Posts from — April 2009

Icarus Releases Grin Without a Cat

A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT is Chris Marker’s epic film-essay on the worldwide political wars of the 60′s and 70′s: Vietnam, Bolivia, May ’68, Prague, Chile, and the fate of the New Left.

Released in France in 1978, restored and “re-actualized” by Marker fifteen years later (after the fall of the Soviet Union), we are proud to release the film now for the first time in the United States.

Described by Marker as “scenes of the Third World War,” the film (the original French title is virtually untranslatable) is divided into two parts, each weaving together two strands:

Part 1: Fragile Hands

1. From Vietnam to Che’s death
2. May 1968 and all that

Part 2: Severed Hands

1. From Spring in Prague to the Common Program of Government in France
2. From Chile to – to what?

Icarus Films

Wexner Center Store Exclusive

The Wex has a special, long term relationship with French filmmaker Chris Marker, and the Wexner Center Store is, for a limited time, the exclusive outlet for the DVD release of A Grin Without a Cat, Marker’s magnum opus—a three-hour overview of the political turmoil around the world during the ’60s and ’70s. On the occasion of its release, director of media arts Bill Horrigan offers his thoughts.

Wexblog

The Struggle for Memory

A GRIN WITHOUT A CAT (its title refers to Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat) is Marker’s magnum opus: a three-hour overview of the worldwide political upheavals during the Sixties and Seventies.

Marker interweaves footage from the Vietnam War and the antiwar protests in the U.S., May 68 in Paris, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, Salvador Allende and the coup in Chile, Che Guevara and Regis Debray in Bolivia, the Shah of Iran, Fidel Castro, et alia.

Official images, film clips, news coverage trims and neglected reels comprise the basic materials of this major fresco, which concludes with the following credit: “The true authors of this film are the countless cameramen, technical operators, witnesses and activists whose work is constantly pitted against that of governments, who would like us to have no memory.”

Wexner Center for the Arts, Chris Marker Store

Bill Horrigan on Chris Marker [excerpt]

One of the unexpected pleasures of Icarus’s DVD of Chris Marker’s Grin Without A Cat comes from reading the essay Marker produced for the disk’s accompanying booklet. Writing in May, 2008, Marker looks back upon the political turmoil of the 1960s that GRIN is grounded in, averring that it’s 1967 (rather than 1968) that ought to be regarded as seminal. [...]

Reading this essay reminded me of how relatively little of Marker’s writing is available in English, the most glaring gaps being the justly legendary volumes of Commentaires, the script of the original version of Le Fond De L’Air Est Rouge (Grin’s French title), and the countless shorter articles he’s been writing for over five decades now, no end in sight. Fragments of these materials appear within Marker’s CD-ROM, Immemory (principally, the text from his book on Korea, Coreennes), but vastly more awaits translation.

Bill Horrigan, quoted on Wexblog

The Harvard Film Archive SECOND LIFE event with Chris Marker will take place on Saturday, May 16 at 7PM. Chris (through his avatar) will be leading a guided tour of his museum and answering questions from myself and a colleague (or rather our avatars) and also taking some from the audience (in the form of another avatar waiting at the conclusion of the tour). The show will also include various video pieces and film clips—single-channel versions of The Hollow Men, Silent Movie and Pictures at an Exhibition plus a number of clips and perhaps other slide shows, all projected in the actual HFA rather than the virtual screening room (although we might see something there).

The HFA calendar will be updated with a detailed description of the show, as well as a mini-retrospective which will begin the weekend before.

Haden Guest, Director, Harvard Film Archive

Image courtesy Lucien Bookmite. Thanks to Tom Luddy for relaying this event information.

This small book arrived yesterday in the post. Just like film, snail mail still has its charms. The book was much more petite than I had expected: something you could put in the back pocket of your jeans while you rode the metro around, pulling it out to accompany an espresso once in a while, to keep up your mental and adrenal stamina, or to attract other Marker otaku. It’s another little addition to the archive of Markeriana, a rather precious one at that. I guess I have a penchant for small things – half hour films and books of 64 pages, aphorisms and Kata frames and shot glasses and thin silver rings…  But I digress. So, without further adieu, here is some text from Abschied vom Kino / A Farewell to Movies, by  “CHRIS MARKER THE BEST KNOWN AUTHOR OF UNKNOWN MOVIES” (as the inner front cover proclaims in a grungy all caps font).

A Farewell to Movies

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iParBp8cS0w
Under that cryptic formula, cognoscenti will identify a familiar path to YouTube, and specifically toward my very latest opus: a one-minute-sixteen-second video piece titled Leila Attacks, featuring a lovable fighting she-rat. I guess I may say I’m not exactly the self-complimenting type, yet when considering the work I did there, I can but call it perfect. Linearity of action, frugality of editing, sobriety of dialogs, all that enhanced by the performance of an exceptional leading lady, who can beat it? Not me anyway. Hence the conclusion that if I were sure never to be able to do better, just as well stop filmmaking once and for all. That by itself could justify the title of this exhibition, but there is a more subtle twist. The original French title, Cinématographie sans films (an assonant play of words with télégraphie sans fil – aka TSF, the name of radio broadcasting in its pristine youth) was impossible to translate. Browsing through English approximations, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms suddenly jumped to my mind, and it appeared that it could work also in German. After all, it has been said that the film camera could be a weapon… The amusing part is that the former title was much less radical in its implications. It meant nothing more than “look, folks, here are a few things I did outside movies.” Now it sounded like an adieu. As if the Angels (I don’t believe in God, I believe in the Angels – Cocteau, Rilke, Wim Wenders and Gitta Mallasz have something to do with it) had used that moment of openness to deliver me a message: “Hey kid (don’t forget they are eternal), you did play long enough with the toys of the XXth century, now it’s time to concentrate on the XXIst.” Who am I to disagree with the Angels?  So let it be a farewell. Yet don’t be surprised if I come back next month with a blockbuster: the right to contradict oneself was coined by Baudelaire in his project for a Constitution.
C.M.

Chris Marker, A Farewell to Movies Abschied vom Kino. Hrsg. Andres Janser. Zürich: Museum für Gestaltung Zürich. 2008

un film documentaire n’est pas, c’est d’abord et avant tout un film. une amie m’a dit : le documentaire c’est la seule chose, c’est ce qui est à la base de tout les arts. je crois que même si nous n’usons pas des mêmes mots, nous sommes d’accord. les choses forment un tout.

conversation avec la lune

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

A heavily illustrated study of French filmmaker Chris Marker’s portentous video installation Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, with essays by Adrian Martin and renowned French film theorist Raymond Bellour. Introduced by Robert Leonard.