Posts from — February 2009

We thought Chris Marker fans would like to know. Many of us learned the text of Sans Soleil forwards, backwards and sideways – down to identifying the lone still self-portrait frame in a Tokyo television monitor – by playing the New Yorker Video release of Sans Soleil on VHS over and over (and over) again, until it was as worn out as, say, Katy Lied.

New Yorker Films, the distributor that helped introduce American moviegoers to the works of Bernardo Bertolucci, Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Ousmane Sembène, announced on Monday that it was going out of business after 44 years.

NY Times

Other reflections on this event:

• spout.com
• indiewire.com
• takeapart.com

Warranting special attention among the typical texts of the sixteenth century are those that, not classified under any recognized genre, overflow the bounds of literary art: the miscellanea and diverse and motley compilations share at least one feature: they gather fragments under more or less traditional headings. All these texts are premature products: they give the public raw or barely processed materials. Their role is to mediate between a producer – classical antiquity – and a user – the modern poet, the orator. The semiprocessed state is the result of a set of activities: reading/writing (copying), grouping together (collecting or collating), and sometimes commentary (intercalated text, moralization, philology). These works, though not designed to persuuade, praise, or blame, still serve to instruct and also to please and surprise by the variety and strangeness of the examples they assemble. They are not intended for aesthetic, hedonistic, or consecutive reading, since they are readymade commonplace books whose function is transitive and instrumental. Constituting a pseudomemory, or an exomemory, like a reference library, they furnish the raw material for a second-degree intervention, for a secondary elaboration aimed at producing literary works of art, which, in principle, would usually be subject to rhetorical, stylistic, and generic imperatives, as well as to criteria such as the verisimilitude of mimesis. According to Quintilian’s metaphor designating rhetorical memory, these centos form “treasure houses of eloquence.” They are not themselves eloquent, nor do they contain writing as presence unto itself, but they are easily accessible, and as they handily substitute for individual memory and its vagaries, they are emblematic of the new typographic age. Individual memory stopped serving a crucial function in the production of discourses when two cultural conditions were met:

1. When the solitary writer had within arm’s reach a reference library complete enough to form, virtually at least, an encyclopedia. Montaigne’s library combines the metaphorical circularity of the encyclopedia with the circular bookshelves along the walls of his round tower. One need only be adept at looking up data, but as every user of he dictionary, encyclopedia, compilation, index, bibliography, and library knows (as opposed to the user of much more specifically programmed electronic memories), there occurs a dispersion, whether because his attention is deflected by something for which he is not looking, or because he finds, next to what he was searching for, more pertinent data. From the end of the sixteenth century on, the writer becomes accustomed to leafing through printed books, to consulting indexes and tables of contents; even if Montaigne does not use a card index, at least he is already in the position of a modern researcher prior to the introduction of electronic memories. With this exception however: Montaigne claims to find what he needs without looking for it.

2. Memory becomes less important when texts, not being designed to praise or blame, to persuade, exhort, or preach, no longer has to obey rhetorical codes of composition and style, one of whose functions in scribal culture was to make it easier for the listener-reader to understand and remember data by introducing a coded redundance, or copia, which was moreover the object of an aesthetic appreciation. So great is the disdain of Montaigne’s task for these obsolete imperatives that the reader has difficulty in remembering the order and tenor of the Essays’ long chapters. The Essays are indeed, in this sense, antimemoirs.

- Michel Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait, trans. Yara Milos, New York: New York University Press, 1991, 111-113. [orig. Miroirs d'encre: Rhéthorique de l'autoportrait, Paris: Seuil, 1980]

According to blu-ray.com:

The Criterion Collection has announced that they will bring Akira Kurosawa’s Ran to Blu-ray on May 12th. Previously released as a two-disc DVD set, this Blu-ray disc is expected to include all the special features on a single disc. Technical specs have yet to be confirmed, but you can expect a 1.85:1 1080p AVC video presentation with some sort of lossless/uncompressed audio track.

Expected extras for this release include:

• New, restored high-definition digital transfer
• Audio commentary by Kurosawa scholar Stephen Prince
• An appreciation of the film by director Sidney Lumet
• A.K., a 74-minute film by director Chris Marker
• A 30-minute documentary on the making of Ran, part of the Toho Masterworks series Akira Kurosawa: It Is Wonderful to Create
• A 35-minute video piece reconstructing Ran through Kurosawa’s paintings and sketches, created as part of the series Image: Kurosawa’s Continuity
• New video interview with actor Tatsuya Nakadai
• Theatrical trailers
• New and improved English subtitle translation
• Plus: a 28-page booklet featuring film critic Michael Wilmington and interviews with Kurosawa and composer Toru Takemitsu

Wexner writes: “The Wexner Center Store has acquired some copies of the 2008 Korean reprint of [Chris Marker's] Coréennes by Noonbit Publishing.”

The order page provides additional information:

Chris Marker: Coréennes
Noonbit Publishing

Korean reprint of 1959’s book of photos by Chris Marker. Over 120 black-and-white photos of North Korea with illustrations from maps, comic books, street posters and paintings. This book was the result of a trip to North Korea.

Coréennes explores Marker’s innovative, “seamless moving in-between media,” defying boundaries between still photography, cinema, the novel, historical accounts and the travelogue. “Rarely has an artist authored so many disparate masterpieces” (Afterimage). Preceding his best-known work La Jetée (1962), which was a series of still photographs cast as a short film, Marker’s Coréennes in many ways inverts that format—here casting a film in a series of still photographs and text.

Hardcover, 150pp, 7.5×8 inches, Korean Text

Member price: $31.50
Item#: 9788974091897
$35.00

Great news, without a doubt, but we can’t help thinking that if this book is indeed a translation and does not include the original French text, it will offer only half the story to its Western readers, like a film with a scrambled soundtrack. This is stated with absolutely nothing against Korean, by all accounts one of the most unique languages on the petite planète…*

* From the Wikipedia entry on Korean language: Korean is similar to Altaic languages in that they both lack certain grammatical elements, including number, gender, articles, fusional morphology, voice, and relative pronouns…

Strange days have found us. The Tate Modern has published an article from the future (about a current exhibit) called “TH.2058″ by Dominique Gonzales-Foerster, dated October 2058. We like the choice of films and novels offered to the soaked inhabitants of this London to come. We are reminded even of a haunting song: “Lost Rivers of London,” by the late great COIL. In any case, here is an excerpt:

A giant screen shows a strange film, which seems to be as much experimental cinema as science fiction. Fragments of Solaris, Fahrenheit 451 and Planet of the Apes are mixed with more abstract sequences such as Johanna Vaude’s L’Oeil Sauvage but also images from Chris Marker’s La Jetée. Could this possibly be the last film?

On the beds are books saved from the damp and treated to prevent the pages going mouldy and disintegrating. On every bunk there is at least one book, such as JG Ballard’s The Drowned World, Jeff Noon’s Vurt, Philip K Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, but also Jorge Luis Borges’s Ficciones and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666.

It seems Bolaño’s future is more future than this future, and it may well be that La Jetée’s is even further out and farther in. The Man in the High Castle was a novel about a parallel or alternate past, constructed meticulously out of coin tosses at the I Ching.  En plus, it seemed to be raining all the time in Blade Runner. Still, this is all just prehistory to the distant future of 4001, the era of perfect memory. What will the humans or otherwise reigning intelligences be viewing and reading then on their möbius magnetic bible?

Thanks to Lucien Bookmite for providing the original material for this translation of a letter from François Truffaut to the Minister of Information Alain Peyrefitte regarding the potential censorship of Chris Marker’s film Le Joli mai in the Spring of 1963. Honestly, we found this piece of history too interesting to leave buried in a comment. If you like, please consult the French original and comment thread.

To Alain Peyrefitte,
Paris, 25 april 1963

Sir Minister,

It may be that this letter will surprise you. We would certainly have greatly preferred to ask you to receive us in person, but, for the moment, we choose to write you to share with you our emotion and our hope.

We are told that you go, within some hours, to decide on the fate of a film which is very dear to us and whose projection moved us all. Le Joli mai appeared to us as a major film in an era when, as you said last year, “the forces of pressure on the individual conscience have become so numerous.” Our friend Chris Marker gives the floor directly to dozens of cornered, uncertain, anxious, at times mystified people, with a loyalty which touches us profoundly. You also said: “It is the plurality of perspectives, it is the confrontation of different opinions which can protect the fundamental liberties of citizens.”

Your comments, it is true, applied to the press. We believe in a cinema of personal expression. And Chris Marker is, for us, one of this cinema’s most brilliant directors. Freedom, in the cinema, encounters large and severe obstacles. Aside from economic pressures and commercial interests, it seems to us essential that the various families of mind can manifest themselves on the big screen.

We do not consider the cinema as an underdeveloped sector of culture. What is right for the press can, we believe, be right for the the cinema. For some years now, a new public has come into being. It reactions have become personalized. It judges. It has became an adult. As you go to decide on the public encounter with this difficult, ambitious film, and on this new type of spectator, we wanted to say to you that we consider this encounter essential, and that upon it depends a whole segment of the future of the French cinema.

We are persuaded, Sir Minister, that you will forgive the freedom which we took in informing you of our anxiety: the fate of Le Joli mai rests in your hands.

We emplore you to accept, Sir Minister, the expression of our great respect.

François Truffaut, Extrait de Corréspondance 1945–1984, Editions Hatier, 1988.