GALLERY
PETER BLUM
CHRIS MARKER PETER BLUM GALLERY
CHRIS MARKER
Born 1921, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France Died 2012, Paris, France
SELECTED SOLO EXHIBITIONS
2019 Chris Marker: Cat Listening to Music. Video Art for Kids, Kunsthall Stavanger, Stavanger, Norway 2018 Chris Marker, Memories of the Future, BOZAR, Bruxelles, Belgium Chris Marker, Memories of the Future, Centre Pompidou, Paris, France Chris Marker, The 7 Lives of a Filmmaker, Cinémathèque Française, Paris, France Chris Marker: Koreans, Peter Blum Gallery at ADAA The Art Show, New York, NY 2016 DES (T/S) IN (S) DE GUERRE, Musée Zadkine, Paris, France 2014 Koreans, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Crow’s Eye View: the Korean Peninsula, Korean Pavilion, Giardini di Castello, Venice, Italy Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, Whitechapel Gallery, London, England; Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo, October 21, 2014 – January 11, 2015; Lunds Konsthall, Lund, February 7 – April 5, 2015 The Hollow Men, City Gallery Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand 2013 Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte, MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA & the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA Memory of a Certain Time, ScotiaBank, Toronto, Canada Chris Marker, Atelier Hermès, Seoul, South Korea The “Planète Marker,” Centre de Pompidou, Paris, France 2012 Chris Marker: Films and Photos, Moscow Photobiennale, Moscow, Russia 2011 PASSENGERS, Peter Blum Gallery Chelsea / Peter Blum Gallery Soho, New York, NY Les Rencontres d'Arles de la Photographie, Arles, France PASSENGERS, Centre de la Photographie, Geneva, Switzerland Thinking Hands, Beijing, China 2009 Quelle heure est-elle?, Peter Blum Gallery Chelsea, New York, NY Second Life (May 16 a one night event), Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA Chris Marker: Par quatre chemins, Beirut Art Center, Beirut, Lebanon 2008 Abschied vom Kino / Farewell to Movies, Museum fur Gegenwartkunst, Zurich, Switzerland Abschied vom Kino / A Farewell to Movies, virtual museum, Second Life Un Choix de Photographies, Galerie de France, Paris, France 2007 Staring Back, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Staring Back, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH The Case of the Grinning Cat, Film Forum, New York, NY Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia 2006 The Hollow Men, Dazibao Centre de Photographies Actuelles, Montreal, Canada The Hollow Men, Prefix Institute of Contemporary Art, Toronto, Canada 2005 Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Through the Eyes of Chris Marker, Hong Kong Arts Centre, Hong Kong, China Through the Eyes of Chris Marker, Macao Cultural Centre, Macao, China 2003 Rare Videos by Chris Marker, Anthology Film Archives, New York, NY 2002 Chris Marker, The Douglas Hyde Gallery, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland 1999 Silent Movie and Selected Screenings, Beaconsfield, London, England Chris Marker, Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville, Spain Chris Marker, Fundació Antoni Tàpies, Barcelona, Spain 1997 Immemory One, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France 1996 Silent Movie, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN 1995 Silent Movie, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Silent Movie, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY Silent Movie, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley, CA
SELECTED GROUP EXHIBITIONS
2019 Hors Pistes 4ª edición. La Luna: un espacio imaginario por defender, Centre Pompidou Malaga, Malaga, Spain We’re Not Like Them, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Rijeka, Croatia 5th Ural Industrial Biennial of Contemporary Art, Commissioner of the Biennial: Alisa Prudnikova, Curator of the main project: Xiaoyu Weng, Ekaterinburg, Russia The Statues Also Die, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France The statues also die. The Daniel Cordier collection, Les Abattoirs, Toulouse, France Lost, Loose and Loved: Foreign Artists in Paris 1944-1968, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid, Spain 2018 One Day at a Time: Manny Farber and Termite Art, MOCA Grand Avenue, Los Angeles, CA Welcome to the Dollhouse, MOCA Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, CA 2017 Resident Alien: The Marin Karmitz Collection, La Maison Rouge, Paris, France After the Fall, Peter Blum Gallery, New York, NY Group exhibition, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, CA 2015 56th International Art Exhibition: All The World’s Futures, Venice, Italy 2010 Les Rencontres Arles photographie Festival, Arles, France 2008 Bergamo Film Meeting, Bergamo, Italy 2007 Documenta XII - Film Program (Artistic Director: Roger Buergel; Film Program Selector: Alexander Horwath), Kassel, Germany Equal, that is, to the real itself (Curated by Linda Norden), Marian Goodman Gallery, New York, NY Anachronism & The Otolith Group (featuring a continuous screening of La Jétee), Argos - Center for Art and Media, Brussels, Belgium The Unhomely: Phantom Scenes in Global Society, Bienal Internacional de Arte Contemporáneo de Sevilla (Curated by Okwui Enwezor), Seville, Spain Airs de Paris (curated by Christine Macel, Valerie Guillaume, Daniel Birnbaum), Centre Pompidou, Paris, France American Video Art, Laznia Center for Contemporary Art, Danzig, Poland System Error: War Is A Force That Gives Us Meaning, Palazzo delle Papesse - Centro Arte Contemporanea, Siena, Italy Centre Pompidou Video Art: 1965-2005, Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney, Australia 2006 Video: An Art, a History, 1965-2005 (Curated by Christine Van Assche), Miami Art Central, Miami, FL Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (Presented by Peter Blum Gallery), Art Unlimited, Art 37 Basel, Basel, Switzerland Photo-Trafic, Centre Pour L'Image Contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland Animal Series, Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, Madison, WI Having been described in words (Organized by Jason Simon), Orchard, New York, NY 2005 Concerning War, BAK - Basis vor Actuele Kunst, Utrecht, The Netherlands 2004 Hard Light (Curated by Klaus Beisenbach and Doug Aitken), P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Queens, NY Artist's Favourites (Act 2) (Work selected by Janet Cardiff), Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, England L´Ombre du temps, Jeu de Paume, Paris, France Being the Future (Curated by Boris Ondreika), Volkspalast, Berlin, Germany Common Property, The Sixth Werkleitz Biennale, Halle, Germany
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
2003 Romancing the Wreck and Looking Away (Curated by Linda Norden and Bruce Jenkins), Harvard University Art Museum, Cambridge, MA Attack! Kunst und Krieg in den Zeiten der Medien (Curated by Gabriele Mackert and Thomas Mießgang), Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film (Curated by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel), Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe, Germany 2001 Do It, Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, MA Revolving Doors: Public Sphere/Private Domain (Curated by Montse Badia), ApexArt, New York, NY 2000 Berlinale 2000, 50th Berlin International Film Festival, Berlin, Germany Left Bank Revisited, Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, MA 1997 L'Autre, 4th Biennale d´art contemporain de Lyon (Curated by Harold Szeeman, Thierry Prat, ThierryRaspail, Halle Tony Garnier), Lyon, France Documenta 10 (Curated by Catherine David), Museum Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany 1993 Time and Tide, The Tyne International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Newcastle, England 1990 Passages de L’Image, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France 1978 Paris-Berlin, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France
SELECTED FILMOGRAPHY
OWLS AT NOON Prelude: The Hollow Men, 2005, Installation: 8-channel video, color, 19 minute loop Chats perchés (The Case of the Grinning Cat), 2004, Television program: color, 58 minutes L’Souvenir d’un avenir (Remembrance of Things to Come), 2001, black and white, 42 minutes Avril inquiet [unreleased], 2001, video, 52 minutes Un Maire au Kosovo [unreleased], 2000, video, 27 minutes Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch (One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenovich), 1999, Telvision program: Video, 56 minutes Immemory, 1998, CD-ROM Immemory One, 1997, Interactive CD-ROM Installation: 2 video projectors, 1 video monitor, 3 computers Level Five, 1996, Beta-SP blown up to 35mm, color, 106 minutes Silent Movie, 1995, Installation: metal stand, 5 monitors, 5 laser disc players, computer interface box, 5 video discs with 20 minute sequences: The Journey, The Face, Captions, The Gesture, The Waltz; 18 black and white film stills, 10 film posters, soundtrack 'The Perfect Tapeur', solo piano pieces lasting 59 minutes 32 seconds Casque bleu (or Témoignage d'un casque bleu), 1995, Beta-SP blown up to 35mm, 106 minutes Le 20 heures dans les camps (Prime Time in the Camps), 1993, Hi 8, 27 minutes Le Tombeau d'Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik), 1993, Television program: Hi 8, 118 minutes Le facteur sonne toujours cheval, 1992, Television program: 52 minutes Zapping Zone (Proposal for an Imaginary Television), 1990, Installation: 14 monitors, 13 laser disc players, 13 speakers, 13 video discs, 7 computers, 7 computer programs, 4 lightboxes with 80 slides, 11 color photos, 10 black and white photos, 7 photomontages Getting Away With It, 1990, Music Video for “Electronic”: Video, 4 minutes Berliner Ballade, 1990, Television report: Video Hi 8, 20 minutes L’Heritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legace), 1989, Television series: Video, 13 x 26 minutes Mémoires pour Simone, 1986, 35mm, color, 61 minutes AK, 1985, 35mm, color, 74 minutes From Chris to Christo, 1985, color, 24 minutes 2084: Video clip pour une réflexion syndicale et pour le plasir, 1984, 35mm, color, 10 minutes Sans Soleil (Sunless), 1982, 16mm blown up to 35mm, color, 100 minutes Junkopia, 1981, 16mm blown up to 35mm, 6 minutes
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Quand le siècle a pris formes (War or Revolution), 1978, Installation: Video U-matic on 2 monitors, 16 minute loop Le fond de l'air est rouge (The Grin Without a Cat), 1977, 16mm blown up to 35mm, 240/180 minutes La Solitude du chanteur de fond (The Loneliness of the Long Distance Singer), 1974, 16mm blown up to 35mm, 60 minutes L’Amdassade (The Embassy), Super 8, color, 20 minutes On vous parle du Chili: Ce que disait Allende, 1973, 16mm, 16 minutes Vive la baleine [with Mario Ruspoli], 1972, 35mm, 30 minutes Le train en marche (The Train Rolls On), 1971, 16mm, 32 minutes On vous parle de Prague: le deuxième procès d'Artur London, 1971, 16mm, black and white, 28 minutes La Bataille des dix millions (TheBattle of the Ten Million), 16mm, color, 58 minutes On vous parle du Paris: Maspero, les mots ont un sens, 1970, 16mm, 20 minutes On vous parle du Brésil: Carlos Marighela, 1970, 16mm, 17 minutes On vous parle du Brésil: Tortures, 1969, 16mm, 20 minutes Jour de tournage, 1969, 16mm, 11 minutes À bientôt, j'espère (Be Seeing You) [with Mario Marret], 1968, 16mm, color, 43 minutes La Sixième face du Pentagone (The Sixth Face of the Pentagon), 1968, 16mm, 28 minutes Loin du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) [with Alain Resnais, Jean-Luc Godard, Agnès Varda, Claude Lelouch, Williams Klein, Joris Ivens], 1967, 16mm and 35mm, color, 115 minutes Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (If I Had Four Camels), 1966, 35mm, black and white, 49 minutes Le Mystére Koumiko (The Koumiko Mystery), 1965, 16mm blown up to 35mm, color, 54 minutes Le Joli mai, 1962, 35mm, black and white,165 minutes La Jetée (The Pier), 1962, 35mm, black and white, 29 minutes ¡Cuba Sí!, 1961, 16mm blown up to 35mm, 52 minutes Description d’un Combat (Description of a Struggle), 1960, 35mm, color, 60 minutes Les Astrounates (The Astronauts) [with Walerian Borowczyk], 1959, 14 minutes Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia), 1958, 16mm blown up to 35 mm, color, 62 minutes Dimanche á Pèkin (Sunday in Peking), 1956, 16mm blown up to 35mm, color, 22 minutes Les statues meurent assi (Statues Also Die) [with Alain Resnais], 1953, black and white, 30 minutes Olympia 52, 1952, 16mm blown up to 35 mm, black and white, 82 minutes
BOOKS BY CHRIS MARKER
La Jetée: ciné-roman. New York: Zone Books, 1992 Le Dépays. Paris: Herscher, 1982 Marie Susini. La Renfermée: La Corse, photographs by Chris Marker, Paris: Seuil, 1981. Le fond de l'air est rouge: Scènes de la troisième guerre mondiale 1967-1977. Paris: Maspero, 1978 Commentaires 2. Paris: Seuil, 1967 Giradoux par lui-même. Paris: Seuil, 1962. Commentaires 1. Paris: Seuil, 1961. Corréennes. Paris: Seuil, 1959. La Chine: Porte ouverte. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1956. Giraudoux par lui-même. Paris, 1952 Regards sur le mouvement ouvrier [with Benigno Caceres]. Paris: Seuil, 1951. Le Couer net. Paris, 1949; as The Forthright Spirit, trans. Robert Kee and Terence Kilmartin, London: Wingate, 1951. Veilée de l'homme et de sa liberté. Paris, 1949
SELECTED SHORT STORIES AND POEMS BY CHRIS MARKER
Phénomène (n.m.), Trafic, 30 (Summer 1999), pp. 26-33.
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Les Separés, Espirit, 162 (December 1949), pp. 921-2. La dame à la licorne, Le Mercure de France, 1024 (December 1948), pp.646-8. Romancero de la montagne, Espirit, 135 (July 1947), pp. 90-98. Chant de l'endormition, Le Mercure de France, 1067 (July 1947), pp 428-34. Till the End of Time, Espirit, 129 (January 1947), pp 145-51.
SELECTED FILM COMMENTARIES, ARTICLES, ESSAYS, AND PORTFOLIOS BY CHRIS MARKER
Since 1947 Marker has been a regular and prolific contributor to the journals Esprit, Avant-Scène Cinéma, Cahiers du Cinéma, and Positif. In addition to his numerous writings in these periodicals, other selected articles and published portfolios by Marker include:
“The Revenge of the Eye: A Portfolio for Artforum,” Artforum, Vol. 44 Issue 10 (Summer 2006), p310-315 “The Rest Silent,” Trafic , 46 (Summer 2003), pp. 57-62 “Filmic Memories: Chris Marker; Filmmaker,” Film Quarterly, LII/1 (Fall 1998), p. 66 “Marker Memoire (Cinémathèque Francaise, 7 janvier-1er fevrier 1998),” Images Documentaires, 31, (1998), pp. 75-85 “De l'ordre du miracle,” Libération, 18 May 1994 “Les gribouilles d'Anetenne 2,” Libération, 22 December 1983 “Kashima Paradise,” Ecran 74, 30 (November 1964), pp. 74-5 “Au Creusot un muse de question,” L'Estampille, 42 (May 1973), pp. 37-40 “Le ciné-ours,” La Revue du Cinéma/Image et Son, 55 (December 1971) “Cinéma cubain: Che Guevara à 24 images/seconde,” Cinémonde, 1832 (21 April 1970) “Les révoltés de la Rhodia,” Le Nouvel Observateur, 123 (22-9 March 1967), pp. 26-7 “L'objectivité passionée,” Jeune Cinéma, 15 (May 1966), pp. 12-13 “Petite Planète,” in 27 rue Jacob, 10 (Summer 1954), p.1 “Demi-dieux et doubles croches,” in Regards neufs sur le chanson, ed. Pierre Barlatier (Paris, 1954), pp. 79-89 “And Now This is Cinema,” “Hollowood: sur place,” and “Cinéma d'animation: UPA” in André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcrose, Gavin Lambert, Chris Marker, Jean Queval, Jean-Louis Tallenay, Cinema 53 à travers le monde (Paris, 1954), pp 136-43 “L'avant-garde francais: Entr'acte; Un Chien Andalou; Le Sand d'un poète,” in Regards neufs sur le cinema, ed. Jacques Chevallier (Paris, 1953), pp. 249-55 “Un film d'auteur: La passion de Jeanne d'Arc,” in Regards neufs sur le cinema, ed. Jacques Chevallier (Paris, 1953), pp. 249-55 “L'aube noir,” DOC 49 (1949) “Introduction à la representation du ‘Mariage du Figaro,’” Doc 47, 1 (September 1947) “L'art noir,” Afrique Noire, Collection ODE (Paris, undated)
SELECTED INTERVIEWS
Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire, Libération, 5 March 2003; English translation in Film Comment, XXXIX/3 (May-June 2003), pp. 38-41 Jean-Michel Frodon, 'Je ne me demande jamais si, pourquoi, comment . . . ', Le Monde, 20 February 1997 Dolores Walfisch, 'Level Five', Berkeley Lantern, November 1996; and Vertigo, 7 (Autumn 1997), p. 38 “Terminal Vertigo,” Monthly Film Bulletin, LI/606 (July 1984), pp. 196-7
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Anne Philipe, “Medvekin, tu connais?,” Le Monde, 2 December 1971, p. 17 R. Ritterbusch, “Entretien avec Chris Marker,” Image et Son, 213 (February 1968), p. 66-8 Jean-Louis Pays, Miroir du Cinéma, 2 (May 1962), pp. 4-7 Francis Gendron, “Le socialisme dans la rue,” Miroir du Cinéma, 2 (May 1962), p. 12 Simone Dubreuilh, Lettres Francaises, 28 Mach 1957, p. 6
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: BOOKS, JOURNAL SPECIAL ISSUES, AND CATALOGUES
Les engafements de Chris Marker. Esprit, 2018/05, n°444 Adam Bartos. Studio: Remembering Chris Marker. New York: OR Books, 2017. 56th International Art Exhibition: All The World’s Futures, May 2015. P. 272-75. Art for Rollins: The Alfond Collection of Contemporary Art, volume II, 2015. P. 74-5. Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat. London: White Chapel Gallery, 2014. Crow’s Eye View: The Korean Peninsula. Seoul: Archilife, 2014. David Levi Strauss. Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow. New York: Aperture, 2014. P. 152-155. Chris Marker. PASSENGERS. New York: Peter Blum Edition, 2011. Chris Marker: Staring Back. Ed. Bill Horrigan. Columbus, Ohio: The Wexner Center for the Arts, 2007. Nora M. Alter, Contemporary Film Directors: Chris Marker. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006. Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. London: Reaktion Books, 2005. Around the World with Chris Marker, Part I: Lost Horizons, Film Comment, XXXIX/3 (May-June 2003); Part II, Time Regained, Film Comment, XXXIX/4 (July-August 2003). Recherches sur Chris Marker, Théorème, 6 (Paris, 2002) Guy Gauthier, Chris Marker: écrivain multimedia ou Voyage à travers les medias. Paris: l'Harmattan, 2001. Chris Marker, Silent Movie and Selected Screenings, Exhibition catalogue, Beaconsfield Gallery, London, 1999. Raymond Bellour, L'Entre-Images 2: Mots, Images. Paris P.O.L, 1999. Jon Kear, Sunless / Sans soleil, Towbridge: Flick Books, 1999. Chris Marker, Exhibition Catalogue, Fundacio Antoni Tapies, Barcelona, 1998. Clara Bow, Chris Marker: Retrospective, Cinémathèque francaise (January - February 1998) Birgit Kamper and Thomas Tode, eds, Chris Marker: Filmessayist, CICIM 44/45/46 (Munich, 1997) Raymond Bellour and Lauren Roth, A propos du CD-ROM Immemory de Chris Marker, Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997. Dossier Chris Marker, Positif, 433 (March 1997) Video Spaces: Eight Installations, Exhibition catalogue, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1995. Chris Marker: Silent Movie, Exhibition catalogue, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio, 1995. Time and Tide, Exhibition catalogue, The Tyne International Exhibition of Contemporary Art, Newcastle, 1993. Chris Marker, Catalogue of the XXXII Pesaro Film Festval, ed. Bernard Eisenschitz (Rome 1993) Images documentaries, 15 (1993) Raymond Bellour, L'Entre-Images. Photo. Cinéma. Vidéo. Paris: La Différence, 1990. Passages de l'image, Exhibition catalogue, Centres Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1990. O Bestário de Chris Marker, Collecção Horizonte de Cinema, 114 (1986)
SELECTED ARTICLES AND REVIEWS
Story, Brett, “Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s ‘Le Joli Mai’”, IDA (March 5, 2020)
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Fujii, Moeko. “Watching Tokyo Through the Eyes of Outsiders”, The New Yorker (December 16, 2019) Aguilar, Carlos. “Review: Like its subject, Chris Marker’s ‘The Owl's Legacy’ stands the test of time,” Los Angeles Times (May 30, 2019) Sachs, Ben. “The Owl’s Legacy is the best symposium on ancient Greece you’ll ever sit in on,” Chicago Reader (January 9, 2019) Hoberman, J.. “‘The Owl’s Legacy’ Explores the Glory That Was Greece,” The New York Times (November 25, 2018) Dars, Jean-François and Anne Papillault, “Magic Moments,” Esprit, 2018/05, n°444, pp. 64-65 Gauss, Daniel, “The ADAA Show at the Park Avenue Armory,” Wall Street International (March 15, 2018) Smith, Roberta, “ADAA: A Fair to Remember Starts a Month of Art Show Madness,” The New York Times (March 1, 2018) Greenberger, Alex and Andrew Russeth, “At the 30th-Anniversary ADAA Art Show, Dealers Bring the New and Artists Lampoon Trump,” Artnews (February 27, 2018) Meyers, William, “Chris Marker: Koreans,” The Wall Street Journal (September 20 – 21, 2014) A.O. Scott, “It’s All Just a Game, Now Take It Seriously,” The New York Times (August 14, 2014) Kaizen, William, “Chris Marker: MIT List Visual Arts Center/Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts,” ArtForum (Jan 2014) p. 216 Tenconi, Roberta, "Secret Land," unFLOP (SS 2012) p. 44 - 48 "PASSENGERS," Time Out New York (April 14 - 20, 2011) Schilling, Mary Kaye, "Close Encounters," New York Magazine (May 9, 2011) Fyfe, Joe, "Chris Marker: STOP STARING," Artnet (May, 2011) Sullivan, Gary, "In a Station of the Metro," Cargo (May, 2011) Fitzgerald, John, "PASSENGERS" Lala, Kisa, "Chris Marker: Travelers in Time," The Huffington Post Aaland, Mikkel, "Homage to Chris Marker," (April 5, 2011) Wilson-Goldie, Kaelen, "Chris Marker and the path less traveled," The National (January 28, 2011) Doran, Anne, "Chris Marker, 'Quelle heure est-elle?,'" Time Out New York (July 9-15, 2009) p. 38 "Staring Back," New Yorker (January 14, 2008) Mcdonough, Tom, "Chris Marker: Gazes and Relationships," Art in America (December 2007) p.49 Davies, Clare, "Chris Marker," Artforum.com Critic’s Picks (October 2007) Cotter, Holland, "Chris Marker: Staring Back," New York Times (October 26, 2007) Perta, Litia, "Chris Marker: Staring Back," The Brooklyn Rail (October 2007) Simon, Jason, "Eye to Eye," Artforum (October 2007) Armetta, Amoreen, "Chris Marker, 'Staring Back,'" Time Out New York (October 11-17, 2007) Zoller Seitz, Matt, “La Jetee / Sans Soleil,” Time Out New York (June 28-July 4, 2007) p. 164 Lee, Nathan, “From Mongolia or Outer Space?,” The Village Voice (June 19, 2007) Zacharek, Stephane, “Summer DVDs: Lives Caught Between Rewind and Fast-Forward,” The New York Times (May 6, 2007) “Coreénes” (portfolio of photographs), Soft Targets v.2.1 (May 2007) pp. 76-87 “Art of the Possible: Fulvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Ranciere,” Artforum (March 2007) Murray, Noel, “The Case of the Grinning Cat,” The Onion, Vol. 42 Issue 51 (December 21, 2006) p. 22 J. Hoberman, “Cat Power: Chris Marker and his feline friend document post-9/11 France,” The Village Voice, Vol. LI No. 51 (December 20-26, 2006) p. 70 Dargis, Manohla, “Leftist Politics Scampers Through Paris on Playful Paws,” The New York Times (December 20, 2006) p. E11 Peterson, Matt, “Chris Marker: ‘Make Cats Not War,’” The Brooklyn Rail (Dec 06/Jan 07) p. 81 “Monsieur Chat,” Artforum, Vol. 44 Issue 10 (Summer 2006) p152 Picard, Andre, “Prelude as postscript: Chris Marker's The Hollow Men,” Cinemascope, 26 (March 2006) Montero, David, “Film also ages: time and images in Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil,” Studies in French Cinema, Vol. 6, Issue 2 (2006) p. 107-115
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Pollack, Griselda, “Dreaming the Face, Screening the Death: Reflections for Jean-Louis Schefer on La Jetée,” Journal of Visual Culture, Vol. 4, Issue 3 (December 2005) pp. 287-305 Murphy, Jay, “More of What it is: Catching up with Chris Marker,” Afterimage, Vol. 33, Issue 2 (Sep/Oct 2005) p. 31-36 Sanborn, Keith, “Shades Without Colour,” Artforum, Vol. 43, Issue 10 (Summer 2005) p. 79 Sragow, Michael, “La Jetée,” The New Yorker, Vol. 81, Issue 8 (April 11, 2005) p. 17 Quandt, James, “Remembrance of Things to Come,” Artforum, Vol. 42, Issue 4 (December 2003) p. 40 Thomson, David, “Chris Marker: Already Living in Film’s Future,” The New York Times (June 1, 2003) p. 26 Wood, Michael, “Immemory Lane,” Artforum, Vol. 41, Issue 6 (February 2003) p. 33 Friedlander, Eli, “La Jetée: Regarding the Gaze,” boundary 2, Vol. 28, Issue 1 (Spring 2001) p. 75-86 Murray, Timothy, “Wounds of Repetition in the Age of the Digital: Chris Marker's Cinematic Ghosts,” Cultural Critique, 46 (Fall, 2000) pp. 102-23. Rancière, Jacques, “La fiction de memoire: À propos du 'Tombeau d'Alexandre' de Chris Marker,” Trafic, 29 (Spring 1999) pp. 36-47. Reprinted and translated into English: Jacques Ranciere, Film Fables. Oxford: Berg, 2006, pp. 157-170 Rose, Miriam, “Mac to the Future,” Artforum, Vol. 36, Issue 9 (May 1998) p. 28 Nesbitt, Molly, “Chris Marker - Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio,” Artforum (April 1996) p. 96- 98 Conomos, John, “The movement of shadows: video as electronic writing,” Art and Design, Vol. 10 (November - December 1995) pp. 38-41 Petit, Chris, “Insane Memory,” Sight and Sound, IV/7 (July 1994) p. 13 Gauthier, Guy, “Chris Marker: montage 'cosmique' et imaginaire singulier,” CinémAction, 72 (1994) pp. 75- 81 Beilenhoff, Wolfgang, “Licht -- Bild – Gedächtnis,” in Anselm Haverkamp and Renate Lachmann, ed., Gedächtniskunst: Raum -- Bild -- Schrift: Studien zur Mnemotechnik. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991 Bellour, Raymond, “The Film Stilled,” Camera obscura, 24 (September 1990) Bensmaia, Reda, “From the Photogram to the Pictogram: On Chris Marker's La Jeté,” Camera obscura, 24 (September 1990) pp. 138-161 Dauman, Anatole, “Chris Marker,” in Anatole Dauman: Argos Films: Souvenir-écran, ed. Jacques Gerber. Paris: Centre Georges Pompidou, 1989 Van Cauwenberge, Geneviève, “Self-reflexivity in contemporary documentary film: Chris Marker's Sans Soleil,” De Greef (1989) pp. 155-166 Penley, Constance, “Time Travel, Primal Scene, and the Critical Dystopia (on The Terminator and La Jetée),” in The Future of an Illusion: Film, Feminism, and Psychoanalysis. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1989, pp. 121-139 Gibson, Ross, “What do I know? Chris Marker and the Essayist Mode of Cinema,” Filmviews, 134 (Summer 1988) pp. 26-32 Holbern, Mark, “Standing in the Shadow,” Artforum (May 1986) pp. 94-99 J. Hoberman, “Japant-Garde Japanorama,” Artforum (October 1985) pp. 97-101 Rafferty, Terence, “Marker Changes Trains,” Sight and Sound, XXXV/4 (Autumn 1984) pp. 165-8 Wollen, Peter, “Feu et glace,” Photographies, 4 (March 1984) Kawin, Bruce, “Time and Stasis in La Jetée,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 36, NO. 7 (1982) pp. 15-20 S. Gaggi, “Marker and Resnais: Myth and Reality,” Literature / Film Quarterly, 1 (1979) Van Wert, William F., “Chris Marker: The SLON Films,” Film Quarterly 3 (1979) pp. 38-46. Gauthier, Guy, “Demarches de Chris Marker,” Image et Son, 247 (1974) Jacob, Gilles, “Chris Marker and the Mutants,” Sight and Sound, IV/7 (Autumn 1966) pp. 165-8 Thirard, P.-L., “Un cinéma différent: La Jetée -- A Valparaiso,” Positif, 64-65 (1964) pp. 144-145. Tailleur, Roger, “Markeriana, description peu critique de l'oeuvre de Chris Marker,” Artsept, 1 (January 1963) pp. 47-62 Thirard, P.-L., “Joli Mai,” Positif, 54/55 (Summer 1963) pp. 110-114
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Thirard, P.-L., “Cuba Oui,” Positif, 56 (Nov. 1963) pp. 72-74 Cameron, Ian, “I am Writing You from a Far Country,” Movie, 3 (October 1962) p. 14 Thirard, P.-L., “A Propos des Commentaires de Chris Marker,” Positif, 44 (March 1962) p. 72 Bellour, Raymond and Michaud, Jean, “Apologie de Chris Marker/Signes,” Cinéma, 57 (6 January 1961) pp. 33-47 and 155-7 Egly, Max, “Varda-Resnais-Marker,” Image et Son, 128 (February 1960) Cayrol, Jean, “Chris Marker, ou La Premiére Chance,” Esprit, 18/9 (September 1950) pp. 405-408
SELECTED AWARDS
César Award, Best Short Film, 1983, for Junkopia Special Mention, Krakow International Film Festival, 1971, for Le train en marche Nominated for the Golden Lion, Venice Film Festival, 1963, for Le Joli mai Best First Work, Venice Film Festival, 1963, for Le Joli mai Golden Dove, Leipzig Film Festival, 1963, for Le Joli mai Prix Jean Vigo (Short Film), 1963, for La Jetée Youth Film Award, Berlin International Film Festival, 1961, for Description d’un Combat Golden Berlin Bear, Berlin International Film Festival, 1961, for Description d’un Combat Prix Jean Vigo (Short Film), 1954, [with Alain Resnais] for Les statues meurent asi
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Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s ‘Le Joli Mai’
BY BRETT STORY | MARCH 5, 2020
From Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme's 's 'Le Joli Mai.' Courtesy of Icarus Films
When the French multimedia artist, writer and nonfiction filmmaker Chris Marker died in 2012, the film world lost a seminal observer of us strange humans. I say "strange" with as much delight and generosity as Marker did in his films, of which there is perhaps no better example than in his remarkable essay film Le Joli Mai. Filmed during "the lovely month" of May 1962, Le Joli Mai is assembled mainly out of in-the-street interviews with a cross-section of "ordinary" Parisians, who are asked a variety of general questions about their lives, their relationships to work and the city, and their outlooks on the future. It meanders, and seems to constantly digress. People discuss the price of potatoes; a woman dresses her cat in costumes. And at some point we realize we are watching a searing indictment of French colonialism and capitalist modernization.
In one of the rare interviews recorded with the notoriously elusive Marker, he describes his overarching project with disarming simplicity: "I keep asking: How do
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETE R BLUM GALLERY people manage to live in such a world? And that's where my mania comes from, to see 'how things are going' in this place or that." That such a seemingly basic question could so lovingly animate a complex, politically radical, and intellectually astute work of moving image is a testament as much to Marker's commitment to the social world as it is to his dexterity with cinematic form.
In collaboration with the cinematographer Pierre Lhomme, who is credited as the film's co-director, Marker moves through the streets of a rapidly transforming Paris posing broad questions to its denizens: "Are you happy?" is asked repeatedly, as is "When are you free?" The answers suggest, at first glance, paralysis: "I try not to think about it" or "I don’t think at all" or "There's nothing we can do." In one scene, two young interns at the Paris stock exchange are at a loss of words to describe the "fun" they think their aspired-to fortunes will buy. Words come much easier to the Black African student we meet later, who, when asked about his first encounter with white people in France, says, "I thought, 'They're the ones that beat us.'" Meanwhile, during this "first springtime of peace" some 10 to 50 Algerian citizens were being killed every day by pro-French paramilitary. A cut in the film to the funeral of eight protesters crushed to death during a protest against a French right-wing terrorist group suggests the filmmakers' political allegiances, while the film itself invites audiences to make their own connections.
People talk about "talking head" documentaries with derision, and the art film world holds up observation as the most aesthetically pure form of nonfiction intervention. But Le Joli Mai reminds us —and certainly reminds me, as a filmmaker similarly interested in "how people manage to live in such a world"—that observing what people say is also a cinematic act, one as necessary, illuminating and sophisticated as anything else that an art of the real is capable of.
In preparatory notes for the film, Marker wrote: "This film, Le Joli Mai, would like to offer itself as a fish tank for the future fishermen casting their nets into the past. It’s for them to sort out what has left a real impression from what will turn out to have been only froth." The future has indeed arrived, and I am always very happy to go fishing.
Brett Story is a writer and nonfiction filmmaker based in Toronto. Her latest feature documentary, The Hottest August, is currently screening in theaters and festivals internationally.
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Culture Desk Watching Tokyo Through the Eyes of Outsiders By Moeko Fujii | December 16, 2019
Chris Marker’s film “Sans Soleil”, 1983
I grew up watching foreigners film Tokyo. Every morning, on my way to school, I met my friends in front of Shibuya Crossing, the city’s notoriously crowded intersection. Each time the lights changed and the car-clogged expanse cleared, Tokyo stretched ahead like a catwalk. We would strut forth, flanked by tourists, until people pummelled us from five directions. By the time we reached the far sidewalk, most of us looked shipwrecked. I liked seeing white men sprinting past us to film the scene. Some would hold cameras on their foreheads, following actors through the swarm of black hair. Others would plant a ladder in the middle of the intersection, as though our city was the moon. Once, I heard shouts and saw a ladder keel over with the slow, graceful arc of a monument toppling during a revolution.
The list of auteurs who have trekked to Tokyo is long: Wim Wenders, Chris Marker, Bong Joon-ho, Leos Carax, Werner Herzog, Sofia Coppola, and Abbas Kiarostami, among others. During the past month, I saw much of their work at the Japan Society, which hosted a film series, “Tokyo Stories,” that studied the city’s place in the global imagination. Three modes seemed to emerge onscreen: the foreign filmmaker who goes to Japan as a tourist; the foreign filmmaker who resists being a tourist; and the foreign filmmaker who goes to Japan and doesn’t make a film about foreigners at all. After some of the films, a friend would elbow me, whispering, “Was that your Tokyo?” Sometimes Tokyo seemed to be made out of cardboard, such as in Max Ophüls’s “Yoshiwara,” from 1937, a “Madame Butterfly” homage shot in a Japanese garden in Paris. Despite the film’s yellowface, I couldn’t help but like its blunt honesty. In one scene, a group of Russian officers head out to visit the red-light district, and a short,
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY hammy man asks his friend if he speaks Japanese. His friend laughs: “You think you need to speak to geishas?”
Speaking Japanese is not required in the Tokyo-tourist film, a genre that includes Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” Justin Lin’s “The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift,” and wryer works such as Doris Dörrie’s “Cherry Blossoms” and Alain Corneau’s “Fear and Trembling.” These films act almost as brochures, and their narrative beats are as predictable as those in a romantic comedy. Their protagonists are usually white and, at some juncture in their lives, go to Tokyo. They are either positioned very low, down in the street, feeling swallowed by the city, or very high, on an expensive floor, staring at the urban forest. The Japanese people they meet are either sterile, or soapy and naked, or satirized as types: a bowing suit, a kimono clutching a designer handbag. This new Japan is chased with extracts of the old—Mt. Fuji, Kyoto, bonsai, ikebana. Finally, there’s a chance encounter with another foreigner, who is more seasoned, more cynical; together, they turn Tokyo into a playground and leave when the fantasy fades. When I talk to my friends from home about this kind of movie, we tend to return to “Lost in Translation,” which we both love and hate. Despite the film’s tropes, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s sense of loneliness is so finely drawn, the relief they find in each other so palpable, that we, too, long to see the city as they do.
If this first type of Tokyo film functions as a guidebook, reverential and rote, Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil” embodies a second type, in which the filmmaker pursues something more than spectacle. Marker looks for Tokyo when it yawns, when no one else is looking. The narrator reads letters from a fictional cameraman visiting Japan. “One could get lost in the great orchestral masses and the accumulation of details,” she says. “But that yielded the cheapest image of Tokyo— overcrowded, megalomaniac, inhuman. He thought he saw more subtle cycles there.” For Marker, Tokyo is full of familiar places—he made several films about Japan—but he’s interested in how even the familiar can shift, revealing strange new patterns. He tracks the syntax of the city: the nods of a salesgirl, the sway of wrists on a train, boys bowing as they mourn at a memorial for a dead panda. “Sans Soleil” wouldn’t satisfy the often blunt metrics of representation: Japanese people don’t talk in the film. Yet this feels like a deliberate choice, one meant to acknowledge the limits of a foreigner’s gaze. Marker sticks to observing surfaces—the expressions on Japanese faces that are walking, browsing, or waiting for a light to change—because he doesn’t presume to speak for what lies beneath. He understands how easily love can become predatory.
And must every film about Tokyo be a love letter? Marker is also willing to confront the city’s darkness, its difference. Some of his first shots of Tokyo are of Koreans, whom the film marks as outcasts. Throughout “Sans Soleil,” Marker returns to footage of extreme right-wing nationalists spewing imperialist rhetoric on megaphones, their words drawing on Japan’s history of colonial and racial violence. Leos Carax, another French filmmaker, sharpens this critique in his short film “Merde,” which is a story of a green-suited, red-haired creature that emerges from the sewers to wreak havoc on pedestrians in Ginza. The creature slips down a manhole and finds, in the bowels of Tokyo, a tattered imperial flag, grenades from the Sino-Japanese War, and a sign supporting the imperial forces of Nanking. He climbs up into Shibuya’s bright night and hurls the grenades into hordes of unsuspecting— and un-remembering—Japanese faces. Both Marker and Carax depict a public that can walk unfazed through a legacy of injustice. They ask us to look at Tokyo and its people without thinking of them as the enchanted, the exceptional.
As these two Tokyos—one neon and innocent, the other shaded, more implicated—slipped before me, I fought a strange urge to claim a place in these films. What would it be like, I wondered, to let the Japanese speak in a foreign film about Tokyo? One answer came from “Like Someone in Love,” one of the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami’s last feature films. In an interview, Kiarostami said that he made
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY a single promise to his producer—“My film won’t show that it’s been made by a foreigner or by an outsider in Japan.” To make good on his word, he hired an entirely Japanese cast. Other foreign directors have done this—Bong Joon-ho with hikikomori, or social recluses; Werner Herzog with Japan’s rent-a-family industry—but their films often turn Japanese characters into allegories for social issues. Kiarostami is interested in more intimate questions. His characters aren’t problems as people; they’re people with problems. The film follows a newcomer to the city, Akiko, a college student who is a sex worker on the side, and a lonely, retired professor who books her, not for sex but for conversation. Kiarostami, in other words, understood that not all outsiders in Tokyo look foreign.
Early in the film, Akiko gets into a taxi at night, planning to meet the professor. When she puts in her earbuds, there are seven messages on her phone. In the first, which was left in the early morning, we learn that her grandmother is visiting from their rural home town and trying to reach her. “Aki-chan, I’ll be leaving on the 11 P.M. train,” the grandmother says. “I’ll be sitting and waiting for you at the benches near the entrance. I hope I’ll get to see you today.” The rest of the messages follow, each left several hours apart, and through them we hear her grandmother’s experience of Tokyo: at first from a bench at the station, then from a soba shop, and then from a telephone booth with advertisements for call girls taped on the door. A girl in a photograph, she says, looks just like Akiko, but it can’t be, can it? Onscreen, Ginza and Shinjuku slip past, leaving slats of neon-blue light on Akiko’s face.
One sees a lot of Tokyo through taxis in these movies—foreigners like to take cabs, unlike the locals— but in Kiarostami’s hands the Tokyo we see isn’t Tokyo-as-style. This city is not a site of escape or irony; it is simply what a girl is concentrating on, what she needs to hold back her tears. When we hear the last message, Akiko’s grandmother is waiting in front of a bronze statue near the entrance of Tokyo Station. Akiko asks the driver if it’s on the way. It’s close, he says. A minute passes, and through Akiko’s window we see a little old woman, using a suitcase as a cane, eagerly checking the faces of the strangers walking by. Akiko must make a choice: to get out of the car and face her grandmother, or to slip away unseen. Kiarostami holds the shot on her face. The driver’s going too fast, and a van blocks her view of her grandmother. Here, finally, we hear a Japanese girl speak—not as type, not as allegory, but as herself: “I’m sorry, do you mind going around it once more?” Her voice is cracked, desperate. In it, we hear the tale of outsiders to Tokyo—those who can’t stop seeing, in the city, all the selves they thought they could be, and all that they have left behind.
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Review: Like its subject, Chris Marker’s ‘The Owl's Legacy’ stands the test of time By CARLOS AGUILAR MAY 30, 2019 | 1:35 PM
Elia Kazan in the 1989 docu-series "The Owl's Legacy." (Icarus Films)
First aired on European television in 1989, “The Owl’s Legacy,” a 13-part docu-series by the late French filmmaker Chris Marker, aspires to make the ancient relevant for a world in interminable upheaval by dissecting the influence of Greece on its modern descendants and humanity at large.
Each episode is a multitude of canonic feathers carrying within their dense intellectual DNA a choral interpretation of the founding philosophical pillars on which Western civilization stands. Unavailable for decades, Marker’s expansive, audiovisual sculpture to timeless knowledge became itself a lost piece in the ruins of the broadcast medium. Its layered wisdom now soars again, remastered and accessible stateside on communal and handheld screens. Never mind the geopolitical conflicts, social movements and evolution of thought in the interim between original release and our era, since like its subject, the show has aged well — the human condition remains just as flawed 30 years later.
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Chiseled from hours of talking head-style conversations with a multinational roster of historians and artists, this symposium of the mind is fundamentally a confrontation between an idealized, textbook-ready version of Greek contributions and a hyper-analytical autopsy of the concepts mankind perpetually upholds as basic truths.
In prolonged segments, which are admittedly verbose, Marker’s passionate speakers unspool Mediterranean antiquity with non-reverential insight, controversial enough to get “Owl’s Legacy” banned in the very land it examines for almost two decades. Deemed too critical of the country’s history, the launch on Greek soil didn’t take place until 2007.
The Olympics as misconstrued paradigm for the Nazis’ self-imposed lore, democracy as unachieved utopia, mathematics as the inextricable link between philosophy and science, music as a metaphor for the soul, and nostalgia as the longing for an unreachable homeland, are among their fascinating theorizations. Noteworthy above the rest is a necessarily scathing chapter exposing them as a phallocrentric society where misogyny thrived.
Language arises recurrently throughout the enlightening episodic work. The topic is discussed both as a bastion of identity that withstood Ottoman conquest and enslavement, as well as a vehicle to decipher the mysteries of existence in the form of mythology and tragedy.
Writer George Steiner argues that the Greeks understood that language has given us “the lethal gift of being able to tell stories.” The absence of this capability would push us into darkness. “Stories saves us from despair,” he continues. And yet, its existence simultaneously condemns us to question the gods’ unsatisfying answers and our own motivations.
The late director Theo Angelopoulos, a notable storyteller himself, appears, saying that, as a child, he was reluctant to learn about his distant ancestors, but came around to appreciate their dramatic prowess as he embarked on his cinematic odyssey. “We come from ancient Greeks. We give our children their names. It’s a continuation,” the auteur says about how language bridges the gap between past and present. Angelopoulos’ lauded film “The Traveling Players” is inspired by the Atreus myth.
Deployed as ambassador of the diaspora, Oscar-winning Hollywood moviemaker Elia Kazan (Greek by blood, Turk by birth, and American by migration) similarly unpacks his Anatolian Greekness via cinema, focusing on his family’s escape from the old continent, depicted visually in clips from his 1963 film “America America.”
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Though Eurocentric by design, Marker’s appraisal takes on more global connotation when addressing Japanese culture’s adoration of ancient Greece. The Asian nation’s praise best manifests in the evident parallels connecting Kabuki and Noh theater to the seemingly ephemeral, yet staggering theater performances of tragic tales in Athens and across the Greek territory. “Crafted for eternity,” says scholar Oswyn Murray, referring to the confection of those productions that engross the Japanese, an arrogant but adequate evaluation applicable in full measure to most classic Greek intangible inventions. Most should prevail as they have, others must be viewed and objected through 21st century lenses, which hopefully are at least slightly clearer. ------‘The Owl’s Legacy’ In French, Greek, Japanese, Russian, and English with English subtitles Not rated Running time: 5 hours, 36 minutes Playing: Part 1, episodes 1-7, May 31, 7:30 p.m. and June 1, 4 p.m.; Part 2, episodes 8-13, June 1, 7:30 p.m. and June 2, 4 p.m., Ahrya Fine Arts, Beverly Hills; also available on Amazon
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The Owl’s Legacy is the best symposium on ancient Greece you’ll ever sit in on Chris Marker’s multipart essay film screens all month at the Siskel Film Center. By Ben Sachs @1bsachs | January 9, 2019
The Owl's Legacy The Owl's Legacy ★★★ Directed by Chris Marker. In English and subtitled French, Georgian, German, Greek, and Japanese. 340 min. Gene Siskel Film Center, 164 N. State, 312-846-2800, siskelfilmcenter.org, $11.
This month the Gene Siskel Film Center is screening The Owl's Legacy (1989), a 13-part documentary series directed by the late Chris Marker (Sans Soleil, A Grin Without a Cat), one of the pioneers of the essay film. The Film Center is dividing the series into four programs over the course of four weeks, with each program playing on Sunday afternoon and Monday evening. I recommend checking out the whole thing, but don't worry if you miss one of the parts. The series can be watched in any order, and no one episode is more illuminating than any other. The overarching theme of The Owl's Legacy is the influence of ancient Greek culture on modern life, and each episode tackles a concept that comes to us from the Greeks (democracy, mythology, tragedy, etc.). Taken as a whole,
Blumarts Inc. 176 Grand Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10013 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY it's a heady and thought-provoking project that asks us to consider our connection to antiquity. Watching it is like sitting in on a superior college seminar.
You could also say that it feels like being invited to a philosophical symposium, which Marker cites in the first episode as the inspiration behind the entire series. Intercut between the myriad interviews (with philosophers, historians, and artists from multiple fields) are scenes set at actual symposia where groups of people hold forth on the concepts at hand, aided by lots of wine. Even when Marker presents one interviewee at a time, The Owl's Legacy still feels like an extended discourse, as the filmmaker (who credits himself as "skipper," as opposed to director) edits the reflections so that the speakers seem to be in dialogue with one another. One idea often leads to a counterargument or antithesis; sometimes it feels as though one speaker is building on what the previous one just said. This structure creates the impression that the ideas of the ancient Greeks are still up for debate and that the concept of civilization remains a work in progress.
This impression comes across the most strongly when The Owl's Legacy considers how different cultures have appropriated Grecian ideas. In one of the early episodes, Marker has several interviewees sound off on the influence of ancient Greeks on German philosophers from the 18th century to the Nazi era, with an emphasis on how the concepts of empire and permanent culture appealed to the Nazis. The appropriation of Greek philosophy—to which we owe the concept of democracy—by fascists would seem counterintuitive, but then Marker brings out filmmaker Elia Kazan to remind us that ancient Greek society was hardly a democracy either, as most of its population consisted of slaves. This reminder speaks to the contradiction in Greek thought between ideals and reality—a contradiction that looms over much of The Owl's Legacy. The frisson is especially pronounced in the episode on mathematics (which Marker wittily subtitles "The Empire Counts Back"), though it can be felt in nearly every part, as the interviewees frequently reflect on the idealism of Greek philosophers.
Comprised mostly of talking heads, The Owl's Legacy may not be one of Marker's most visually striking works, though the organization of ideas is characteristically playful and probing. Marker even throws in some intellectual curveballs, such as the assertion that modern Japan is more closely aligned with ancient Greece than any European nation. This digression allows the filmmaker to indulge in his Japanophilia (one of the key threads of his masterpiece Sans Soleil), and it raises the question of whether Greek ideals truly belong to the entire world. Located in an episode on tragedy (subtitled "the Illusion of Death"), it finds Marker delineating Japan's integration of art into society at large and presenting striking clips of a Noh adaptation of a classic Greek tragedy. In locating similarities between Greek and Japanese modes of dramatization, Marker invites you to ponder whether certain concepts are universal.
Marker worked on The Owl's Legacy for much of the 1980s and premiered it on British television at the end of the decade, around the time that contemporary philosophers were pondering whether humanity had reached the end of history. Given this context, the series suggests a summation of sorts; at the same time, several of the interviewees opine that civilization still has a long way to go toward reaching its ideal form. Marker, who held radical political beliefs and explored them in quite a few of his works, seems to side with these thinkers the most. Still, he engenders a sense of wonder at all humanity has accomplished so far. The world of ideas established by the ancient Greeks comes to seem like a trove so great that The Owl's Legacy can only begin to scratch the surface of it. By the end of the series, you may wonder why Marker didn't make it longer.
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‘The Owl’s Legacy’ Explores the Glory That Was Greece
By J. Hoberman Nov. 23, 2018
The actress Catherine Belkhodja in “Music or Inner Space,” Episode 8 of Chris Marker’s “The Owl’s Legacy.” Credit Icarus Films
Chris Marker’s 1989 television series, “The Owl’s Legacy,” is something for the ages. This 13-episode examination of ancient Greece’s contribution to the modern world (streaming on VHX) is at once illuminating and confounding, heady but playful.
It is also seldom less than entertaining. A French media artist who was the pre-eminent film essayist of his generation, Marker (1921-2012) orchestrated a medley of voices for this wide-ranging inquiry. “The Owl’s Legacy,” written with Jean-Claude Carrière, is populated by a lively group of artists and intellectuals — most of them Greek or French — holding forth and often disputing the enduring influence of Greek antiquity on contemporary civilization.
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Would that freshman introductory courses were this enjoyable. The mood is affably garrulous, the narration deadpan and droll. Marker’s model is the symposium, which, in ancient Greece, was a banquet in which wine was served to ease the flow of ideas. The series intercuts footage from four staged symposiums — in Athens; Paris; Berkeley, Calif.; and Tbilisi, Georgia — where the tables are heaped with fruits, as if food for thought, and the discourse is typically dominated by a single loquacious speaker.
“The Owl’s Legacy,” which was telecast in Britain in 1991, was not seen again until 2007, when it was shown for the first time in Greece as an art installation, with the entire series presented simultaneously on 13 monitors. Even on one, it can be dizzying. Ideas whiz past and rebound like balls on a squash court. The talk is punctuated by film clips — including excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl’s “Olympia,” Norman McLaren’s number animation “Rhythmetic” and Elia Kazan’s “America, America” — as well as images of ancient statuary and documentary footage of contemporary Greece.
The most expansive of the participants is the Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis; the most provocative is the French-American literary critic George Steiner, who, among other things, wonders whether the death of Jesus Christ or of Socrates was more meaningful. (It was Steiner’s impolitic assertion that ancient Greece had little to do with contemporary Greece that got “The Owl’s Legacy” banned in that country for nearly two decades.)
Each half-hour episode is given a title that consists of a Greek-derived word followed by an often provocative phrase: “Symposium or Accepted Ideas” is followed by “Olympics or Imaginary Greece,” “Democracy or the City of Dreams,” “Nostalgia or the Impossible Return,” “Amnesia or History on the March,” “Mathematics or the Empire Counts Back, “Logomachy or the Dialect of the Tribe,” “Music or Inner Space,” “Cosmogony or the Ways of the World,” “Mythology or Lies Like Truth,” “Misogyny or the Snares of Desire,” “Tragedy or the Illusion of Death,” and, finally, “Philosophy or the Triumph of the Owl.”
Language in “The Owl’s Legacy” feels elusive yet concrete. At one point, Marker’s narrator compares Greek words to the angels in Wim Wenders’s “Wings of Desire”: benign, invisible, ubiquitous presences. It’s impossible, while watching, not to note other Greek words in everyday usage — technology, dialogue, analysis, to name a few. The singer and composer Angélique Ionatos, born in Athens and living in Paris, remarks how proud she feels to hear Greek words in French.
One of Marker’s recurring themes is the continuing presence of ancient Greece in contemporary Greece, through the use of classical names, the appreciation of “The Odyssey” as a national epic and the spectacle of men arguing in the street. Another theme is the appropriation of Greek antiquity by younger nations, most significantly Nazi Germany, as discussed in the episode “Olympia.”Looking for more contemporary equivalents, Marker touches down in Cape Verde and Japan, countries that figured in his best-known film essay, “Sans Soleil.” The Japanese material, which includes a Kabuki staging of “Medea” and a quick tour of a Tokyo department store with mannequins inspired by Greek statues, is the more persuasive.
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“The Owl’s Legacy” makes a credible case that the Western idea of history was derived from the Greeks. Politics, too. What the series calls “imaginary Greece” has been used to fuel totalitarianism as well as democracy (literally, “people power”). Castoriadis and the Italian scholar Guilia Sissa connect Greek tragedy to democracy, concerned as tragedy is with the clash of contradictory individual rights. More fanciful is the questionable notion, derived from Greek mythology, that Athens invented music. And although Marker enlists the glamorous movie actress Arielle Dombasle to credit Pythagoras with the discovery of mathematics, he backs off a bit to suggest that Greek math developed in a dialectical relationship to that of Egypt and Babylon.
Philosophy is indisputably Greek. Plato first used the word, and the Georgian philosopher Merab Mamardashvili declares that “all philosophy is Greek philosophy.” It seems evident that psychoanalysis is Greek, too. As the Greeks had neither sacred books nor prophets but, as the British classicist Manuela Smith points out, invented the injunction to “know thyself,” we might consider Freud Socrates’ belated heir. (Ego and psyche are Greek words. Therapy, too.)
Toward the end, in the episode “Misogyny,” which deals partly with Greek eroticism, Marker addresses an issue that has been troubling throughout the series — namely, patriarchy, which, Ionatos remarks, persists in contemporary Greece. And despite her presence and that of several other female commentators, “The Owl’s Legacy” amply illustrates the patriarchal, yet another Greek term.
Its most annoying manifestation is the inclusion of invariably silent, winsome young women for the sole purpose of bestowing wide-eyed attention on the pronouncements of some middle-aged male blowhard. It may be that Marker intends you to wonder, after a while, what these women are actually thinking.
The final episode, “Philosophy,” turns this on its head. It begins with a discussion of the owl, the goddess Athena’s sacred bird, the symbol of wisdom and the inspiration for the series’s title. One after another, the regulars instinctively refer to the owl as “her.”
In its final minutes, “The Owl’s Legacy” pivots from the Cartesian proposition “I think, therefore I am” to Castoriadis’s more self-reflexive question: “What should I think?” Others express the view that philosophy may have become exhausted. “The Owl’s Legacy” was first shown the year the Berlin Wall fell and the Cold War ended, a moment, some thought, that signaled the end of the 20th century as well. It might not have been Marker’s intention, but the series has the feel of a glorious, collective epitaph.
A version of this article appears in print on Nov. 25, 2018, on Page AR15 of the New York edition with the headline: Looking Into the Past.
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Chris Marker’s Little-Known TV Series on Ancient Greece By Tanner Tafelski | October 24, 2018
Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy presents a complex portrait of Ancient Greece in 13 episodes that revolve around single words.
Chris Marker, The Owl’s Legacy (1989) (image courtesy Icarus Films)
A second decade into the 21st century and there are still works by major filmmakers that are finally seeing the light of day. This year alone saw the US premiere of Raúl Ruiz’s “final” film, The Wandering Soap Opera (1990/2017), which Ruiz’s wife and frequent collaborator Valerie Sarmiento (a director in her own right) assembled from Ruiz’s accumulated footage. With the help of Peter Bogdanovich and Netflix, Orson Welles’s 48-years-in-the-making The Other Side of the Wind is set to stream on the Netflix and open in select theaters on November 2. And, in the realm of auteur television, Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy (1989) will enjoy a week-long run at Metrograph starting on November 9, before Icarus Films releases the series on home video.
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Chris Marker, The Owl’s Legacy (1989) (image courtesy Icarus Films)
Commissioned by the Onasiss Foundation and TV channel La Sept, Marker’s 13-part series concentrates on ancient Greece and its enduring impact on contemporary society. At first glance, the series appears rather conventional and hardly distinguishable from the educational programs broadcasted on television. However, Marker creates a complicated portrait of ancient Greece, full of differing viewpoints that are finally funneled through his own vision. The series consists of talking head shots, featuring filmmakers (Elia Kazan, Theodoros Angelopoulos), composers (Iannis Xenakis), philosophers (Cornelius Castoriadis, Michel Serres), professors (Mark Griffith), and historians (Linos Benakis, Oswyn Murray, Jean-Pierre Vernant) that Marker cuts away from to archival footage, clips from films, and footage he himself recorded.
Chris Marker, The Owl’s Legacy (1989), featuring Greek singer Angélique Ionatos (image courtesy Icarus Films)
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In every shot, there is an owl, whether seen taking up an entire wall in the background or manifesting as a sculpture inches away from the interview subject. Each person gets their own owl — the bird that accompanies Athena and the everlasting symbol of knowledge. Resembling banquets held in Ancient Greece, Marker stages a number of dialogues in which groups of people gather, chat, eat, and drink wine at tables in Berkeley, Paris, Tbilisi, and Athens. He returns to them intermittently throughout the series; in the midst of their conversations, the camera lingers and swerves around animated faces.
Marker devotes each 26-minute episode to a concept crystallized by a single word: symposium, myth, nostalgia, tragedy, music, olympics, and more. Episode six, “’Mathematics,’ or the Empire Counts Back,” begins with pre-Socratic logic and Pythagoras, to Plato, followed by interludes on artificial intelligence, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and computers. A testament to Marker’s playfulness (besides crediting himself, “Chris. Marker,” with the title of “Skipper,” rather than “Director,” in the end credits), he’ll list and name the software, technology, and animals seen in The Owl’s Legacy — each deserve as much billing as the people in the series.
Chris Marker, The Owl’s Legacy (1989), featuring Elia Kazan (image courtesy Icarus Films)
In the second episode, “’Olympics,’ or the Imaginary Greece,” the ancient state as a myth and ideal leads to the rise of totalitarianism and the Nazi ideology in the 20th century. Later on, in “’Democracy,’ or the City of Dreams,” the Greek-American director Elia Kazan says that Greek democracy is a legend, going so far as to consider it not a democracy at all. “90 percent of the people in Athens were slaves, and [the] ten percent were supported by these slaves.” Further in the episode, Yale classics scholar John Winkler sees “political bluff” and smear-mongering as the continuity between Western and Athenian culture. Marker presents footage of George H.W. Bush, François Mitterrand, and other political figures in the West, as Winkler notes their ability to elude, evade, and scheme in the name of democracy.
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In a recent article, the writer Kodwo Eshun pointed out how the Onassis Foundation banned the series because of one particular comment: It had “taken offense at George Steiner’s statement that ancient Greece [has] nothing to do with modern Greece; that modern Greece was a farce and a joke.” It wasn’t until 2007, when the Otolith Group collaborated with Marker in the first Athens Biennial, that the series played in Greece.
Chris Marker, The Owl’s Legacy (1989) (image courtesy Icarus Films)
After The Owl’s Legacy, ambitious in its scope but a bit tame in form, Marker would push further into different fields, such as more installation work (Zapping Zone, Silent Movie), CD-ROM (Immemory), and virtual reality (his Second Life museum, Ouvroir). Marker never remained in one medium for long, and The Owl’s Legacy is one of the missing pieces in a varied and unpredictable career.
Chris Marker, The Owl’s Legacy (1989) (image courtesy Icarus Films)
Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy (1989) is screening at Metrograph (7 Ludlow St, Lower East Side, Manhattan) November 9–15 and will release on home video with Icarus Films.
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Magic moments By Jean-François Dars and Anne Papillault MAY 2018 #Various
1968(may). Everything moves and swarms of photographers (already) shoot at everything that moves, police in uniform running youth in civilian clothes, in the spirit of fox hunting: the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible (Oscar Wilde ). Barricades, lashings, postures, crowds, protests, flags, slogans, speakers, workers, Chris Marker, who did not do that, finds time to photograph all this, insisting, as always, on the eyes, including those of the police behind their biker glasses. But he does more. Accompanying a demonstration passing in front of the prison of the Health, it seizes, with the TV of 200 mm of his Pentax, which nobody had thought to photograph, even less to see: the gesture of solidarity of two prisoners through their bars. Two men locked up encouraging a free crowd, he had to see it. A few nights later, in front of a street blocked by a cordon of police, he seized again what nobody else thought to seize that night: a young woman with a very Russian smile and his companion, sitting on the edge the sidewalk in a skylight, conscious and indifferent at the same time, living their parenthesis against the backdrop of law enforcement, two images abundantly reproduced in a number of cine-tracts of the time.
© Iskra
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© Iskra
1985 . While a man-orchestra he realizes K. , that is to say a comment (that too fast spirits would call a making-off) of the filming of the Ran Kurosawa, still armed with his Pentax now at the end of a click , he captures one last moment, the moment when the arrow leaves the bow and his archer to go fuzzy in time, the last image of his now untraceable book Le Dépays (Herscher, 1986).
With the kind permission of Belin editions
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2011 . Income from the use of professional instruments but always ready to divert and fold at will the most banal tools, armed this time with photographic glasses of a single megabyte of memory, purchased by correspondence on the site of L a modern man, he grasps the dream and the feminine solitude on the subway without their knowledge. The images lack definition? Never mind: the pixels too apparent will make these dreamers access to the rank of Byzantine mosaic faces. And all the others will join the painting. He was thinking of Ingres, Delacroix, Leonardo (da Vinci), Burne-Jones. Also sometimes reaching the ordinary nightmare of a Bacon, in Passengers, a wonderful and soon untraceable book (Peter Blum, 2011). Never underestimate the American dimension of Chris Marker.
Courtesy the Chris Marker Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
Courtesy the Chris Marker Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
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Being a great photographer is not already given to everyone. Being a great photographer while being a great filmmaker, a virtuoso of music and writing and a formidable manipulator of computer science, is magic. But perhaps it was "enough" for Chris Marker not to have wanted anything to be all of this in particular, to have rather wished to be first a moralist of his century, with the means of his century. A century of which he has neither snubbed nor swallowed the successive lyrical illusions, which, however, he accompanied, as one accompanies the wonders of a child, just before they are smashed on the walls of reality.
Courtesy the Chris Marker Estate and Peter Blum Gallery, New York
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The ADAA Show at the Park Avenue Armory
Art Fair Mania in the Big Apple 15 MARCH 2018, DANIEL GAUSS
Chris Marker: Koreans presented by Peter Blum Gallery Photo by Charles Roussel
Chris Marker at Peter Blum – Marker made one of the greatest experimental films of all time Sans Soleil, which seems, at times, to be a reflection on what Melville called the “mystery of iniquity”. The film often shows a world in which the frail bonds of morality and compassion have been abandoned and, as Sophocles puts it, good has become evil and evil has become good. Among one of the scenes I will never forget is footage of hunters in a helicopter chasing after and shooting wolves in a pack as they helplessly try to outrun the airborne hunters. At one point, as the helicopter hovers over a wolf, the wolf spins around and seems to make eye contact with those in the helicopter. The snarling and exhausted wolf shows a type of incomprehension but also rage, or outrage, at the gratuitous cruelty as the hunters laugh gleefully.
Blum has a series of photos by Marker from North Korea during the year of 1957. Some folks have written that this is a type of contemporary political statement, compelling viewers to see North Koreans as something other than enemies. Yet, I believe we all feel great sympathy for the North Korean people and their current situation, especially for those languishing under torture, brutal treatment and starvation in political concentration camps. Political and diplomatic engagement to change this seems to be a moral imperative for every civilized country. What folks writing about these photos have missed is that North Korea was, to some historians, a better place to live than South Korea for a substantial amount of time. It might have been Marker’s intention (righteous
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ADAA: A Fair to Remember Starts a Month of Art Show Madness By ROBERTA SMITH MARCH 1, 2018
Opening day of The Art Show in the Park Avenue Armory, with more than 70 dealers of modern and contemporary art. Credit Joshua Bright for The New York Times
Further Looking
Another batch of small fine drawings, these by the Sudanese artist Ibrahim El-Salahi, commands the back wall at Salon 94. In a two-artist show at Locks Gallery, Joseph Cornell overshadows Thomas Chimes, but don’t miss the latter’s small fine paintings, including one based on the famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp as Adam, in fig-leaf and wristwatch. Peter Blum is showcasing the poignant photographs of everyday life taken by the French avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker in North Korea in 1957, as the country was sealing itself off from the world.
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At the 30th-Anniversary ADAA Art Show, Dealers Bring the New and Artists Lampoon Trump
BY Alex Greenberger and Andrew Russeth POSTED 02/27/18 7:47 PM
Work by Chris Marker in the booth of Peter Blum Gallery, at the 2018 ADAA Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory. MAXIMILÍANO DURÓN/ARTNEWS
New York’s Peter Blum Gallery turned over its booth to a timely series: Chris Marker’s photographs of North Koreans. Some of the works had previously been shown at the New York gallery in 2014, but since then, they’ve taken on a new significance. Marker, who is best known for his essayistic documentaries, took the photographs when he traveled to North Korea in 1957 as a journalist. Most of the images depict nothing special: women stroll through city streets, mountainous forests appear overgrown with trees, men smile for the camera. (In an unusually straightforward one, a little girl stares at a political cartoon about U.S. involvement in her country.) For the most part, these works are extremely ordinary, and this is their point—they depict North Korean citizens as perfectly harmless, totally normal people. In today’s climate, they act as arguments against Trumpian threats of war.
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Chris Marker’s “Koreans” Peter Blum Gallery, New York September 4 – October 18, 2014 October 9, 2014 Stephen Squibb, writer
A sequence of photos by Chris Marker on display at New York’s Peter Blum Gallery features a little girl. The 51 images are mostly snapshots; matte, legal-pad-sized prints hung evenly at eye level around the four walls of the gallery. Some appear to have a kind of incidental chronology, following a single figure through different settings, as with the child in a dress. In one image, we are positioned behind View of Chris Marker, “Koreans,” Peter Blum Gallery, her as she faces a propaganda poster. In New York, 2014. another, we see her alone amidst a vast public plaza. In a third, she regards us quizzically alongside a strange painting on a stone wall. In each case we feel as if we are alongside the girl, sharing her field of vision and experience, rather than regarding her as a subject for pity or contemplation. The photos were taken in 1957 when “the formidable propaganda machine that would soon be identified with the sheer mention of North Korea wasn’t yet running at full throttle,” as Marker puts it in an accompanying testimony. The resulting photos, he notes with amusement, were rejected on both sides of the 38th parallel:
“To the North, [work] which never mentioned once the name of Kim Il-sung simply didn’t exist. To the South, the raw fact that it had been allowed to be done in North Korea made it a tool of communist propaganda. That’s how, I was told, it was exhibited in Seoul’s counter-revolutionary museum, and its author introduced as a ‘Marxist dog’. I didn’t mind. Since Snoopy, the word ‘dog’ has ceased to be an insult in my cats-ruled world.”(1)
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Happily identifying with dogs, cats, and children: this is pure Marker, someone who, for all his intellectual power and political commitment, never slipped into facile didacticism or formal austerity. When his work was long or difficult—as it often was—it was because his subjects were long and difficult, and not because he felt that length or difficulty were castor-oil and vitamins for his audience, unpleasant but necessary, in and of themselves, for the viewers’ long-term health and well-being. If Godard was the first-born cinematic child of Brecht’s theory of the distancing effect, then Marker was his other, second son, and, perhaps, the one who followed his precursor’s practice most closely.
Brecht’s theory of the Verfremdungseffekt—which he borrowed from the Russian formalists—held that the audience’s identification with the characters on stage must be disrupted. Entering the theater as more or less willing pawns of the ruling class, the spectators, via the pedagogy of the distancing effect, leave as critical thinkers. The viewer’s initial position is taken to Chris Marker, Untitled #18, 1957, from the series “Koreans.” be one of unconscious, maleficent separation from their true interests and, by being alienated again, this time from the conventions of narrative storytelling, they come to recognize their own interpolation as national subjects to be so much hocus-pocus. Montage, gesture, and direct address are thus difficult to swallow for an audience accustomed to the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, or total work of art, and this difficulty is necessary to stimulate the aggregate demand for revolution.
This could be called the “revelation” school of Brechtian representation, in that the intention is to shock the audience out of their false consciousness and into the revelation of the real conditions of their lives. But this is one thing in mechanically reproducible genres, like film and photography, and another, perhaps, in the theater, where the encounter with the work is always fixed in time and space. More to the point, the revelation school emphasizes Brecht’s theory as opposed to his practice, which, in plays like Roundheads and Peakheads (1936),The Private Life of the Master Race (1938), and The Resistible Rise of Arturo Uri (1941), is closer, in some ways, to Marker than it is to Godard. Here the audience is not cast as thought-less drones in need of critical shock therapy, but, on the contrary, as thought-full spectators hungry for information. The problem is less the
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM audience’s identification with the characters on stage or in film than it is with the sorts of circumstances it is encouraged to identify with. This is particularly clear when the background is North Korea, whose casting as the locus classicus of unfreedom in the American political imaginary would emphasize the absolute difference between the two territories and their alienation one from the other. It is this distance that Marker’s photographs collapse. His subjects, with their immense variety of activities—shooting guns, making things, dancing ballet, performing traditional rituals— are like Brecht’s protagonists, neither angels nor demons, but individuals negotiating a social landscape littered with contradictions. The effect is to drive a wedge not between audience and performer, but between all of us humans, on the one hand, and the instituted narratives that would divide us—by reference to our ostensible freedom, our race, or our nationality—on the other. Marker’s subjects are not alienated from us so much as they are alienated like us. Hence the emphasis on Marker’s camera placement alongside the figure of the girl—rather than above or below—as we confront the grimacing propaganda image together, side by side, as a kind of montage or jump-cut already embedded in the lifeworld.
Marker thus exemplifies a second Brechtian tendency, the realist school, wherein representation seeks to accompany the audience, to address them as comrades and adults, not, as with revelation, in order to scramble their thinking, but to contribute to its already ongoing and essential process. The difficulty with the realist school is that it requires a great deal of faith; faith in the possibility of communication, faith in the strength and vitality of the larger movement, and, above all, faith in the people as Chris Marker, Untitled #45, 1957, from the series partisans of their own individual and collective “Koreans.” autonomy. Whether such thinking is possible today, I cannot say, but what is certain is that it shines, joyous and indomitable, throughout Chris Marker’s “Koreans.”
The article can be found online at: www.art-agenda.com/reviews/chris-marker’s-“koreans”/ (1) Chris Marker, 2009, quoted at peterblumgallery.com, last accessed October 7, 2014: http://peterblumgallery.com/exhibitions/2014/chris-marker-koreans/press-release.
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It’s All Just a Game, Now Take It Seriously
August 14, 2014 A. O. Scott, writer
Chris Marker, who died on his 91st birthday in 2012, was a filmmaker beyond category. It is often said that he transcended or defied the conventions of genre, but it might be more accurate to say that he operated in serene indifference to what other, less liberated souls took to be the rules. Most famous for “La Jetée,” his 1962 time- travel tour de force, 28 minutes long and composed almost entirely of still images, Marker also seemed to have freed himself from the strictures of time. “Level Five,” a passionate and cerebral science-fiction adventure made in 1997, belongs equally to the past, the present and the future. Never released in the United States before, it starts a weeklong run at BAM Rose Cinemas on Friday as part of an invaluable retrospective of Marker’s work. Its themes are a bit nostalgic and some of its technology looks dated, but there is nothing else in theaters now that feels quite as new.
Is “Level Five” an essay film, a documentary, a techno- Scenes from Chris Marker’s “Level Five,” a 1997 film receiving its first American release at BAM thriller or a mystery? The answer is yes, in an Rose Cinemas. Icarus Films. arrangement that is characteristically playful, ruminative and melancholy. Always thrifty and resourceful, Marker was adept at using modest cinematic means to pursue visionary ends. Much of “Level Five” consists of the straight-to-camera testimony of Laura (Catherine Belkhodja) as she reflects on the legacy of a vanished lover and collaborator, who disappeared while researching an interactive video game.
The subject of that game is the Battle of Okinawa, which is also, therefore, among the subjects of the film. Interviews conducted in Japan (including one with the great Japanese filmmaker Nagisa Oshima) are interspersed with ghostly archival footage to recall a horror that much of the world has
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM forgotten. After American forces landed on the island and gained a strategic advantage, the Japanese military, determined to fight to the last man, began a campaign of executions and forced suicide against the civilian population, more than 100,000 of whom died.
Marker’s calm, mournful voice-over notes that this was one of the worst instances of slaughter in the Second World War, comparable to what happened in the Nazi death camps. His video game designer imagines that it might be possible for players to undo this dreadful history and arrive at different outcomes, and it is perhaps this hope that leads him astray.
But “Level Five,” though it is in part a rigorous, informative and morally powerful historical documentary, is also a meditation on the relationship between the fixity of the past and the flux of memory. It wonders, in a way that feels joltingly contemporary, about how the Scenes from “Level Five.” images captured, invented and disseminated by various forms of Above, Catherine Belkhodja. technology — including cinema itself — affect what we know about Icarus Films. the past and ourselves.
Level Five
Opens on Friday
Written and directed by Chris Marker; directors of photography, Gérard de Battista and Yves Angelo; music by Michel Krasna; produced by Raphael Roméro; released by Icarus Films. In French and Japanese, with English subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. This film is not rated.
WITH: Catherine Belkhodja (Laura).
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Chris Marker, Whitechapel Gallery, review: ‘provocative and prophetic’
April 17, 2014 Alastair Sooke, writer
Strange but splendid: A still from La Jetée (1962) by Chris Maker Photo: BFI Stills Collection
For the uninitiated, it can be hard to get a handle on the cult French filmmaker Chris Marker. Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921, this “best-known author of unknown movies”, as he once described himself, was devilishly reclusive: he rarely granted interviews, and resisted having his photograph taken, preferring instead to be represented by images of a cat.
Yet his career (a word that he detested), prior to his death in 2012, was influential. Credited with inventing the “essay film”, a thoughtful and subjective form of documentary elegantly expounding upon a theme like a mishmash of cinema and Montaigne, he is best known for his 1962 sci-fi short La Jetée (“The Jetty”), which inspired Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys - as well as, more loosely, the Terminator movies. A rare print of La Jetée, a dystopian drama almost exclusively told using still images, is currently being shown at the Whitechapel Gallery, as part of the first retrospective of Marker’s work mounted in Britain.
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Even though he could be disarmingly self-deprecating (“I make these things and people take me for Plato,” he once said with disbelief), the point of the retrospective is to suggest the scope of Marker’s creativity beyond filmmaking. We therefore encounter nearly 80 of his photographs, as well as many of the covetable travel books he edited for the Petite Planète (“Small Planet”) series during the Fifties, designing their covers and commissioning photographers including Henri Cartier-Bresson and William Klein (Rough Guides, eat your heart out).
Immaculate landmarks in graphic design, these publications testify to Marker’s lifelong fascination with other cultures - as well as the faces of beautiful women, who invariably grace their covers.
For aficionados of Marker, who served in the Resistance during the Second World War, this material will be diverting. For the rest of us, however, it’s his films that provide the impetus to visit the Whitechapel. A thing of strange splendour, La Jetée remains a masterpiece of pared-down storytelling, involving a time-travelling prisoner from a post-apocalyptic future who falls in love with a woman he once saw on the observation platform or “jetty” at Orly Airport.
The print at the Whitechapel includes an alternative opening sequence using moving footage. Marker subsequently rejected this, so that the jarring effect of the film - which famously relies upon photographs appearing on screen in quick succession, a little like a deck of black-and-white picture cards being shuffled and dealt before our eyes - would be established from the start.
Elsewhere, there are also all five of Marker’s multimedia installations, including Zapping Zone (1990-94), in which 20 blurting television screens compete for our attention within a darkened chamber - a quintessential, and prophetic, work of art, you could argue, for our impatient and hyperactive age.
I was more drawn, though, to the subtler argument of Marker’s classic early art-historical film Les Statues Meurent Aussi (“Statues Also Die”) from 1953, which he co-directed with Alain Resnais, who once described him as “the prototype of the 21st-century man”.
Shown in the first gallery, this poetic documentary is a scintillating, whip-smart diatribe against the modish appropriation of African culture by Westerners during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Marker’s central proposition is that classifying and labelling African tribal sculptures, and locking them away behind glass in museums, robs them of the fervour, mystery and magic with which they were once imbued.
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As an argument, this is true - but at the time of its release, the film must also have slyly dismantled assumptions about the benefits of Europe’s colonisation of Africa. Not everyone will agree with Marker’s empire-bashing political agenda, but most would concede that it is rare to encounter provocative, polemical filmmaking delivered with such élan.
‘Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat’, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1, to June 22. Whitechapelgallery.org 02075227888
This article is available online at: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/art-reviews/10772395/Chris-Marker- Whitechapel-Gallery-review-provocative-and-prophetic.html
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The Independent
Chris Marker: Mystic film-maker with a Midas touch
April 22, 2014 Zoe Pilger, writer
Alexandra Stewart in ‘La Jetée’ (as noted in the article)
Paris has been wrecked by a Third World War. The survivors are living in camps underground and a sinister group of scientists is conducting a series of experiments on men who go mad or die as a result. They select one man for his exceptionally strong imagination. His eyes are covered; he is hooked up to a machine. He must travel back in time through his own memory to find the woman he loves.
This is the plot of French film-maker Chris Marker's 1962 photo-roman La Jetée (The Pier). The film is half- an-hour long and consists of a series of still black-and-white photographs, a lyrical voiceover and music. Photo-roman means photo novel; La Jetée has the depth of very great literature. I hate the word "masterpiece" for all the macho pomposity that it implies, but La Jetée is one. To watch it for the first time is an intense, melancholic experience. I have watched it many times and I still love it.
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The film is the star of the first UK retrospective of Marker's work, which has just opened at the Whitechapel Gallery. This is the exhibition that I have been most excited about all year, and it delivers. Marker was a seer with a fascination for technology and a deep, near mystic understanding of people and the power of images. This is well worth a visit.
Fans of La Jetée will discover the breadth of Marker's vision; he is best known as a Nouvelle Vague film- maker, but he also created some excellent video installations in his later years – particularly Silent Movie (1995) and Zapping Zone (1990-4). He took photographs throughout his life. He was a polymath with a sense of political responsibility, who managed to convey pure human emotion through experimental form. This is a feat not achieved by most contemporary artists. Video installation art is now all the rage, but Marker elevates the form. In so doing, he highlights how much rubbish is produced today.
Marker was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in the outskirts of Paris in 1921. It is thought that he named himself after the magic marker pen, one of many mysterious facts that surround his identity. He was famously reclusive. He rarely gave interviews and sometimes sent a picture of a cat when he was asked for a photograph of himself. The driving force of his work seems to be a yearning for an indefinable thing – perhaps love, perhaps more abstract than love – which has been lost.
After joining the Resistance during the Second World War, he worked as a journalist, novelist, poet and activist. He edited a series of Petite Planète travel books in the 1950s. Their acid-bright covers are displayed here. Each is adorned with an alluring women from a different country: Tahiti, Japan, Denmark. They point to several of Marker's obsessions: travel, classification, female beauty. Far from a Don Quixote, however, his work seems respectful. He died in 2012 at the age of 91.
The time-travelling protagonist of La Jetée finds "the girl who could be the one he seeks" in a garden, in a museum filled with taxidermied animals. He admires the nape of her neck as she holds up her hair. Their love for one another is conveyed by the way they look at each other. It is one of the most tender and true portrayals of love that I have ever come across in any art form. It is on a par with the sex scene in Don't Look Now (1973), but the sensuality of La Jetée is restrained. Love is a cocoon against tyranny, but it is too fragile to survive. In the end, darkness wins.
It is wonderful to see the film on a big screen. However, the problem is that it is running on a loop. Marker's style may be fragmented but his narrative is absorbingly linear: there is a beginning, middle and end. In order to enjoy the full beauty of La Jetée, you really need to see it from the beginning. It would perhaps have been better to run the films on a schedule. Also I think the film lends itself to being watched in the dark, rather than
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM a white-cube space. But these are minor criticisms. Overall, the curators have done a fantastic job of showing the thematic coherence of his life's work.
It's also great to see some of the process of production. A workbook for La Jetée is displayed, along with two stills. The first shows the protagonist's lover asleep on a white pillow, her blonde hair arranged above her. She is serene. Her eyes are closed. In the second, her eyes are open. This is the moment in the film when the form changes from photography to moving image: the muse wakes up. It is sudden, shocking, uncanny, akin to a doll who blinks. Marker breaks the illusion that he himself has created and disarms the viewer. If a woman in a photograph can open her eyes, then what else is possible?
The curators made the sensitive decision to hang photographs from the Staring Back series, which Marker took from 1952 right up to 2006, throughout the exhibition. They lend a continuous narrative thread. Each photograph is a portrait of a woman from around the world. One is particularly striking. It shows a woman wearing a headscarf, standing in a field. Her gaze is ferocious – perhaps frightened. Her eye make-up is Cleopatra-esque. Her glamour is at odds with the rural setting. She tugs at the ends of her headscarf, about to tie a knot. The gesture appears ominous, even murderous.
"We exchanged looks, as one says, but what did they get in exchange?" Marker wrote of the series. He was unusually aware of the violence of his own camera, of the invasiveness of capturing strangers' images, but he was also clearly infatuated with female beauty. The series questions the unequal relationship between artist and subject. It recalls John Berger's Ways of Seeing (1977), which explored the power of "the male gaze" in classical paintings of the nude and contemporary advertising. By ensuring that the women "stare back", Marker proves himself to be a progressive, not merely in matters of world politics, but gender too – a rare quality in the pre-feminist era in which he was working.
Another exceptional film is Statues Also Die (1950-3), which explores the colonisation of Africa through the transformation of sacred objects into tourist trinkets. Statues with "the value of illuminations" are mass produced and lose their magical function; dances to the gods are transformed into empty spectacles for white tourists. The film could be criticised for expressing some of the prejudices of its time – black experience is generalised and, to a degree, fetishised as a paradise lost – but its spirit is indignant. Marker evidently hated domination of all kinds.
His political commitment is most evident upstairs: there are photographs of the May 1968 demonstrations in Paris. One shows a young couple, sitting together, their faces lit romantically. They look utterly happy and in love. Behind them, rows of police are cast in darkness. The image sounds trite, but it is not. Rather, it points
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM to Marker's abiding theme: love versus totalitarianism. There is intimacy between a man and a woman on the one hand, and the anonymous oppression of the state on the other.
This too was the rallying cry of the 1960s counter-cultural movements: "Make Love, Not War". Rather than wild sex, however, it is true love that emerges in Marker's vision as that which is capable of saving us – almost. "Now he is sure she is the one," says the narrator of La Jetée. "As a matter of fact, it is the only thing he may be sure of, in the middle of this dateless world…"
Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 (020 7522 7888) to 22 June
This article is available online at: http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/chris-marker-mystic- filmmaker-with-a-midas-touch-9273471.html
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‘Thrilling and prophetic’: why film-maker Chris Marker’s radical images influenced so many artists From experimental sci-fi to cartoon cats, Chris Marker’s work was profound, prophetic and hugely influential. Ahead of a new exhibition, some of those he inspired examine his cult appeal
April 15, 2014 Sukhdev Sandhu, writer
Meditating on the 20th century … La Jetée, Chris Marker’s much-celebrated short film, made from a series of still images. Photo: BFI Stills Collection
Chris Marker was a phantom, an escape artist, a shapeshifter. He told friends he came from Ulan Bator, Mongolia. Born in 1921 in a pleasant Parisian suburb, Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve racked up many pseudonyms and monikers: Sandor Krasna, Jacopo Berenzi, Fritz Markassin. Early on, as if in anticipation of the new vocabularies and identities that would proliferate in the digital era, he signed himself Chris.Marker.
He rarely gave interviews and was happy to be represented by images of a cat. But he was no hermit or recluse. His elusiveness was a tool for creation. It furnished him with freedom. Untethered by biography, unshackled by celebrity, he was able to drift through the second half of the 20th century witnessing, documenting and meditating on its political and imaginative upheavals.
Across many fields – in graphic design, multimedia, but most of all in film – he made the activity of thinking about images, whether photographic or moving, seem both profound and playful. He had prominent admirers, among them Francis Ford Coppola and Terry Gilliam, the latter reworking his still-photograph-constructed
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM time-travel masterpiece La Jetée (1962) as 12 Monkeys (1995). But his work, at once prolix and difficult to see, mostly appeared as clandestine and spectral as its maker.
A new survey at London's Whitechapel Gallery offers a rare opportunity to engage with a broad cross-section of Marker's protean productions, including a never-before-seen version of La Jetée with an alternative opening sequence. For co-curator Chris Darke, who frequently corresponded and also worked with Marker, the show reveals the ways in which the artist's "central subject was intelligence, a very particular, astute intelligence that's also full of political acuity, humour and lyricism".
The world that Marker navigated over the course of the 1950s was full of deconstruction and dreams. Colonised peoples everywhere were feverishly trying to create new societies. One of his earliest films, Statues Also Die (1953), a collaboration with Alain Resnais, is a startlingly bold critique of European approaches to African art. A voiceover, using the language of Afro-futurism – a school of thought that sees the abduction, transportation to the "new world" and ritualistic violence meted out to Africans during the slave trade as a form of proto-science fiction – claims: "We [the west] are the Martians of Africa. We disembark from our planet with our ways of seeing, with our white magic, and with our machines." The film was banned in France for 15 years.
Marker was instinctively cosmopolitan, but his perspective was subaltern rather than aristocratic. He journeyed to China, Israel and Cuba – societies grappling with modernisation, with fashioning brave new worlds. He was a passionate anti-imperialist, someone who always sided with the weak (he loved cats because, he claimed, "a cat is never on the side of power"), but he later worried that in his pre-1962 films he'd treated authoritarian regimes with kid gloves. Later works such as The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967), about a 100,000-strong anti-Vietnam war march, would be less partisan.
According to Naeem Mohaiemen, an award-winning film-maker preoccupied with histories of the Bangladeshi left, this tonal shift gave political documentarians a license to develop more equivocal voices. "In The Sixth Side his narration displays the capacity to speak, even within the white heat of the moment, about the possibilities of failure. He's not Norman Mailer, sounding like Olympus proclaiming from on high; Marker still had palpable affection for the movement, even as he critiqued it. That capacity was profoundly influential for my generation, as we struggled to make sense of revolutionary left politics from within the debris of a previous epoch's dreams."
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Marker's work can be seen as a more radical companion to Edward Steichen’s The Family of Man, the hugely popular 1955 exhibition of photographs of men and women – united by things such as love, children, death – from all around the world. It's rich with sensuous humanism and a near-ethnographic curiosity in peoples and perspectives. Whether in his colourful and innovative book design for the Petite Planète travel guide series (1954-58); Staring Back, an aptly titled collection of protest photographs taken between 1952 and 2006; or in his dreamlike documentary Sans Soleil (1982), which has been widely hailed as one of the most influential non-fiction films of the last few decades, there's never a trace of exoticism or voyeurism.
Emiko Omori, director of the newly released documentary To Chris Marker, An Unsent Letter, spent the second world war in an internment camp for Japanese Americans. "Growing up in California," she recalls, "I came out of those camps not wanting to be Japanese. We are often stuck in our own upbringings, but his films opened so many doors of possibility, and my mind to other ways of seeing and relating."
Marker's films are often described as writerly, and he's regularly cited as an early master of the essay film – a ruminative, often self-reflexive form of non-fiction (other practitioners include Jean-Luc Godard, Adam Curtis and Mark Cousins), the increasing popularity of which was marked by a recent season at London's BFI Southbank. But his actual writings – poetry, current affairs essays, even a 1949 novel entitled The Forthright Spirit – are little known. The show's catalogue includes a translation of his essay on Cocteau's Orphée (1950) that is especially fascinating, argues Darke, "because it's Marker meditating about the poetic capacities of cinema before he becomes a film-maker".
In fact, says Darke, "Marker was constantly exploring the relationship between word and image, page and screen". This interplay between text and image is at its most delightful in Marker's photo-essay book Coréennes (1958), and in Commentaires (1961), a collection of early film scripts that were a key influence on Richard Hollis’s design for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), a bestselling work whose analysis of the relationship between art and society led one critic to describe it as "Mao's Little Red Book for a generation of art students". Here, photos and graphic illustrations are as important as the words, which are generously distributed so that the text feels aphoristic, as quietly resonant as a haiku. Each page spread is spacious; not a clump of information to be absorbed, but a field of potential relations to be traversed.
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Chris Marker’s workbook for the creation of La Jetée
Marker didn't regard artistic forms as sacred. He didn't believe in the primacy of celluloid or the cinema screen. He was continually embracing and experimenting with new technologies: one of his richest later works was a CD-Rom entitled Immemory (1997); he created Photoshop cartoon-collages for the French website Poptronics; the Whitechapel show includes a projection of Ouvroir: The Movie (2010), a tour of a museum he created on Second Life, as well as the UK premiere of Zapping Zone (Proposal for an Imaginary Television) (1990-94), a sprawling assemblage of videos, computers and light boxes.
"Marker was always interested in transformation," recalls Darke. This fascination with the ability of new technologies to transform ideas of human identity, social connection and the nature of memory makes him a strikingly contemporary figure whose work has been embraced by young art students as much as cinephiles. His claim to be a "bricoleur" – a collector of pre-existing visual material – is resonant now that the harvesting, assembling and curation of images has become as important as their creation. His fondness for revisiting old
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM material and reusing it in new contexts resonates with the present era's unprecedented ability not only to store huge digital archives, but to click, drag and recontextualise their contents across limitless formats.
At a time when corporations and governments alike are hell-bent on surveilling and snooping on citizens, Marker's anonymity feels like a thrilling and prophetic act of resistance. His willingness to work collaboratively – whether as part of the group of directors (including Agnès Varda and Joris Ivens) that made the omnibus Far from Vietnam(1967) or with the Medvedkin Group, who worked on agit-garde productions documenting insurgent union members – signals not just a lack of ego, but a socialist strategy that's of great relevance to today's austerity-hit young artists.
Always on the move, sometimes against the tide; collecting, logging, speculating about images; teaching us that we don't have to be slaves to spectacle but can use photography as an instrument of thought – Marker's work still feels like liberation, a road map to newfoundlands. SS
A museum built by Chris Marker in Second Life, the online virtual world
William Gibson, novelist I first saw La Jetée in a film history course at the University of British Columbia, in the early 1970s. I imagine that I would have read about it earlier, in passing, in works about science fiction cinema, but I doubt I had much sense of what it might be. And indeed, nothing I had read or seen had prepared me for it. Or perhaps everything had, which is essentially the same thing.
I can’t remember another single work of art ever having that immediate and powerful impact, which of course makes the experience quite impossible to describe. As I experienced it, I think, it drove me, as RD Laing had it, out of my wretched mind. I left the lecture hall where it had been seen screened in an altered state,
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM profoundly alone. I do know that I knew immediately that my sense of what science fiction could be had been permanently altered.
Part of what I find remarkable about this memory today was the temporally hermetic nature of the experience. I saw it, yet was effectively unable to see it again. It would be over a decade before I would happen to see it again, on television, its screening a rare event. Seeing a short foreign film, then, could be equivalent of seeing a UFO, the experience surviving only as memory. The world of cultural artefacts was only atemporal in theory then, not yet literally and instantly atemporal. Carrying the memory of that screening’s intensity for a decade after has become a touchstone for me. What would have happened had I been able to rewind? Had been able to rent or otherwise access a copy? It was as though I had witnessed a Mystery, and I could only remember that when something finally moved – and I realised that I had been breathlessly watching a sequence of still images – I very nearly screamed.
Mark Romanek, paid homage in a David Bowie video I was exposed to Chris Marker’s work at a particularly impressionable age. He’s been a huge influence. Bowie and I shared and admiration for La Jetée, so we contrived to pay homage to it in Jump, They Say. The Idea of making those iconic still images move seemed both exciting and somehow a little sacrilegious. I was deeply relieved to hear that Mr. Marker was pleased and not offended by the gesture.
Joanna Hogg, film-maker One of the things I find so seductive about Marker’s films is the sense of nostalgia that permeates much of his work, a tone of reminiscence as if you, the viewer, had a shared history with him. At the same time, one is never allowed to forget the constructed nature of memory. This is perfectly illustrated in the marvelous sequence in La Jetée when the time traveler and the woman visit a museum of natural history, an enchanted afternoon in an artificial Eden. In these frozen moments of happiness, it becomes possible to forget that some of the animals with which they cavort already extinct, at the same time as the distinction between the living and the dead is temporarily removed.
This article is available online at: http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/15/thrilling-prophetic-chris- marker-experimental-films
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Chris Marker “Guillaume-en-Égypte” at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (MA)
December 12, 2013
Chris Marker “Guillaume en Égypte’ installation view at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (MA), 2013
The MIT List Visual Arts Center presents Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte, a survey exhibition of the work of renowned filmmaker and artist Chris Marker (1921-2012). The exhibition is presented concurrently at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (October 18, 2013-January 5, 2014) and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University (October 18, 2013-December 22, 2013), and is accompanied by a retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive (October 17-December 9, 2013). Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte is the first comprehensive presentation of Marker’s pioneering work in text, photography, film, video, and digital media, reflecting his role as a chronicler of the second half of the 20th century through its images. The exhibition and related programming includes screenings and contributions by Agnès Varda, Duncan Campbell, and Jason Simon. Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte is organized by João Ribas.
Best-known for his 1962 science fiction film La Jetée, Chris Marker worked as a photographer, writer, and editor, before turning to film in the early 1950s. The exhibition at the List will include a comprehensive selection of his media work along with three of Marker’s most important photographic series: Coréennes, his black-and-white-photos of a trip to North Korea in the mid- 1950s; Staring Back, photographic portraits captured during travels in Asia, South America, Scandinavia, Africa, Russia, and elsewhere from 1952 to 2006, as well as images from political demonstrations and from Marker’s own films; and Passengers, images taken between 2008 and 2010 of passengers traveling on the Paris Métro. The exhibition will also explore Marker’s critical interest in the relation between images and memory, and between documentary and fiction, through works such as Si j’avais quatre dromadaires” (1966), centered on over 800 photographs Marker
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM had taken for over a decade; Remembrances of Things to Come, (2003), a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon and her images of postwar culture; and The Last Bolshevik, Marker’s tribute to the work and legacy of Russian film director Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989).
In the late 1960s, Marker’s interest in time-based moving image production and political engagement lead him to establish the SLON and Groupe Medvedkine collectives, whose objectives were to make films collaboratively and to encourage industrial workers to produce their own films. From the striking French workers at the Rhodiacéta factory in À bientôt, j’espère (Rhodiacéta) (1968) to Marker’s reflection on the role of imagination in public life in The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), the various works presented in the exhibition reflect Marker’s ongoing engagement with politics.
Always an early adopter of new moving image technologies, Marker turned to the layering of images and the aesthetics of video, as well computing and digital media, in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition will present a comprehensive selection of Marker’s work in video spanning several decades, including television productions and his pioneering use of digital technology in the landmark CD-ROM based work, Immemory (1998), which invites readers to navigate “zones” of travel, war, cinema, and poetry, moving through photographs, film clips, music, and text. Marker’s engagement with the digital in Level Five (1996) deploys computer games, digital databases, and web interfaces as platforms for historical investigation, anticipating the ways in which new media are increasingly becoming sites of collective memory. The exhibition will also include recent work Marker produced for a variety of digital platforms, including Second Life and Youtube.
As part of the exhibition, the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University will present a selection of media along with two of Marker’s most-important installation-based works: Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, a 19-minute looped media installation inspired by T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” created in 2005 for the Museum of Modern Art; and Silent Movie (1994- 95), Marker’s response to the one–hundredth anniversary of the invention of cinema. Originally commissioned by the Wexner Arts Center Silent Movie evokes the memory of pre-sound cinema in an installation that investigates the intersection of personal recollection with collective nostalgia.
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Chris Marker “Guillaume-en-Égypte” installation views at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (MA) 2013
Courtesy: Argos Films; Peter Blum Gallery, New York; the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts at Harvard University, Cambridge (MA); MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge (MA). Photo: Peter Harris Studio.
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MIT List Visual Arts Center & The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University
Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte October 18, 2013 – January 5, 2014
The MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University presents Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte, a survey exhibition of the work of renowned filmmaker and artist Chris Marker (1921-2012). The exhibition is presented concurrently at the MIT List Visual Arts Center (October 18, 2013 – January 5, 2014) and the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts (October 18, 2013 – December 22, 2013), and is accompanied by a retrospective at the Harvard Film Archive (October 17 – December 9, 2013). Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte is the first comprehensive presentation of Marker’s pioneering work in text, photography, film, video, and digital media, reflecting his role as a chronicler of the second half of the 20th century through its images. The exhibition and related programming includes screenings and contributions by Agnès Varda, Duncan Campbell, and Jason Simon. Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte is organized by João Ribas.
Best-known for his 1962 science fiction film La Jetée, Chris Marker worked as a photographer, writer, and editor, before turning to film in the early 1950s. The exhibition at the List will include a comprehensive selection of his media work along with three of Marker’s most important photographic series: Coréennes, his black-and-white-photos of a trip to North Korea in the mid- 1950s; Staring Back, photographic portraits captured during travels in Asia, South America, Scandinavia, Africa, Russia, and elsewhere from 1952 to 2006, as well as images form political demonstrations and from Marker’s own films; and Passengers, images taken between 2008 and 2010 of passengers traveling on the Paris Métro. The exhibition will also explore Marker’s critical interest in the relation between images and memory, and between documentary and fiction, through works such as Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), centered on over 800 photographs Marker had taken for over a decade; Remembrances of Things to Come, (2003), a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon and her images of postwar culture; and The Last Bolshevik, Marker’s tribute to the work and legacy of Russian film director Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989).
In the late 1960s, Marker’s interest in time-based moving image production and political engagement lead him to establish the SLON and Groupe Medvedkine collectives, whose objectives were to make films collaboratively and to encourage industrial workers to produce their own films.
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
From the striking French workers at the Rhodiacéta factory Á bientôt, j’espère (Rhodiacéta) (1968)to Marker’s reflection on the role of imagination in public life in The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), the various works presented in the exhibition reflect Marker’s ongoing engagement with politics.
Always an early adopter of new moving mage technologies, Marker turned to the layering of images and the aesthetics of video, as well computing and digital media, in the 1970s and 1980s. The exhibition will present a comprehensive selection of Marker’s work in video spanning several decades, including television productions and his pioneering use of digital technology in the landmark CD-ROM based work, Immemory (1998), which invites readers to navigate “zones” of travel, war, cinema, and poetry, moving through photographs, film clips, music, and text. Marker’s engagement with the digital in Level Five (1996) deploys computer games, digital databases, and web interfaces as platforms for collective memory. The exhibition will also include recent work Marker produced for a variety of digital platforms, including Second Life and Youtube.
As part of the exhibition, the Carpenter Center for the Visual arts at Harvard University will present a selection of media along with two of Marker’s most-important installation-based works: Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, a 19-minute looped media installation inspired by T.S. Elliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men” created in 2005 for the Museum of Modern Art; and Silent Movie (1994-95), Marker’s response to the one-hundredth anniversary of the invention of the camera. Originally commissioned by the Wexner Arts Center Silent Movie evokes the memory of pre-sound cinema in an installation that investigates the intersection of personal recollection with collective nostalgia
Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Institut Français and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, The Dedalus Foundation, Icarus Films, Cultural Service of the French Consulate in Boston, TOKY, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and the Friends of the List. Special thanks to Peter Blum Gallery for their generous support and assistance.
Chris Marker, The Case of the Grinning Cat, 2004 Photo Courtesy of Icarus Films
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November 2, 2013 Mark Feeney, writer
Chris Marker’s “Christine Aya” from the “Staring Back” series. PETER BLUM GALLERY
CAMBRIDGE — Style is how an artist approaches content. All great artists have one; it’s a proof of their greatness. Sensibility is different. Transcending style, sensibility is how an artist approaches life. Surprisingly few artists have a sensibility. Chris Marker (1921-2012) had one — and what a one. Few would recognize his name — Marker once puckishly described himself as “the best-known author of unknown movies” — but fame little concerned a man far more interested in making images, visiting distant lands, cherishing cats and owls, and distrusting authority.
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Marker’s sensibility is what unites a lavishly large and varied body of work. That work encompasses film and video and photography, documentary and fiction and agitprop, writing and editing, computer art and multimedia projects and forays onto the Web.
The surpassing cultural project of the French Enlightenment was the Encyclopedie, its many volumes a way of making sense of the world through knowledge (and style) and by doing so subvert the political and religious establishment. It’s not inaccurate to describe Marker, a Frenchman, as the last Encylopediste. In his slyly unsystematic way, he was kin to Denis Diderot as well as Jean-Luc Godard. There’s an affiliation with Montaigne, too, the father of the essay. For regardless of medium or mode, Marker’s work is naturally essayistic and interrogatory.
The Marker sensibility — playful, intelligent, cool, lucid, deeply humane, audacious, happily heterodox, searching, skeptical, relaxed, restless, constantly curious, elegant (both intellectually and visually), historicist yet also up-to-the-minute and much drawn to technology — is on full and entrancing display at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and Harvard’s Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts. The exhibition, “Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte,” runs at Harvard through Dec. 22 and at MIT through Jan. 5. And the Harvard Film Archive hosts a Marker retrospective through Dec. 16. Taken together, they are a signal event in the cultural life of Greater Boston and a gratifying reminder of how enriching institutional collaboration can be.
(Guillaume-en-Égypte? It was the name of Marker’s cat, who then provided the model for his computer avatar.)
Marker’s most famous work, “La Jetée” (1962), is emblematic of his art in both excellence and unclassifiability. Does it even qualify as a film? Its 28 minutes consist almost entirely of still black- and-white photographs, purporting to show life in a post-apocalyptic Paris. There’s the merest instant of motion, which makes the stillness of the rest of the film all the more piercing. An evoking of love, memory, and mortality, and the interplay of past, present, and future, “La Jetée” is like nothing else — not even the film Terry Gilliam derived from it, “12 Monkeys” — yet a half century on, the influence of its lyrical dystopianism continues to be felt throughout the culture.
The List has the lion’s share of “Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte.” Monitors show a selection of two dozen or more of his films. Subjects include whales, Siberia, Tokyo, folk art in San Francisco Bay (that one lasts all of six minutes), a solar eclipse (not the eclipse itself, but the people observing
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM it – a telling Markerish distinction), a French workers’ strike in 1968, the ‘30s photojournalist Denise Bellon. Nothing human was exotic to Marker.
More than anything else, perhaps, Marker was an ethnologist of “the strange tribes of the late 20th century.” Those words come from “Level Five” (1997), a film as extraordinary as it is unclassifiable (that word again). It’s about the nascent Worldwide Web (Marker offers his own version, Option World Link — note the initials), the battle of Okinawa, human isolation, computer games, Marker’s fascination with the actress Catherine Belkhodja, who delivers the narration as a sumptuous soliloquy. “Level Five” is projected on a large screen, as it well deserves.
Also at the List are upward of 200 photographs. They mostly come from three series: “Coréennes,” taken in North Korea in the late ‘50s; “Passengers,” showing riders on the Paris Métro; and “Staring Back.” “Staring Back” is just what it says it is: photographic subjects gazing into Marker’s camera. In implying an equal status between subject and maker, the images are Marker at his most characteristic.
None of the photographs are framed. They’re not meant to be discrete. They’re part of a larger whole, an ongoing engagement with the world. Some of the images are film stills, from “The Sixth Side of the Pentagon,” Marker’s documentary about a 1967 anti-Vietnam protest, and his magnum opus, “A Cat without a Grin” (1977), a three-hour recollection of the political upheaval of the ‘60s. Marker may have had the intellect of an 18th-century philosophe, but his soul belonged to the 1960s. Boundaries — temporal and geographic, no less than aesthetic and political — held no appeal for him whatsoever, other than the pleasure that came of ignoring them.
The Carpenter Center features two installations. “Owls at Noon: The Hollow Men” (2005) is a visual meditation on T. S. Eliot’s poem. It flirts with solemnity as nothing else in the show does. “Silent Movie” (1994-1995) celebrated the 100th birthday of the cinema — and Marker loved the movies as much as he did cats and owls. On five monitors footage from silent films is interspersed with black- and-white images of Belkhodja. Across from the installation hang several posters Marker created for “premakes.” As a remake succeeds a preexisting movie, a premake precedes it. For example, there’s a poster for “Hiroshima Mon Amour” starring Greta Garbo and Sessue Hayakawa. Or there’s the one seen on a monitor at the List for a version of Proust directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
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Also at the Carpenter are monitors showing segments of Marker’s 13-part documentary for French television, “The Owl’s Legacy” (1989), about ancient Greece, and computers offering selections from his work for the Web and CD-ROM. The most notable, “Immemory” (1998), is on display at the List, too. Then there’s “Stopover in Dubai” (2011), a video of terrifying simplicity. Consisting solely of intertitles and 26 minutes of surveillance footage, silent but for the sound of a Henryk Górecki string quartet, it’s a documentary account of a Mossad assassination of a Hamas official. The murder is never seen. Instead, we’re shown indistinct images of people as they pass airport security, walk through lobbies, enter elevators, loiter in corridors. The visual neutrality makes the emotional effect all the more overwhelming. Will “Stopover in Dubai,” with its blank, blurry inexorability, be for the next half century what “La Jetée” has been for the one just past? The strange tribes of the 21st century may have Chris Marker to reckon with, too.
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Chris Marker: Influential writer and film maker
By Colin McCabe 8/7/12
Chris Marker, who died on his 91st birthday in Paris was a man of many parts: film-maker, travel writer, piano player, novelist, actor, typographer and perhaps the first great artist of the digital age. Marker delighted in secrecy; he never abandoned the habits formed as a member of the clandestine French Resistance, and was assiduous in spreading false rumours about himself. He was born in 1921, Christian François Bouche Villeneuve, although there is some dispute as to where. Neuilly sur Seine – where he grew up – would seem obvious but Ulan Bator Outer Mongolia was Marker's own preferred birthplace.
At school he would gather in a local café where a young Jean Paul Sartre held forth on German phenomenology, and he then took a licence in philosophy at the Sorbonne, where his teachers included Gaston Bachelard. He joined the Resistance for, in his words, "the adventure rather than the ideology", and then the American Army when, for a brief period after the Battle of the Bulge, the Americans recruited Frenchmen directly into the American Army. He fought right through to the end of the war and one of his most treasured possessions was the signed letter from Eisenhower thanking him for his service.
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A period playing piano in a bar came to an end when he joined the offices of Travail et Culture, part of the French adult education movement, in 1946. Originally his duties focused on the theatre but in the next room was André Bazin working on the cinema and the two became fast friends, working on a myriad of projects. This period of joyful creativity – " it was like '68 everyday," he was to say later – came to an end with the Cold War and the Communist Party's increasing control of their cultural front organisations.
If Bazin stimulated an already strong interest in cinema – on a clandestine mission to Geneva he had dropped into a cinema and seen a double bill of Citizen Kane and Hellzappoppin' – Marker's reason for choosing film as a vocation was that it seemed to be the best way to fulfil his primary passion – travel. He turned down Bazin's request that he edit Cahiers du Cinéma and started a travel book series at Seuil Le Petit Planète, many of which have become classics of travel writing.
His first film was a documentary of the Helsinki Olympic Games and he followed that with a joint project with Alain Resnais, Les Statues meurent aussi, a prescient study on the relations between colonialism and art. Sunday in Peking (1955) was the first of a series of films made of then inaccessible Communist regimes. Perhaps the most influential was Letter from Siberia, made in 1958. Bazin, in one of his last articles written before his tragically early death, hailed his friend's work as an "essay film". Marker has a strong claim to have created this ever more fertile genre.
Continuing to travel, camera in hand, Marker made films on Israel (Description of a struggle) and Cuba (Cuba Si) before filming his first masterpiece, Le Joli Mai, in 1962. This film, edited down to 150 minutes from the 55 hours shot, caught the people of Paris, on the cusp of the new audiovisual age, registering an eloquence and a world about to disappear. Like many of his films this was to be a considerable influence on others. Godard's trademark use of interviews seems borrowed from this film and Marker's films are a constant point of reference as Godard developed through the next five decades.
Just before the release of Le joli mai he shot his single most influential film, a 20-minute short composed almost entirely of still photos. Entitled La Jetée (The Jetty), it is set in a post-nuclear future and involved time travel as the survivors try desperately to summon both past and future to their aid. The hero is obsessed with memories of an event in his childhood at one of Orly airport's jetties. At the end of his film he travels back in time to Orly to discover that the event that obsessed him was his own death as agents from the future shoot him down. This remarkable film is a reference point for many subsequent science fiction films and was remade as Twelve Monkeys by Terry Gilliam in 1995, starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt.
Marker was one of the first to feel the political pulse of the Sixties and he soon threw his activities into a co-operative, Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles (Slon). Its first production was the compilation film Far from Vietnam (1967) but over the next few years it was to lend its skills to many of the struggles, particularly factory occupations,
then convulsing French society. On his return to individual film-making Marker then made the single best film on the politics of that period, Le fond de l'air est rouge 1977 (English title: The grin
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM without a cat). It charts the rise of political hope in the Sixties and the defeats of those hopes in the Seventies.
A much more personal film was Sans Soleil (1983), which returned to the theme of memory and the inability to ever remember fully. Shot between Tokyo, where Marker was then living in a luxury hotel, and Guinea Bissau, where he was training young African film-makers in conditions of extreme poverty, the film meditates on travel and politics as a young woman reads out the letters of the photographer Sandor Krasna, one of Marker's numerous aliases.
Marker's last 30 years saw him add prolifically to his already numerous films but it also witnessed his engagement with the digital world. He was an early aficionado of computers, and digital technology offered for Marker a way out of the inevitable linearity of film. In 1998 he produced the CD ROM Immemory, arguably the first great work of digital art, in which he was able to continue his investigations of memory in a medium that, for the first time, allowed Marker to explore the structure of memory with rather than against grain of the technology he was using.
He died working at his bank of computers in his studio in the 20th arrondisement of Paris.
Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve (Chris Marker), film-maker: born 29 July 1921; died 29 July 2012.
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What ‘Back to the Future’ and ‘Terminator’ Owe to ‘La Jetée’ by A.O. Scott Published: September 26, 2012
Chris Marker, who died earlier this year at 91, was an enigmatic figure, reluctant to be photographed and prone to biographical embellishment. A creature of the European postwar avant-garde, Marker would seem an unlikely influence on modern Hollywood. But his 28-minute “photo- novel,” “La Jetée” — a shuffle of mostly still black- and-white images now marking its 50th birthday — has spawned more would-be blockbusters than any comic book or series of fantasy novels.
This is partly because of its subject, which is time travel. Marker didn’t invent the concept in literature or film — H. G. Wells’s “Time Machine” was adapted for the screen two years before “La Jetée” — but he did unlock its poetic possibilities. In “La Jetée,” a P.O.W. held by postapocalyptic rebels is sent into the past in search of a childhood memory and then into an even more distant, technologically advanced future. The scenario was adapted and expanded by Terry Gilliam in “12 Monkeys,” but the themes of “La Jetée” hover over everything from the farce of the “Back to the Future” movies to the terror of the “Terminator” franchise. Marker’s fingerprints can be found on “Looper,” on the most recent “Star Trek” movie and on lower-budget experiments like “Primer” and, of course, “The Future.”
According to the laws of physics and the principles of philosophy, time travel is impossible. What Marker showed, with his haunting images and matter-of-fact voice-over, is that for movies, it is irresistible, even essential. The camera is itself a time machine, drawing us simultaneously forward and backward, in the film’s words “calling past and future to the rescue of the present.” And what drives the journey is not scientific curiosity but regret and desire, the longing to recover lost time and know ourselves for the first time.
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Tuesday, April 5, 2011
Posted by: Mikkel Aaland
HOMAGE TO CHRIS MARKER
Chris Marker's Exhibition. Courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
I’m blessed. I’ve met Ansel Adams, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Ernst Haas, Bill Owens, my all-time hero Josef Koudelka, and many others who generously shared with me their skills and wisdom. But none of them inspired me as much as the great French photographer, filmmaker, and artist, Chris Marker. Marker is relatively obscure here in the States but people who know of him are filled with reverence. His brush with popular fame came in 1995 when his 29 minute film, La jetée (1962), created almost entirely with still images, inspired David and Janet Peoples to write the screenplay for 12 Monkeys, a Hollywood blockbuster starring Bruce Willis and directed by Terry Gilliam.
I met Chris Marker a couple times in Paris back in the 90s and for many years carried on a lively fax correspondence. I wrote a cover story on him for the now defunct magazine Digital Creativity. Our personal correspondence dropped off but Chris has always kept me in the loop with his various projects and exhibitions. Just the other day I received notice of a show at the Peter Blum gallery in New York titled, Passengers. It runs from April 2-June 4, 2011.
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From the Peter Blum gallery press release:
PASSENGERS captures the many private actions and gestures that take place daily in the public sphere. Mothers cradling their children, couples whispering intimately, women wistfully staring out the window or into the middle distance, engrossed in their own personal thoughts. In several of the shots, we see whole train cars filled with similarly disengaged people. Taken as a complete body of work, this series very clearly illustrates the various ways in which people create invisible walls and boundaries in order to cope with modern urban life. Chris Marker further to the photographs he takes, enhances, changes or colors his images on the computer, giving them often an eerie, almost otherworldly presence.
The amazing thing is, Marker was 75 when I met him in 1995. That makes him… you do the math. I want to be going strong at 90!
Here is an excerpt from the article I wrote after meeting Chris in 1995:
At precisely 11 a.m. Marker met me at the door of his modest apartment in a working-class neighborhood. He was tall, handsome, completely bald and, like me, seemed a little nervous. He welcomed me in perfect American English. There was no hint of his age except in his Old World graciousness. I followed him past walls of shelves containing videos, past the well-kept kitchen into a room full of books. I observed leather-bound books, books by Jules Verne and Rainer Rilke. Although Marker has authored many books himself I didn’t see any of them. Everywhere were images of cats and owls, which I remembered from [his film] Sans Soleil were his favorite animals. A backroom was filled with video- and sound-editing equipment. As Marker stood in front of the console I suddenly saw him as a captain of a giant spaceship, looking in fact like Captain Picard of Star Trek: The Next Generation. When I mentioned this to him, he pulled up his ears and said he’d prefer to be Spock.
And then, when he showed me his computers, he surprised me again. I’d read that Marker was considered both a man of the 18th century and of the 22nd. Indeed, he once wrote “I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.” Sans Soleil clearly showed that the man wasn’t intimidated by technology, but I wasn’t prepared for what followed. Marker launched into praise of his simple Apple II GS, and then complained bitterly about Apple’s abandonment of what he considers a wonderful machine. He knowledgeably commented on how Roger Wagner’s HyperStudio was one of the most flexible and witty systems he’d ever used for creating interactive media. We then carried on a conversation about, of all things, encryption software. I was amazed at the depth of his computer savvy. Here was a legendary filmmaker fascinated with personal computers and interactive media.[Remember
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM this was back in 1995!]
Marker then offered me a drink of Polish pepper-flavored vodka, which I downed quickly. I pulled out my tape recorder and asked if I might record the rest of our conversation. “No, no,” he replied firmly. “No interviews. Instead, if you must write something, use your imagination. Place us on a boat on the Nile. We are drunk. It’s your story.” He didn’t realize that sitting there in a Parisian apartment with him was as exotic to me as being with a pharaoh on the Nile.
Marker was clearly uncomfortable with any discussion about his past, waving my questions aside as if they were annoying mosquitoes. So, I asked him if he was involved in any interactive CD-ROM projects. He told me about Immemory, an autobiographic CDROM recently begun, which, he said, played with the subjective nature of memory in a way only interactive digital media can. He demonstrated a rough version, showing archival images, text and sound and a map of unknown countries and islands interconnected by hyperlinks. One image is stamped in my memory: a pile of severed heads, all with Slavic features. Marker said he had found the image in a family album with no explanation or date. I remembered a line from Sans Soleil: “I look at the machine and I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend… Poetry will be made by everyone.”
In response to requests for photos of himself Chris Marker mails off a picture of a cat. Unlike other artists of his stature, he has never sought publicity and, in fact, has studiously avoided it. Indeed, this legendary French writer, filmmaker and multimedia artist has never granted an interview.
Marker lives amid a sea of rumors, some believable, some outrageous. Film encyclopedias report that Marker was a paratrooper during World War II. That his father was an American soldier. That he was born in Mongolia. That he is actually from another planet, or the future, “which,” one writer wrote, “leads one to believe that the race of Earthlings will resemble Marker in a few centuries.” That his real name isn’t Chris Marker but
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Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve. Like all good legends, the boundaries between the facts of Marker’s life and the fiction are blurred.
At some point it occurred to me that Marker’s encounter with the computer and new media had been inevitable. Hadn’t he always challenged boundaries of time, space and place? Hadn’t he broken through the restraints and limitations of writing to become a filmmaker? I was witnessing a man clearly free of yet another restraint. I recalled the story of the great Russian writer Tolstoy who, at the end of the last century, near the end of his life, saw the simple, yet revolutionary film of a train bearing down the tracks. Tolstoy is reported to have left the theater utterly depressed, remarking that he was born 80 years too early.
The last time I saw Chris Marker was on a boat on the Nile. He had left his new computer (a fully loaded Power PC) behind. It was early evening. We had both drunk way too much vodka. He was amazed when I told him that my friends and I actually got together to watch La jetée. “Do you know there is a bar in Tokyo called La jetée?” he asked. “It is filled with pictures from the film. We should meet there some time.” Then he revealed that La jetée wasn’t really his film. “The film came through me,” he said, “I’ve never done anything like it before, or after.”
As the boat drifted near the banks and I watched the sun gloriously set behind the Sphinx, I recalled the last sequence in Sans Soleil which begins with the face of a cat and ends with the face of an enigmatic African woman. The images were electronically enhanced by the Japanese video artists, Hayao Yamaneko into beautiful psychedelic colors. I asked Marker if he was still in contact with the artist because the name sounded familiar to me. He threw his head back and laughed. “There never was a Japanese video artist. That was me. Most of the credits in Sans Soleil are made up. I am so tired of filmmakers plastering their names all over a film.”
Finally, emboldened by the alcohol, I ask him, “Were you really born in Mongolia?” He looked at me painfully, clearly embarrassed by my directness. But then he replied with a twinkle in his eye, “What is so strange about being born in Mongolia?”
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
ARTLOG
FACES IN THE CROWD
Chris Marker, Untitled #188, 2011, color photograph mounted on white Sintra. Courtesy Peter Blum Gallery.
Reclusive writer, filmmaker and artist Chris Marker works in Paris, where he refuses interviews and sends out pictures of cats in place of pictures of himself. Best known for his classic time travel film La jetée, this exhibition documents moments of isolation in the crowds on the Paris Metro. More than 200 photographs are spread across Peter Blum's SoHo and Chelsea spaces.
WHERE: Peter Blum (Chelsea) and Peter Blum (SoHo), New York WHEN: Through June 4
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Chris Marker: Travelers in Times
Kisa Lala, writer
French photographer and filmmaker, Chris Marker (b. 1921), best known for his conceptual films Sans Soleil and La jetée, has a show of recent photographs at Peter Blum Gallery entitled Passengers.
As an avid documentarian Marker had found an ideal recording device which could candidly photograph people in public spaces: a camera embedded in a wristwatch. Armed with this device he could pretend to check the time while discreetly capturing passersby on film. In this new series, taken in the Paris metro, he uses various photo devices to get a similar candid feel.
Though this photo-journalistic technique is not unique, the sum of these images portray people caught in inward journeys, revealing fragments of their inner space: A private face, reserved for the time when one is alone, not expecting to be recognized; their bodies sag, their faces are deflated, lacking animation engagement. People stare through black, opaque windows into the infinite distance.
Sometimes Marker digitally alters the images to enhance their impact – in the Soho Gallery there are 4 portraits of passengers juxtaposed next to historical paintings that draw parallels in aesthetic symmetry. Women are the photographer’s preferred subject and Marker projects his ideal onto their vacant public faces.
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Many of Marker’s works are meditations on the moment and travelogues that intersect physical space and memory. The 29 minute La jetée (1962), narrated through a series of photo-montages, depicts an experiment in time travel where the protagonist returns to an incident in his memory from his childhood in which he recalls an assassination – which later turns out to be his own. This simple, recursive and haunting plot from the era of French New Wave films, precedes by decades, such films as Inception with their overwhelming dependence on digital acrobatics.
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Chris Marker, now in his 90’s, continues to experiment with new technologies and humour. Also, at the Chelsea gallery, is a folder containing Chris Marker’s postcards. This series of postcards of “How a Grinning Cat Visits the HISTORY OF ART” is worth a peek. Sometime in late 2001 the graffiti of a grinning cat, called M. Chat, more grin than body, began appearing on the Paris streets – and spreading quickly in notoriety, began to be used on political posters and demonstrations occurring in France at the time. Incidentally, Chris Marker’s own cat starts in another of his short “bestiary” films – forming a part of the diverse reveries of this provocative and imaginative filmmaker.
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] PETER BLUM GALLERY
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected]
GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected] GALLERY PETER BLUM
Blumarts Inc. 20 West 57th Street Tel + 1 212 244 6055 www.peterblumgallery.com New York, NY 10019 Fax + 1 212 244 6054 [email protected]