Chris Marker

i'd like to see le mystere koumiko, cuba si, description d'un combat, etc. more widely available. not to mention le fond de l'air est rouge.

also, sans soleil is (or at least was) available on vhs here.

these, sadly, are the only 2 i've seen.

-- mark s (mar...), November 19th, 2003.

ha!

Perhaps the luckiest "catch" I've ever had in my moviegoing life. Actually, scratch that "perhaps."

Well, I'd imagine that I'll just buy the DVD burn of Vietnam and hope it's a little bit less chatty than Sans soleil or Last Bolshevik.

Immemory

and here also

Chris Marker CD-Rom

almost missed this, closes this weekend. now, could be extended to the 10th.

http://www.peterblumgallery.com/soho.html

http://www.peterblumgallery.com/images/aliocha_orly.jpg

http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/2008/10/22/cats-go-barack/

'la joli mai' at NFT today and tomorrow

a fav

must read for fans of marker and/or vertigo:

http://www.chrismarker.org/a-free-replay-notes-on-vertigo/

I think we're still catching up with things Marker was thinking about decades ago.

this rings true but tbh felt sorta overwhelmed by sans soliel to the point of not really feeling/thinking anything at all

Only feels like a 'catch up' because his work isn't v available.

Sans Soleil is nowhere near as good la joli mai.

not really impressed by 'grin w/o a cat'

seems really credulous politically

or that's what i thought, watching it, and then towards the end it makes allende look like a complete dick... but my impression was that he was meant to be one of the heroes?

wonder what was in the four-hour cut that got left out

I've seen the four hour cut, I thought it was great

i had no idea this guy had made so many films. La jetee and sans soleil are totally major imb but i've never seen anything else and i get the feeling u cant just buy them on amazon.

some of it was impressive, but a lot of it was very boring and humbug-packed speeches.

marker's cutesy cat thing rubs up all weird with his softness towards dictators: cats, he says, never respect power. which is great because power is always bad -- except when it isn't. not sure what the appeal of a lot of it is unless you specialize in the history of the french far left: all of the hatred for the union of the left is, im sure, fine (and a lot more directly put than his pretty mild critique of euro-maoism), but he's way more specific about all that than, say, the nature of the democratic socialist project the film is allegedly devoted to. that is a sort of shadowy ideal, and the allende-makes-a-dick-of-himself moment is directly related to it. he's whinging that -- shocker -- workers don't turn up to meetings on the weekend to discuss factory policy. he's all like 'it's your factory' and they're all like 'w/e'.

xpost

he's kind of suppressed his pre-jetee/joli mai stuff. some of it gets shown sometimes, but not much. i'd love to see 'description of a struggle', which *does* get shown a bit.

I think you can get this and The Last Bolshevik and maybe Case Of The Grinning Cat

xp

erm you can buy a three hour version of Grin... on amazon, but if its originally 4 hours then I'd assume any argument would be damaged by the shortening? xxp

it's just as possible that the argument in the 1977 version was even worse!

it doesn't exactly have an argument, just kind of an idea that there was a non-aligned democratic-socialist left in the 1960s, particularly in czechoslovakia and chile, that failed because the US and USSR wanted it to fail.

it's not a fully coherent argument coz castro, not exactly non-aligned, seems to be pretty much a hero throughout -- not entirely, but pretty much.

well, ok, whatever the idea, it might be more fully fleshed out, which might make it more hateable - who knows, maybe that's why all that is easily available on dvd is Sans Soleil and a short film.

it's not hateable exactly, it's just that CM has a reputation as a tip-top intellectual film essayist and this is a let-down. i guess i would rather see the original warts-and-all 1977 one, coz this one ends *really* abruptly with the collapse of the USSR. some of it is dazzling, but not enough! a lot of it is just speeches. the early travelogues don't do that.

i was watching that "letter to jane" thing last night and i was like "u know i really like film essays maybe" and i was thinking about this guy and i still havent seen anything beyond la jetee and sans soleil but i dled loin du vietnam and im gonna watch it tonight but then i was like o hey what other things should i maybe see (i dont even know if this vietnam thing is gonna be any good) also like agnes varda she doesnt have a thread

harun farocki is ya boy

if you can find jean-pierre gorin's southern CA trilogy anywhere, watch those, they are great

orson welles' 'f for fake' (art forgeries!)

haha i really like a lot of these too i guess

oh ok thats the guy godard is talking to in letter to jane?

yeah. they were both part of dziga vertov group (of whom i've seen one film; it was, uh, 'difficult')