Chris Marker
Cinema Against the Grain
by
Marie Muracciole
The negatives
of memory
‘With an obsessive
curiosity (…) I keep asking: How do people manage to live in such a world?’[1]
With his documentaries or his narrative
films, Chris Marker was someone who looked at the reality of the world with
open eyes. He died last July the 29th, age 91. Marker was a witness
of the Second World War, of post-colonial society, of mutations of
totalitarianism, capitalism and globalization. He was a photographer, a
filmmaker, a writer and, above all, an essayist in all of these media; a
traveller, the editor of “Little Planet”, le chat Guillaume en Egypte, and so
on. Marker could explore the world without staying silent with terror or shame,
without forgetting the past, and without dogmatism, because he knew he was part
or it and therefore a responsible actor. He had what John Keats named “negative
capabilities”: when man is capable
of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching
after fact and reason [2]. The negative is also the first form of the film; it
represents the latency in the photographic and filmic process. Latency provides
the time that we need to step back and to proceed when we take the floor and
say: “I”.
The
first-person/ a voice
Using the
first-person, and very often his own voice, as Marker did in his films, was a
way to assert the voice of the singular, the unknown, the one among millions. He
was known to be quite secret and gave almost no interviews. The first person is
not ostentatious. When I say “I”, I loose myself into many – as Jacques Lacan,
and afterwards the artist Marcel Broodthaers, stated. To address others, we
have to remember that we must deal with the anonymity of the “I”. We must lose our
(dear) selves in a common language as the main condition of enunciation. In
this realm, in front of the expansion of technologies of representation, Marker
acknowledged this expansion as an access to self-effacement (and even to masks,
like with his avatar, the figure of the cat Guillaume-en-Égypte, his pseudo
Kosinsky on Youtube or his avatar in Second Life).
But the effects
of the tools are not only in terms of production: they would allow thought to
show its architecture—as a tree-branching process, and as a way to link distant
parts of the mind to distant parts of reality. Some tools give the possibility
to inhabit consciously the imaginary without causing harm in real life: Second Life. Chris Marker was someone
special: tools and cunning gave him a field for a personal voice. The awareness
of the anonymity of the ‘I”, when made public, makes the difference between an
ego statement and the subjectivization process, and in terms of content, builds
a bridge between telling stories and building history.
Return to the
future
The dvd-rom Immemory
was a great object, even if it is now technically obsolete (mine is still
sleeping in a box)[3].
It opens passages between La Jetée
and the figure of Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo.
From there it goes to Marcel Proust and to the key to memory – la petite madeleine[4].
And the whole drives us to the myth of Orpheus: memory is the realm from which
we try to extract what we once loved. It doesn’t bring it back to life, but we
can access some present experience and the possibility for the next ones. In Marker’s
work, the moment we live gives us access to the past, therefore we are present
to our time and build a memory (For every image of the past that is not
recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear
irretrievably[5]). In other terms, we can read La
Recherche du temps perdu again, see Vertigo again, and thanks to La Jetée build some bridges between them
and the myth of memory and death that Orpheus
represents. Each moment is a threshold that the past opens to the now. In the narrative of La Jetée, the present seems to open on
to yesterday with the aim to reach tomorrow. La Jetée is a search of the past to find a way to the future; Sans Soleil is a journey for history,
for the now, where the past finds its
life. Marker explains why he published one DVD of two films he made 20 years apart,
by a little text he found in Japan on a program:
“Soon the voyage will be at an end.
It's only then that we will know if the juxtaposition of images makes any
sense. We will understand that we have prayed with film, as one must on a
pilgrimage, each time we have been in the presence of death: in the cat cemetery,
standing in front of the dead giraffe, with the kamikazes at the moment of
take-off, in front of the guerrillas killed in the war for independence. In La
Jetée, the foolhardy experiment to look into the future ends in death. By
treating the same subject 20 years later, Marker has overcome death by prayer”.
Trains and
tools
‘And that's where my
mania comes from, to see "how things are going" in this place or
that. For a long time, those who were best placed to see "how it's
going" didn't have access to the tools to give form to their
perceptions—and perception without form is tiring. And now, suddenly, these
tools exist. It's true that for people like me it's a dream come true.’ In filmmaking, tools are expensive and require one to deal
with this heavy capitalistic device. Cunning, with a lack of money, has been Marker’s
first tool. He used the means of television, created SLON with Resnais and
others to produce and distribute films “that would not have existed”. La Jetée had a tiny budget: some photographs
and a few seconds of film created one of the most mythic works of this period. Marker
also favoured actual collaborations with many other filmmakers. One great model
would, of course, be Alexander Ivanovitch Medvedkin and his cine-train, the ancestor
of television and agit-prop. Marker meets and interviews him at the moment he
himself is filming the workers of Rhodiaceta, a textile factory in Besançon (À bientôt j’espère, 1967), and will soon
help them to become filmmakers under the name Groupes Medvedkine[6].
He also filmed his portrait Le tombeau
d’Alexandre. Medvedkin was familiar with cunning and the necessity of
technical invention, with the lack of money, and the constant struggle in front
of censorship. This cinema was aimed to help life, and so was soon considered
as a dangerous medium that the political power had to control. It was a
collective experience. Trains are made for the masses and not just for the
happy few: the train entering la Ciotat’s station was not only showing the
powerful movement of the machines, it was imaginarily driving future spectators
to the Lumière brothers. But they were perhaps not imagining so many owners of
cameras. Marker, who made some lucid assessments of the collective
experimentations of the 60s in Le fond de
l’air est rouge, had a very important purpose: the redistribution of tools
to change the symbolic order.
History
Marker’s cinema is still asking so many useful
questions, and one of them, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s formula of brushing history against the grain[7],
would be: what kind of relationship do we build with the present when dealing
with the past? ‘What interests me is history, and politics interests me only to the
degree that it represents the mark history makes on the present’, he said. Again,
traces like on a negative. Marker, whose real name was François
Bouche-Villeneuve, left his own mark on the notion of present.
[2] At
once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially
in literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously- I mean Negative Capability,
that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties. Mysteries, doubts,
without any irritable reaching after fact and reason. John Keats, Letter to
George and Tom Keats,
21, ?27 December 1817
[3] This dvd-rom was the point of departure or the website
project Marker was doing with Christine Van Assche at centre Pompidou, a
project frozen by his death.
[4] See from Victor Burgin, his great essay about La Jetée,
« Marker Marked », in The Remembered Film, London, Reaktion Books. 2004
[7] There is no document of civilization
that is not at the same time a document of barbarism. The historical
materialist therefore…regards it as his task to brush history against the
grain. Walter Benjamin, "Edward Fuchs, Collector and Historian" (1937).
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