Chris Marker

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.

Old-timey ilxor on Grin Without a cat

i think we agreed this is the agnes varda thread; seventeen of her films streaming for free, here, inc. cool stuff like daguerréotypes, http://dafilms.com/event/107-retrospective-agnes-varda/

I watched 'The Sixth Side of the Pentagon' and 'The Embassy' yesterday - both very good. Lots of the 'Sixth Side' footage pops up in 'Grin Without a Cat', though. Looking forward to watching the Varda stuff too.

Good work schlump - will look at a couple of those films over the w/e.

So far:

RÉPONSE DE FEMMES (Orig.) / 1975 / France / 8 min
ELSA LA ROSE (Orig.) / 1965 / France / 20 min
LES DITES CARIATIDES (Orig.) / 1984 / France / 13 min

Elsa is p/fascinating, how a woman not only stands besides the artist but is crucial in seemingly bringing it to existence. Elsa herself does not acknowledge her role in this, its either sad or just something there, to be contemplated and never to be answered for definite, an unwilling agent, which goes against the women of Reponse de Femmes, who hate what men make of them and want to be left alone (if that's what it takes).

Another thing is for ear and text and architecture - she is so on.

The LA years:

MUR MURS (Orig.) / 81 / France / 80 min
DOCUMENTEUR (Orig.) / 1981 / France / 63 min
UNCLE YANCO (Orig.) / 1967 / France / 22 min
w/Black Panthers which I'd seen before, ads to an an amazing programme of works and portraits of peoples and landscapes of LA: love letters to Bohemia on one hand, the other side of escape from another life on another, esp if you are a single mother or black and live in a tough neighbourhood, and how you can use art to deal with the pain. Because ultimately there is always pain and life is hard. Mur Murs is incredible all by itself: a plot of how a public art might work, but how it is still grubby art -- made by artists still in service of the money men (and govt bodies) who fund it -- but allows for a completely different interaction w/people and the environment. And at the end, the way it ends as rubbish, as decay...well that is a price that seems well worth paying.

She is so good with people, so witty and so interesting and interested, her antennae is truly wide and picks up one everything, but its not frightening at all. Its about letting yourself be opened up: Varda is an alert, model citizen.

In the middle of a long-weekend program at the Cinematheque: Remembrance of Things to Come/La Jetée/The Sixth Side of the Pentagon on Friday, A Grin Without a Cat last night, The Case of the Grinning Cat/One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich tonight. (I skipped Sans Soleil this time.) Thanks to English narration, I had an easier time with A Grin Without a Cat than when I watched it at home last year. Such a dense sprawl, though...it pushes my powers of concentration to the limit, and I still come up a little short when he leaves the USA. (By which I mean I just don't have enough background knowledge about Prague and Paris and the rest to connect the dots; I still find the images and dissonances compelling.) Liked seeing Ed Sanders (part of the footage taken from the Pentagon film).

I was there last night! Great stuff.

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.