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Marker s i r h C Memories of the Future Catherine Lupton Chris Marker Chris Marker Memories of the Future Catherine Lupton reaktion books For Donald Richie Published by Reaktion Books Ltd 33 Great Sutton Street ec1v 0dx, uk London www.reaktionbooks.co.uk 2005, 2006, 2008 First published reprinted 2005 Copyright © Catherine Lupton All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wiltshire British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Lupton, Catherine Chris Marker: memories of the future 1 . Marker, Chris – Criticism and interpretation I.Title 791.4'3'0233'092 isbn-13: 978 1 86189 223 2 isbn-10: 1 86189 223 3 Contents Introduction: Free Radical 7 1 The Invention of Chris Marker 13 2 Travels in a Small Planet 40 3 A Moment in Time 77 4 A Grin Without a Cat 109 5 Into the Zone 148 6 Memories of the Future 177 Conclusion: The Eye That Writes 217 References 218 Bibliography 237 Filmography 243 Acknowledgements 252 Illustration Credits 253 Introduction: Free Radical Chris Marker is a towering and seminal figure in the field of contemporary visual culture, but until very recently one of its best-kept secrets. In an astonishingly diverse career that now spans more than half a century, Marker has embraced writing, photography, filmmaking, videography, gallery installation, television and digital multimedia in order to probe the deep cultural memory of the twentieth century through the filter of his own utterly distinct sensibility, at once erudite and funny, tender and incisive. 1940 Marker emerged in late s Paris as a writer already alert to the formal qualities and cultural significance of cinema and the visual image. He then proceeded to bring to filmmaking the style and analytical powers of the literary essay, in a series of groundbreaking travelogues released in the 1950 1960 1958 late s and early s, among which Lettre de Sibérie( , Letter from 1962 Siberia) remains the most famous. Two films made in broke open this mould: La Jetée, the haunting science-fiction fable told in still photographs and an instant of movement that remains his best-known film; and Le Joli mai, which upturned Marker’s reputation as the master of voice-over commentary by making interviews the central plank of its topical investi- gations. The human exchanges of Le Joli maipaved the way for Marker’s 1967 immersion in militant left-wing film collectives for a decade after . He 1960 went on to take stock of the revolutionary upheavals of the s in the epic 1977 1982 Le Fond de l’air est rouge( ), then in brought together his passion for travel and his abiding concern with history and cultural memory in the landmark Sans soleil(Sunless), a masterpiece of the personal essay film genre that Marker has made his own. By incorporating images that had 7 been manipulated with a visual synthesiser, Sunless served notice of Marker’s enthusiastic adoption of new electronic media technologies. 1980 90 During the s and ’ s he began increasingly to work with video and the computer, and to diversify from film into television projects and multimedia 83 gallery installations. Today, aged (or thereabouts), Marker is the grand old man of new media, a still-active pioneer who has recently used digital cd-rom hypermedia and the storage capabilities of the to create Immemory 1998 ( ): a virtual map of a lifetime’s memory, drawn from his capacious personal archives. The singularity and diversity of Marker’s achievements set him at a remove from most other filmmakers and artists, even though close collabo- ration with friends and contemporaries has been a constant element of his work. Marker has drawn significant inspiration from the innovative chron- iclers and observers of the early Soviet cinema, Dziga Vertov and Esfir Shub, and paid direct homage to the influence of Shub’s successor in the compila- 1 tion documentary genre, Nicole Védrès. Among the celebrated directors 1950 who formed the nucleus of the French New Wave at the end of the s, including Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda, Marker alone bypassed the route of entry via a transition to the nar- rative fiction feature film. The starkly original short La Jetéeremains his sole foray into pure fiction, and was itself undertaken during the production of Le Joli mai: a novel exploration of new possibilities in direct documentary recording. When the iconoclastic force of the New Wave receded in the sec- 1960 ond half of the s, and many of its directors settled safely back within known cinematic bounds, only Marker and Godard stood out in their par- allel, if very differently manifested, commitments to both media innovation and political efficacy. The paths of these two veterans continue to hold out intriguing comparisons: Godard chiselling away at the edifice of cinema from within, Marker skirting through and across it in his protean engage- 2 ments with other media. In more recent years, Marker’s move into creating gallery installations that recycle elements of his film work has anticipated a wider export of cinematic traces and fragments into the space of the gallery, evident in exhibits by directors such as Chantal Akerman, Atom Egoyan, Isaac Julien and Harun Farocki that press at the distinctions between cinema 3 and installation art. 8
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