Posts from — November 2008

Chris Marker’s 1981 short film Junkopia is now available for viewing online at Ubu.com. Thanks to Nate Lavey for the heads-up. Notable are the foregrounding of the sonic elements that were always present in Marker’s films, yet often took a more subliminal position in deference to the commentary, which here is explicitly abstained from, as the add-on “framing” of the film provided by arte points out.

This style of sound painting recalls Holgar Czukay and David Sylvian’s Plight and Premonition and Biosphere’s Substrata – ambient atmospherics integrating radio wave sampling that Marker’s otherworldly sonic backdrops predate by a long shot (watch La Jetée someday with your eyes closed :>).

Commuters from the East Bay to San Francisco will be familiar with this no man’s landscape in Emeryville culled from the floatable spare parts of the city, washed ashore. The animal forms, such as the watchful tinfoil owl above, receive their due attention, as is so often the case in Marker’s productions, whatever the scale.

Thanks to Second Life chronicler lucien bookmite for drawing our attention to this new work by Kosinki on YouTube. Could the music be Arvo Pärt? This series of photographs, seemingly run through the Animoto engine, harks back to Staring Back, and more distantly – in this viewer’s mind at least – to Si j’avais quatre dromedaires. Ever new surprises from the master behind the camera, but rarely in front of it.

All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men’s task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible.
Sans Soleil

WHAT IS “CACTUS LAND” IF NOT BARBED WIRE?

Chris Marker Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 72.

Owls at noon, night birds in the day, things, objects, images that don’t belong, and yet are there. Leaflets, postcards, stamps, graffiti, forgotten photographs, frames stolen from the continuous and senseless flow of TV stuff (what I’d call the Duchamp syndrome: once I’ve spotted 1/50th of a second that escaped everybody, including its author, this 1/50th of a second is mine). Bringing into the light events and people who normally never access it. It’s from that raw material, the petty cash of history, that I try to extract a subjective journey through the 20th century.

Everybody agrees that the founding moment of that era, its mint, was the First World War, and that it was also the background on which T.S. Eliot wrote his beautiful and desperate poem The Hollow Men. So the Prelude to the journey will be a reflection upon that poem, mixed with some images gathered from the limbos of my memory.

After reproducing the above passage, Raymond Bellour, in his essay “Marker’s Gesture,” comments: “These lines, dated 6 April 2005, appeared (in English) at the entry of the dark room where Chris Marker’s Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men was presented, on the occasion of the Museum of Modern Art’s reopening in New York.” [13]

Martin, Adrian and Raymond Bellour, Chris Marker Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, Brisbane, Australia: Institute of Modern Art, 2008.

Chris Marker
Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men 2005
two-channel eight-LCD-screen video installation
19 minutes.
All images courtesy Peter Blum Gallery, New York

Chris Marker roves the international press after the victory of US President-elect Barack Obama and presents us with this celebratory Animoto video on YouTube. Here is evidence of the global import of this moment in history. This press coverage, tracked with the tenacity of a grandmaster archivist, represents, in a sense, the public face of a deep joy that erupted worldwide.

“Astrophysics, physiology, theology, taxonomy, philology, cosmology, mechanics, logic, poetics, technology. Here we catch a glimpse of a future in which all mysteries are resolved. A time when we are handed the keys to this and other universes. And this will come about because these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will lay the fragments of a single secret end to end, a secret with a beautiful name, a secret called happiness.”

Alain Resnais (and Chris Marker), Toute la mémoire du monde, as quoted on Brandon’s Movie Memory.

“The dream of a library (in a variety of configurations) that would bring together all accumulated knowledge and all the books ever written can be found throughout the history of Western civilization. It underlay the constitution of great princely, ecclesiastical, and private ‘libraries’; it justified a tenacious search for rare books, lost editions, and texts that had disappeared; it commanded architectural projects to construct edifices capable of welcoming the worlds’ memory.”

Roger Chartier, The Order of Books: Readers, Authors, and Libraries in Europe Between the 14th and 18th Centuries, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1994, 62.

The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of its hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings, New York: New Directions, 1962, 52.

Brooding at the end of the world on my island of Sal in the company of my prancing dogs I remember that month of January in Tokyo, or rather I remember the images I filmed of the month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape. How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed.

Chris Marker, Sans Soleil.

Letizia Álvarez de Toledo has observed that this vast Library is useless: rigorously speaking, a single volume would be sufficient, a volume of ordinary format, printed in nine or ten point type, containing an infinite number of infinitely thin leaves. (In the early seventeenth century, Cavalieri said that all solid bodies are the superimposition of an infinite number of planes.) The handling of this silky vade mecum would not be convenient: each apparent page would unfold into other analogous ones; the inconceivable middle page would have no reverse.

Borges, “The Library of Babel,” Labyrinths, FN1, 58.

References: Matej Krén’s Bookcell

The Owl’s Legacy Chris Marker (France, 1989) Parts 1, 2 and 3 (L’héritage de la chouette).

“He must have been a royal pain in the ass. It’s just unbearable to have a man like that in a city.” This is how George Steiner describes Socrates in one of the many provocative moments in Chris Marker (Sans Soleil)’s latest “cultural documentary,” a television series based on Greek culture and its rich, often troublesome heritage. Topics include the unique nature of Athenian democracy, the grammar of myths, sexuality and pleasure, the invention of the self, music, Pythagoras, and the ever-dominant importance of language. Marker’s ability to document the relatively abstract and often specialized nature of such subjects covered during scores of interviews with scholars, philosophers, artists, scientists, politicians in Athens, Berkeley, Paris, Tbilisi, and sustain it without ever being dull or repetitive is truly remarkable. And alternating with the answers to Marker’s persistant questions are literally hundreds of inserts: montage sequences of statues, film excerpts, computer graphics and landscapes, all illustrating or contextualizing the replies. It is difficult to imagine a more perfect illustration of one of Castoriadis’ final remarks about what he considers one of Greek philosophy’s major contributions: “What should I think?” In its very structure, and the dialectics woven across many thinkers, it is also “a critique of the representation of the tribe,” in this instance, the legacy of Greek culture to the world.–Bertrand Augst

Written by Marker. Photographed by Emiko Omori, Peter Chapell, et al. Edited by Khadicha Bariha, Nedjma Scialom. With Iannis Xenakis, George Steiner, Elia Kazan, Theo Angelopoulos, Cornelius Castoriadis. (In English, and French, Georgian, Greek with English subtitles, Color, 3/4″ Video, projected, Cassettes courtesy Chris Marker with permission of Film International Television Production and La Sept) (Total running time, parts 1, 2, 3: 75 mins)

Memory of the Future

Thank you to DT for bringing this prescient Guillaume moment from 6 November 2004 (!) to our attention. [See comments on post “Guillaume Sends a Message“]. This collage was originally published in Un Regard Moderne.

A shift in paradigms occurred: Nietzsche and Ebbinghaus presupposed forgetfulness, rather than memory and its capacity, in order to place the medium of the soul against a background of emptiness or erosion. A zero value is required before acts of memory can be quantified. Ebbinghaus banned introspection and thus restored the primacy of forgetting on a theoretical level. On the one hand, there was Nietzsche’s delirious joy at forgetting even his forgetfulness; on the other, there was a psychologist who forgot all of psychology in order to forge its algebraic forumula.

– Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Mettler, Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1990, 207.