine the image to a supplementary role—rather, it refers laterally in some way to what is said. Thus, the intelligence is expressed ‘from the ear to the eye.’

Bazin sees Marker’s treatment of the roadworker sequence as dialectical, ‘consisting of placing the same image in three different intellectual contexts and following the results.’90 This is consistent with the director’s explanation of his working method for Le

Joli mai—except that he speaks of his approach in terms of the dimensions of space and time. Marker’s starting point is the independence of the events or facts he encounters, followed by their selection and editing. This editing not only expresses the moment of the encounter but also extends this event or fact ‘beyond the immediate time’ he wanted to represent.91 The director speaks of time here because the materiality of film ensures that ideas, no matter how abstract, must be physically represented within the dimensions of cinematic space and time. So, with regard to the Yakutsk street scene, he saw how the small, relatively insignificant activity of the scene could be visited and revisited, thereby extending the original moment of encounter long enough to verbally express the amusingly confrontational ideas that situate this small scene within the larger setting of the Cold War.

From this, we can see how the intelligence of the sequence is expressed simultaneously on both the level of sound and the spatial and temporal flow of images. But this flow is not like that which is predominant in the traditional documentary. There, the montage creates an illusory continuity of space and time in the flow of images so as to convey a sense of realistic or chronological time.92 Marker’s horizontal montage breaks with this ‘realism’ in the roadworker sequence by first rupturing that flow, then repeating this one set of images

90 Bazin, ‘Bazin on Marker,’45. 91 Marker, quoted by Gersch, ‘An interview with Chris Marker (1964),’ in Alter, Chris Marker, 132. 92 Richter, ‘The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary Film,’ 197. 46

several times—clearly subordinating spatial and temporal continuity to the narrative conveyed by the soundtrack. In the process, the formal articulation of the sequence creates what Bazin terms a ‘discontinuous choice of instants.’

Bazin coined this term in his review of L’Espoir, Malraux’s film adaptation of his own novel about the Spanish Civil War.93 But while Astruc praises L’Espoir for the way its ‘film language’ is equivalent to literary language, Bazin contends that the film’s ellipses are sometimes too literary in form to be readily understood. He notes that both filmmakers and novelists employ the rhetorical figure of ellipsis within the narrative in order to create a discontinuity ‘simultaneously temporal and spatial.’ However, Bazin cautions that the cinematic ellipse must be expressed differently to the literary ellipse. For a start, he argues that cinema doesn’t tolerate discontinuity because the viewer can’t pause to establish spatial, temporal or narrative continuity as is possible with a literary work. In addition, a cinematic ellipse engages our imagination through the spectacle provided by the transient images, rather than through the idea behind their presence. So, to ensure that the cinematic ellipse is understood during its fleeting appearance, it must appeal to our imagination rather than our intellect, which it does through the plastic presence of its images.94

Bazin’s caution refers specifically to discontinuity in the classical narrative film.

However, as a film essay, Letter from Siberia is a hybrid form between literature and film.

Thus, it retains some of the advantages of the literary work in overcoming the effects of discontinuity and ellipsis in the spatial and temporal expression of its narrative or argument. With the words ‘I am writing you this letter,’ the voice-over sets up the expectation at the very start of this essay film that the intelligence will be conveyed through

93 Bazin, ‘On L’Espoir, or Style in Cinema,’ 146. 94 Bazin, Ibid., 146. Added to this is the plastic presence of the soundtrack. See the idea of added value in Michel Chion, Audio-vision: Sound on Screen, transl. Claudia Gorbman, Columbia University Press, NY, 1994. 47

the spoken text. This expectation is maintained throughout the film as the voice-over employs what Laurent Roth terms ‘the rhetoric of directive commentary’ to give continuity to the film’s argument or narrative as well as its discontinuous instants.95 This directive role is particularly clear in the roadworker sequence with its repetitive sequence of images.

Bazin’s second point is that, first and foremost, the film ellipse engages the viewer’s imagination through its plastic presence. This brings to mind Fieschi’s analysis of the edit in Murnau’s Nosferatu whereby an imaginary space between Nosferatu and Ellen Hutter is created by the dialectical interaction of the plastic, formal and narrative elements of the scene. In this example, as earlier discussed, the gaze and gestures of the two characters comprise the plastic element, while the cut between the two shots is the formal element.

The combination of the two subverts the convention of the cut-on-eyeline match in order to indicate a logically impossible, imaginary connection between the characters. A similarly close analysis of the disruption to the spatial and temporal flow of images in Letter from

Siberia’s roadworker sequence reveals the contribution made to its meaning by the plastic and formal presence of the repetitive images.

95 Roth, ‘A Yakut Afflicted by Strabismus,’ 53. 48

Figure 6: A graphic summary of the sequence showing one image from the first and last shots of each repeat.

The plastic presence of the repeated image sequence contributes an audacity and excitement equal to the drama and humour of the verbal parody of conflicting views. The opening shot of the passing bus is particularly effective because, each time we see it, its strong form and contrasting colour draws both the camera and the eye as it heads down the road. In addition, each reappearance of the same image is a shock in itself, breaking with convention and thwarting expectations that the cut or edit invariably indicates the passage of space and time. When taken in combination with the argument supplied by the voice-over, the plastic and formal visual elements of Marker’s sequence represent a logically impossible stagnation in the flow of space and time, obstructed or trapped by the conflicting interpretations imposed on it by the sound. 49

This interpretation gains support when the repetitive images are considered in the context of the shots that precede and follow them, where the voice-over is supportive.

Figure 7. The roadworker sequence follows an outdoor broadcast of a Russian song about Yves Montand:

Voice-over: ‘As I listen to this tribute to Yves Montand I looked around me. Undeniable energy, enthusiasm and the will to work…’

The trapped-image sequence follows immediately after:

This sequence is followed in turn by:

Voice-over: ‘But objectivity isn’t the answer either. It may not distort different Siberian realities but it does isolate them long enough to be appraised, and consequently distorts them all the same. What counts, is the drive and the variety.’

It’s not until the voice-over once again expresses a sympathetic view of its subject that the flow of images resumes the illusion of spatial and temporal continuity.

Throughout the roadworker sequence, the plastic and formal presence of the images supports the narrative conveyed by the directive commentary. The images flow freely when the commentary is supportive and prop when it’s conflicted, thereby creating a cinematic space and time that makes visible the idea of conflict. This enables the film to poetically express the antagonism and rigidity of Cold-War views about Siberia and to suggest that progress is impossible while these views hold sway. In creating this space and time, at once documentary and imaginary, Marker employs the stylistic figure which I propose as the basis of all his work.

Bazin defines this stylistic figure as rapprochement.96 For Bazin, rapprochement is the reconciliation, connection, comparison, or even simple opposition between two juxtaposed events or images, which explains, or refers to, the ellipse between them. To reiterate several points made earlier, Bazin contends that, whereas the literary comparison is expressed as metaphor and (like all literature) works only through the imaginary, in film a comparison can only be suggested, because the image is concretely real and contains denotative information from the profilmic situation (the moment of filming).97 In addition to its denotative or documentary quality, Bazin contends that the cinematic image also has

96 Bazin, ‘On L’Espoir, or Style in Cinema,’ 149, 150. 51

an ambiguous quality to it. He describes this quality as a ‘certain metaphorical polyvalence,’ which gives the image the potential for a comparison or metaphor. This metaphorical polyvalence may be subconsciously sensed by the viewer ‘and it is this that gives the image its aesthetic density.’ Even so, he insists that the filmmaker succeeds in giving the image connotative meaning only through suggestion, ‘when it spontaneously provokes the desirable associations in us.’98 As an example, Bazin describes one scene in L’Espoir in which dynamiters have left acid to drip slowly into a container in an empty room. A camera shift, equivalent to a cut or an ellipse within the frame, brings the container into close-up to reveal that its shape is ‘vaguely evocative of an hourglass,’ the only sound, the dripping of liquid into it.99 While this association may arise spontaneously in the mind of the viewer, it’s actually the result of the rapprochement created by the filmmaker.

For Bazin, the association of antithetical ideas implies a comparison. Therefore, although his idea of cinematic rapprochement springs from the idea of comparison in the literary metaphor (which speaks only of similarities between like things), rapprochement extends the comparison to the contrast of unlike things. There are two examples of rapprochement within the roadworker sequence—both of which involve a rapprochement of antithetical ideas. The first occurs in the trapped-image section, where the plastic and formal presence of the disrupted and repetitive flow of images suggests the obstruction caused by the conflicting antagonistic interpretations conveyed through the voice-over.

The second example is a rapprochement suggested by the visual contrast between the repetitive-image sequence and the free-flowing space and time of the images surrounding it. Here, both visual sequences are closely aligned to the sentiments expressed by the voice-over within them. In both cases, the spatial and temporal flow of the images

97 The term ‘profilmic’ refers to the moment of filming. Bazin, Ibid., 150. 98 Bazin, Ibid., 151. 99 Bazin, Ibid., 152. 52

actualises those sentiments, enabling Marker to reach beyond a simple documentary record of the roadmaking events in order to stylistically express his criticism of blinkered Cold-

War politics and his desire for rapprochement— in the social and political sense—between citizens of the East and West.

Letter from Siberia is often referred to in terms of the roadworker sequence. However, it would be wrong to assume from this that the sequence contains the film’s sole example of stylistic innovation. On the contrary, the richness of Marker’s stylistic innovation is evident in the number and variety of rapprochements in the film. The remainder of the chapter explores a few more examples—each expressed differently.

Bringing Together the Distant: In the Midst of Life…

The edge-of-the-world sequence from Letter from Siberia, like the Metro sequence in The

Case of the Grinning Cat, speaks of death in the midst of life.100 The sequence begins with a point of transit into the imaginary when images of the taiga, or forest, are accompanied by a melancholy folk song and the words ‘I’m writing you this letter from the edge of the world. According to a Siberian proverb, the forest was made by the devil.’ Here, the place

Marker is writing from can be understood as both real and imaginary. After a joke suggesting the USA was also made by the devil, the voice-over continues: ‘When he’s not busy making forests or states, the devil steals peoples’ souls. Or at least that was how the

Siberians regarded death for many centuries.’

Figure 8. The edge-of-the-world sequence: first, the graveyard.

Voice-over: ‘In this frozen ground, corpses never rot. In these graves, which rest on foundations of ice, life and death are separated by nothing more substantial than a breath of air. Bring back the breath and the body is ready to live again,’

Voice-over: ‘to come back and share in the slow, chilly existence of the wooden villages, rounding up stray horses, building snow ploughs, or leading herds to milder pastures.’

We are presented with a closer shot of the village; shots of a mixed herd of sheep, cattle and goats; a herder on horseback; black and white sheep; the mixed herd again, trees behind, rolling hills, fields beyond—a pan reveals the herdsman nearby, gazing past the camera. Finally, we see the long, backlit shot of the herd and herdsman heading off into the distance.

The folk song, the sole accompaniment to most of these images, ends partway through the final shot.101

The whimsical voice-over suggesting the possibility of life after death is not intended to be taken too seriously. Nevertheless, it’s reinforced by an other-worldly quality in the

100 The Metro sequence is discussed in the Introduction.

images. Apart from the medium close-up of the herdsman, most of the images in this sequence are so devoid of human interaction with the camera as to suggest, plastically and formally, that here, ‘at the edge of the world,’ it may really be possible to ‘bring back the breath’ and live again. Distancing is also conveyed through the lack of synchronous sound and the way the traditional folk song joins the narrative conveyed by the voice-over to extend the time-frame, drawing it back toward the past—a time when ideas, magical and romantic, were the only comfort in the face of the uncertainties and sorrows of life in such a harsh environment. If rapprochement is ‘the art of bringing together the distant,’ what could be more distant, metaphorically speaking, than life and death? Yet here, Marker has brought them together to inhabit the same space and time.

The Metro sequence speaks of death through a rapprochement of sound from one event over images from another, suggesting that both are taking place in the one space and time in the Paris Metro. The rapprochement in the edge-of-the-world sequence is created by different means. Here, the narrative expressed by the voice and song combines with the suggestive plastic qualities of both sound and image to create a rapprochement which overlaps linear and archaic time, reason and myth, to express the difficulties of living in this harsh climate.

Bazin affirms that Letter from Siberia is written by a poet with the words: ‘Better it might be said that the basic element is the beauty of what is said and heard, that intelligence flows from the audio element to the visual.’102 The qualities of beauty and intelligence are certainly in evidence in this sequence, not only in the form and content of the soundtrack but also in the image-flow and the interaction of the two. In addition, beauty and intelligence are also evident in the formal qualities of its rapprochement of cinematic space

101 The reflective mood of the final backlit image is abruptly broken by the intrusion of the sound of quacking ducks followed by voice-over introducing the playful mammoth sequence that follows. 102 Bazin, ‘Bazin on Marker,’ 44. 55

and time. In the following pages, I’ll consider two final sequences from Letter from Siberia.

In the first, the rapprochement is created through the interaction of different forms of cinematic images.

Rapprochement of ‘Any and All Filmic Material’

As Bazin notes, the narrative of Letter from Siberia is distinctive for its ‘firework display of technique,’ which encompasses not only its horizontal montage but also its incorporation of complementary material, as in the mammoth sequence. Although Bazin’s idea of rapprochement in a traditional narrative film is between photographic images only, he endorses Marker’s use of animated images in this essay film: ‘Marker does not restrict himself to using documentary images filmed on the spot, but uses any and all filmic material that might help his case.’103 This brings to mind Richter’s argument discussed in

Chapter 1, that the essay film can use whatever means are available to express its ideas.104

The mammoth sequence, which speaks of ways of understanding and representing

Siberia’s natural world, combines documentary and graphic images of ducks, mammoths, the Lena River and various human beings in a surprising and delightful way. Due to its complexity, it’s necessary to examine the sequence in several parts so as to pinpoint the differences between its rapprochements of different forms of cinematic images along with their different renditions of space and time.

The sequence is introduced through the documentary images of the kolkhoz, or collective, of ducks whose quacking puts an end to the reflective mood of the previous sequence. The voice-over presents the ducks as sympathetic to the cameraman and willing

103 Bazin, Ibid., 45. 104 Richter, ‘The Film Essay: A New Form of Documentary Film.’ 196. 56

to ‘promote friendship between peoples.’ They demonstrate ‘naval manoeuvres’ at the risk of being trapped in the ice—the fate (long ago) of the mammoth.

Figure 9. The mammoth sequence: Ducks on manoeuvres.

A trumpet fanfare then introduces a sequence of animation and collage accompanied, at first, by doggerel on the fate of the hapless mammoths, lost en route to ‘a holiday in

Iberia.’ Then the voice-over tells a fanciful tale about how early Siberians and Chinese thought the mammoth was a giant mole (and named it ‘mother of mice’). They also supposedly thought, from the fact that mammoths were only ever found dead, under the ground, that the slightest ray of sunlight could kill them instantly.

Figure 9, (cont.). Mammoths en route for southern climes.

The start of the mammoth sequence is represented by a juxtaposition of two different forms of cinematic images: the documentary images of the ducks and the graphic animations of the mammoths. The distinctiveness between the two forms of image is complicated by the voice-over, however, which presents the ducks as friendly, politically astute comrades. Although this imaginative element is grounded in the reality of the profilmic moment, its anthropomorphism provides a point of transit into the imaginary sequences with their faux-naive ideas about the mammoth, expressed through lively music, voice-over and doggerel, along with animation and collage, at once childlike and

sophisticated.105 Interestingly, the plastic and formal qualities of both sound and graphic elements in the imaginary sequences are far more vivacious and funny—larger than life, in fact—than those in the documentary scene.

The main part of the mammoth sequence consists of a potted history of discoveries by the West of mammoths’ frozen remains. Illustrated by a similarly amusing mix of sound and graphics, it summarises the way 18th-century Western appropriation of mammoth bones as Christian relics gives way to scientific understanding in the 20th century. First,

Father Breuil, the mammoth’s ‘publicity agent,’ spreads the word about discoveries of their

‘portraits’ or cave paintings, then hardy ‘men of science,’ assisted by more doggerel and more animation, make persistent ‘forays into the Siberian wasteland’ of snow and ice— finally succeeding in bringing home frozen specimens for scientific study.106

Figure 10. Playful graphics give way to a more realistic style at the end of the ‘portrait’ sequence.

The start of a rational understanding of the animal is expressed through the transition from animation of a mammoth posing for its ‘portrait’ on a cave wall, to the sketch (now in a more realistic graphic style) of Father Breuil regarding the same drawing, as though explaining it to others. This transition from one era to another and from one way of thinking about the mammoth to another is visually suggested by dissolves—from mammoth, to drawing, to Father Breuil—as well as a simultaneous change in graphic style.

In effect, the dissolves that end with the reveal of Father Breuil create a rapprochement of

105 The animation was created by the Arcady team of Paul Grimault and William Guéry. Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 56. 106 The tale is enlivened by surprises in the collage such as the cocker-spaniel pianist in Victorian dress playing a French song about the ‘mammouth’ and the surreal encounter between three ‘men of science’ and a carload of mammoths out for a jaunt in an old jalopy. 58

narrative styles within the animation form. This reinforces the voice-over to suggest the growth of logical thought over time. (However, this is promptly followed by a return to a whimsical graphic style to depict the mammoth hunters.)

In the final part of the sequence, rational understanding is first depicted by the map of Siberia, overlaid with natural-history renditions of mammoths and rhinoceroses, while the voice-over summarises the findings. As the camera zooms into the drawing of the mammoth in the vicinity of the Lena River, the voice-over declares the film-crew’s intention to join the search for ‘at least an incisor’ at the nearest diggings on the banks of the Lena. To the sound of a woman singing a folk song, the filmed image of the Lena returns us to the space and time of the filming. Then follow further documentary images filmed from the river, accompanied by the song, while the voice-over muses on the differences between the Lena and the Seine.

Figure 11. Comparing scientific and experiential forms of representation.

This part of the sequence juxtaposes two visual representations of contemporary reality: first, the map as a way of knowing through the abstraction of science, and second, the documentary film images of the river, which can be read as a way of knowing through experience. The meticulous graphic documentation of the map reveals the extent of the mapmaker’s understanding of the locations of fossils discovered over the previous two centuries. These locations, in turn, reveal mammoth habitats in prehistoric times. When combined with the voice-over summarising the findings of mammoths and rhinoceroses, the images suggest that our understanding of the world depends upon our slow accumulation of information about it.

In contrast, the peaceful documentary images of the river speak only about the moment of filming, sometime in 1957. Here, the voice-over states, the film crew attempted to link up with the past in their search for ‘at least an incisor.’ Instead, they found and recorded this brief moment of beauty and tranquility in the present time. When combined with the song and reflective voice-over, the images of the river suggest the phenomenological view of the world (one based on experience) with its lyrical, rather than omniscient way of understanding. In fact, both these logical forms of knowledge— scientific and phenomenological—are themselves incomplete, or partial, relative to each other, as are their forms of representation, in that they abstract, or summarise, information about certain specific aspects of the world in order to both understand and speak about it.107

Earlier, I mentioned that the film’s epistolary form allows the director to express several ways of thinking about Siberia, all framed within his own perspective. In this innovatory sequence, each form of cinematic space-time actualises one way of seeing the world. By juxtaposing the various documented and imagined forms, the resulting rapprochement enables the film to stylistically express the development of human understanding of Siberia’s mammoths and their world. In addition, the joy and humour in both the formal and narrative dimensions of the sequence enable it to suggest that some of the pleasure for a visitor trying to make sense of Siberia comes from the consideration and representation of all the visitor’s ideas about it, both imaginative and factual. As the voice- over declares when introducing the imaginary newsreel, ‘What counts is the drive and the variety.’

107 Similarly, with filming, Bazin states that despite the indexical relationship between the cinematic image and the moment of filming, the moment can’t be represented in its totality, hedged round as it is by convention,

Prospecting for Time in the Wild West

Towards the end of Letter from Siberia, there’s a moment that could easily slip past unnoticed. Insignificant in terms of the overall duration and activity of the film, the importance of the moment lies in the way it develops the stylistic figure of rapprochement into one of transformation—a key figure in Marker’s later films such as Sunless. The moment I speak of is in the Wild West sequence; it is the precise moment when still images from the past become documentary images of the film’s present.

In the Wild West sequence, the voice-over speaks of similarities between the Soviet and North American gold rushes with all their vitality and lawlessness. Historic, sepia- coloured still images are set within a black oval frame suggesting that they have been found within an old photo album. The camera pans across several of the images and dissolves between some, while yet others pass back and forth on the screen like a magic-lantern slide show. This adds to the sense of past time, also conveyed by the stillness of the images and the nature of their subjects—the trans-Siberian express and its engineers, paddle-steamers, gold-diggers, ‘Indians,’ cowboys, rustlers, etc. The last of these sepia images is one of a bearded man in a fur hat gazing to camera. The voice-over states that one woman, a communist, came to save Aldan from lawlessness, ‘And it was she, one Judith against 4000 bearded Holophernes, who saved the city.’ The man then moves, the image now in full colour as the oval frame pulls out, simulating the effect of an old-fashioned iris-pull. The still image, supposedly of the past, becomes moving footage: a documentary image from the film’s present.

the technical limits of the medium and the abstracting intentions of the filmmaker. Bazin, ‘An Aesthetic of Reality,’ 27. 61

Figure 12. The past enters the present.

Voice-over: ‘Today, under the watchful gazes of a few surviving Holophernes, the gold diggers have become workers like any others. But in memory of that woman who achieved the triumph of right over might, the gold in Aldan is guarded and handled only by members of her sex.’

Bazin celebrates the ability of film to record the element of time in a manner unavailable to photography with the words ‘Now, for the first time, the image of things is the image of their duration, change mummified as it were.’108 With the above juxtaposition, what at first appears to be one more frozen photographic moment is brought to life in a way that suggests not a mummification of change but rather a logically- impossible continuity of one moment from the past into the present day. This juxtaposition of still and moving images involves not only a rapprochement between the materiality of the photographic and cinematic documentary forms but also an actual transformation of the one into the other. By adding time and movement to an initially static image, the transformation creates a moment both documentary and imaginary, which expresses the idea of the enduring nature of the quality of rugged individualism amongst the Siberian people.

This chapter has explored the formal means of expression in Letter from Siberia. In particular, it has sought to understand various ways in which the film speaks poetically through the stylistic figure of rapprochement. The final example of this chapter considers the extension of rapprochement into the transformative figure so important to Marker’s later works. The following chapter will explore the nature and expressive role of the stylistic figure of transformation in Sunless. Of particular interest is the relationship

between the transformative figure and the film’s key subject of the memory of a moment of happiness.

108 Bazin, ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image,’ 15. 63

CHAPTER 3

Sunless as Sea change

Full fathom five thy father lies, Of his bones are coral made, Those are pearls that were his eyes. Nothing of him that doth fade But doth suffer a sea change Into something rich and strange. - The Tempest, 1, 2

Introduction

To describe Sunless as a fascinating, multi-layered film essay in epistolary form barely starts explaining its intricacies. The story, put very simply, begins with an image of three young girls on a windswept hill in 1965. To the film’s cameraman, this image represents happiness. The film appears to be about his search for the way to present this image—to give it the right context—so others can also see this happiness. As he trawls through images from his peripatetic life, ideas about representing happiness are joined by ideas about representing other things such as the effects of time and memory. His expanded search appears finally to be resolved when he arrives at the idea that this moment of happiness cannot be either remembered or represented without a corresponding understanding of loss.

To understand the film’s set up, it may help to begin with Marker’s outline of its

‘dramatis personae.’ This outline states that the voice of an ‘unknown woman,’ apparently the friend of a ‘freelance cameraman,’ reads the letters and comments he sends her about 64

the images he has filmed in several countries since World War II—mainly Japan and

Africa, but also Iceland, France and the USA. The cameraman questions his role in helping to form memories, and even histories, through these representations of the world. A

‘Japanese colleague’ of the cameraman ‘attacks the images stored in memory’ with the aid of a digital synthesiser. A ‘cinema producer’ then works some of the filmed material into a form similar to Modest Mussorgsky’s song cycle, Sunless—where each song creates a small world of its own. Finally, states Marker, ‘from these memories, placed side by side, is born a fictive memory.’ 109

With regard to the ‘dramatis personae,’ Jon Kear argues that these characters can be seen as ‘positions’ within the film, which enable Marker to present alternate approaches, aesthetics and strategies to representation.110 Support for this argument comes from the film’s running commentary about its processes of construction. Kear states: ‘For Marker, it is an ethical imperative of representation that it declare its means, rather than present film as a transitive instrument of reality.’111 Of the images the ‘Japanese colleague’ creates in the

‘Zone,’ for instance, the voice-over says: ‘At least they proclaim themselves to be what they are—images—not the portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.’

The ‘fictive memory’ Marker refers to above is equally complex and multi-layered.

The raw material from which the fictive memory is created combines the woman’s voice- over and snatches of music with documentary images and sequences filmed throughout the world by the cameraman, as well as documentary footage filmed by others.112 All the images are subject to commentary, as are images from various fiction films such as

Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) that have influenced the cameraman’s thoughts on memory and

109 Chris Marker’s own summary of the film, quoted in Kear, Sunless/Sans Soleil, 1. 110 Kear, Sunless/Sans Soleil, 7. 111 Kear, Ibid., 30.

representation. In this way, the footage of events and places is accompanied by personal memories and philosophical ruminations about people from different political and cultural ways of life (particularly Japanese and African) and reflections on political struggles and their frequently depressing outcomes. The combination provides the beginnings of a journey through time and memory.

This journey is aided by frequent references to the thoughts of other writers and philosophers about ways of representing truth, happiness, the effects of time passing, memory and melancholy. All these references are set within the frame of a film, which, we are told, will involve a time-traveller compassionate about our unhappiness and loss of memory. Immediately after this news, we are told the film will never be made—but nevertheless its structure will be similar to Mussorgsky’s song cycle, and its title will be

Sunless.

The innovation and complexity of the film’s content and structure are echoed by its equally rich and varied stylistic figures. As the idea of memory and its representation are the two main ideas of the film, its most important stylistic elements both speak of and involve some form of transformation. This chapter focuses on stylistic figures in which the quality of transformation is an extension of rapprochement. Thus viewed, these figures constitute an important development and maturation of Marker’s ‘master figure’ of rapprochement, evident 24 years earlier in Letter from Siberia.113 But while Letter from Siberia has only one major example of transformation as an extension of rapprochement, Sunless contains several.

112 Some of this footage is acknowledged (like Haroun Tazieff’s shots of Heimaey – home of the three young girls – after the volcanic eruption) but much isn’t, like the footage of the killing of a giraffe. The filmmakers responsible are acknowledged in the closing credits. 113 Roth defines rapprochement as Marker’s ‘master figure,’ in L Roth, ‘A Yakut Afflicted with Strabismus,’ 52. 66

Yvette Biro states that although Marker speaks of how the mind is powerless to retain memories in the unequal struggle with time, he’s not powerless to forcefully reveal

‘the story of this dramatic loss.’114 Two examples of the stylistic figure of transformation address the cameraman’s struggle to represent his memory of one specific moment of happiness, which occurred when he filmed the three young girls from Heimaey.

Voice from the Void: From Black Screen to Black Leader

The first example of transformation as an extension of rapprochement in Sunless occurs in the title sequence, which speaks of the difficulties of convincingly representing the cameraman’s memory of a moment of happiness. The sequence lasts 60 seconds, and apart from the film title (in three languages) and the production information, it contains the

T.S. Eliot quote, two images and two sentences of voice-over. The predominant impression is of a black screen upon which everything else appears then disappears in sequence, starting with the Argos Films’ logo and title. After these fade, a quote in grey text appears upon the black:

Because I know time is always time And place is always and only place TS Eliot’s Ash-Wednesday.

Then the text fades and the black continues as we hear the voice of the nameless woman friend of the fictitious cinematographer.115

114 Yvette Biro, quoted in Kear, Sunless/Sans Soleil, 16. 115 Spoken by Alexandra Stewart in the English version of the film. 67

Figure 13. Title sequence: black screen precedes images.

Voice-over: ‘The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965.’

We then see the first image of three young girls, hair blown by the wind, a bit shy of the cameraman. The image, which lasts about eight seconds, is presented without sound.

Then black appears again.

Voice-over: ‘He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images…’

The image of the bomber plane descending below the deck of the aircraft carrier appears and lasts for about five seconds.116

116 The shot of the aircraft carrier in the Gulf of Tonkin was filmed by Claude Lelouch for Far From Vietnam (1967). Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 155. 68

Voice-over: ‘but it never worked. He wrote me:’

Voice-over: ‘One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader.117 If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’

The black continues under the producer credit and the vivid colours of the film’s title in

Russian, English, French.

Just one minute long, this title sequence is remarkable in its dynamic interaction of formal and narrative elements which sets the pattern for their seemingly paradoxical relationship throughout the film. Although this interaction won’t be fully clarified until the film’s climax, an examination of the major stylistic figure in this sequence will reveal important aspects of Marker’s intentions for the film that follows.

As with the sequences in Letter from Siberia, here, at the start of Sunless, Marker’s horizontal montage enables the voice-over rather than the image-flow to create the narrative continuity of the title sequence. The voice-over states in full:

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: ‘One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with

117 On a film reel, black leader follows the countdown and sound pip before the first image of the film appears, as an aid in the screening of the film. 69

a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’

Apart from the voice, no other sound accompanies the heterogeneous collection of images which consist of production credits and logo, followed by the T.S. Eliot quote, the two documentary images (the girls, the aircraft carrier) and the film’s title. Each of these discontinuous visual elements appears for a few brief seconds from the void of the film’s black screen.

The first thing to consider is the status of the two elusive documentary images. The voice over the black screen introduces the first image of the girls: ‘The first image he told me about,’ filmed ‘in Iceland, in 1965.’ This introduction invites the viewer to accept the black screen as simply part of the film medium while simultaneously considering the image of the children as an image, rather than the first of many documentary moments to come.

This framing of the children as an image is supported by the lack of sound over the image itself. The voice-over resumes with the reappearance of the black screen, and continues to specify the image status of the preceding shot by giving it a provisional meaning—it was

‘the image of happiness’ for him—as though he had not yet represented it in a way that would convince anyone else, despite trying to link it to other images, such as this one of the aircraft carrier—as unlikely an association as one could imagine.118

Ross Gibson explains this association in terms of Marker’s place in a French aesthetic tradition whose poets expect to astonish with their conjunctions or metaphors.

Gibson argues that this is an ‘associative ambition’ which requires the poet to bring together all the ‘speciously heterogeneous’ images and sounds that come to mind in order

118 Lupton contends Marker’s use of the image of the aircraft-carrier is an allusion to his militant, collective filmmaking, while the children can be seen as ‘an oblique reminder’ of his comments about Scandinavian societies as ‘the apex of modern civilisation’ in his earlier film, If I Had Four Camels (1966). Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 155. 70

to throw some light on the poet’s subject.119 (Gibson compares this process with that used in the creation of Metaphysical wit.) This continued process of metaphoric activity eventually forms an ensemble that is poetic or lyrical rather than omniscient: ‘the lyrical poetry of ideas.’120 So, in Sunless Marker examines the film’s subject of happiness by juxtaposing it with everything that might throw some light on this elusive subject.

Gibson’s analysis provides an explanation for the near-juxtaposition of the image of the three girls (representing happiness) and the aircraft carrier (representing power). I say near- juxtaposition because the two images don’t actually meet. Gibson’s analysis of Marker’s stylistic ensemble gives important insights into the director’s work. Equally valuable is the understanding gained by extending that analysis to include a consideration of the juxtaposition of the images with the intervening black screen itself.

When the presence of the black screen is overlooked, the two images, representations of vastly different experiences of the world, do appear to be juxtaposed.

But closer inspection reveals that each image is juxtaposed with the black screen, rather than each other. Black screen (as distinct from black leader) usually appears unheralded in a film, simply to mark a brief jump in space or time, or a pause in the argument or narrative. Here, however, the black screen takes on a different role. By holding the two discontinuous instants in suspension it prevents them joining together to begin the spatial and temporal flow of the narrative. At the same time, the narrative function at the start of

Sunless is carried by the voice-over, which is heard only during the presence of the black screen. The co-existence of the voice-over and the black screen means that the latter functions as both a formal space and a space of reflection, memory, and contemplation

(although one that’s not yet acknowledged). The black screen keeps the two images

119 Gibson, ‘What do I know?’ 26. Clive James states that Diaghilev instructed Cocteau to ‘astonish me.’ Clive James, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of my Time, Picador, London, 2007, 128. 120 Gibson, ‘What do I know?’ 29. 71

separate while the voice-over justifies the separation—the attempts to link the image of the children with other images ‘never worked.’ The resulting rapprochement enables the film to stylistically and materially express the cameraman’s difficulty in representing this happy memory within the context of representations of other memories such as the aircraft carrier that are incompatible with happiness.

The juxtaposition of image and black screen then reaches a climax with the reappearance of the black screen after the image of the aircraft carrier, where its presence continues to obstruct the emergence of any narrative flow of images. In this moment, its formal status is suddenly transformed when the voice-over refers to it as ‘a long piece of black leader.’ Formerly unremarked, the black screen now becomes part of the emerging narrative about the difficulty of representing the memory of a moment of happiness: ‘If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.’ The verbal identification of the black screen as ‘black leader’ is astonishing because black leader is simply part of the film medium, carrying no representational or narrative information or meaning. Here, however, the identification gives meaning to the black screen’s continuing obstruction of the spatial and temporal flow of narrative. In doing so, it actualises the idea of a failure of understanding and communication. This use of the black leader as a stylistic expression of communicative failure not only creates a rapprochement between material and narrative elements but also brings about an actual transformation from the one to the other. Thus, the ‘speciously heterogeneous’ elements Marker uses to express the cameraman’s reflections on his subject include material elements of the film’s form. The transformation of the black leader into a narrative element provides another means of expression in his search for a way to represent his memory of happiness within the context of his other, less happy memories.

Another important aspect of the title sequence is the way its horizontal montage invites the viewer’s understanding of the film’s formal means, first, through its articulation of the film’s central problem and second, by its identification of the black leader. This initial invitation sets up the expectation that the film will share its considerations with the viewer. In addition, conducting the title sequence discussion through its form suggests that the film will approach its subject of the representation of memory through speculative, meditative deliberations in which the formal means of representation are as important as the subject they discuss. As the voice-over states soon after, ‘We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.’

Train of Dreams: From the Banal to the Ambiguous

At the start of the train/dream sequence, the voice-over states: ‘The train inhabited by sleeping people puts together all the fragments of dreams, makes a single film of them— the ultimate film.’ This sequence juxtaposes documentary images of sleeping train commuters with ‘fragments of dreams’ consisting of cinematic and photographic images from several sources. The main source is television, earlier referred to as ‘that memory box.’ From this are drawn images from horror films, action programs and anime. These are combined with images from advertisements within the commuting environment in order to consider the effect upon people’s subconscious of the images surrounding them in their daily lives.

As the sequence begins we see the department-store entrance to an underground railway station in Tokyo where, in the foreground, a shop window displays a large image of a smiling caucasian woman’s face looking to camera. This breaks up like a vertical louvre and swivels as Japanese pedestrians approach the door. The voice-over states, ‘A face

appears, disappears… a trace is found, is lost. All the folklore of dreams is so much in its place that the next day when I am awake I realize that I continue to seek in the basement labyrinth the presence concealed the night before.’

Among shots of people walking to the trains we see a large image of another caucasian woman’s face, eyes heavily made up, head and shoulders decorated with artificial leaves, gazing out with an intense expression from behind drapes as people pass. The voice-over talks of dreams finding their setting here, wondering if they may be part of a collective dream of which the city may be a projection. Most of the shots of these large faces include commuters—either their bodies or their reflections—in the frame. So the shots which include the faces are complex ones because they incorporate two moments of filmmaking. Although the original purpose of the women’s faces may have been to sell various products, they are incorporated in the sequence to help sell the idea of a dreamlike state where ‘A face appears, disappears… a trace is found, is lost.’ In addition, the images bring to mind the earlier comment about Japanese television: the more you watch it ‘the more you feel it’s watching you.’ In any case, the way the images are incorporated helps to establish the idea that they are part of ‘a gigantic collective dream of which the entire city may be the projection’.

The train dream is preceded by a point of transit at the station’s ticket barrier. Here, people deposit their tickets under the gaze of the ticket collector—the close-ups of hands and tickets at the barrier creating a rhythmic, hypnotic effect as people’s bodies pass rapidly through frame. Burbling electronic music begins with the final statement from the voice- over: ‘The tickets from the automatic dispenser grant admission to the show.’ A sense of

‘miraculous disorientation,’ akin to that produced by photogenie, is induced by the combination of the camera work, the fluid editing and the rippling, repetitive music. This sets the scene for a dreamlike state in preparation for the commuters’ imaginary dream.

But this is a fairly ambiguous invocation of a poetic register because it includes a shot that steps back into the documentary register when a boy mocks the camera, showing it his ticket before handing it in, then turning to show his raised empty hand before moving on.

The film then sets up the mood of a fictional journey by cutting from documentary footage of a speeding real train at night, blue and black predominating in the images, to footage from a tv-anime with its blue/black image of train tracks, as though seen from the front of a speeding train. This train switches from one trainline to another, then the sudden superimposition of a title in Japanese signals the approach of the collective dream promised back at the ticket barrier. (No English translation is given, but the title, Galaxy

Express 999, is the title of a popular tv-anime science-fiction series featuring an interplanetary steam train.121)

The earlier documentary train sounds blend with the sounds of the anime train. We see several documentary shots of train tracks from the rear of the real train travelling fast.

There’s a scrap of music and a haunting whistle from the anime train. We then go to interior documentary images of people sleeping, reading, strap hanging. Through the windows we catch glimpses of towns and streets. There are sounds of a modern train horn and fast travel on the track as the light gradually darkens from late afternoon to dusk.

Then, three minutes from the scene at the ticket barrier, the sequence returns to animation with the shot of a track angled up into the night. A train heads up the track and off into the sky. There’s another ghostly train whistle, a girl’s gasp, and a close-up of a girl looking shocked. We are now into the drama of the collective dream.

121 Galaxy Express 999 is a television series of 113 episodes made from 1978-1981. Based on Leiji Matsumoto’s science-fiction manga, its characters travel through space via an interplanetary steam train. 75

Figure 14. Second point of transit into the collective dream.

The dream begins with a sequence from a horror film in which documentary close- ups of sleeping commuters are juxtaposed with ghoulish, threatening beings from horror movies in order to suggest a glimpse into the commuters’ dreamscape. For instance, there’s a shot of a woman passenger, her head lolling and jerking as she dozes, followed by a shot from a horror film of a young woman whose head leaves her body and floats up into the air. There’s a haunting cry as we see a big close-up of a staring eye, before we return to the woman, still dozing.

Figure 15. Nightmare

After several minutes, the horror-film sequence gives way to a short action-movie sequence which juxtaposes images of younger sleeping commuters with images of samurai fighting, to which Natsume Masako (as the young monk from Monkey) appears to react. 76

Then, returning to the commuters, we see documentary images of a young man and woman side by side, both dozing. Close shots show their hands demurely in their laps.

These are juxtaposed with close-ups of hands in a sex scene, followed by other images of love-making, intercut with shots of the young commuters sleeping on. There’s a cat’s miaow, then a photograph of a cat, supposedly looking on, wide-eyed.

Figure 16. Young dreamers observed by cat.

As the train slows for the station, the dream ends with the close-up of a woman who wakes, her gaze going, first to the camera, then off left, presumably out the opposite window, where it is ‘met’ by the malevolent glare of a man’s face on a huge film poster in the street nearby. At the end of the sequence, the passengers disembark and leave the station, while large images of a sweet young woman seem to watch them, or to watch over them, as they descend the station steps, their reflections on the glass before her.

Figure 17. Watching over the travellers.

Before the sequence depicting the dream begins, the voice-over states that it combines all the fragments of the sleepers’ dreams into the ‘ultimate film.’ McElhaney

responds to the way the voice-over frames the sequence by suggesting that the images of sex and violence ‘speak of and to the passengers’ larger collective unconscious desires.’122

For Kear, also, the intercutting of the television images with the sleeping faces suggests the way media images of desire and violence become imprinted in the subconscious of the viewers.123 But these analyses say nothing about the mode of address, or tone of voice, with which the film addresses its subject, although this is as important as the content in creating the meaning of the sequence.

In Nosferatu, as discussed earlier, Murnau’s juxtaposition of the images of Nosferatu and Ellen Hutter creates a logically-impossible imaginary space between the two characters, thus enabling an element of fantasy to be stylistically incorporated into the film’s narrative.

By contrast, although Marker’s juxtapositions of documentary and fantastic elements in the train/dream sequence in Sunless make a pretence of creating the imaginary space-times of sleepers’ dreams, there’s a self-consciousness to the juxtapositions that skews the meaning of each rapprochement. (This also applies where the juxtaposition occurs within the shot, as with the complex images that juxtapose hurrying commuters and watchful female presences.)

Speaking of the principles behind his selection of images for his earlier film, Le Fond de l’air est rouge, Marker says that he wanted to reveal the origins of the images so the information they presented wouldn’t be seen ‘as a cosa mentale—a mental object—but as a material object, with its grain, its spots of irregular surface, sometimes even its splinters.’124

This motivation can also be seen in Sunless’s dream sequence, where the images convey information about their origins, despite being removed from their original context. For instance, the tv-anime Galaxy 999 is no doubt familiar to many viewers. Similarly, many of

122 McElhaney, ‘Primitive Projections: Chris Marker’s Silent Movie,’ printed in MFJ No.29 (Fall 1996) Video Installation, 11. 123 Kear, Sunless/Sans Soleil, 22, 23. 78

the other images are probably instantly recognisable to those who’ve seen the films. Even viewers unfamiliar with the Japanese language and culture can understand the playful intent of the sequence, partly because its juxtaposition of low-key documentary footage of the commuters with highly dramatic and stylistically distinctive television images draws attention to the formal qualities of the latter.

However, one of Marker’s playful juxtapositions relies on specific cultural and linguistic knowledge. This is the sequence where the young lovers are supposedly watched by the wide-eyed cat. As much of the fun in the sequence comes from the viewer’s understanding of the origin of the cat image, non-Japanese speakers can’t fully appreciate the intent of the sequence without understanding the text superimposed over the cat.

On first glance, the black cat appears (according to the convention of shot/reverse shot) to be gazing in fascination at the scene of youthful sex which, in turn, appears to express the mutual desire of the two young commuters. For a non-Japanese speaker, the text superimposed over the cat is easily overlooked, or even enjoyed as a decorative token of Japaneseness. When translated, however, it reads ‘Tokyo Mode Gakuen,’ revealing that the entire image is part of an advertisement for the prestigious private fashion school of this name. 125 Thus it appears, from the simultaneous expression in the image of the cat of two incongruous messages—one imaginary and the other documentary—that the sequence is actually a humorous comment on youthful desire rather than a serious depiction of it.

The image of the cat was probably included in the advertisement to give the sense of ‘cool’

124 Marker, Le Fond de l’air est rouge, quoted by Alter in Chris Marker, 86, 87. 79

likely to attract young commuters to enrol at the fashion school. Here, however, the cat seems to be transfixed by the sex scene, to which young viewers are equally likely to be attracted. So the cat image carries more than one message. Seeming to simultaneously endorse both the school and the sex, it could even be read as suggesting that this style of sexual activity is considered fashionable.

Close scrutiny of all the fragments or discontinuous instants from television included in the train sequence reveals that they are all doing double duty in the sequence, first in their documentary capacity representing images seen on television ‘the night before’ and second as imaginary moments within commuters’ dreams. This simultaneity prevents their successful transformation into the discontinuous instants of the dream. In this, the

‘splinters’ in the fictional moments forestall the transformation of banal media images into representations of sleepers’ dreams. Part of the fun of viewing this sequence comes from considering the implications of this mismatch between its voice-over and the manner of its rapprochements. Due to their playful nature, the rapprochements between documentary and fictional space-times don’t quite yield the transformation of banal media images into sleepers’ dreams which the voice-over leads us to expect.

Transformation in the Zone

The Zone in Sunless is a reference to Andrei Tarkovsky’s science fiction film The Stalker

(1980). In The Stalker, the Zone is a disconcerting space, apparently possessed of the power of thought, which travellers must cross to reach their goal. Formally, the strangeness of the space is conveyed through the counterpoint of unidentifiable and disturbing sounds with images of abandoned fields and structures. In Sunless, the Zone is

125 Japanese translations and incidental information from Hiroko Moore, 8 January, 2008. 80

the film’s term for a series of six sequences whose images are solarised with the aid of a digital synthesiser in order to discuss the process of representing memory and history. As justification, the voice-over states that the cameraman’s pal, Hayao Yamaneko: ‘claims that electronic texture is the only one that can deal with sentiment, memory and imagination.’

The Zone is introduced following the sequence showing a demonstration against the building of the Narita airport. The voice-over accompanying the images expresses the cameraman’s frustration that nothing has changed after ten years of demonstrating except that the airport has now been built. Hayao presents a solution: ‘If the images of the present don’t change, then change the images of the past.’ We then see images of demonstrators reproduced in the Zone, where the process of solarisation has utterly transformed them. Accompanied by strange electronic music, the plastic and formal transformation of the images suggests the possibility that change has actually occurred in the decade of struggle. The cameraman comes to the conclusion that, although the peasants have failed to stop the airport, their resistance has given them a new understanding of their place in the world.

The solarised images in the Zone are replete with the empowerment of photogenie, as were the fictional images in the train/dream sequence. But where the photogenic quality in the train/dream images refers back to their source, the photogenic quality of the solarised images in the Zone acts to distance them from their original context—often one of conflict and repression—while simultaneously dramatising the subjects’ point of view.

Kear sees the Zone’s transmutation of documentary images into ‘a pageant of flowing plural energies and fragmentary intensities of colour and shape’ as an alternative language for discussing the limits of conventional representation, particularly for those whose previously-suppressed point of view might otherwise go unexpressed and unheeded.126

126 Kear, Sunless/Sans Soleil, 34, 35. 81

Apart from the Narita demonstrators, the Zone’s subjects include the Kamikaze, whose unacknowledged personal stories are so at odds with the historical record. Then there is the almost-hidden, direct gaze of the woman in the marketplace at Praia that lasts the length of one film frame until solarised and extended. Another example concerns the Eta

(Burakumin) or non-persons, whose name is a taboo word which can’t be pronounced. As the voice-over states: ‘Non-persons. How can they be shown, except as non-images?’ In the case of the woman in the marketplace, a rapprochement occurs in the way she is first seen ‘untreated’ and then as a solarised image in the context of the Zone. In the case of the Kamikaze, however, the rapprochement between the documentary and solarised form of the footage is elided, so the images only appear in solarised form.

The Kamikaze sequence follows a sequence about the Ryukyu people, whose sovereignty of Okinawa was ignored during World War II by both the occupying Japanese and the invading American forces. Both sequences concern events related to the battle for

Okinawa. Stylistically, however, the two sequences are very different—particularly in their treatment of space and time. The Ryukyu sequence uses voice-over in conjunction with the cameraman’s silent documentary footage to explain how the island of Okinawa had a different sense of time to that of the modern, industrialised world until the war brought profound change to its way of life. The camera follows elderly people walking up a hill in

Okinawa to a traditional purification ceremony. Over this footage, the voice-over speaks about the savage battle for a hill like this between the Japanese and United States in 1945.

We watch the ceremony, conducted by the local community’s last remaining Noro priestess and hear that the tradition will die with this Noro, due to the impact of the war upon the

Ryukyu culture of magical belief. The voice-over declares: ‘Magical cultures that disappear leave traces to those who succeed them. This one will leave none: the break in history has been too violent.’ At the end of the sequence, the camera films a ditch, edged with a line

of stones, with palms and vines growing from its depths. We see a man take a photograph of it, climbing over a low fence to get a closer shot. The voice-over states: ‘I touched that break at the summit of the hill, as I had touched it at the edge of the ditch where 200 girls had used grenades to kill themselves during the battle, rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans.’ A fast pan away from the ditch gives a glimpse of someone posing for another photographer. The voice-over states: ‘People have their pictures taken in front of the ditch. Across from it, souvenir lighters are sold, shaped like grenades.’

Immediately after, there’s a close-up of Hayao’s hand adjusting a control on the image synthesiser. The voice-over says: ‘On Hayao’s machine, war resembles letters being burned, shredded in a frame of fire.’ The Kamikaze sequence begins with solarised images from World War II of the Japanese military, including the Kamikaze pilots. The voice-over discusses the nature and beliefs of the Kamikaze pilots, coerced into a sacrificial role by the

Imperial Army: ‘Off Okinawa, the Kamikaze dived on the American fleet. They would become a legend… One would have to read their last letters to learn the Kamikaze weren’t all volunteers, nor were they all swashbuckling samurai.’ We hear the farewell letter of

Kamikaze pilot, Ryoji Uebara:

I have always thought that Japan must live free in order to live eternally. It may seem idiotic to say that today, under a totalitarian regime. We Kamikaze pilots are machines, we have nothing to say, except to beg our compatriots to make Japan the great country of our dreams. In the plane I am a machine, a bit of magnetised metal that will plaster itself against an aircraft carrier. But once on the ground I am a human being with feelings and passions. Please excuse these disorganised thoughts. I’m leaving you a rather melancholy picture, but in the depths of my heart I am happy. I have spoken frankly, forgive me.

After the letter, the voice-over gives way to the slow, melancholy music, electronically- treated, accompanying solarised images of Kamikaze planes attacking American warships— some exploding on target, others being destroyed in mid air or falling into the sea.

Figure 18: Solarised images dramatise one pilot’s last flight.

Although very different in style, both the scene at the ditch and the scene of the

Kamikaze in their final battle speak about, and on behalf of, young people whose voices were lost in the war. However, the different styles of representation give the viewer a different experience of their equally tragic deaths. The girl’s suicides are depicted indirectly, long after the event, by the cameraman’s documentary footage of the ditch, now a tourist site, where they killed themselves. We see the site in the present, while the voice- over account of their suicide is couched in the past tense, thus distancing the viewer. After this, the sequence returns to the present with the story of the cigarette lighters shaped as grenades. As to the girls themselves, not only do we lack images of them, we also know nothing about them beyond the manner of their death and the fact that it’s the Ryukyu women who transmit the magical knowledge in their culture.

By contrast, the pilots’ deaths are presaged by the reading of Ryoji Uebara’s farewell letter, bringing him to life for us and giving us insight into his feelings—presumably shared by others. The pilots are then represented by solarised images from the actual battle in which they died. In their solarised form, the images suggest the idea of death by fire, reinforcing the thought expressed earlier—‘war is like letters being burned’—that the pilots’ thoughts are being silenced along with their bodies. Although the contextual detail has been lost in the process, the basis of these images is still their indexicality, so we know that within these solarised images are individuals—perhaps even Ryoji—whose historic death is happening before our eyes. This knowledge lends an uncanny quality to the images due to the way they resurrect these men at the moment of death—a moment made

more poignant by our awareness of Ryoji’s feelings. Roland Barthes speaks of the profound effect of seeing a photographic image of a condemned man taken in 1865, shortly before the man’s execution.127 This effect, which Barthes terms the photo’s punctum, was his own horrified realisation about the subject: ‘He is dead and he is going to die.’128 Barthes earlier identifies the punctum as the equivalent of being moved, or ‘pricked’ by the image (particularly by a detail in it), which leads him to feel compassion for the subject.129 In the case of the photograph of the condemned man, Barthes identifies the punctum as aligned to the temporality of the photograph—its quality or affirmation of ‘that- has-been.’ The fascination for Barthes lies in the nature of the time perceptible within the image. Its subject, who is now dead, is alive in the moment recorded in the photograph and yet he is going to die sometime before our present, just as we are going to die sometime in the future.

Barthes contends that the ever-moving, constantly changing nature of the cinematic image prevents the viewer from experiencing an equivalent punctum to that which results from taking the time to ponder the complex temporality in the moment captured by the photograph.130 This proviso would seem to apply to the sequence of the girls’ suicide at the ditch, which reveals the horror of its history while leaving no time for contemplation of the event. Immediately after the revelation of the suicide, the time pressure against reflection is compounded by the ironic tale of today’s exploitation of the site. In addition, there are no images of the girls when alive, only images from the present day of the ditch— all that remains of the site where, we are told, the event occurred. But despite the lack of images from the past, a careful examination of this sequence reveals that the temporal

127 Alexander Gardner photographed Lewis Payne in his prison cell where he was waiting to be hanged for attempting to assassinate U.S. Secretary of State, W.H. Seward. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, Hill and Wang, NY, 1981, 95, 96. 128 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 96. 129 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 116. 85

encounter attributed by Barthes to the photograph’s indexical status is, for Marker, connected to the physical space of the ditch where the cameraman touched that ‘break in history.’ Here, his belief that the magical Ryukyu culture will leave no traces to those who succeed them because ‘the break in history has been too violent’ is borne out in the opportunistic way the historical moment of the suicide is incorporated into the contemporary tourist experience. With its juxtaposition of voice-over about the past event and images of the present-day treatment of the site, the resulting rapprochement gives the viewer the experience of a complex temporality while clearly illustrating the absence of the traditional Ryukyu culture in today’s world.

Where the ditch sequence discusses the role of forgetting and absence in our understanding of history, the Kamikaze sequence considers the way history is rewritten through the inclusion of previously-suppressed data. Barthes’ idea that the cinema viewer is unable to take the time to experience complex temporality is based on the constant pace of film through the projector. However, his objection doesn’t take into account essay films such as Sunless, and the temporal disruption of its active analysis of representation. The discussion of the ditch sequence reveals one way in which the film provides a complex temporality for the viewer. The Kamikaze sequence provides another. As earlier discussed, the reading of the pilot’s farewell is followed by images of several planes on take off and in battle. We see several solarised images of the pilots’ deaths, the only sound the slow lament of the music. The absence of voice-over, along with the slow pace of the music—its lamenting tone signalling the past tense of their deaths—seemingly suspends the projected pace of the film, freeing the viewer to contemplate the temporality of the deaths in light of the historic circumstances in which they occurred. This contemplative

130 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 89. 86

state enables the viewer to feel a profound pity for these pilots similar to that which

Barthes felt before the photograph of the condemned man.

Despite the formal differences between the ditch sequence and the Kamikaze sequence, both can be imagined as a form of bearing witness for their subjects. By reintroducing them into history, the filmmaker follows the example of the couple in the temple consecrated to cats—performing the ritual for their lost cat by naming her so she will be recognised on her death—and thus repairing the ‘web of time where it has been broken.’ And despite Hayao’s claim, mentioned earlier, that electronic texture is the only one that can represent sentiment, memory, and imagination, the effect of these two sequences—one with images transformed by solarisation and one without—is due, not simply to any formal transformation of the image’s photogenic qualities but to the rapprochement of sound and image within each sequence.131 In the Kamikaze sequence, the transformation in the image assists this rapprochement in its rewriting of history.

Loss Foretold: From Reject to Revelation

Marker’s inclusion of the film’s material form in the title sequence highlights his use of the stylistic figure of transformation to express the cameraman’s struggle to represent his memory of one moment of happiness in today’s world. In the ensuing cinematic discussion, the film presents various ways of representing memory and history through the figure of transformation—several of which have been considered in these pages. This section returns to the director’s method of using the film’s material form as a stylistic figure

131 This confirms Kear’s idea that the film’s dramatis personae, here represented by Hayao, can be seen as positions within the film, enabling the director to present alternative ways of representing memory and history. 87

of transformation—this time in its role in the climactic sequence of Sunless, which depicts the cameraman’s resolution of his search.

At the start of the film, the cameraman begins his search for a way to represent the happiness he saw in his memory of the image of the three little girls. By the time the film arrives at the climactic sequence of Sunless, thoughts about representing one memory of happiness have been joined by reflections about representing other important issues such as the effects of time and memory more generally. His expanded search appears to finally be resolved when he arrives at the idea that this moment of happiness cannot be either remembered or represented without loss. This point occurs just after the dondo-yaki sequence, where people clean up after a celebration. Part of the clean up involves the burning of ornaments that were used in the celebration. The voice-over likens this ceremony to the one at Uemo shown earlier in the film. (There, broken dolls were burned in the temple of the goddess of compassion in a ceremony for the repose of their souls.)

In the dondo-yaki sequence, the voice-over explains the Japanese ceremony of dondo-yaki as ‘a Shinto blessing of the debris that have a right to immortality… The last state—before their disappearance—of the poignancy of things.’

The film juxtaposes the image of Japanese children beating the ground with sticks at the dondo-yaki ceremony with the shot previously seen of the children from Iceland. The voice-over states: ‘And that’s where my three children of Iceland came and grafted themselves in.’ The shot now extends to follow the girls as they head off into the distance, the image from the handheld camera now trembling noticeably.

Figure 19: The climactic sequence: first, the shot that ends shakily.

Voice-over: ‘I picked up the whole shot again, adding the somewhat hazy end, the frame trembling under the force of the wind beating us down on the cliff: everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said better than all the rest what I saw in that moment, why I held it at arms’ length, at zoom’s length, until its last twenty-fourth of a second…’

The film cuts from the three young girls to the start of a pan of their city. ‘… the city of Heimaey spread out below us.’ The pan gradually reveals that the city is largely covered in black ash, with some still smoking behind it.

Voice-over: ‘And when, five years later, my friend Haroun Tazieff sent me the film he had just shot in the same place I lacked only the name to learn that nature performs its own dondo-yaki; the island’s volcano had awakened.’

There’s a close shot of redhot lava leaping into the air. A zoom out reveals its location behind several partly-buried houses.

Voice-over: ‘I looked at those pictures, and it was as if the entire year ’65 had just been covered with ashes. So it sufficed to wait and the planet itself staged the working of time.’

Taking the sequence as a whole, the viewer learns, through the voice-over, that when the cameraman began making Sunless, he knew the children and their home town had

already been imperilled by the volcano.132 However, he didn’t know how to think about or represent his memory of happiness until he associated it with the dondo-yaki ceremony.

‘And that’s where my three children of Iceland came and grafted themselves in.’ This is why the sequence begins with the juxtaposition of the dondo-yaki ceremony, which blesses the last state, ‘before their disappearance—of the poignancy of things,’ with the image of three children whose home was soon to be threatened by a volcanic eruption. The idea behind this juxtaposition is to extend the blessing of compassion conveyed by the dondo- yaki ceremony, as well as the earlier ceremony at Uemo, to the three children. But in order to convey the idea of a rapprochement between the two sequences—both of which involve destruction by flames—the cameraman needed to connect the images of the girls with the images of their town in the path of the volcano.

At this point, the cameraman returned to the original footage of the girls with its shaky frames. He had previously rejected these shaky frames because the wind had prevented him holding the camera steady. But, then, when he began to think of the volcanic destruction of the girl’s home as nature’s dondo-yaki, this enabled him to see how the shaky frames could represent the force of nature soon to overwhelm the girls’ home. ‘I picked up the whole shot again, adding the somewhat hazy end, the frame trembling under the force of the wind beating us down on the cliff: everything I had cut in order to tidy up, and that said better than all the rest what I saw in that moment.’

The cameraman now sees in these shaky frames something that wasn’t previously visible to him: a representation of the threat to come. The shaky image of the young girls makes visible the fragility and temporality of happiness in a way that gives the viewer an understanding that is at once cognitive, sensual and emotional. In addition, the inclusion

132 Most people were evacuated from the island of Heimaey on the January 1973 night when the eruption began. Emergency crews stayed to fight the lava flow with seawater, saving about half the town’s houses

of the shaky frames draws attention to both the profilmic and the filmmaking process of the essay film. (As discussed in Chapter 1, Richter contends that the essay film may use any and every formal means ‘to render visible what wasn’t previously visible.’133)

Thus, the cameraman puts back the shaky frames because he now sees how to represent his memory of happiness within the context of representations of other memories. In the process, the material status of the shaky images is made to play a part in the narrative. In the same way that the black leader in the title sequence becomes a stylistic expression of communicative failure, the visual evidence of the conditions under which the filming of the three girls took place becomes a stylistic expression of the poignant impermanence of happiness. The cameraman’s decision to use a deformed or disfigured image of the world has enabled him to fulfil Bazin’s idea that film is capable of revelation.

In the words of Serge Daney: ‘the obstinate movement of the camera, far from being neutral, can provoke the transformation.’134 Bazin’s original idea of this transformation refers either to the capture by the camera of decisive moments such as a moment of risk, crisis or passage in the life of the filmed subject (for instance, when death is imminent) or to the potential for the simultaneous rupture, disruption or disfigurement of the image.

Here, I am extending the idea to include the moment of the filmmaker’s recognition during the edit that the footage can be read differently, the moment when ‘the children came and grafted themselves in.’

In Sunless, Marker makes us privy to this decisive moment through his method of using the voice-over to explain the significance of the images, thus giving us the impression of watching as he goes about the process of editing, thinking and speculating aloud about

over the next four months. The clean up and restoration took several years. About two thirds of the population eventually returned. http://www.eyjar.is/eyjar/eruption.html, (accessed 15.05.2008). 133 For a fuller discussion of Richter’s ideas on the essay film, see Chapter 1, 21. 134 Serge Daney, ‘The Screen of Fantasy (Bazin and animals)’ in Rites of Realism: Essays on Corporeal Cinema, ed., I. Margulies, Duke University Press, Durham & London, 2003, 39. 91

the images. This enables him to examine his own feelings in relation to the topic, alluding to the meaning of the event for him as an essayist in cinematic form. In this instance, the meaning is the difficulty or even impossibility of adequately representing his memory of the moment of long-lost and doomed happiness without there being some form of concomitant loss or disturbance of expression.

Additionally, we might perceive that the meaning of the event for the filmmaker concerns the impossibility of hanging onto a moment of happiness from a time gone by.

This brings to mind the quote from ‘Ash-Wednesday’ at the start of the film: ‘Because I know that time is always time/And place is always and only place’ which goes on to say

‘And what is actual is actual only for one time/And only for one place.’ But even though both representation and meaning in this climactic sequence invoke loss and failure, the filmmaker’s acceptance of the nature of their limits leads to both affirmation and revelation which are successfully expressed in this transformation of the materiality of film into the narrative of the cinematic essay form. While accepting the truth of the Eliot quote, nevertheless, the film rewrites memory ‘much as history is rewritten.’

CHAPTER 4

Locating the Past in the Present

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 giving a certain accumulation to sketch an itinerary, to map the imaginary land that stretches out inside of us. Chris Marker

Introduction

The previous chapter considers several different ways in which the figure of transformation cinematically actualises the process of memory itself, thus enabling Sunless to express

Marker’s ideas on time, place, memory, history and representation. This concluding chapter will consider the means by which the director further ‘essays’ these ideas in three of his multimedia works. These are the museum installations Zapping Zone: Proposals for an

Imaginary Television (1991) and Silent Movie (1995), as well as the CD-ROM Immemory (1998), which Marker proposed in 1994, some 50 years after his first creative work. Although seemingly very different in form, all three works represent an extension of his film essays, allowing further development of stylistic figures first considered in relation to avant-garde films of the 1920s.

The non-linear and seemingly haphazard structure of Marker’s multimedia works recalls the aims of those early filmmakers who sought to use photogenie and discontinuous

narrative to ‘counter the classical aesthetic of coherence and unity’ in film.135 Similarly,

Marker’s proposal for the structure of Silent Movie announces his intention to oppose the

‘arrogance of classical story-telling.’136 The quote at the head of this chapter is from

Marker’s proposal for Immemory—a digital model of the director’s possibly fictional memory.137 His working hypothesis is that memory can be visualised as an imaginary land whose terrain is discovered and mapped with the aid of visual evidence such as photos, postcards and mementos acquired and retained throughout life. In the digital architecture of the CD-ROM, each visual aid triggers a memory located in a specific site or zone of the imagined geographical space. Each site, in turn, is linked to others through the network of transverse connections made possible by the digital medium. With its varied links and associations between sites, the structure of Immemory provides a homology between the

CD-ROM’s physical means of representing and negotiating memory and the process of memory itself. Immemory will be approached via the two installations that served as stepping stones in Marker’s journey from the linearity of film to the non-linearity of the

CD-ROM.

Ephemeral Random Rapprochements: The Past Revisited

Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television is a multimedia installation commissioned by the Centre Georges Pompidou as part of its travelling show, Passages de l’image, curated by

135 Abel, ‘Photogénie and Company,’ 111. 136 Chris Marker, Immemory proposal, January 1994, quoted by Bill Horrigan in ‘Another Likeness,’ Chris Marker, Silent Movie, 10. 137 Chris Marker, ‘Selected Notes’ from Qu’est-ce qu’une Madeleine? A propos du CD-ROM Immemory de Chris Marker, 2. 94

Raymond Bellour, Christine van Assche and Catherine David.138 For Lupton, the exhibition aims to explore the passages and interfaces between film, video and photography in contemporary audiovisual art. This accords with Bellour’s ideas about the space or passageway between photos, films and videos, ‘the place where images pass today.’139 Viewers of Zapping Zone, arriving and departing at random, are confronted with an installation on low central platforms of numerous monitors and speakers of various shapes and sizes. These are simultaneously playing different laser-disc or video programs made by

Marker, along with computer terminals playing his computer-generated works, and light boxes showing 80 of his slides. In addition, others of his photographs and computer- generated collages are mounted on surrounding walls.

The video works are divided by their titles into various zones: Zone Matta (Matta ’85)

– Zone Bestiaire – Zone Tarkovsky (Tarkovsky ’86) – Zone Sequences (extracts from several Marker films from Le Joli mai onward) – and so on. Zone Matta is a simple, to- camera interview of the artist, surrounded by an exhibition of his paintings, expounding on the nature of being and our relationship with animals. Zone Bestiaire is a collection of four short videos on animals, mostly set in zoos.140 Zone Tokyo (Tokyo Days) has scenes on a train and escalators reminiscent of Sunless, which may, in fact, be offcuts from its location footage.141 Similarly, Zone Tarkovsky (Tarkovsky ’86) mainly consists of segments of the final day’s filming for The Sacrifice (1986). It appears to be an early version of One Day in the life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999). Zone Berlin (Berlin ’90) is also apparently part of Berliner

Ballade (1990), commissioned for television. Early scenes juxtapose close-ups of crosses

138 Zapping Zone is part of the museum’s permanent collection. Although the complete exhibition isn’t currently on display, video segments may be viewed there. Not having seen the installation, apart from individual videos from it discussed here, my account of the effect of the complete work relies on Lupton’s report. Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 180ff. 139 Raymond Bellour, L’Entre-Images: Photo, Cinéma, Vidéo (1990), summarised at http://www.newmedia- art.org/english/glossaire/b/htm, (accessed July 30, 2006). 140 Bestiaire (at the time of viewing) includes ‘Chat écoutant la musique,’ ‘An Owl is an Owl is an Owl,’ ‘Zoo Piece,’ ‘Slon Tango.’ 95

commemorating unknown people (killed trying to escape East Berlin) with images of people selling chunks of the Wall, freshly graffitied. A droll animation, Théorie des Ensembles

(Theory of Sets), considers the various ways Noah could store all the world’s animals upon his ark (which is shaped like the head of the Cheshire cat). Lupton suggests this may be a pointer for making sense of the diverse array of topics in the work’s various zones— particularly for the way it shows that the animals may be classified in a number of overlapping sets.

From the installation’s title, it appears that Marker intends Zapping Zone as an alternative, tongue-in-cheek model of the distracted way viewers move among television narratives and media images in the world today. And no doubt the viewer is likely to experience a great deal of distraction in the midst of the installation’s plethora of voices, sounds and images—its random rapprochements of discontinuous moments conveyed by a variety of graphic, photographic, and cinematic means. According to Lupton, the installation provokes an ‘enchanted bewilderment’ in the viewer, followed by momentary

‘flashes of association and lateral insight’ as the different zones appear to link meaningfully with each other before falling apart once more.142 One might expect these chance rapprochements to lack meaning or cohesion (as with most television zapping in real life) except that they are all between moments from works created by Marker. For this reason, almost incidentally, all these separate zones or representations can be seen as constituting parts of one whole or set. But what is this set, and what is the nature of its poetics?

In Sunless, the voice-over states ‘my images are my memories’ and, in Zapping Zone, the viewer is exposed to the cacophony of representations of the director’s past concerns, all clamouring for attention, from which viewers choose their own focus as best they may within the press of topics, sounds and images. (I assume from Lupton’s account of Zapping

141 There are also excerpts from Sunless in Zone Sequences. 96

Zone that the entire work is in a state of perpetual motion, with each rapprochement between individual works creating an imaginary space and time of an ephemeral, random nature.) With this simultaneous screening, each work competes with others for attention, so the distracted viewer is unlikely to experience any sense of linear progression. For instance, one viewer may focus in turn on Tarkovsky setting up the tracking shot of ‘The

Adoration of the Magi’ for The Sacrifice in Tarkovsky ‘86, then Juju doing her sad dance in

Lubljanka zoo for Slon Tango, followed by the close-up of the memorial for an unknown person in Berlin ’90.

Figure 20: Ephemeral random rapprochements.

Another viewer may focus on an entirely different ‘sequence.’ Where the meaning in each film—viewed singly—is more or less accessible, the ephemeral nature of the viewer’s experience of the installation forestalls understanding. Consequently, the major stylistic figure of the installation is the ephemeral random rapprochement leading to a momentary imaginary space-time connecting two or more works, but one that is not sustained dramatically as it may be in a film.

In Zapping Zone, rapprochement plays a different role. Here, its function is to build, by chance, a loose amalgam of imaginary spaces and times within the installation as a whole. Each photographed or cinematic space-time, whether documented or imagined, actualises one way of seeing one aspect of the world. By randomly juxtaposing them, the resulting ephemeral random rapprochements enable the installation to poetically express the associative faculties of the mind. Together, these accidental rapprochements create a

142 Lupton, Ibid., 180. 97

new narrative, individually experienced, which poetically applies a retrospective focus to

Marker’s past works: comparing his past ideas on time, place, memory, history and representation, one with another, and also drawing them into the present for reconsideration. As a result, the installation of Zapping Zone can be seen as an early step, even if unintentional, toward an electronic prototype of memory, where the director’s memory is physically represented by his previous works. However, this model lacks both the guiding voice-over of his essay films’ subjective consciousness and the figure of transformation expressed so convincingly in Sunless. There, the voice-over states: ‘We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten.’ Yet here, in Zapping Zone, representations of past concerns are presented unchanged in all but their chance proximity to one another.

Ephemeral random rapprochement is also a major figure in Marker’s installation,

Silent Movie, in which he ‘quotes’ the works of pre-1940s filmmakers, primarily of the silent screen era. This work was commissioned to mark one century of cinema by the Wexner

Center for the Arts at Ohio State University. It has also travelled to other museums where it has been set up in different ways. The following discussion describes Silent Movie as though the installation was still at the Wexner Center. Its physical setup, therefore, consists of a single stack of five video monitors simultaneously playing DVDs containing numerous black-and-white film excerpts from earlier films. These are organised to appear in random sequences. Accompanying the images is a soundtrack, The Perfect Tapeur, Marker’s eclectic compilation of solo piano music, which includes works by Duke Ellington, Bernstein and

Scriabin. On the walls near the video tower there are posters of playfully recast and rethought films (such as Hiroshima, mon amour, starring Greta Garbo and Sessue Hayakawa), along with stills of Catherine Belkhodja. Viewers may stand or sit to view the image tower and listen to the music, or move around the room to view the posters and stills. Also

accompanying the exhibition is the catalogue Chris Marker: Silent Movie, with chapters by

Marker and the installation’s curator, Bill Horrigan.143

The content of the videos includes extracts from silent films such as those by

Murnau, Epstein, Abel Gance, Fritz Lang, Luis Bunuel, René Clair, Marcel L’Herbier,

Griffith and Dziga Vertov, while extracts from sound films come from the early horror genre: Frankenstein, King Kong, Cat People, Creature from the Black Lagoon.144 Interspersed throughout are images of Catherine Belkhodja as the ‘star’ of the work. Four of the five monitors are each devoted to a particular theme: ‘The Journey,’ ‘The Face,’ ‘The Gesture,’ and ‘The Waltz.’ On the central monitor, there are images of eyes, and what Marker refers to as ‘abstracted archival imagery.’145 These include moments of discontinuity— superimpositions, slow motion and freeze-frames. In addition, the central monitor contains 94 intertitles.146

Figure 21: Possible horizontal sequence of eyes for the central monitor.

Even without the abstracted archival imagery and the intertitles, the sequence of images of eyes filmed in different eras with different film stock and styles of shooting is both intriguing and distracting.147 These feelings are exacerbated by the ever-changing array on the image tower.

143 Bill Horrigan, ‘Another Likeness,’ and Marker, ‘The Rest is Silent.’ 144 Joe McElhaney, ‘Primitive Projections: Chris Marker’s Silent Movie,’ 8, 12. 145 Marker, quoted by Horrigan, ‘Another Likeness’ 12. 146 McElhaney, ‘Primitive Projections: Chris Marker’s Silent Movie,’ 10. 147 Here, the eyes of the editor and cameraman from Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera flank a close-up of Catherine Belkhodja from Marker’s Silent Movie. 99

Figure 22: Possible chance juxtapositions on the video tower.148

The Journey

The Face

Intertitle: ‘Remember me but oh forget my fate’

The Gesture

The Waltz (under water)

Some intertitles are drawn from other artforms. For instance, ‘Remember me/but oh forget my fate’ refers to Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas (1689).149 Others refer to Marker’s own work. ‘And the train rolls on, toward an uncertain future’ refers to The Last Bolshevik.

On the whole, the intertitles reconfigure the intertitles of the silent era. For instance, ‘And

148 Image sources: The Man with the Movie Camera; Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante (1934); Silent Movie. 149 Purcell’s words are ‘Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.’ 100

when they had crossed the bridge…’ refers to the intertitle in Nosferatu after Hutter crosses the bridge to Count Orlock’s castle: ‘And when he reached the other side of the bridge, the phantoms came to meet him.’150 In Silent Movie, each intertitle on the centre screen mimics the role of the Nosferatu intertitle by providing a point of transit into an imaginary space and time connecting the images on the other screens. However, the computer interface program ensures random sequencing of all five programs. Therefore, each intertitle, while seeming to give interpretive or associative inferences to the images appearing simultaneously with it, could actually ‘apply’ to a completely different set of images on its next appearance. Thus the ephemeral random rapprochements in Silent Movie are given a new, one-off, random ‘meaning.’ In Marker’s words: ‘It’s the Kuleshov experiment extended to writing.’151 But rather than providing the viewer with any sense of narrative, the constantly changing, random appearance of the plethora of texts and images in Silent Movie actually gives the viewer a dazzling series of associations that are never sustained.

In its juxtaposition of contemporary forms of photogenie and discontinuity with earlier forms, Silent Movie poetically applies a retrospective focus to the latter. With its mix of old and new images and intertitles, each ephemeral random rapprochement creates an ambiguous, momentary space-time or connection between them. This is at once documentary—in the sense that each of its elements has a particular historical status—as well as imaginary in its new ephemeral alignment within the installation. In this dialectical adaptation, the ephemeral random rapprochements act as a prototype of memory and the associative workings of the mind. However, this prototype lacks the transformative figure that actualises the process of memory in Sunless. Silent Movie adopts a different strategy toward the representation of Marker’s memories of early film. By freeing the archival

150 Fieschi, ‘F.W. Murnau,’ 719. 101

images from their original context to exert their photogenic qualities in the present, the installation enables the contemporary viewer to experience a degree of disorientation akin to the miraculous disorientation the director remembers feeling when he first saw Simone

Genevois in de Gastyne’s La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc.

Marker returns to his childhood memory of Genevois in his CD-ROM, Immemory.

Immemory is a digital working model of the director’s memory imagined as a geographical space whose terrain, or zones, can be traversed with the aid of the visual evidence accumulated through the life of its creator. The visual evidence includes a few snatches of film along with images of prints, postcards, tickets, film stills and photographs, cinema programs, posters, and other memorabilia. Marker’s proposal for Immemory states: ‘I claim, for the image, the humility and the powers of a madeleine.’152 In Proust’s Remembrance of

Things Past, the narrator discusses how the chance taste of a small cake called a madeleine— last tasted as a young boy in the company of his aunt Léonie—triggers an involuntary recall of people and events from his youthful past.153 Similarly, for Marker, each small piece of visual evidence of his past acts as a memory-trigger or madeleine.154 In the imagined geographical space of Immemory, the image is the gateway to one of the director’s memories of a particular place and time in his past. For Proust, the encounter with the past occurs by chance. Due to the CD-ROM’s non-linearity, this aleatory quality is also present in

Immemory.

This working model of memory uses computer memory—with its prodigious capacity for accumulating data—to hold the information representing the memories present in the director’s mind. In order for the CD-ROM to function like human memory,

151 Marker quoted by Horrigan, ‘Another Likeness,’ 12. 152 Marker, Immemory proposal, quoted by Horrigan, ‘Another Likeness,’ 9. 153 Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Vol. 1, Chatto & Windus Ltd., London, 1982, 47-50. 154 For Marker, the name Madeleine also refers to the heroine of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo with her allegedly impossible memory of a time before she was born. 102

with its constant selection and revision of facts, items in the computer memory are arranged in a non-heirarchical manner accessible by various routes or links. The viewer may enter Immemory either through the Index or through the image icons for one of the zones. These zones have the subject headings of Travel, Museum, Memory, Cinema,

Poetry, War, Photography and Xplugs (an ironic reworking in collage of images from art history). Each zone contains a cluster of information and impressions relating to the topic.

When progressing through a zone, the viewer’s path is frequently complicated by options to follow a tangent, bifurcation or addendum leading to another topic or even another zone. This arrangement mimics the way forgotten memories may be retrieved through their links and associations with other memories. For the viewer, chance plays a part in their viewing, according to the options they select as they move through a zone. (Despite this, the viewer’s ability to control the direction and timing of the viewing experience with the click of the computer mouse ensures that Immemory avoids the loss of coherence caused by the ephemeral random rapprochements of Zapping Zone and Silent Movie.)

Marker likens Immemory to ‘the place in the mind’ where memory is processed.

Robert Hooke referred to this place as a location ‘where all impressions [that] are received by the senses are transmitted and received for contemplation, and furthermore that these impressions are nothing else than the movements of particles and bodies.’155 The latter phrase indicates Marker’s desire for infinite flexibility in his representations of spaces and times, in order to physically actualise the workings of memory and the mind more closely than can be achieved through the linearity of film. Freed from this linearity, the structure of Immemory provides a homology between the CD-ROM’s digital means of representing and negotiating memory and the process of remembering. Marker states that he used the

Hyper Studio program to create Immemory because, in making it possible to follow a

155 Horrigan, ‘Another Likeness,’ 11. 103

nonlinear narrative, it enabled him ‘to simulate the aleatory and capricious character of memory—which by definition a film cannot do.’156

But while the above summary explains the overall structure of Immemory, it leaves unanswered two questions essential to this study of the poetics of editing in Marker’s works. The first considers what effect Immemory’s digital basis has on the representations of space and time within each memory. The second question considers whether these representations further develop the stylistic figures of rapprochement and transformation so crucial to the treatment of the subject of memory in Sunless.

Celluloid to CD-ROM: Memory Rewritten This final analysis of the key stylistic figures developed by Marker will focus upon

Immemory’s treatment of images of Simone Genevois as Jeanne d’Arc in La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc. Unannounced, these images follow the treatment of the film Wings (1927) in the Cinema zone.157 A click with the mouse on the right of what turns out to be the last

Wings image reveals the madeleine for this sequence—a slightly tinted, soft focus close-up of Genevois on a dark ground, identified by pale blue text above and below as ‘Simone

Genevois/ Jeanne d’Arc.’ Another click reveals the same close-up of Genevois enlarged to fill the screen. This image provides the background for the entire sequence. A double wipe reveals a complex image with text superimposed on screen left over half of Genevois’ face—her image still visible behind the words. Superimposed on screen right, blocking the other half of her face is a three-frame segment of the film reel containing three more frames of her close-up. Romantic orchestral music accompanies eight seconds of movement in the central shot of the three-frame segment as Genevois, as Jeanne d’Arc,

156 Chris Marker, ‘Interview with Chris Marker’ 1997, Alter, Chris Marker, 148. 104

looks around, first to her right and then her left, where the movement ends. The music lingers a moment before fading out. Although this central image is a continuation of her close-up, it’s presented out of context spatially—between the images, rather than after them at the bottom of the screen.

Figure 23: The memory of Simone Genevois as Jeanne d’Arc

The English translation of the text reads:

This is the image that taught a child of seven how a face filling the screen was suddenly the most precious thing in the world, something that haunted you ceaselessly, that slipped into every nook and instant of your life, until pronouncing its name and describing its traits became the most necessary and delicious occupation imaginable – in a word, the image that taught you what is love. The deciphering of these bizarre symptoms only came later, along with the discovery of cinema, so that for the child who had grown, cinema and woman became two inseparable notions, and a film without a woman is still as incomprehensible to him as an opera without music. Why this face and this gaze remained unknown for almost sixty years is yet another mystery.158 When prompted, the larger image of Genevois’ face appears twice more, each time with a superimposition on the right of screen of three small frames from the film presented within the one piece of celluloid. These frames are non-consecutive and contain no

157 The images may also be accessed through the Index, eg., with the name of Genevois. 158 Chris Marker, text on screen over image of Simone Genevois, in Immemory, (English version). Composite image reprinted in Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 96. 105

movement. With each reappearance of the close-up, the text continues the story of the image and its importance for the director’s understanding of cinema. On the second appearance of the image, the text declares that as a young boy of seven, nothing had prepared him for this face ‘enlarged to the dimensions of a house.’ The impact of this huge close-up of Genevois’ face gave the actress a quasi-divine character, which ever after helped to define the nature of cinema for the filmmaker Marker was to become. In support, the text refers to Godard’s idea that cinema is higher than us because we have to lift our eyes to it, whereas we lower our eyes to view the small screen of television (and presumably the screens of installations and computers). Consequently, small screens give viewers only the shadow of a film, the longing for a film, ‘but never a film.’

On the third appearance of the close-up, the text identifies its source as La

Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc, and recounts the director’s rediscovery after so many years of this image that had played such an important role in his life. He tells how, at the French

Cinémathèque’s screening of a restored print at the palais de Chaillot he found himself sitting not far from a charming old lady who had no idea that these images of herself had given him his early insight into the nature of ‘things that quicken the heart.’159

In Marker’s affectionate recounting of the moment of miraculous disorientation that determined the course of his life, he reprises the film stylistics of discontinuous instants, double exposures, freeze frames and split screen effects first employed in avant-garde films of the 1920s such as Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera. In addition, Immemory displays new stylistic figures such as its juxtaposition of text over image, which replaces the voice- over of Marker’s essay films to provide the CD-ROM’s horizontal montage. On the three screens of the Genevois sequence, the text is superimposed on the left of screen over the

159 In the English version of Sunless, Sei Shonagon is the author of the first list of ‘things that quicken the heart.’ Elsewhere, Marker states that Genevois, this charming old lady, ‘didn’t suspect for one minute she had been, literally, my first love.’ Marker, ‘The Rest is Silent,’ Chris Marker: Silent Movie, 16. 106

still image of the actor’s face. In black type except where it covers her dark hair, the text sits lightly upon her image. For Bellour, the words in lighter hues follow the ripple of hair along the actor’s face ‘like a caress.’160 In this juxtaposition of text and image, the plastic presence of the text gains photogenic or visually expressive qualities that reinforce the sentiments of its words.

Marker’s text speaks of the way his love for film and filmmaking was motivated by the ‘quasi-divine character’ of Genevois’ close-up on the large screen. This echoes

Epstein’s idea, discussed in an earlier chapter, which defines photogenie as a quality of the large cinema image either when the subject moves in space-time or when the editing isolates close-ups (whether of inanimate objects or parts of the body) which thereby assume an ‘almost godlike importance.’161 But while Marker’s words extol the effect of a simple image on a large screen, their physical presence in the superimposed text contributes to the complexity of the small computer screen with its several reproductions of Genevois’ close-up. Further adding to this complexity—at least on the first screen—is the movement in the central right frame as the actor looks to her right and left, accompanied by the lingering romantic music. When the latter ends, the viewer faces a silent, static frame combining text with several reproductions of the actor’s close-up (three of the same instant at the start of her movement and one from its end). Both still images represent only one twenty-fourth of a second of Genevois’ movement in the film. However, their digital reincarnation transforms their momentary film presence into an onscreen digital presence of undefined duration, free of the time constraints of projected film.

As the narrative function is now carried by the text in conjunction with the image, the screen functions as both a formal space and a space of contemplation and memory.

While the viewer reads about the impact on the director’s life of the moment these images

160 Bellour, ‘The Book, Back and Forth,’ 143. 107

represent, the memory of Genevois’ small gesture lingers in the mind like the music that lingers after her movement ends. The complex rapprochement of text and image gives retrospective meaning to her gesture, suggesting that this fleeting representation of lived time is the visual distillation of the director’s memory of this encounter. This sentiment echoes the idea expressed in Sunless that happiness can’t be remembered without loss. At the same time, the formal aspects of the sequence actualise the film’s proposition that we don’t remember, we rewrite memory. This new treatment of space and time enables the sequence to express Marker’s memory of this moment of encounter in a way that expands the meaning of it into an homage for early film and its influence on his own life of filmmaking.

This homage is rearticulated in the following section, with the viewing options still controlled by the director. After the Genevois sequence, the progression moves through

French film epics of the period on the subject of World War I before arriving at a close-up of Dracula. Here the cartoon figure of Guillaume-en-Egypte (Marker’s cat in the role of the director’s alter ego, William of Egypt) may tempt the viewer to divert to the director’s

Aunt Edith. The diversion reveals only that Aunt Edith, like Dracula, was born in

Transylvania. From Aunt Edith one may return to Dracula and then to the final image referring to Genevois.162 This image consists of a panel containing graphic indications of violence and mayhem and a rough sketch of part of a dead body. The drawing is like an image from a comic book. It is overlaid by the faces of Dracula and Genevois combined into one. The combined face is created through the insertion of part of the close-up of

Genevois’ face into Dracula’s larger photographic portrait. The text reads ‘Jeanne d’Arc et

161 Epstein, ‘On Certain Characteristics of Photogénie,’ 315, 316. 162 Alternatively, the viewer could move from Aunt Edith into the Family Album site, leaving the remainder of the Cinema Zone for another time. 108

Dracula, les héros de mon enfance.’163 With this rapprochement, Marker rearticulates his feelings for Genevois. By including Dracula, the sequel brings the earlier homage down to earth, grounding it in the director’s memory of the ‘land of childhood’ where ‘we were chased by wolves, blinded by Tartars and carried away on the Trans-Siberian Express.’164

The delicate figuring of the Genevois sequence along with the rough-and-ready humour of the Genevois/Dracula sequel attests to the variety and richness of expression in

Marker’s creative vision. Here, in the digital medium, the director’s embrace of new technology enables him to renew and rework the stylistic figures of rapprochement and transformation first found in Letter from Siberia.

Coda

In Immemory, as in Sunless, the work is still an imaginary journey through memories of sounds and images representing ‘things that quicken the heart.’ In Immemory, as in his film essays, Marker continues to use the filmed evidence of his encounter with the physical world in ways that extend the encounter beyond the moment it represents. In his films, this encounter is expressed relatively simply in the relation between the sound and the cinematic space and time of the image. In the CD-ROM, the encounter is expressed in the complex relationship between graphics, photos and text on the one hand, along with snatches of sound and cinematic images on the other. While the sound is necessarily always heard in real time, most of the cinematic images are freed from film’s linear time constraints. In terms of overall structure, the stylistic difference between the two media is largely due to the way the digital medium releases the images from their predetermined

163 ‘Joan of Arc and Dracula—my childhood heroes.’ 164 See Chapter 2 for my discussion of Letter from Siberia. 109

sequential flow, thus giving free reign to the director’s poetic urge to compare, combine or associate. This impulse extends to the materials with which he represents his subjects.

When Bazin speaks of the way the director furthers his argument in Letter from Siberia by using ‘any and all’ filmic material, he refers to material that can be incorporated within film’s sequential flow. In Immemory, however, ‘any and all’ material encompasses its incorporation of formal elements of the photograph and film as well as the graphics and text of the book. In this, the expressive capacity of the essay film is expanded as it becomes the filmed CD-ROM essay—‘the contemporary form for the classical essay.’165

In Immemory, Marker continues to use cinematic footage of places and times of past events in order to represent history through his own memory. His sustained desire to speak in this way motivated the evolution of his work beyond the spatial and temporal limits of the linear possibilities of the film form to the more fluid form made possible either by installations or, alternatively, by computer. Of the software program used in creating Immemory, Marker states: ‘Finally, they’ve done what I was aiming at with the rudimentary tools I had, since I tried to shape things my way.’166

In the ever-evolving expression of his subjective view of the world, Marker continues to mediate between different forms of media—redefining their limits and capabilities in the process. At the same time, he redefines the cultural and thematic implications of the images that form part of his overall strategy of rapprochement. More than other auteur figures, Marker is known through these processes of mediation. The value of understanding his formal means of expression goes beyond the study of any single media and bears on our understanding of our image-soaked media world. This project has necessarily focused on just a few aspects of Marker’s creative practice. It has done so in

165 Alter, Chris Marker, 122,123. 166 Marker, letter to Horrigan, 31 March, 1994, quoted in Horrigan, ‘Another Likeness,’ 10. 110

the hope that the ideas developed within these pages will contribute to a larger investigation of the stylistics of visual media.

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FILMOGRAPHY

A Grin Without a Cat. Dir. Chris Marker. 1988. France.

A propos de Nice. Dir. Jean Vigo. 1930. France.

A Sixth Part of the World. Dir. Dziga Vertov. 1926. USSR.

Battleship Potemkin. Dir. Sergei Eisenstein. 1925. USSR.

Chats Perchés (The Case of the Grinning Cat). Dir. Chris Marker. 2004. France.

Chronique d’un été (Chronicle of a Summer). Dir. Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin. 1961. France.

Farrebique. Dir. Georges Rouquier. 1947. France.

Immemory. CD-ROM. Dir. Chris Marker. 1998. France.

La Jetée. Dir. Chris Marker. 1962. France.

La Merveilleuse Vie de Jeanne d’Arc. Dir. Marc de Gastyne. 1928. France.

Le Fond de l’air est rouge. Dir. Chris Marker. 1977. France.

Le Joli mai (The Merry Month of May). Dir. Chris Marker. 1962. France.

Le Sang des Bêtes (The Blood of Beasts). Dir. Georges Franju. 1949. France.

Les Statues Meurent Aussi (Statues Also Die). Dir. Alain Resnais, Chris Marker. 1953. France.

Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik). Dir. Chris Marker. 1993. France.

Lettre de Siberie (Letter from Siberia). Dir. Chris Marker. 1958. France.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Dir. F.W. Murnau. 1922. Germany.

Sans Soleil (Sunless). Dir. Chris Marker. 1982. France.

Silent Movie. Installation. Dir. Chris Marker. 1995. France.

Sunday in Peking. Dir. Chris Marker. 1956. France.

The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty. Dir. Esfir Shub. 1927. USSR.

The Man with the Movie Camera. Dir. Dziga Vertov. 1929. USSR.

Van Gogh. Dir. Alain Resnais. 1948. France.

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Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television. Installation. Dir. Chris Marker. 1991. France.

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