Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

A day late and a dollar short. But SLON is an elephant and has a long memory. Sorry we missed this. Sorry you missed this. If you didn’t miss it, let us know what you thought. Reprinted from: lafilmforum.org

Tonight’s films will include:

A Bientot J’espere (Be Seeing You) (1968, 43 min)

A Film by Mario Marret and Chris Marker

In the spring of 1967, workers at the massive Rhodiaceta textile mill in Besançon, France, walked off the job. It was no ordinary strike. The month-long work stoppage was about more than just wages, it addressed the workers’ rights to a decent life. Political and cultural concerns were effectively merged.

From 1967 to 1976 Chris Marker was a member of SLON (the “Company for the Launching of New Works”). One of several groups that emerged in those years, in which filmmakers, militants, and others came together to focus in a cooperative and parallel basis on the problems of movie production, SLON was based on the idea that cinema should not be thought of solely in terms of industry and commerce.

So it was only natural that Chris Marker, along with other technicians and members of SLON, would visit Besançon to document the strike, and the lives and attitudes of the workers.

Management went on to sack 92 militants at the end of the year and resorted to lockouts, so that the majority of workers eventually went back to their jobs with few concrete gains. But the strikers had developed a sense of the potential power of labor — and had helped lay the groundwork for May of 1968, when France would be rocked by revolutionary protests. The film’s most important moments are composed of conversations with workers and their wives in their homes. They believe the working class is increasingly at the mercy and disposition of the system, a system that gives them no power, a system that would like them to remain powerless. And so it was that their local demands grew to questions about the larger political system.

First released in 1968, Marker’s piercing film is an extraordinary document of a pivotal moment in European labor history. This is the first time the film has been subtitled in English.

For more on the Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles, see autourdu1ermai.fr and iskra.fr.

We would like to invite all visitors—Marker admirers worldwide—to wish Chris Marker a Happy Birthday / Bon Anniversaire. Tomorrow, on July 29th, 2010, he will turn 89. It is indescribable what he has accomplished and continues to accomplish, but we can hope to convey a feeling, a set of feelings: celebration, admiration, and heartfelt wishes for health & many more moments of happiness (hold the black leader).

We also wish to acknowledge a celebratory discount to mark this occasion on the part of the always gracious Wexner Center Store:

In honor of Chris Marker’s 89th birthday, the Wexner Center Store is discounting all items in the Chris Marker Store 20%.

Sale starts at 12am CEST (Central European Summer Time) and ends 11:59pm EST (Eastern Standard Time) July 29, 2010.

Because of the time difference between Paris and Columbus the sale will last 30 hours.

The Chris Marker Store page is located at: store.wexnercenterstore.com/chrismarkerstore1.html.

Cheers! Please leave comments below expressing your thoughts, feelings, regards, reflections on this remarkable polymath, bricoleur, cinéaste, photographer, human being.

[Guest post by John Fitzgerald. Thanks John! - ed.]

Walking over to Peter Blum Gallery in Chelsea to see the new Chris Marker exhibition, I happened to pass by a section of the newly completed High Line, a pedestrian greenspace retrofitted onto an old elevated train track on the West Side. I stopped to look at a curious feature of the renovation: a glass panel cut into the side of the wall overlooking Tenth Avenue. Behind the glass was tiered seating where people sat and watched the traffic beneath them and the pedestrians walking by. The whole image reminded me of a movie theater—tiered seating all facing a rectangular screen—except instead of a screen, there was glass, and instead of a film, there was The Street. Turning onto 29th Street to go to the gallery, I couldn’t think of a better prelude to Marker’s exhibition about watching people on the trains in Paris.

“Chris Marker: ‘Quelle heure est-elle?’” is a meditation on spectacle. Comprised of pieces selected from the early and latter periods of his career as an artist, filmmaker, and photographer, all are united by Marker’s fierce attention to the world around him, be they images of war or faces in the Métro, pictures in magazines or movie posters of imaginary films. The images that make up the exhibition’s title consist of a series of thirty-six black and white photographs of people riding the Métro in Paris between 2004 – 2008. In order to capture his subjects “truer to their inner selves,” he explains, he used a digital wristwatch camera—thereby coming a long way from the 16mm silent film camera that he boldly employed in the crowded trains of Tokyo for Sans Soleil in 1983. “Here I caught them innocent like animals, in the beauty of the jungle,” he notes.¹ And while the people he captures—predominantly women—are certainly less aware of his gaze than in much of his previous work, some of the images, while very beautiful, still seem to fall short of being entirely natural. Perhaps the innocence that Marker has sought in images throughout his career is not necessarily more attainable merely with a new technology. As he acknowledges, in this age of the cellphone camera, we are more cognizant of being watched than ever before, and the subway, with its absence of anything interesting in the windows except mirror-like reflections, only heightens this sense. But Marker, for me, is a writer more than he is anything else, and while these photographs are ponderous to look at, I miss the breathless, evocative commentary that accompanies such images in his films. Commentary, in this instance, may be unnecessary though. Why articulate in prose something already so perfectly expressed by Ezra Pound in his poem, “In a Station of the Metro”: “The apparition of these faces in the crowd / Petals on a wet black bough”? This was to be Marker’s epigraph in his previous exhibition, “Staring Back,” in 2007. He dropped it at the time, but was struck by how a reviewer, seeing the photographs, began his review by quoting this poem. “So it was true, after all,” Marker writes, “there existed such a thing as poetry, whose ways are by nature different from the ways of the world, that makes one see what was kept hidden, and hear what was kept silent.”

The exhibition is also comprised of a series of other outstanding works including Coréennes (1957), photographs of North Koreans going about their largely agricultural daily lives, pictures of what essentially, to this day, remains a hidden society. Though at the time—and even today—they were inhabitants of one of the most isolated countries on the planet, Marker’s images of North Koreans have almost the same nonchalant intimacy of his femmes du Métro on the opposite wall. They are images seemingly suspended in time, and—except for the occasional intrusion of some pre-modern technological advancement like a bicycle—would have been as familiar to a traveler two centuries earlier as they were to Marker during the height of the Cold War. Considering how rare it is to be able to glimpse inside of North Korean society, the mere existence of these images merit their exhibition; that they are meditative on an artistic level as well is only to Marker’s credit. Invited by the country’s communist government in the wake of the Korean War, Marker enjoyed an almost unheard of amount of freedom in documenting the conditions beyond the thirty-eighth parallel. Where, in Sans Soleil, Marker trained his camera lens on a hyperactively open and “connected” Japanese society on the precipice of major economic expansion and found penetrating mysteries and rituals behind the veneer of everyday mundanity, in Coréennes he peers into a fanatically closed world and reveals how truly accessible it seems. We see the women of the countryside, pensive, the schoolgirls holding aloft their fans and preparing for a dance. There are no images of tanks or infinite crowds furiously saluting the Great Leader. Even before the sixties Marker was already post-political. His focus is the people, the daily life. Of the war he only wrote: “When a country is split in two by an artificial border and irreconcilable propaganda is exercised on each side, it’s naïve to ask where the war comes from: the border is the war.”²

The Hollow Men (2005), also on view, is a multi-screen installation depicting images of twentieth-century conflict—beginning with the First World War—against textual interstices of lines variously inspired by, or taken from, T.S. Eliot’s poem of the same name. Here, too, we are spectators, and as in his other works the focus so often is on faces. One passage begins, “’I’LL BE SEEING YOU’ / WAS OUR SONG / LESS THAN 80 SEASONS LATER / FOR EVERY WAR HAS A SONG.”

I’ll be seeing you. The irony, of course, is that a man who has spent so much of his life pointing his camera lens at others should himself remain shrouded in obscurity. The gallery’s artist biography merely indicates that Marker was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France in 1921 and that he “lives and works in Paris.” Though he was a member of the most luminary generation of French auteurs in the history of cinema, he is still sufficiently unknown for a popular New York magazine to confidently claim him as an “avant-garde American filmmaker.”³ Presumably, without this veil of mystery, he would never be able to get as close to his subjects as he does. And while he may not be American, his preoccupation with looking at The Street—in Paris, in Pyongyang, in Tokyo—is literally, in something as small as that viewing area on the High Line, gaining ground in this country. Somehow, I imagine Chris Marker wouldn’t mind spending an afternoon perched up there over Tenth Avenue looking at all the people passing below.

David Thomson, author of the classic A Biographical Dictionary of Film as well as books on Hitchcock, Welles and Brando, recently published a thoughtful reflection on Chris Marker’s photograph series taken in the Paris metro. The piece is called “Chris Marker’s Underground” and is can be viewed at The New Republic’s “Slideshow” blog.

Marker’s territory for chasing images may have changed in the 21st century as his global explorations became less frequent, but his backyard as found in his viewfinder remains a world unto itself, as this series of photos (7 are reproduced with his permission in Thomson’s article) and of course the movie Chats perchés [The Case of the Grinning Cat] reveal.

In contemplating the nomad who does not travel outside the city, I’m reminded of a passage from Deleuze and Guattari’s Thousand Plateaus:

There are not only strange voyages in the city but voyages in place: we are not thinking of drug users, whose experience is too ambiguous, but of true nomads. We can say of the nomads, following Toynbee’s suggestion: they do not move. They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating, of holding a smooth space that they refuse to leave, that they leave only in order to conquer and die. Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities, even if they also develop in extension. To think is to voyage… [532]

Or, as the master of ambient Pete Namlook puts it more succinctly, “traveling without moving.” [Air II CD].

In narrowing the circle of travel in earthspace, Marker has only become more of a nomad. The truncation of the world to one’s own city finds its looking glass counter-world not only in the underground and the elegant graffiti mysteries of M. Chat, but also and no less profoundly in Marker’s migration to Second Life, a world without end, a fractal archipelago that allows the voyager-in-place to meet others without moving, to pass through without moving, to visit spaces by jumping coordinates, to remain a fixed point in an expanding universe of travel and aleatory encounter.

The metro also takes us back to the hypnotic dream sequences of Sans Soleil in the Japanese commuter trains. It is here that we may have first slipped into the Zone, where Marker filmed the drifted-off bodies being taken, consciousness slipping into unconsciousness, from point of departure to point of arrival. The interim is filled with imagination, projected images from Japanese television of their potential dreams. Why the Zone? Because the Zone is the machine of derealization, the slippage mechanism that takes one imperceptibly from document to dream, and serves in a manner so subtle to be subliminal to silently replace the limited audio-visual faculties of film with an unbounded imagination.

The Zone makes of the tourist a nomad memory device, but all the memories flip immediately into machine memory, and from there into phantasm. These phantasm-traces form the fundamental building blocks of a kind of network, a relay system of the imagination that stiches the borders of documentary and fiction and then removes the stitches. It is a mobile architecture of memory, a digital descendant of the ancient art of memory evoked by Marker in Immemory, but no longer glued to the commonplaces of the rhetorical tradition.

Montaigne writes of friendship: “En l’amitié de quoi je parle, elles nos âmes se mêlent et confondent l’une en l’autre, d’un mélange si universel qu’elles effacent et ne retrouvent plus la couture qui les a jointes.” We live today in this space of erased stitching that is that of friendship, the still life as nomad, and the Zone.

Thomson’s speculations on place and name, his wry Markerian references such as Ulan Bator (a place-name that has messed with film biographers such as himself), and his own dreamlike projection-reflections carry on the work of the imagination that surfaces in the dream commuters of Marker’s foray into the Zone. But it must be said as well that the photographs he displays and discusses are also and primarily just what they are, without addition: light and camera in-between action, and always the implied presence of the photographer, himself unphotographed.

Portraits that are always also self-portraits with the stiches removed. People lifted out of the flow of the quotidian into the lens. Everlasting beings caught in the moment, nameless but respected. As Marker long ago wrote: On traque, on vise, on tire et — clac! au lieu d’un mort, on fait un éternel. He may be saying, all these years later, that instead of war one makes a friend.

Thanks to Quentin D. for alerting us to a fascinating poem-image collage narrative entitled L’Archipel Fantôme, set in the virtual space of Second Life, one of many lives known to the transmigrating cat. Though veiled with  elegant self-effacement, this rêverie bears the signature, to our senses, of the master’s hand, mind and spirit (though it is not his own, as we have learned post-post).

The story presents a kind of back and forth play of images and words, the images postcards from the rich space of the Ouvroir and neighboring or jump spaces within Second Life, the texts evocations of a search and encounter with a “sad angel” named Mary Céleste. The quote that serves as the epigraph of the site is from Giraudoux (subject of Marker’s 1952 book for Seuil Giraudoux par lui-même):

“Sa vie nouvelle éclatait déjà sur lui dans le miroir”

The archipelago, as thought-form, experience and poem, visualizes the concept of both the ancient art of memory and the bricolage of Second Life itself, a string of geographies with traversable passages between them: a hyper-natural arcade within which the poet-flâneur is guided by his avatar. The themes of fleeting personal sightings/meetings with a friend-stranger, of discreet moments of bonheur à deux that provide the emotional atmosphere of La Jetée are here, woven concisely into the stanzas (“Nous nous étions promis de nous revoir”).

The tricks of sight and memory are at play: most of the images seem phantasmatic, a mix of dream, hallucination and cinema: sometimes invisible, sometimes semi-transparent, sometimes caught within the process of mutation from one state of being to the next. The quest is less that of Marker’s photography, to capture as in a hunt, than to live within the indecisiveness of these states of image and perception.

Throughout, there is a pacing that is clearly remniscent of La Jetée and, further in the background, of the essay film, with its dense meaning yet light touch that transforms documentary into veiled self-portrait. Here the commentary of the essay film has migrated into poetry and so further condenses, like a white dwarf star. The voice seeks to find the phantom angel girl, not wishing to exhaust the images (or the angel) with words, only grace them with the touch of another medium, as if the image and the word were old friends, each aware of its particular powers, its valences and its limits.

As throughout Marker’s expeditionary career set to celluloid, the theme of traveling and its inter-spaces appears—architectures, visions seen and experienced in the process of moving from one place to another, fleetingly recorded then receding into the past of travel, space moving back into time. One of these images, which “create their own captions” (as Marker once stated as program and wish), attests to the “proof that an image can be a living organism.”

As in Sans Soleil and the book Staring Back, we brush up against the theme of the regard of and from the other. It is not now the length of a single frame of film, 1/24th of a second, nor of the desiring, voyeuristic photographer, but rather a gaze that sees through and beyond while remaining completely present. The gaze of the other shifts from an object of capture to a shared moment of being-together, inscribed emotionally rather than technologically. This is the feel of the encounter with the girl angel, black-haired with a hint of dreadlocks, pale, freckled and clothed in black. A fallen angel? Perhaps. Or an angel of history.

The presence of the encounter takes place within a respect for the intrusiveness of words: “J’évitais d’être trop bavard.” This respect keeps the encounter within the air of mystery that the seeking itself breathes. It also slyly refers to the over-abundance of words in the spaces of social networking, and how silences and listening can be as important as constantly informing an interlocutor, a stranger-friend, of every last detail. Restraint of voice becomes a respect for the miracle of the encounter, and for the unknowable palimpsest of identity. The masks of avatars reveal something already true in the event of meeting another human being: s/he is more than meets the eye. What do we really know, in an encounter, of the past, the durée, the origins and trajectory of this being?

Just as space is fluid, so too is time and memory. The poem speaks of “Deux jours, deux semaines / ou deux mois plus tard, je ne sais plus…”. Objects share this fluidity, and their world a sense of animism, as if all creations within this world were in some manner alive, negotiable in their being, ephemeral and evolving. The world is presented as a puzzle, or rebus, something to be put together to form a whole, itself part of some greater whole … in fractal succession.

The older media are not lost in this space; they become the content, as McLuhan (for whom Marker “gave up Gutenberg long ago”) promised, for the new medium: so projectors of film are themselves fluid objects embedded in the landscapes, sometimes floating freely in the air, at other times installed in intimate spaces that represent new ways of situating the moment of spectation.

The question of authorship is unimportant as fact, though it has its particles of evidence: references to Giradoux, to San Francisco (one thinks of Marker’s intensive encounter retracing the temporality and spatiality of Vertigo), to Cuba, to owls. Throughout there are images of the markerian past, including floating cubes holding images of Le Joli mai, Le Fond de l’air est rouge, Le Mystère Koumiko, and the recurrent image of Guillaume. In the thank you note on the site, the other Guillaume, Guillaume-en-Egypte, is credited as “assistant d’un photographe et vidéaste dont certaines images apparaisent ici furtivement.” That the whole production could have been put together by another, an imposter, a Marker simulacrum, only stitches it tighter into the weave of his oeuvre.

As with authorship, identity and authenticity, the primacy of the human is blurred too. Animals, angels, aliens, architectures and machines all co-exist in the phantasmatic space within which each traversing, each leg of the journey, becomes a unique experience—not re-playable, not monumentalized in any history, not encapsulated in a product with beginning and end, and as such marking another chapter, a further evocation of Marker’s “Farewell to Movies.” But every farewell holds within it the possibility of new encounters, and this work is a testament to those, even as these new encounters hold out finally the message of their own disappearance and sense of loss.

L’Archipel Fantôme: http://larchipelfantome.blogspot.com/

The second installment in a series of articles devoted to the work of Chris Marker has been released by the online journal Image [&] Narrative, Vol. 11, No. 1 (2010). The journal, with abstracts and pdfs of each article, is available at ojs.arts.kuleuven.be. Below is a list of articles.

Thematic Cluster

Introduction – Peter Kravanja
The Imaginary in the Documentary Image: Chris Marker’s Level Five – Christa Blümlinger
Montage, Militancy, Metaphysics: Chris Marker and André Bazin – Sarah Cooper
Statues Also Die – But Their Death is not the Final Word – Matthias De Groof
Autour de 1968, en France et ailleurs : Le Fond de l’air était rouge – Sylvain Dreyer
“If they don’t see happiness in the picture at least they’ll see the black”: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and the Lyotardian Sublime – Sarah French
Crossing Chris: Some Markerian Affinities – Adrian Martin
Petit Cinéma of the World or the Mysteries of Chris Marker – Susana S. Martins

We will offer a more in-depth view into the state of Marker scholarship in an upcoming post discussing new books and recent articles, while adding a selected secondary references page to this site.

Prompted out of a kind of suspended time of my own by several emails from Christophe Payet, “journaliste pigiste,”  I found my one-d and zeroed way to the above image on poptronics’  site, and thought about the strange swirling of time, the wounds of time as they might possibly exist in the New Year within the being named Chris Marker. I wandered simultaneously upon a passage in Roberto Bolano’s 2066, which has been keeping me company late at night:

And then he spied a tremor in the sea, as if the water were sweating too, or as if it were about to boil. A barely perceptible simmer that spilled into ripples, building into waves that came to die on the beach. And then Pelletier felt dizzy and a hum of bees came from outside. And when the hum faded, a silence that was evenworse fell over the house and everywhere around. And Pelletier shouted Norton’s name and called to her, but no one answered his calls, as if the silence had swallowed up his cries for help. And then Pelletier began to weep and he watched as what was left of a statue emerged from the bottom of the metallic sea. A formless chunk of stone, gigantic, eroded by time and water, though a hand, a wrist, part of a forearm could still be made out with total clarity. and the statue came out of the sea and rose above the beach and it was horrific and at the same time very beautiful.

With the aforementioned emails came news of Guillaume’s farewell to poptronical submissions, and a kind of rumor wave of retreat or retirement rushed through the markerian emotional landscape at the speed of telepathy, dotted by these sundry asynchronous dates: 3009, the arrival of Guillaume at a ballardian drowned world in his sleek skimming time-travel merkabah vehicle; 2010 the faux-hollywood poster graphic of a kind of adieu – certainly seeming more that than an au revoir – clearly containing within it a parody of the hypertrophic apocalyptical thunderings of the as yet unseen movie 2012, combined with one interpretation, a hopeful one, of a  feline mutation to fit the times, like the origin of Batman or some other superhero, as if Guillaume’s wit and emblematic wry underminings of power in the form of collage barrage that have graced poptronics’ site were no longer enough, could no longer hold at bay another round of disappointment.

More wounds of history, more memories and more oblivion. And a rising from the ashes, a phoenix move on the part of the cat, or a vacation in time, considering… “Considering”* is a bit like the famous bon mot by André Gide when asked about the greatest French poet, his answer of course being “Victor Hugo, hélas”.  Best wishes, alas. And more dates: 2084, 2066, 4001 (the era of perfect memory). In a way, Guillaume takes off like Pacal Wotan takes off, in his spaceship-for-one. Marker may take off the way the Mayans took off, in mystery and grace and full of traces. Meanwhile, the disappearances continue: the world empties itself out, migrating in the manner of bees to an as-yet undisclosed location, a new world. There is a kind of cultural colony collapse disorder happening, as a Mandelstamian cry of “No!”  against those who would hold the suicidal oligarchy together with string and glue. 2010, alas. Happy New Year, horrific and beautiful.

For further reading:

• poptronics < 01’01’10 > 2010, les adieux de Guillaume-en-Egypte
• PressAgrume’s meditation on the news: Guillaume-en-Egypte se retire : « Farewell to Chris Marker » ?, from which the following quote is taken:

Après l’adieu aux films (Farewell to movies, 2008), ce départ de Guillaume-en-Egypte nous condamne-t-il à un silence définitif de Chris Marker ? N’ayant jamais été bien loquace, Chris Marker a su se faire maître dans l’art du « silence éloquent ». Guillaume, son « double bavard », à son tour retiré, voilà l’humanité privée d’un précieux observateur. N’allons toutefois pas trop vite en besogne. Notre élégie précoce n’est que souffrance amoureuse. Si à la chute de Guillaume, rien ne succède, alors il y a bien quelque chose qui pour nous s’éteindra.

* Marker explains his choice of the word “Considering”: “…considering est le point d’ironie qu’on ajoute à un bilan par ailleurs catastrophique (exemple : dans “Asphalt Jungle”, Louis Calhern à Marilyn Monroe qui vient de le balancer aux flics “You did quite well, considering”) s’achève un cycle…” [poptronics]

With the recent release of Patricio Guzmán’s epic documentary The Battle of Chile on DVD, a moving tale has come to light: of solidarity among filmmakers; of Marker’s focus on giving without need of thanks; of this nearly inexpressible thank you coming nonetheless years later in a revelatory interview; of collaboration and friendship; and of the redistribution of the means of reproduction that made the impossible film possible.

In the ongoing list of ‘things that quicken the heart,’ this tale certainly takes its rightful place. Marker does not wear his heart on his sleeve; rather, he places it carefully into his actions. In this clip of remarkable recollections by Guzmán of Marker, we see the emotional, inspiring result of several of those actions.

View original at http://www.nfb.ca/film/capturing_reality_patricio_guzman/

The Battle of Chile on DVD

In December 2009, Icarus Home Video released a deluxe 4 disc DVD edition of The Battle of Chile. Their site notes:

Long banned in Chile after Pinochet’s coup, only in 1997 could Guzmán return to show THE BATTLE OF CHILE there for the first time. CHILE, OBSTINATE MEMORY (included on the fourth disc here) is the extraordinarily moving record of that homecoming, and a fitting conclusion to a “thrilling documentary double feature,” “the unusual opportunity to see one film artist sustain an inquiry into the life of a troubled country over the course of decades.”

In the press kit [pdf] for the new DVD set, there is a section noting Chris Marker’s contributions, citing a 1975 interview with Guzmán by Le Monde film critic Louis Marcorelles:

Chris Marker played a fundamental role. He had translated into French for us El primero año; so, at the beginning of 1973, when we sensed that the great political crisis was approaching, we wrote to Chris and explained to him that we wanted to make a film which would be a vast panorama of everything that was taking place in Chile, but that we didn’t have any film because of the economic blockade. Chris wrote to me: ‘Very well, I will see what I can do.’ A very short letter. And at the end of three months, he alerted me that he was sending the material. Chris made no conditions on his shipment. He said to us: ‘The material is yours, film with it, all I can do is to send it to you.’

Icarus Films also presents a substantial overview of Guzmán’s life and work on this page. The more one learns, the more it becomes clear why Marker volunteered, in such direct but profound gestures, to become a kind of ambassador for both The First Year and The Battle of Chile — “one of the most eloquent and daring explorations of revolution and repression, hope and memory, to survive our sorry times” (as Ariel Dorfman is quoted) — to Europe and to the world.