Posts from — September 2008

We received this note from Bryne Rasmussen:

I am very excited about this upcoming series, Screencasts, here at YUAG this fall. I thought fellow readers of your blog might like to know too.

“The Face is A Politics: On Chris Marker’s ‘Staring Back’”

Part of “Screencasts: Cinema as Medium in Contemporary Art”
Thu Oct 30 2008 5:30 PM - 7:30 PM
Yale University Art Gallery
1111 Chapel St. at York Street
Vered Maimon, Northeastern Univ.
General Public / Free

“Selected Films by Chris Marker”

Part of “Screencasts: Cinema as Medium in Contemporary Art”
Fri Oct 31 2008 6:30 PM - 9:30 PM
212 York Street, Room 108
General Public / Free
(203) 432-0600
artgallery.yale.edu

Cheers
Bryne Rasmussen

The selection of films has not been announced yet, but we will keep you informed as we know more.

Image courtesy of japanese forms (cropped and tweeked). Thank you!

Greetings, hoping this finds you well!

September 25-28, from 7 to about 11pm

The Works of Chris Marker

Fourteen or fifteen films will be screened here in our cozy gallery (about 4 hours each night), books and other materials will also be here to look at- also the Immemory CD-ROM will be accessible thorough a kiosk.

With a career spanning five decades, French filmmaker Chris Marker has defined “subjectivist documentary”. The Wikipedia link is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chris_Marker … and a link to http://chrismarker.org , which provides some fantastic background to the work. [Thanks we appreciate that - ed.]

Highlights to Mention

On Sep. 25, one film will be screened which you may have heard of. La Jetée – shot, I believe, (…almost) entirely with a Leica 35mm still camera- this film is well known in part because the plot premise was used by Terry Gilliam in his excellent 1995 film 12 Monkeys (this would have to be the only similarity).

Sep. 26: The Sixth Face of the Pentagon, Marker’s take on the march on the Pentagon on October, 21 1967.

Sep. 27: Le Fond de l’air et Rouge, a 240 min rumination of the fate (or legacy?) of the international Leftist movement, in retrospect. Personal reflections his earlier depictions of certain salient events in the history of the Left, the film was constructed with the discarded material from earlier films, yielding a different view of things.

Sep. 28: Sans Soleil, to me, the most brilliant and life changing film I have ever seen. It is useless for me to attempt to describe it since others have made such progress in that line: http://www.geocities.com/wolfgang_ball/ Although I must confess, it might be a mistake to approach the film intellectually, tempting as it may be. This film affects me on the deepest levels, I am overwhelmed emotionally… something I don’t know the word for, something greater and more meaningful than “insight”. The amazing soundtrack by Isao Tomita is haunting and extraordinarily zeitgeisty…. If you must see only one of these films, try to make it this one.

…Bring wine or something if you wish….

Call if you have any questions- and we look forward to seeing you!

-Elliott and Monique

Manette
820 NW 21st Ave.
Portland, OR 97209
http://manettefinearts.com
503-863-9347

In La Jetée, Chris Marker finesses still images that are meant to simultaneously represent the past as well as the future until they approximate motion. That is to say, he takes frames that exist in alternative time zones and wills them into motion, a motion that is, in filmic terms, the very embodiment of the present tense. Remembrance of Things to Come may sound from its title like a cute turn on Proustian concerns, but it is actually a haunting examination of another photographer’s work, a body of pictures that Marker seems to conclude reflect the parallel existence of past and future in much the same way he earlier proposed via sci-fi parable.

– Eric Henderson, “Remembrance of Things to Come,” Slant Magazine

Walter Benjamin said that. Literally: one time is no times. Looser: once is not enough. Let the subliminal rise to the surface of consciousness by grazing again through the text, the stream, the grain, and then again against the grain to feel the furrows of the patterns not picked up the first time. Viewing a film we start with the zero view. The second view is the first, and we move on from there, not always forward. For the Kabbalists, opening the Book a second time one will find the language has changed, mutated, grown in the meantime. Just as for them the written word was still alive, a type of living, breathing and regenerating organism, certain films change in their dormancy. As we visit them again, they reveal different facets, catch the light at a changed hour – at the cusp of a new constellation. Philip K. Dick spent the last years of his life trying to decipher this and related mysteries. Chris Marker seems to have had from early on a caméra-stylo that writes such a living language, not to manuscript or movable type but to celluloid. As screenings of his celluloids have been rare, the “einmal” of viewing one of his films tended to produce a strange kind of hunger, an otaku hunger. That hunger – in some cases decades in duration – is beginning to be appeased…

You may have already concluded that DVD is a perfect medium for Chris Marker, since his cunning, calculated work requires and repays multiple viewings…. Marker’s great talent as a filmmaker is giving us the impression that any digression is welcome, any accident is providence and anything can happen, even as he is firmly in control. We don’t feel steered or manipulated, nor adrift and meandering. A philosopher of passionate ideals, Marker makes films that are, at their essence, generous invitations to join him in an inquiry into the mysteries of human society.

- GreenCine Daily [Correction: citation from original article published at sf360.org by Michael Fox]

Next: palinode and prolepsis. Reading backwards and forwards. Anticipation. Retrospection. Circularity. The notion of an “edition” applied to Marker’s films.

Dennis Lim, “Chris Marker’s Obsessions,” Special to the LA Times, August 31, 2008.

This piece belies its intriguing title by presenting a very factual and summary account of official Icarus releases of The Last Bolchevik, Remembrance of Things to Come, The Case of the Grinning Cat and The Sixth Side of the Pentagon / The Embassy. These releases had been available exclusively from the Wexner Center for the Arts, and have now entered the main stream, if not the mainstream.

It seems like every time La Jetée is mentioned in the press, it is regarded chiefly as the inspiration for 12 Monkeys. In 100 years, long before the future accessed in La Jetée, no one will remember the latter, and the former will be played on goggles while you’re teleporting to work.

As far as obsessions go, they are barely touched on in this piece of lightweight journalism. I wish the reporter had been more obsessed himself, or at least chosen a different title. But as the Germans say, na ja, which sure beats the California-ism “it’s all good.” It ain’t all good, and Marker knows it as clearly as anyone thinking, scribbling and creating today.

Guillaume has become his spokesperson for this die-hard unwillingness to let things slide, and Marker the model of finding ever new means and media as outlets for expression (political cartoons, Second Life mini-worlds, multi-dimensional installations, photographs that look people right in the eye, YouTube channels – you name it). Marker’s obsessions are alive and well, but not stagnant or stale, ever. They are like miniature mobile armies of truth, small stabs that bring down giants, just as La Jetée is a half-hour movie that can outshine 3 hour epics in its sleep.