IVAC 2013--Chris Marker: Cinema Against the Grain

Chris Marker La Jetée 1963

Chris Marker 

Cinema Against the Grain

curated by 

Marie Muracciole

Les Statues meurent aussi / Statues Also Dies

Chris Marker Les Statues meurent aussi 1953

1953 / 30'

This collaboration between Alain Resnais and Chris Marker begins as an examination of African statues, then raises questions about their status and presentation in European museums, and ultimately touches on the delicate field between African sculpture and racism. The film won the 1954  Prix Jean Vigo. Because of its criticism of colonialism it was censored in France until the 1960s. An exceptional visual essay…

La Sixième face du Pentagone / The Sixth Side of the Pentagon

with François Reichenbach

1968 / 28'

Chris Marker La sixième face du Pentagone 1968

On October 21, 1967 over 100,000 protestors gathered to march to the Pentagon. It was the largest protest gathering yet, and it brought together many different groups of people, from hippies to Yippies. Che Guevara had been killed two weeks previously and, for many, this was not simply marching against the war but a direct action to try to stop the American war machine. Marker too was present with his camera, and, through his images and comments, takes us back 40 years to that day.

La Jetée / The Jetty

1962 / 28'

In the aftermath of the third World War Paris has become rotten with radioactivity where survivors live underground and conduct experiments in time travel with the hope of finding a solution. A man selected from among prisoners is sent to the past to meet a mysterious woman as he is haunted by an image from his childhood. Considered a landmark of science fiction filmmaking, La Jetée is a cine-novel composed almost entirely of still images told in Marker’s poetic, provocative style. The film, which also came to be known as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film “12 Monkeys,” melds human frailty with global catastrophe, beginning with totalitarian government experiments. Marker was also the writer and cinematographer of “La Jetée.” The film, which earned him international acclaim, remains a classic work of art cinema, science fiction cinema, and perhaps French New Wave cinema.

Sans soleil / Sunless

1983 / 100'

An outstanding travelogue that questions the relationship between time, human memory,

Chris Marker Sans soleil 1983

and film. As it stretches from Africa to Japan, the two extreme poles of survival, “Sans Soleil” shows how personal and global histories are affected by memory. The film, which takes its title from the song cycle Sunless by Modest Mussorgsky, is a kind of meditation. The amazing cinematography of sequences from life is evidently the work of a theorist of montage. A Japanese shrine where people pray to dead cats, a giraffe slaughtered by poachers… With many scenes of this sort, “Sans Soleil” extends the limits of the documentary.

Chris Marker

French filmmaker Chris Marker was one of the world's most highly regarded and experimental figures in cinema. Marker's classic fiction film and best known work, La Jetée, was made in 1962; his first feature-length documentary was produced a decade before. His documentary work includes profiles of the artists Matta and Christo, and film directors Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. Marker's film works make deliberate use of a restricted visual palette, adopting the techniques of cinema's silent era, using dissolves, subtitles and montage effects.

In the 1990s he began working with new technologies, reworking elements from his earlier film and television for the video installation Zapping Zones (1992). Marker's video works range from idiosyncratic documentaries to poetic meditations. Among his media-based projects are an interactive CD-Rom entitled Immemory (1998) and the feature film Level Five.

Writes Bill Horrigan, curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio: "Although Marker is widely regarded as one of the few indispensable, inimitable figures of post-World War II international cinema, it becomes clear that, for him, cinema is simply one expressive domain, one 'zone' and perhaps, at that, an interim or intermediate one. Having recently written, 'I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan a long time ago,' the genuinely self-critical Marker continues to experiment with new technological frontiers...."

Chris Marker (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) was born in 1921 at Neuilly sur Seine, France, and died in 2012. He fought for the French resistance during World War II and enlisted as a Paratrooper in the United States Air Force. In the 1950s Marker wrote for l'Esprit and Cahiers du cinéma and was an assistant to Alain Resnais. His work was been presented internationally. Marker was the subject of a film retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was a featured artist of the exhibition Passage de l'image at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Documenta X, Kassel, Germany.

Marker lived in Paris until his death in 2012.

Biography from Electronic Arts Intermix  www.eai.org