Posts from — January 2009

Thanks to Cineaste magazine for sending along a copy of their recent issue [Vol. XXXIII No. 4] featuring an illuminating article by Chris Marker: “The Last Bolshevik: Reminiscences of Alexander Ivanovich,” a lead article by Adrian Martin entitled “Chris Marker: Notes in the Margin of His Time,” and Martin’s compiled resources “Some Key Chris Marker Films on DVD (Plus Some Other Works and Resources).”

On the cover is a small Guillaume graphic stating in the perennial thought bubble: INSIDE : A FEW THINGS ABOUT CHRIS MARKER, followed by another one: BUT MAINLY ABOUT ME. This familiar feline figure (a monogram, of sorts) sits above the left shoulder* of Penélope Cruz – not a bad spot.

Cineaste was nice enough to also include a new glossy sell-sheet from Icarus Films presenting the recent Chris Marker DVD releases, which we’ve taken the liberty of turning into a pdf for download here.

More about the Marker article on Alexander Medvedkin soon…

* “‘For, although it has the same shape, the right hand is stronger (fortior) than the left; likewise, the right shoulder is stronger than the left in motion, although the left is stronger for carrying weight; and likewise the right foot is stronger in motion, but the left stronger in standing fixed.’” [Thomas Aquinas, quoted John Freccero, Dante: The Poetics of Conversion [36]

Chris Marker collage originally published “Au pays des merveilles de Barack,” [21-01-09] poptronics.fr

“Monkeys have evolved. The censors? That remains to be seen.”
Chris Marker

“Entia non sunt multiplicanda sine necessitate.”
William of Ockham

A “pièce d’occasion” by Chris Marker entitled A propos du clip «Stress» has appeared on the horizon, or more specifically on the site poptronics.fr, to which Marker’s alter ego Guillaume has been a frequent contributor. It concerns a so-called “clip” by the enigmatic pop group Justice.

Why do we call Justice a pop group, and enigmatic to boot? Well, to our minds their chosen territory is the viral delivery of simulacra – via music video “products” with a sense of graphical finesse approaching that of Kraftwerk – of the whole mesmerizing, gnostic façade-world of Branding. Justice’s own branding is a cross between a black cross and a tomb. It doesn’t get much more iconic than that.

It seems that Justice’s video “Stress” has caused a fair amount of stress, and even a formal complaint by MRAP (Mouvement contre le Racisme et pour l’Amitié entre les peuples). Certainly, if you know Marker, he represents in and unto himself a force majeure against racism and for friendship between people(s). But he uses this occasion to take exception to MRAP ascribing authorial intention to the piece,* and to ruminate on genre. Striking the word “clip” with the essay equivalent of a two-handed backhand winner down the line, Marker perceives “Stress” instead as a poem, whose role was once to show “what no one wants to see”:

Mais d’abord, marre de ce terme de « clip » pour désigner n’importe quel très court métrage. Tant de longs métrages aujourd’hui ressemblent à des clips étirés qu’il est permis de saluer un clip qui ressemble à un film. Je risque un autre mot, en m’amusant d’avance de l’incrédulité qu’il va susciter chez certains : un poème. Un poème noir, violent, sans concession, sans alibi, magnifiquement « écrit » (encore faudrait-il qu’on s’intéresse à l’écriture cinématographique, vaste débat) et dans la ligne d’un certain nombre de ces poèmes qui dans toutes les langues, à un moment donné, ont dérangé et troublé, et dont certains en effet ont fini devant les tribunaux.

Montrer ce que personne ne veut voir, c’était en d’autres temps une fonction de la poésie. Cet objet non identifié qui tombe dans un paysage audiovisuel où par ailleurs la violence est partout présente, mais avec assez de roublardise et de complaisance pour être acceptée sans états d’âme, j’aurais tendance à le comparer au parallélépipède que Kubrick dresse, dans « 2001 », près d’un troupeau de singes endormis. Incongru, incompréhensible au point que c’est à force de n’y rien comprendre que s’éveillera l’idée qu’il y a quelque chose à comprendre. Les singes ont évolué. Les censeurs, ça reste à voir.

Into the world of the “sleeping apes” – watchdogs, censors, talking heads employed by media machines to chitchat ceaselessly and aimlessly about whatever has most recently caused a stir within the mass of viral carriers – suddenly comes this enigmatic object. “Incongruous, incomprehensible to the point that it is due to the very fact of understanding nothing that arises the idea that there is something to understand.” Bon mot, and applicable well beyond this particular occasion. Was not La Jetée too a kind of “unidentified object fallen into the audiovisual landscape” whose enigmatic effects are still playing out on us? Luckily, its impression wasn’t counted in “impressions,” hits, views, pay-per-clicks and eye-share. Yet no matter the medium, the poems seem to eventually rise to the top, pushed up geomorphically like the Himalaya by the Indian subcontinent once upon a time.

You can find the entire text of the article here: www.poptronics.fr/A-propos-du-clip-Stress-par-Chris

* Cut to: Wimsatt, Beardsley, Jauss, Iser, Barthes, Bloom, de Man, Derrida, Foucault – the whole damn trans-generational posse of intentional fallacists and authorial pallbearers – nodding thoughtfully in the background.

Wexner Center for the Arts has added the re-release of Immemory: A CD-Rom by Chris Marker, published by Exact Change, to their online store.

For more information, you can visit their Chris Marker Store.

In Immemory, Chris Marker has used the format of the CD-Rom to create a multi-layered, multimedia memoir. The reader investigates “zones” of travel, war, cinema, and poetry, navigating through photographs, film clips, music, and text, as if physically exploring Marker’s memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st-century Remembrance of Things Past, an exploration of the state of memory in our digital era. With it, Marker has both invented a literary form and perfected it.

SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS: For Macintosh computers only, running OS X version 10.4.11 or later, including 10.5 “Leopard.” Price: $19.95 | Member price: $17.95