Chris Marker

So was I! I was hoping for more of Marker's comnmentary on the images that we get in the early sequence, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

By which I mean, I was hoping for more discussion of the images themselves in general.

One of the most interesting things about Grin for me--and one of the reasons I have a hard time pinpointing Marker's view of these events a decade after the fact (somewhat rueful but not bitter?)--is that you get his words read by a variety of other people.

Did you guys stop by the photo exhibit on the fourth floor?

i love grin. i saw the whole thing with my mom years ago. there's some pretty accurate/brutal stuff leveled at french maoists, and a whole soliloquoy (sp?) delivered to (unnamed) JLG.

clemenza i think marker is ambivalent and that def. comes through.

The Godard soliloquy must have went right past me.

Ambivalent is a good description. That's there in The Case of the Grinning Cat, too, which I saw last night. I didn't much care for that one--the events in A Grin Without a Cat are so momentous that the ambivalence feels tragic, but in the second film, it wanders off into whimsy. I did like how clear-eyed he is about hyperbole, though; when the one French conservative gets compared to a Nazi by the left, Marker responds with the most withering "Really?" imaginable.

he was in the resistance; he should know right

Exciting!

Healthy film programme (seen most of them, no reason not to attend a screening or two) + nice catalogue.

the documentary about marker's early (pre-cinema) years should be interesting. like rohmer he lived something like a full life before cinema.

Comments by William Gibson and others:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/15/thrilling-prophetic-chris-marker-experimental-films

yeah I'm gonna go to this although I prob won't make any screenings which :-(((((((( but this should be cool, love this dude

damn, have no idea where the whitechapel gallery is but wish i was near there!

london. *dreams*

Love Whitechapel. Haven't been in ages, work near it for the next couple of months so great excuse to go more regularly.

Brooklyn retro in August

http://www.bam.org/film/2014/chris-marker

Region 2 release:

http://chrismarker.org/2014/06/chris-marker-collection-english-released/

Oh, I just bought that - didn't realise it was new. Watched the first disc, which was very good.

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.

i have this but without subtitles and my french isn't quiiiiiiite good enough :(

I watched it on dailymotion or something w/ subs iirc – that version seems to be on youtube now

will look, thanks

Saw the Whitechapel exhibit - There were 5-6 rooms when really you only needed 2-3. Marker made bits of video art but it was hard to get a handle on how out there this stuff was for the time.

Attended a couple of screenings: Sunday in Peking looks gorgeous. I have almost all of these in shagged out copies from a few years ago, when Marker was alive and wouldn't authorise release. Its interesting as to why he thought the early stuff wasn't much cop. I mean he is alert: writing great narration (all with blink-and-you-miss subtle criticism), displays a great eye for colour and its depths (the market in Peking). Really was this stuff worse than some of the late works? I did watch one and the soundtrack was crappy electronica, the narrator's voice was off...

A biography of him would be amazing. Give the criticism (as evidenced by the exhibit) is lacking I bet a Coca-Cola it'll be terrible.

Someone should translate his novel tho'.

his Level Five (1996) opens in NY/LA today

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-chris-marker-bam

I know a number of Marker stans who can't stand that one. But of course, I'll watch anything he's done, so.

i've seen the CM 'biggies,' anything i should target in the Brooklyn retro that you might've seen?

You've probably seen what I've seen ... everything that's been released on DVD + La Joli Mai, basically.

Level Five isn't great - and it's not helped by lots of ancient computer graphics. It has some great parts to it, though, and it's certainly not without something to say. There's just something about how fragmented it is that doesn't work.

Saw digitally restored Letter from Siberia, which is typically light (animation, playful voiceover) but not frivolous. Also a (faded to pink) print of the 20-min Sunday in Peking, prob the most filmic images of '50s Chinese life I've seen.

(some old codger exiting was grumping about "propaganda," not sure which film he meant)

full house for this, tho it was a room of about 150 seats probably.

They're really lovely films, but very light. I'm not sure how much he associated them with his later work, a bit workmanlike. But charming. I suppose people might wonder about them being propaganda seeing as they don't explicitly condemn either government? But it's not likely they would.

Icarus Films will release Level Five on DVD and VOD on October 7.

Cool

that's one i've never seen! i don't think it ever got much distribution in the states.

i got that UK "chris marker collection" thing and have been making my way through it. his documentary about israel (description d'un combat), which i hadn't seen in 15 years, is so moving. i wish that lanzmann's "porquoi israel" was more readily available, the two films would make a fascinating comparison.

might as well add susan sontag's "promised lands" to that list. one thing i like about all three films is their complete absence of glibness. we could use more of that anguished searching now.

Level Five isn't great - and it's not helped by lots of ancient computer graphics. It has some great parts to it, though, and it's certainly not without something to say. There's just something about how fragmented it is that doesn't work.

― Spaceport Leuchars (dowd)

OTM. Not a particularly great transfer either.

Yeah, the ancient computer graphics combined with VHS bleed kind of make you want to poke your eyes out. I remember there were a couple of interesting ideas (a meditation on footage of a woman jumping to her death?) but nothing that has stuck with me.

recent addition to my living room - really happy with the job the framers did on this!

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e128/ilxalbums/c245a5e2-0a4a-43b8-be38-6492943d72f9.jpg

Beautiful.

if you type chris marker into amazon prime search, it comes up with three chris marker films plus "dilbert: the complete series"

So incredible, watch while you can - the most suppressed of Chris Marker's films, for years was near impossible to find, perhaps because it's his most personal. Vividly restored, and one of the first verite portraits of Post-war Japan from a Western perspective. https://t.co/Xl1nQnOzhE

— Aaron Stewart-Ahn (@somebadideas) June 21, 2019

He’s not hiding behind a big orange cat it that one, is he?

I haven’t seen it! Mainly putting this here to remind myself to watch

I was just joking. When Agnès Varda passed recently I saw a few films of hers in which he appears and because he is camera shy she always obscured him in the fashion described.

Yeah I got that

Oh, okay

Thanks for posting. Much, much cleaner than the DVDR copy that I lost a couple moves ago.

Thanks for posting!!

Seems that French language version just showed up a few weeks ago of La Jetée on Criterion. Hadn’t realized that English language version had equal status.

Dope!

Re: wins post, thx wins

Yeah, thanks, wins.

I can't seem to find any prior post, from myself or otherwise, but I really dug this installation he did I saw at MoMA which was called Silent Movie.