Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve was born 100 years ago, on July 29, 1921. Sources, including the man himself, differ on his place of birth. Whether it was in the capital of Mongolia or France, it doesn't matter. What does matter is that, before World War II, the man became a Philosophy student, later joining the French Resistance. Inspired by his teaching and experiences, he'd become a journalist during the war's aftermath and, eventually, a film critic. From there, he pursued photography and, finally, became a filmmaker during the 1950s. Instead of his given name, the artist preferred to be credited as Chris Marker. This polyvalent artist would become one of the essential names in cinema history, a crucial part of the Nouvelle Vague, and, in his words, the best-known author of unknown films…
STATUES ALSO DIE (1953)
Be aware that the introductory paragraph may not be entirely truthful. It's difficult to ascertain any fact about Marker since the man was a master of misdirection. He was always more comfortable behind rather than in front of the camera and seldom indulged in interviews. Marker consistently did his best to obscure, twist, transform beyond recognition, any semblance of a linear biography. It feels fitting that the maker of such enigmatic palimpsests of ideas and images would himself be shrouded in many veils of projected concepts, illusions, delusions, self-made myths, and many smokescreens of alienation. In some regard, Chris Marker doesn't exist as a single entity. He was an assortment of possibilities, constantly adapting – a legend rather than a man. He was like his films, a permanent disruption.
We do know that he was acquainted with the famed André Bazin and that, in 1952, he shot his first film, a documentary on the Olympic Games in Helsinki. Not long after, the novice filmmaker found some acclaim, codirecting a short focused on African sculpture, Statues Also Die, with Alain Resnais. These two works set the stage for the first phase of the director's output. During the rest of the decade, Marker traveled the world, shooting a vast collection of cinematic postcards, morsels of passive observation, and cultural empathy through voyeurism. Gradually, his movies gained a more definite political verve, moving away from what some would derisively call touristic movies (though those still had an anti-imperialistic POV). Indeed, while shooting a critical portrayal of contemporary France and its political malaises, Le Joli Mai, Marker developed the idea for his best-remembered work.
LA JETÉE (1962)
La Jetée is a landmark of sci-fi cinema, a short burst of still images (and one single motion) that tell a strange story that seems to circle back on itself. Years later, Terry Gilliam would extend Marker's original vision into the more conventional 12 Monkeys, but the original piece possesses powers no remake will ever recapture. Marker's work is both an obstinate exercise in formalism, a political screed, and an atmospheric fable that drives home a sense of such loss that the entire cosmos bends around it. The sorrowful tale extrapolates immense feeling from the frozen image, the moment immobile for infinity, a glimpse that, given enough time, will become nothing but a document of what is gone. As the future intervenes in the present to save its past, Marker bends time and narrative. He distorts the audience's perception of memory and creates one of the greatest films ever made, regardless of duration.
Some directors might have been content with stagnation, keeping on with narrative cinema, well into oblivion. Not Marker, who never stopped reinventing his conception of what cinema could be. As we move from the 60s to the 70s in the filmmaker's output, we can most clearly register the emergence of the modern cinematic essay. Chris Marker didn't necessarily invent this type of audiovisual expression. Still, he was a pioneer, an innovator who rarely seemed concerned with how his films related to the current molds of cinema. Movies by Marker acted more like a self-amused game rather than a response to the surrounding artistic context. At a time when the ghost of the Nouvelle Vague mutated into new forms, sometimes evolving cinema into unsustainable epic proportions, Marker experimented freely with collage, with the use of TV telecasts and found footage.
SANS SOLEIL (1983)
Like the plastic artists who defied expectations with ready-made objects, so did this filmmaker play with ready-made images. In creations such as A Grin Without a Cat, it's the relations created between interpolated pictures that produce meaning. Better yet, they question the very essence of meaning. The same techniques would be taken to headier extremes in Chris Marker's ultimate masterpiece, 1983's Sans Soleil. Returning to Japan, a country often immortalized in his movies, the cineaste created something like a pulverized puzzle of memories in constant reformation. In this cinema, rememberance is an act of creation, both for the people on-screen and the people looking on. Such flowery language indicates how cerebral the flick is, but they don't do justice to its underbelly of wonderment. Sans Soleil isn't meant to be solved. It's here to be reacted to in the purest, most organic of senses. So, honestly, forget about this write-up and go watch it.
While it seems as if there's always someone announcing the death of cinema – be it because of feature-length, sound, color, TV, streaming, etc. – Chris Marker was more enticed than frightened by innovation. In the later decades of his life, he explored how new technologies could originate newfangled visions of what cinema could be. Instead of looking at these things as a death knell, the director regarded them as proofs of life. In 2008, he even created an experimental CD-ROM called Immemory. His taste for continuous, never-ending playfulness didn't always produce masterpieces, one must acknowledge. Indeed, these movies sometimes look like glorified PowerPoint presentations. Nonetheless, the efforts are a fascinating watch. In his late 80s, Chris Marker was looking into the craze of machinima and starting his very own Youtube channel. He made cinema until he died, in 2012, on his 91st birthday.
As sprawling as this article tries to be, it doesn't even scratch the surface of Chris Marker's contributions to cinema. There have been no mentions of SLON or ISKRA, of his portraits of other filmmakers like Andrei Tarkovsky and Akira Kurosawa. Where are his homages to Eisenstein and posthumous love letters to Simone Signoret? What of his owl obsession? One could spend hours laughing about his hilarious multimedia shorts that are a bit like arthouse shitposts. Most disgracefully, we haven't touched on Chris Marker's love of cats and how he so often made them into the stars of his shorts. Hitchcock had a cadre of icy blondes, Godard had Karina, Bergman Ullmann, but Marker's best muse beats them all. Hail the great Guillaume-en-Egypte, feline superstar of experimental essayistic cinema. For as crazy as Marker could be, sometimes the man knew when simplicity was in order, as when he directed a purrfect short that consists only of his pet reacting to music. Yes, like all videographers and nascent Youtubers, Chris Marker made cat videos.
CAT LISTENING TO MUSIC (1988)
You can find a plethora of Chris Marker's works all over the internet. MUBI and the Criterion Channel have excellent restorations of his most acclaimed works, while Youtube is a treasure trove of obscure experiments. There's no better way to honor this innovator's legacy on his centennial than to watch his life's work.