Chris Marker

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')

cool, i can never think of anything to watch when i wanna get a movie

the gorin trilogy isn't on dvd in the states i think, dunno about anywhere else

but yeah, FAROCKI: if you like the marker vietnam film, check out HF's short 'inextinguishable fire' about american chemical companies and napalm manufacture in vietnam (then check out the paper i wrote about it as an undergrad, or, yknow, don't)

Donna OTM. That Gorin trilogy is amazing. There were supposedly Criterion editions in the works, but I guess JPG had some sort of falling out with them. Janus did restore them, though, so I imagine they'll become available in some form. Farocki is also great. Inextinguishable Fire is the real canonical one. I like Workers Leaving the Factory and Images of the World and the Inscription of War better.

I've never regretted seeing a Marker film, but there are definitely ups and downs. I'd most strongly recommend Grin Without a Cat and Le joli mai on top of the ones you've seen.

"Film essay" is an increasingly capacious label, and people get pretty defensive about the parameters (you should track down Philip Lopate's (written) essay "In Search of the Centaur") . There are a million of these things now. Without thinking too long about it or worrying too much about definitions, I'd also suggest Patrick Keiller's Robinson trilogy, Jon Jost's early films, Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (which you can find on Youtube), Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage (which I believe is also on Youtube), anything by Morgan Fisher, anything by Bill Brown, Histoire(s) du cinema, Adam Curtis' tv work (start with The Trap maybe?). I'm forgetting tons of great stuff, but this is probably already more than you were looking for.

x-ps

Isn't Letter to Jane a Vertov Group film?

i think sans soleil is one of like three movies where ive gone back and watched the bits i fell asleep through

i think it is, technically xp to c0l1n

shit yeah, 'los angeles plays itself' is fantastic (i watched it in chopped-up segments on youtube, which suited me fine given its length)

Really liked Le Mystère Koumiko (1965) (on youtube) - the girl he interviews/edits/lets take over is 'mixed up' and, similarly, CM adopts that as a strategy on Japan. Could've been really embarrassing but its actually fab.

The BFI shop have that three hour cut of Grin Without a Cat NRQ talks about, or should I really try to torrent(?) the four cut (when I get into torrents) (assuming someone has that)

From the description Grin... and Carlos would be the most exciting double bill, but also the most deadly for your circulation - maybe one to watch over a flight to Australia.

A/K is a curiously flat (not as a criticism) portrayal of a nice Japanese man who happened to have made a brilliant set of films. Surprising, but only watched aout half of it.

i don't agree with NRQ re marker's attitude to castro at all: he doesn't denounce him openly (he doesn't denounce anyone really) but he really isn't treated as the hero of the second half, anything but

That Gorin trilogy is amazing. There were supposedly Criterion editions in the works, but I guess JPG had some sort of falling out with them. Janus did restore them, though, so I imagine they'll become available in some form.

eclipse set coming out in january btw

Watched Grin.. over Xmas and its a remarkable montage. Since then I've seen The Last Bolshevik, L'Ambassade (his other fictional film, which is wonderful although no La Jetee), If I had 4 Camels (in the same format as La Jetee but just the most exciting travelogue, as if someone showed slides from their world tour but its so well scripted, soundtracked and narrated -- like all his stuff, pretty much)

And I agree that Grin... doesn't make Castro a hero at all, but he doesn't demonise him either...although he jently mocks him (when he talks about how he taps the microphone when making speeches). So the 'portrait' makes his turns.

Allende 'made to look like a dick' also sounds wrong.

There is a HUGE universe to this stuff: Far From Vietnam, The Battle For Chile, Ivens' A Valparaiso, Statues Also Die. All great pieces of filmmaking he had a hand in producing or assisting, and which I've been v lucky to see in the last few months.

Has anyone here read his novel?

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.