Posts from — May 2009

Thanks to Eupalinos Ugajin (an SL cipher we have yet to decipher) of webknot.net for publishing a saved chat of Chris Marker’s recent tour of Ouvroir in Second Life. The blog post is called “Chris Marker (Sergei Murasaki) présente son exposition dans l’Ouvroir” and provides a window onto the avatour recently hosted by the Harvard Film Archive. Marker, in the guise of Sergei Murasaki – montage that quickens the heart – touches on Tarkovsky, the La Jetée bar in Tokyo, his Staring Back photos of the trees at the Place de la République, the origin of the Petite Planète book series, Simone Signoret and much more. There are some classic one-liners, such as: “Memory was given to man for lying;” “Memory is made to tell fairy tales;” “She came to my place and looked interested” (on LEILA); “As if the God HE believed in had driven me to leave a testimony” (on Tarkovsky); and of course the quote in the title of this post. When asked about Guillaume, he replies “that, my dear, would take a whole evening.” On the possibility of a Second Life film, which is a tempting one no doubt, he comments: “I have already lots of rushes on my trips in SL what I need is again an extra life to work on them.” A third life, as Marker / Murasaki calls it…

View the full post here: “Chris Marker (Sergei Murasaki) présente son exposition dans l’Ouvroir” : Mai 17th, 2009 by Webknot

And we too tried to be no nearer
In “death’s dream kingdom”
Under our disguises
Cat’s coat, owlskin, and the rest
Behaving as cats behave
No nearer
Chris Marker, A Farewell to Movies, 35

I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, that is easy to pronounce in most languages because I intended to travel. You need search no further than that.
Sergei Murasaki

An interview conducted within Second Life, through the mediation of avatars and the conversational interface of textual chat. Folds within folds. This inter-face, playful subversion of the tête-à-tête, causing an aleatory truncation of discourse: la cristallisation presque instantanée d’une pensée infiniment alerte et malicieuse.*

Le Baroque ne renvoie pas à une essence, mais plutôt à une fonction opératoire, à un trait. Il ne cesse de faire des plis. Il n’invente pas la chose: il y tous les plis venus d’Orient, les plis grecs, romains, gothiques, classiques… Mais il courbe et recourbe les plis, les pousse à l’infini, pli sur pli, pli selon pli. [Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, Paris: Minuit, 1988].

Adorno stated exactly this about the essay form: It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say. Both with and against the baroque comes Marker’s insistent dismissal of complication: the interviewers’ presumptions returned as small darts, and an artisan occupational designation as bricoleur. Je m’en tiens au bricolage, avec ce qu’il y a d’honorable dans l’artisanat. Miniaturization of product in Leila Attacks: the masterpiece as cinéma mineur. Epic poems reduced to haiku. The relation of the essay film to craft, seen too in Farocki’s elegies to the artisan, coded with the melancholy of the loss of craft in the desertified Real (“RL”) and its return in a minor mode of filmmaking. The essay relieves thought of the systematic and replaces abstraction with the concrete feel, taste and smell of materials placed next to each other with care, “cobbled” together. In this manner, a break is rendered possible: a break with the insane means of production of the cinéma majeur. An unheralded yet profound sensation of triumph that one is, finally, able to successfully write and distribute the “caméra-stylo.”

Pouvoir faire tout un film, Chats perchés (2004), avec mes dix doigts, sans aucun appui ni intervention extérieurs… Et ensuite aller vendre moi-même le DVD que j’ai enregistré à la braderie de Saint-Blaise… Là j’avoue que j’ai eu un sentiment de triomphe : du producteur au consommateur, direct. Pas de plus-value. J’avais accompli le rêve de Marx.”

To be able to make a whole film, The Case of the Grinning Cat [2004], with my own ten fingers, without any external support or intervention . . . and to then go sell the DVDs I’d burned myself at the Saint-Blaise market . . . I confess, I felt triumphant. From producer to consumer, directly. No surplus value. Marx’s dream come true.

* Original SL entretiens with lesinrocks.com available here. Translation by Dorna Khazeni for Criterion.com.

Presented below is the official press release distributed by The Harvard Film Archive for its upcoming film series and live event. You can also view the program at the HFA site.

THE HARVARD FILM ARCHIVE PRESENTS
THE SECOND LIFE OF CHRIS MARKER
MAY 9 – MAY 16, 2009

CAMBRIDGE, MA: The Harvard Film Archive is thrilled to host a virtual event with legendary filmmaker Chris Marker titled THE SECOND LIFE OF CHRIS MARKER, on May 16. The event, which will take place in the virtual world of Second Life, will be preceded by screenings of Marker’s films May 9-11.

Chris Marker (b. 1921) has been a source of continual fascination and endless speculation since he first emerged in the 1950s as one of the most original and elusive voices of the post-World War II French cinema. A brilliant practitioner and early pioneer of the essay film (In a revision of this text Marker was careful to assert that he did not “invent” the essay film and points to Nicole Védrès and her 1949 La Vie Commence Demain as a major influence upon his embrace of the essay form), Marker’s best known works are animated by a simultaneously playful and philosophical intertwining of documentary and fiction filmmaking techniques and traditions. The dense yet lyrical poesis of montage and voice created across Marker’s films found its fullest expression in Sans Soleil (1982), his celebrated meditation on travel, memory and cultural difference. Among the most politically committed and perceptive European directors, Marker has also created a series of pointed documentary interventions recovering repressed and repressive histories of dissent, whether locally, as in The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967), or globally, as in his tragic, sweeping magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (1978).

Marker has remained famously indifferent to the popular spotlight – leaving all public appearances to Guillaume-en-Egypte, the ginger cat who serves as his pseudonym, mascot and muse – and adamant about his need for unmitigated independence as an artist (while not ruling out occasional work with select collaborators). Marker’s desire for a fully self-sufficient means of production, together with his search for a liberated narrative form to explore the slippages and superimpositions of individual and collective memory has drawn him to experiment with an incredible range of image technologies, from the photo book in his early years to small gauge 16mm and Super-8 cinema and then to video and video games and, most recently, the CD-ROM and Internet. Marker, whose work from as early as La jetée (1962) is deeply informed by science fiction, has an uncanny ability to predict the future and to be there already. In 2008, a commission for the Design Museum in Zürich gave way to the landmark exhibition Chris Marker. A Farewell to Movies, for which Marker, together with Viennese architect Max Moswitzer, created a cyber museum in the virtual world Second Life in order to reexamine and share examples of his photography, films and installation work. The Harvard Film Archive is proud to join Marker for an extremely rare live tour of his Second Life museum, Ouvroir, on Saturday, May 16th and, as a prelude, to present a focused retrospective of his films.

This program is co-presented by Icarus Films on the occasion of their release on DVD of nine Chris Marker films. Special thanks: Jonathan Miller and Lori Fried, Icarus Films; Lucien Bookmite; Max Moswitzer; Naomi Yang, Exact Change Press; Brigitte Bouvier and Eric Jausseran, Consulate General of France, Boston.

Chris Marker Screening Schedule

The Case of the Grinning Cat (Chats perchés)
Saturday May 9 at 7pm
In his latest film Chris Marker offers a lively, roaming examination of political dissent in 21st century France and an energetic return to the film essay form that he pioneered. Intrigued by the enigmatic appearance of an insouciant graffiti cat, grinning from ear to ear, perched defiantly high across the walls of Paris, Marker set out to track the feline pattern and the broader mood of the post-9/11 city. Marker’s search eventually leads him to discover a sudden reassertion of political voice by Parisian youth, a spirited defiance to the American invasion of Iraq and the insurgent French ultra-right, with the grinning cat an icon and emblematic participant.
Directed by Chris Marker.
France 2004, video, color, 58 min. French with English subtitles
Followed by
Sans Soleil
Marker’s ruminative, melancholy masterpiece channels the imagination of a lonely traveling cameraman—evoked in letters from distant Africa and Japan—into a profound meditation on the creative conjuring powers of memory, place and image. Among the most brilliant examples of the essay film, Sans Soleil uses a lyrical, associative structure to transform modern Japan into a vivid metaphor for the scintillating mosaic of fact, fiction and fantasy that defines the increasingly mediated image world in which we live. A crucial bridge between Marker’s adventurous earlier travel films and his growing interest in media and technology, Sans Soleil is one of Marker’s most dazzling and inexhaustible works.
Directed by Chris Marker.
France 1982, 16mm, color, 100 min. With English narration

A Grin Without a Cat (Le fond de l’air est rouge)
Sunday May 10 at 7pm
Marker’s incomparable editing skills attained a new level of sublimity and subtlety in his epic chronicle of the international New Left’s spectacular rise and fall. At turns mordant and mournful, A Grin Without a Cat uses an extraordinary range of source material – newsreels, propaganda films and Marker’s own footage – to construct a polyphonic, immersive and critical history of political struggle. “I am not boasting that I made a dialectical film. But I have tried for once (having in my time frequently abused the power of the directive commentary) to give back to the spectator, through the montage, “his” commentary, that is, his power.” – C.M.
Directed by Chris Marker.
France 1978, 35mm, color, 180 min. French with English subtitles

The Embassy (L’Ambassade)
Monday May 11 at 7pm
A potent study of political disorientation, state terrorism and exile, Marker’s “anonymous” 1973 Super-8 film reads as an allegory and vivid evocation of the violent paroxysms and unrest roiling Latin America and much of the world at the time.Directed by Chris Marker.France 1973, video, color, 21 min. French with English subtitles
Followed by
The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (La sixième face du Pentagone)
Marker’s charged rendering of the October 21, 1967 march on the Pentagon was made for a French “television magazine” and later distributed by the Franco-Belgian film collective, SLON). Integrating still photographs, voiceover commentary and dramatic actuality footage, Marker’s hard-hitting short represents a forcible mode of alternative reportage, a type of counter-newsreel made during a period of intense distrust of the mainstream media.
Directed by Chris Marker, François Reichenbach.
France 1967, video, b/w and color, 26 min. French with English subtitles
And
Sans Soleil
[see description above]

Special Event Tickets $10
Chris Marker’s Second Life, A Live Event
Saturday May 16 at 7pm

In conjunction with the 2008 exhibition Chris Marker. A Farewell to Movies at the Design Museum in Zurich, Chris Marker presented a series of exhibits of photography, film clips, video installations and other media work, all contained within a radically futuristic museum created in the popular virtual world and free Internet portal, Second Life. Designed and frequently updated by Viennese architect and computer guru Max Moswitzer and Margarete Jahrmann, Marker´s museum hovers motionless above the virtual archipelago Ouvroir, a creative geography of mysterious islands, sculptures and uncanny architecture. Over time, Ouvroir has continued to transform and expand as an interactive environment with new structures and exhibition spaces appearing regularly and often containing content related to Marker’s work.

Always at the very cutting edge of technological innovation, Marker long ago fully embraced the digital and virtual, producing in 1996 perhaps the only lasting and artistically ambitious CD-ROM, the fabulous Immemory, which expanded Marker’s fascination with the playful mirages of memory, history and the moving image into a nonlinear and engrossingly interactive environment. In 2006, Marker premiered a new film, the one minute Leila Attacks, on YouTube (where it can still be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iParBp8cS0w). Marker has also been working for many years in digital photography, with a new exhibition, Quelle heure est-elle? opening in May at New York’s Peter Blum Gallery.

The Harvard Film Archive is pleased to host a truly historic live encounter with Chris Marker’s Second Life. Marker, who has often been sited – in the form of his avatar – in Ouvroir, has generously agreed to lead a guided tour and offer commentary on his latest creation, including special single-channel presentations of his video pieces Silent Movie and The Hollow Men, an occasion made all the more meaningful by the recent announcement that the museum will be dismantled later this year.

Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy Street, Cambridge, MA 02138
(617) 495-4700
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa
Tickets for regular screenings are $8 General Admission, $6 Harvard faculty and staff, seniors and non-Harvard students. Harvard students free to regular events. Tickets to special event screenings are $10.
Tickets go on sale 45 minutes prior to show time. The HFA does not do advance ticket sales.

Press Contact:
Brooke Holgerson
Publicity and Outreach
Harvard Film Archive
24 Quincy Street
Cambridge, MA 02138
617-496-3211
holgers {at} fas.harvard.edu

Lately – and late at night mostly – I’ve been reading a rather obscure tome entitled The Shape of Ancient Thought: Comparative Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies, by Thomas McEvilley (New York, Allworth Press, 2002). The book, like the exhibition discussed below – albeit in a much different manner – serves to dismantle the long-held conceit of the hegemony of ancient Greece as an immaculate and self-contained birthplace of (Western) civilization, so-called. As McEvilley states early on, “Ancient cultures from the eastern Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean were shaped through a continuous interplay with one another, an interplay only dimly seen, which is the hidden map of ancient history. It is a map of caravan routes and sea voyages, of travels and commerce—and of their consequences. [...] The records of caravan routes are like the philological stemmata of history, the trails of oral discourses moving through communities, of texts copied from texts, with accretions, scribal errors, and incorporated glosses and scholia. What they reveal is not a structure of parallel straight lines—one labeled ‘Greece,’ another ‘Persia,’ another ‘India’—but a tangled web in which an element in one culture often leads to elements in others.” There is something in the nomadic ambition of this investigation that resonates with the highly itinerant, cross-cultural curriculum vitae of Chris Marker. Marker of the Cat is not the only Marker. There is also the Marker of the Owl; it is to this Marker that a recent Greek exhibition turned, resurrecting a major television endeavor that Marker undertook in 1989, to question some refined minds about fate of Greek wisdom and to take Athena’s companion for his own.

Meanwhile, both mainstream and more obscurely-sourced books about Marker are in an upswing [...] Most tantalizing is a slim volume produced by U.K.’s Otolith Group entitled Inner Time of Television, a project for 2007’s First Biennial of Athens, restoring Marker’s legendarily unseen 1989 television series on the legacy of Greek antiquity and philosophy, The Owl’s Legacy, with Marker in the catalogue reflecting on the project from a twenty year distance.
– Bill Horrigan, Wexblog

1st Athens Biennial by Diana Baldon

“THE MINDLESSNESS OF POWER sometimes creates a memory from what was meant to be amnesia,” Chris Marker observes in Inner Time of Television, 2007, the words appearing on a wall above a bank of video monitors as part of an installation made by the London-based Otolith Group in collaboration with the French filmmaker—and put on view in this past fall’s First Athens Biennial. Appropriately enough, given the setting, the work is centered on Marker’s Owl’s Legacy, 1989, a little-known television series (never before screened in Greece) consisting of interviews with some forty intellectuals—including Michel Serres, George Steiner, and Iannis Xenakis—who discuss Greek philosophy and myth, ancient concepts of the soul, the etymology of Greek-derived words, and other subjects. Behind many of the talking heads is a colorful owl that stares intently at the viewer, seemingly guarding the legacy of Marker’s title. But in the context of a biennial intended to undermine the power of cultural stereotypes that inform perceptions of Greece, the insistence of this owl (the emblem of ancient Athens and companion to Athena, a goddess of wisdom) served more to reflect the intransigence of the idea of the “cradle of civilization.” Indeed, The Owl’s Legacy emerged in the show—which was somewhat hyperbolically titled “Destroy Athens”—as a nuanced take on the theme around which curators Xenia Kalpaktsoglou, Poka-Yio, and Augustine Zenakos organized their exhibition, fodder for their argument for a break with the antiquity that haunts the country and its people.

THIS IS THE END from Pictures at an Exhibition

Final citation excerpted from Diana Baldon, “1st Athens Biennial,” ArtForum January 2008, 276. Diana Baldon is curator in residence at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. For another review of the Athens Biennial, see Lilly Wei, “Destroy, They Said” [yes, we like the Duras reference], Art in America, June-July 2008, 126-130.

Remember the borgesian-style story ‘Ate onde le sabe’ from Brazil (featuring Sandor Krasna, the dreamer)? Well, here comes another lusophonic snippet. Lead, garden path, dead end? Who cares. Alas, the smooth, sensual quality … of the Portuguese ‘nos gusta’ is lost in the translation that follows.

q-significa-krasna

1st message (request):

> necesito saber e significado del nombre krasna lo q si se es
> q es de origen checo.

“I need to know the meaning of the name ‘Krasna’ in its original Czech form.”

2nd message (answer):

> krasna es de origen Croata, pero tambien esta presente en otros
> paises como rusia etc. significa algo lindo. algo bonito o algo
> hermoso. es para referirse a alguna cosa o alguna persona que
> nos gusta. ;-D

“Krasna is of Croatian provenience, but also crops up in other countries such as Russia etc. It denotes something nice, pleasant, handsome. It is used to refer to something or someone we like / approve of / suiting our taste.”

Which invites us to read ‘Krasna’ as yet another name for something or someone that / who makes our heart beat faster.

I re-read what I just wrote, and it looks suspiciously familiar. Is it possible that it’s just a paraphrase of something I posted before?

- DK