Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory
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The Owl’s Legacy: Filmnotes @ PFA

by blindlibrarian

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. Athenian OwlMarker’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)

3 comments

1 blindlibrarian { 11.11.08 at 10:18 am }

In the late 1980s the newly formed cultural television channel La Sept (forerunner of the Franco-German Arte), with the support of the Onassis Foundation, commissioned Marker to make a television series on the legacy of ancient Greek civilization in the modern world. Composed of thirteen 26-minute episodes, The Owl’s Legacy is among Marker’s most ambitious projects, but because it has not had the wide exposure of a commercial cinema release, the series has garnered little critical attention. The Owl’s Legacy stages an extended encounter between Marker’s commitment to interviews and the oblique yet unmistakable intervention of his own private sensibility and preoccupations. The notion of the ‘owl’s legacy’ primarily represents the stated quest after the contemporary heritage of ancient Greece (the owl being associated with Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom), but Marker himself can be discerned in the guise of his favourite bird, as the different episodes of the series set out and expound, via a range of opinions and perspectives, the abiding concerns and reference points of his own work.

Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, London: Reaktion Books, 2005, 170.

2 blindlibrarian { 11.11.08 at 10:26 am }

The Owl’s Heritage: Sequence

  1. Symposium, or Accepted Ideas
  2. Olympics, or Imaginary Greece
  3. Democracy, or the City of Dreams
  4. Nostalgia, or the Impossible Return
  5. Amnesia, or History on the March
  6. Mathematics, or the Empire Counts Back
  7. Logomachy, or the Dialect of the Tribe
  8. Music, or Inner Space
  9. Cosmogony, or the Ways of the World
  10. Mytholody, or Lies like Truth
  11. Mysogyny, or the Snares of Desire
  12. Tragedy, or the Illusion of Death
  13. Philosophy, or the Triumph of the Owl
3 Alan Green { 01.04.09 at 1:31 pm }

I have seen a few episodes, and I can’t bloody believe this series is IMPOSSIBLE to buy, to get, or see anywhere except in “Select” institutions accross France - while sitting in front of a terminal. Heck, I want my friends to watch it with me!!

If anyone knows where this brilliant series so I can buy a DVD, let me know.

THANKS

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