Chris Marker

Some stuff to chase here -- fairly gd piece in terms of info, although uncritical (how does the analysis in Hour of the Furnaces hold up?). I don't know if neglecting the 2nd part is exatly a wise move -- it doesn't support Peron wholeheartedly, it does look at his time in office as a halfway-house, an unfulfilled revolution. It does apply some of their analysis given in the 1st to comment on the situation in Argentina in the 2nd part. The film ends in interviews w/activists who were imprisoned and tortured, some harrowing stuff. Overall its quite a package.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49831

The film’s renewal of the economic-political treatise as cinematic form can be traced in many subsequent films whose activism operates through similarly diverse experimental energies: Godard’s Le Rapport Darty (1989), Raoul Peck’s Profit & Nothing But! Or Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle (2001), Erik Gandini’s Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers (2003), Alexander Kluge’s Notes from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital (2008), Lech Kowalski’s The End of the World Begins With One Lie (2010) or John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010).

Has anyone seen much from this batch?

Quite a lot to unpack in the trade-off between style and activism, whether one can exist w/the other or not. Cash is needed, how is this funded and by whom? Interesting that Marker is only mentioned as collaborator and Grin... isn't mentioned...then there are narrative films of the 2nd cinema that work toward the struggle, surely? I know what the author means as not quite enough, but again, there is a hole there.

RIP

RIP indeed. That link includes a video of the full version of La Jetée.

Rest In Peace.

odd that just yesterday I reserved The Last Bolshevik at the library.

My rep for repping De Palma aside, Chris Marker is/was my very favorite director. RIP

oh shit.

RIP.

reap

:(

RIP. Sans Soleil is a movie I haven't watched in several years but I'm thinking about it all the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KalkgX5Igwo

I showed that video to a big time cat person and their response was "I want my 3 minutes back." I don't think I've ever come closer to crying at someone's wildly divergent take on a movie.

Last time I looked, there was a Marker-style cat painted on a brick facade near my old job on West 26th St; wish I had pointed it out to you, Eric.

you should have said i want our years of friendship back xp

Instead, I tied her down and forced her to watch all 3 hours of A Grin Without a Cat.

All the while pointing out with every passing minute how awesome the movie is.

Ehrenstein parses and supplements CM's Wiki entry:

http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2012/07/30/christian-francois-bouche-villeneuve-aka-chris-marker/

RIP. I've tried to hack Sans Soleil a couple of times but it always puts me to sleep; I ought to rectify that sometime soon.

don't hack it, watch it

usual bunch of Keyframe links (I wd esp point toward excerpt of Marker's piece on Vertigo that Glenn Kenny has):

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-chris-marker-1921-2012/

yes that was great

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7y98wx2H11rw6lx6o1_500.gif

oh, and the former Steve Shasta linked the Vertigo essay way above.

that vertigo essay's incredible.

RIP, Cat-man.

RIP. Sans Soleil is such a beautiful movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d4_YKpMQLc

Brody, with a link to a 2003 interview that needs to be translated.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/07/in-memoriam-chris-marker.html

also, Film Comment has put a host of Marker material online:

http://www.filmcomment.com/issue/may-june-2003

http://www.filmcomment.com/issue/july-august-2003

Very sad to hear about this.

I'm Marker's senior by a dozen or so years. When he was a young journalist on Esprit magazine Chris wrote to me expressing admiration for the cat mosaics I was making at the time, and asking for advice on how to get established as a cat mosaicist himself. My response was that he should pose as a Maoist, then slowly work more and more cats and mosaics into his work.

I also suggested that Christian should change his name and make up some juicy lies about his past in order to make himself sound more mysterious, while at the same time refusing to confirm or deny anything. For instance, Chris was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, which is a pretty boring and bourgeois suburb of Paris. This would never do for a Maoist-mosaicist, so I told him to spread the rumour that he came from Ulan-Bator in Mongolia. This he did, although not quite as consistently as I would have liked. He also claimed to have been a NASA parachutist, to have saved Fidel Castro's life on three occasions, to come from the future, and to suffer from a rare medical condition for which the only treatment was to drink a litre of boiling hot flamingo blood each week.

Only last week I emailed Chris suggesting he tell people he was suffering from a case of Morgellons picked up from Joni Mitchell, and had coloured threads in the shape of cats' whiskers growing on his upper lip. Unfortunately, Chris stopped responding to any of my communications in 1962. I think the success of La Jetée went to his head a bit, to be honest.

Oh well, see you back in the future, Chris!

http://nelliek*ll*an.tumblr.com/post/28354641278/chris-markers-favorite-photo-from-may-68-je

Brody, with a link to a 2003 interview that needs to be translated.

i could give this a shot if you want

i got beaten to it:

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/marker-direct-an-interview-with-chris-marker

thx, I was wondering if it was in the FC package

I'm Marker's senior by a dozen or so years.

Hang on.... what?

Either that's a piece of absurdism, or penned by Manoel de Oliveira.

lol guys

:-(

I've just watched first episode of The Owl's Legacy. holy shit it really is just some interesting and/or super-knowledgeable people (Vernant - Castoriadis - Xenakis why not) talking about the legacy of ancient Greece for 6.5 hours, this is the best thing ever, thank you Chris Marker.

whoa

Saw Sans Soleil and La Jetee tonight. (I saw what was probably the same double-bill 10 or 15 years ago.) They showed them in that order, with a short break between.

I had a real tough time with Sans Soleil. The problem for me is that I need time to process the non-stop stream of aphorisms, fragments, riddles, and the rest that make up the narration. I had that problem to a degree with A Grin Without a Cat, but at least there I was always interested in what was happening on-screen; my attention never flagged. I just didn't find the visuals in Sans Soleil all that compelling. La Jetee was great; I'm glad it found a place on the Sight and Sound list. I wonder if showing them out of chronological order helped a bit--truthfully, it was a major relief not to have to read and really be able to appreciate the beauty of the images.

They showed Sans soleil with the French soundtrack but La Jetee with the English one? Odd.

The English narration was so good for La Jetee (in terms of catching the right tone), it was almost confusing--it just didn't seem like something that was slapped on in place of the original French. I know I'm short-changing Sans Soleil, but that's what happens with me when I have to divide my attention with dense subtitles. It'd be nice to see it with an English audio track as good as La Jetee's.

Yeah, I don't think Sans soleil suffers from the alternate English narration at all (it's on the DVD). I'd imagine it feels a whole lot less dense that way.

(I say that because it's the only way I've seen it, in English.)

Marker 6-pack in new Senses of Cinema:

http://sensesofcinema.com/issue/64/chris-marker-64/

I watched the first half of Sans Soleil last night. It's way more up my alley than La Jetee was.

Man, Sans Soleil.

I could watch this forever.

ha i felt like i WAS watching it forever the first time but maybe i was in a bad place. I need to try again because i know it's better than i think it is.

Strange, I was really taken with it the first time then really bored the second.

I had a couple of false starts & decided to 'come back to it in a bit' (ie forget it exists for 18 months), but loved it when my mood and its tone finally came together.