Category — Memory

In La Jetée, Chris Marker finesses still images that are meant to simultaneously represent the past as well as the future until they approximate motion. That is to say, he takes frames that exist in alternative time zones and wills them into motion, a motion that is, in filmic terms, the very embodiment of the present tense. Remembrance of Things to Come may sound from its title like a cute turn on Proustian concerns, but it is actually a haunting examination of another photographer’s work, a body of pictures that Marker seems to conclude reflect the parallel existence of past and future in much the same way he earlier proposed via sci-fi parable.

– Eric Henderson, “Remembrance of Things to Come,” Slant Magazine

Musing on a gem

For me, this priceless gem of a video (a lightly edited recording leaning, like a cat’s paw on a keyboard, on the playback of another recording) takes us, as the image of the three children in Iceland that commences Sans Soleil, into another moment of happiness, or more than a moment – a lazy, timeless dream-stretch of happiness. Happiness here is stretched out over the length of a treasured song, the unclockable duration of a catnap, the extent without end of a loving gaze that could go on forever and yet is somehow captured in time. Time is marked by the pulsing of the lights, the periodic twitching of Guillaume-en-Egypte’s ears during particular sonic surges, the languid shifting of position, the stretching of a paw in a miniature feline yoga. Whereas the children in Iceland were placed at the beginning of a film to represent happiness, a happiness both eclipsed and preserved by the blackness that follows, this piece is placed as the entr’acte in a film about filmmaking, creativity truncated on all sides by the State and a man who once-upon-a-time made a film called Happiness. It is an intermission as détente, but one during which you won’t want to leave your seat. It is nested, an homage within an homage, in the eye of the storm. It is a light step taken out of history and into memory, where time loses its linearity and events dissolve into dreamtime. It is the record of two beings in absolute accord with each other.

History of a gem

The video [Chat écoutant la musique] is actually one of three parts to a ten-minute video anthology called Bestiaire. I haven’t seen the other two segments that follow this one. The middle piece deals with owls (cats with wings) and the final bit apparently shows animals in a zoo, gradually revealing their sad situation. Bestiaire itself was used by Marker as part of a larger video installation piece called Zapping Zone (Proposals for an Imaginary Television), in which Bestiaire and many other short video pieces (including excerpts from Marker’s longer films) played simultaneously on various TV screens stationed throughout the Pompidou Center. ZZ was mounted in 1990, and I believe Bestiaire was compiled in 1988. I’ve seen various resources cite the taping of this particular segment as taking place in 1985. [...] I took the video from the European DVD for Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (1992), which uses the three minutes as an intermission [Entr'acte], of sorts, between the feature’s two halves.

cansesclasseled.com

We received a thoughtful note from Don Livoni @ fogblog regarding his recent discovery of Chris Marker. Crafting a haunting film from stills is a discovery that evidently can be made without prior knowledge of La Jetée. It’s a bit like Leibniz and Newton, albeit with a time “differential,” if you like ;). While Mr. Livoni’s films (for example, “Rosie’s Girls” and “DNYK Dreamer”) evoke La Jetée by the skillful sequencing of stills, they also display a stunning sense of chromatic hypersensitivity and palimpsest layering. Meanwhile, the site’s motto – it is without sun, it is memory – aptly summons the spirit of Sans Soleil. Here’s a bit of the note we received, a brief homage to Chris Marker’s sensibilities by a new-found fan:

i love his sense of wonder at what the camera sees and what we remember. i so admire the enigmatic intellect of the narrations, the beauty of the images and the sound juxtaposition, the economy of the technique. it’s all so personal and masterful, mysterious yet historically mindful. i’m looking forward to “discovering” more of his work.

If that were not enough, fogblog presents a stunning set of faux High-Renaissance portraits of (in large part) aristoc(r)atic felines: “L’Histoire des Grands Chats—Religious Leaders, generals, courtesans and clowns” which would no doubt offer a pleasing Sunday afternoon virtual museum expedition for M. Marker himself.

First Run / Icarus films has uploaded to YouTube this teaser for the new-to-DVD Chris Marker & Yannick Bellon film Remembrance of Things to Come. One feels, even in the first moments preceding the title, the lingering taste, the déjà vu of La Jetée in the b/w collage of living stills, and the déjà entendu of Sans Soleil in the unmistakable voice of Alexandra Stewart.

LE SOUVENIR D’UN AVENIR
de Yannick Bellon et Chris Marker
2001, noir et blanc, 42 minutes (vidéo)

“Couleur du temps, couleur des jours, la moisson des photographies de Denise Bellon n’est rien d’autre, peut-être, qu’un passionnant journal, le journal d’une vie ouverte à son époque, de 1935 à 1955. Denise Bellon a fait partie, depuis sa création dans les années 30, de l’équipe de ” l’Alliance-Photo”, Agence photographique de presse.

Ses images ont été publiées en France et à l’étranger dans les grandes revues telles que ” Arts et métiers graphiques “, “Vu”, ” l’Illustration”, “Plaisir de France” et “Match”.

L’itinéraire de l’artiste emprunte constamment les chemins de la liberté. Sa règle d’or est la curiosité et l’attention donnée au monde. Un photographe est un voleur d’instants. Son Rolleiflex à la main, Denise Bellon ne cesse jamais d’aller à la rencontre de la vie, d’avoir rendez-vous avec des êtres, de capturer les beaux visages inconnus et les voisins célèbres, les flâneurs de la Seine, Prévert et sa bande, les ferrailleurs et Marcel Duchamp, André Masson ou Pierre Bonnard dans leurs ateliers.

Jour après jour, ce journal en images tisse la trame du temps : au hasard de la grand’ville, au rythme de l’Histoire, de l’Exposition Universelle de 1937 aux nuits de l’Occupation, des amis surréalistes à Auguste Lumière, d’un mariage gitan à Giono et Joë Bousquet, l’amitié et la découverte font la ronde.

Et en filigrane de ce témoignage d’une vie, on devine le sourire de celle qui sut tendre au temps le miroir d’une époque.”

Claude Roy

Voix : Pierre Arditi
Tissu sonore : Michel Krasna
Post production : Jean-François Naudon
Mixage : Florent Lavallée
Direction de production : Eric Le Roy
Une coproduction Les Films de l’Equinoxe, Arte France.

“Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it’s a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema’s all time greats – the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.”
Susan Sontag

“Immemory is a contribution to the ars memoriae that, once experienced, will prove difficult to forget. Yet because of its multiple paths, its forking, hypertextual options, it cannot of course be experienced once, or in one way. It might be construed as a series of homages and constructed memory sites. At a particular level, or portal, it renders a homage to cinema that wonders simultaneously whether it also prefigures the death of cinema. It traces as well a variable journey through the images, the remnants and the revenants, the stillness and the dust. Immemory, finally, offers a tour of the musée imaginaire we inhabit over time, along with an evocative summation of the profoundly human concerns of Marker’s art. Might it not also be seen as a gently ironic reprise and reimag(in)ing of La Jetée? ”
Michael Palmer

“Admirers of the great photographer-filmmaker Chris Marker will find this haunting, alluring, sardonic and politically charged cybermuseum of geographical memory invaluable for exploring the threads, relations, transitions, juxtapositions of his life (as he cares to reveal it) and work.”
Susan Howe

Quotes culled from Exact Change English edition