Posts from — April 2008

We received this nice & informative note from the breathtaking Manette Gallery in Portland regarding their Chris Marker exhibition/installation coming up in July 2008:

We hope our humble gallery will be a good nook in which to enjoy these works. The walls will have various stills to look at, I have several books about CM guests can look at, a vintage powerbook 5300 kiosk with headphones running the Immemory CD-ROM, and at least a dozen films shown throughout the month via video projector, including all or most of these:

The Sixth Side Of The Pentagon / The Embassy, Remembrance Of Things To Come (both from Wexler DVDs), Le Fond de l’air et rouge, Le Train en marche, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, Level Five, Le Tombeau d’Alexandre, Le Mystère koumiko, Chats perchés, Le Joli Mai, A.K., La Jette, Sans Soleil… this is off the top of my head. […]

So for anyone who happens to be in Portland, Oregon in July, check http://manettefinearts.com for updates and a definite schedule of the screenings.

Elliott Wall
Manette Gallery
820 Nw 21st Ave.
Portland, Oregon 97209
http://manettefinearts.com

The Koumiko Mystery (La Mystère Koumiko)

Marker studies a young Japanese woman, wandering about Tokyo during the 1964 Olympic games, asking her questions about how she feels about herself and the world. Koumiko comments vaguely on her feelings of separation from people and animals, of drifting with the tide of an anxious world. Amid the transience of a futuristic World’s Fair-like atmosphere, Marker may exoticize Koumiko’s ancient beauty but the “mystery” of the film’s title is, quite simply, the mystery of individuality. Please note: We regret that the color has faded to pink on our print and all prints of this film existing in the U.S.

A film by Chris Marker. (1965, 47 mins, In French with English subtitles, Color, 35mm, Print from PFA Collection/New Yorker Films Deposit)

Letter from Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie)

Chris Marker’s ethnographic essay-documentary on Siberia, made in 1957, remains fresh and relevant today. Combining fantasy animation (of woolly mammoths and mammoth buildings) and documentary photography shot by Sacha Vierny, Marker displays above all his amazement at the diversity of Siberia, at once almost pre-historic and post-revolutionary. On the film’s revival at the 1982 New York Film Festival, Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey called it “compassionately detached, playful and eclectic…. What still thrills about Letter from Siberia 25 years after it was made is Marker’s sympathetic ethnography, so much against the grain of the partisan American documentaries of the ’50s where the omniscient voice told you how to read each image.” In one hilarious segment, Marker does include that voice - repeating a scene with a Capitalist-propaganda voice-over and then with a Soviet one.

Directed and Written by Chris Marker. Photographed by Sacha Vierny. Music by Pierre Barbaud. Edited by Anne Sarraute. (1957, 60 mins, In French with English titles, 35mm, color, Print from New Yorker Films)

A propos: On the website www.ac-nancy-metz.fr, there is a useful structural breakdown, for pedagogical purposes, of the famous montage-commentary sensorium phase shifting contained in Lettre de Sibérie. The image sequence reproduced above is lifted (with gratitude, bien sûr) from that site. The site also presents the three voiceover narration bits that “interpret” this sequence of images in three radically different manners (for these texts, see comments). Here’s what film students are ostensibly supposed to learn:

Objectifs:

• établir une relation entre les différents éléments d’un message audio-visuel
• mettre en évidence le poids des mots par rapport aux images
• introduire la notion de point de vue

La photo, c’est la chasse, c’est l’instinct de chasse sans l’envie de tuer. C’est la chasse des anges… On traque, on vise, on tire et – clac! au lieu d’un mort, on fait un éternel.

The photo is the hunt, it’s the instinct of hunting without the desire to kill. It’s the hunt of angels… You trail, you aim, you fire and – clic! – instead of a dead man, you make him everlasting.

Die Fotografie ist Jagd, ist der Jagdinstinkt ohne die Lust am Töten. Die Jagd der Engel… Man schleicht sich an, man schießt - und klick! Anstelle eines Toten gibt es einen Verewigten.

– Chris Marker, “Si j’avais quatre dromadaires,” Commentaires 2, 87

“During those years, I came to the conclusion that the only sensible weapon against the cops could be a film camera. Not that glorious but, at times, efficient. With a small 16mm contraption, stolen from an UNESCO drawer, I caught my first demo footage, rather fuzzy, stealing light from the television people. And that was a turning point in my film ‘career’ (that despicable word). In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don’t choose your time.”

- Chris Marker, Staring Back, 7.

transcription courtesy of: markertext.com

A marketplace is the Republic of things (I mean the ideal Republic, of course): the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, it is beautiful even if the details are gauche or banal. Thus the Mercato Nuovo in Florence, where every object taken separately is an offense to the spirit’s good manners, while the whole is as flamboyant and funny as a high altar. The Mercato Coreano is not so simple. “Korea,” writes Father du Halde, “furnishes white paper, brushes of hair and wolf tail, Ginseng, gold, silver, iron, yellow varnish so beautiful that anything coated in it appears gilded: the tree whence this gum is distilled resembles a palm: chickens whose tail is three feet long, ponies three feet high, sable and beaver pelts, and fossil salt.” To which I would add, on the basis of my modest knowledge of Korean marketplaces: playing cards which are pleasant-looking flat dominoes, as in Japan, women’s clothing – the short tapestry bolero, transparent and stiff as a chrysalis, and the long, dark-colored skirt knotted at the first swell of the breasts – ribbons covered in gilt letters to encourage longevity, cothurne sandals with incurving prow, blue elephants, pink cats, pens and lamps, old opium pouches modestly called the smoker’s necessary, watch faces strung together like sapeks, flowers… and a somewhat Promethean, I mean aquiline, taste for the entrails of things: the innards of radios, the plexus of an electric razor or the thorax of a lock. Men sit chatting, squatting like the dead in the niches of Mexican cemeteries. And Mexico is not far off: it’s in the white cloth suits, the broad-brimmed straw hats, it surfaces in the tanned faces, in the nonchalance of an eye stretched out in its slit like a hammock at the gleaming crest of the cheek – it’s walking with this peasant (it could be an old Tarasco) who amuses himself scaring groups of people by uncovering, in a single movement, the serpent (though not plumed) that he holds on his fist – it bursts out of just as I frame, when suddenly another figure violently enters the field and bang! – he slaps the old man with the back of his hand, and the latter shies away to disappear who knows where, bringing his serpent along with … maybe for a baby-sitting at Alcmena’s? An instant later the self-appointed lawman had disappeared in his turn, and the people on the street are smiling at me and gesturing that everything is fine now. It all went by as quickly as a forgotten image between two shots, but what I felt there, the way a foot laid inadvertently on a tomb makes you feel the cold of death for one second, was a flash of hatred (so Mexican!). Toward me? Toward him? Blame, shame, fear? A critique of bad country manners, exasperation at my desire for the picturesque while they’re trying to build a modern Korea – or is it just that ophiolatry is prohibited in this town? I’ll never know.

- Chris Marker, Corréennes, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1959.

Ließe nicht ein passionierender Film sich aus dem Stadtplan von Paris gewinnen? aus der Entwicklung seiner verschiedenen Gestalten in zeitlicher Abfolge? aus der Verdichtung einer jahrhundertelangen Bewegung von Straßen, Boulevards, Passagen, Plätzen im Zeitraum einer halben Stunde? Und was anderes tut der Flaneur?

Couldn’t an exciting film be made from the map of Paris? From the unfolding of its various aspects in temporal succession? From the compression of a centuries-long movement of streets, boulevards, arcades, and squares into the space of half an hour? And does the flaneur do anything different?
– Walter Benjamin, Passagenwerk | The Arcades Project [C1,9]

Nichts ist schöner als Paris, wenn nicht die Erinnerung an Paris.
– Chris Marker [q. Kämper/Tode, hg. Chris Marker: Filmessayist, Munich: CICIM, 1997, 8]

“What we call past is somehow similar to what we call abroad. It is not a matter of distance, it is the passing of a boundary.”
- Chris Marker, The Embassy

Quoted by Acquerello @ The Auteur’s Notebook in a recent review (4/3/08). After his incisive analysis, he goes on to note: “First Run/Icarus films has made the two-film DVD of The Embassy and The Sixth Side of the Pentagon available exclusively from the Wexner Center for the Arts prior to its official DVD release later this year.”

Wexner’s notes summarize the film: “One of Chris Marker’s few fiction films, THE EMBASSY shows political dissidents seeking refuge in a foreign embassy after a military coup d’état in an unidentified country. Over the next few days, more and more people fleeing the military assault-teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, and politicians-arrive at the embassy.”

• GUILLAUME-APPROVED EDITION
• New, restored high-definition digital transfers, approved by director Chris Marker
• New video interview with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin
• Chris on Chris, a video piece on Marker by filmmaker and critic Chris Darke
• Two excerpts from the French TV series Court-circuit (le magazine), directed by Luc Lagier: the first, a look at David Bowie’s music video for “Jump They Say,” inspired by La Jetée; the second, an analysis of Hitchcock’s Vertigo and its influences on Marker
• Both films presented in two versions: English and French with English subtitles
• New and improved English subtitle translation

Criterion.com