Category — Video

From Chris Marker’s collection Bestiaire aka Petit Bestiaire (1990), consisting of three ‘video haikus’:
Chat écoutant la musique – 2:47 min, color, sound
An Owl is an Owl is an Owl – 3:18 min, color, sound
Zoo Piece – 2:42 min, color, sound

Episode 1 of “Agnès de ci de là Varda” on arte.tv gives viewers a rare glimpse into Chris Marker’s atelier, replete with audio-visual & computer equipment, books, clippings, cats & owls, totemic miscellanea, and a bit of the voice-off of Marker himself. Here is an endless sprawl of creation out of the personal archive, the living space of the magnetic bible continuously remembering itself. Here the traces of travel, of nomadic photo- and cinematography—come to some sort of slow-spiraling gravitational orbit in the artist’s loft, a kind of ground zero of the mnemonic.

Agnes de ci de là Varda
Série documentaire réalisée et commentée par Agnès Varda
(France, 2011, 45mn)
ARTE F
Link: http://www.arte.tv/fr/Agnes-de-ci-de-la-Varda—15/4304968.html

Thanks to japanese forms for the letting us know about this fascinating mini-doc by Marker’s longtime friend and fellow filmmaker.

This video, “KINO”—subtitled “A short history of cinema”—appeared on Chris Marker’s Kosinki YouTube channel on October 5th.

Two days later, we receive another Kosinki video, on the mass media response to the bardo-traversing of Steve Jobs. Long live the archive and the archivist.

I had always been convinced that in my small essays, the untold part was more meaningful…”
Chris Marker, Passengers

IMAGINE. Chris Marker’s enigmatic video of August 24, 2011, the day of Steve Jobs’ resignation, sent to some friends and associates without comment, in an email entitled “Guillaume’s Conclusion.”

Avec ses quatre dromadaires
Don Pedro d’Alfaroubeira
Courut le monde et l’admira.
Il fit ce que je voudrais faire
Si j’avais quatre dromadaires.
– Apollinaire [+ epigraph to Si j'avais quatre dromadaires]

On the YouTube channel that goes by the name of Kosinki, Chris Marker has posted an enthralling montage video of photographs from the recent protests (or should we say revolutions?) in the Middle East. You can view this presentation, the fruit no doubt of much paying attention, hours of archiving and arranging here:  TEMPO RISOLUTO.

The images fly on to the screen like people emerging on the street. The soundtrack takes you on a journey, paced and tuned to the meter of accelerating change. And of course there are animals…

Thanks to some enigmatic clues that have surfaced in a Japanese Twitter account and a comment on an earlier post here on L’Héritage de la chouette, we have stumbled upon (or been inexorably led to) a site, gorgomancy.com, that bears the imprint of Guillaume and offers to the woefully deprived seekers of a viewing of Marker’s 1989 television series on classical Greek thought and cultural practice a chance to view it, all 13 chapters, online. The site, designed in Flash, has four items on the menu: the recent movie Ouvroir: A Second Life Wandering with Guillaume-en-Egypte, taking us on an adventure into Marker and Guillaume”s home away from home in the Archipelago of Second Life; the monumental port to Flash and thereby the Internet (sorry, iPad fanatics) of the CD-ROM Immemory; the entirety of L’Héritage de la chouette (with the ability to jump to specific chapters); and finally a strange, chilling retrieved footage documentary of a reconstructed murder called Stopover in Dubai.

In fact, there is more: when you click on the title GORGOMANCY itself, two further and very poignant items are revealed: Pour Elle and Pour Lui. You’ll see…

We would have to speculate that these are all parts of Marker’s oeuvre that he wished, without any fanfare, as is his custom, to offer to the public at this time, in one location. The caméra stylo strikes again. The choice of domain names of course relates somehow intimately with the idea of a dangerous spectatorship, the Gorgon being the mythological order of beings that, gazed upon, turn the gazer to stone. Medusa is the most famous of the Gorgons, but not the only one. In fact, it is a topic in the Heritage of the Owl, as discussed by Jean-Pierre Vernant in the Cosmogony episode:

Le grand problème, c’est le regard de la Gorgone. La question que pose cette espèce de face monstrueuse, c’est que, la voir, c’est toujours la regarder en face. Elle représente, si vous voulez, dans le divin, une puissance qu’on ne peut aborder qu’en la regardant dans les yeux, et en même temps, la regarder dans les yeux, c’est être dèja mort, c’est en quelque sorte prendre sa place, c’est être changé en pierre, c’est-à-dire, rentrer dans un domaine où il n’y a plus ni voix, ni transparence, ni luminosité. Le monde de la nuit. C’est ça que ça veut dire, cette espèce de… La face de Gorgô, dans ces positions, sur les vases, traduit figurativement cette expérience, absolument bouleversante, d’une puissance surnaturelle que… qui vous fascine, et qui en croisant son regard avec vous, en devançant toujours votre regard, vous livre à la mort. Et en même temps, elle est comme une espèce de miroir, parce que, quand vous la regardez, ce que vous voyez en elle, c’est ce que vous allez devenir, une face de mort, un être monstrueux, une tête entourée de ténèbres. Il y a donc, entre l’oeil de Gorgô et vous, quand vous le regardez, une espèce d’échange en miroir, qui fait que vous entrez, fascinés, dans le domaine qui est le sien. Et que, tout d’un coup, vous vous changez vous-mêmes en une espèce de masque, d’invisibilité, de chose monstrueuse.

The great problem is the gaze of the Gorgon. The question posed by this sort of monstrous face consists in the fact that to view it is to always look it in the face. It represents, if you will, a power within the realm of the divine that one can only access by looking it in the eye, while at the same time to look it in the eye is to already be dead, to in a sense take its place, to be turned to stone—to return, in other words, to a domain where there is no longer a voice, nor transparency, nor luminosity. This is the world of night. The face of the Gorgon, in these positions, on these vases, translates figuratively a totally overwhelming experience, that of a supernatural power that fascinates you and that, in crossing eyes with you, in becoming your view, delivers you to death. At the same time, it’s like a kind of mirror; when you look at it, what you see in it is what you will become: a facet of death, a monstrous being, a head enveloped in darkness. There is therefore, between the eye of the Gorgon and you, as you watch it, a kind of mirrored exchange, to the effect that you enter, fascinated, into the domain that is this other’s. And suddenly, you change yourself into a type of mask, an invisibility, a monstrous thing.

This ancient myth is, in a way, the Ur-figure of the idea that lives and breathes throughout Marker’s work, that of “Staring Back.” It is the 1/24th of a second, the single frame that turns you to stone. It is the breaking of the fourth wall, a place where the voyeur, the ‘man with the camera’ becomes trapped by the returned gaze and descends to darkness, to the other side of the camera—and the captured gaze in turn becomes a new species of Gorgon, a mask within the labyrinth of faces entered into the archive across decades, from Koumiko to the Paris Métro, turned to light.

With that, we leave you to enjoy Marker’s GORGOMANCY.

The blog Found Objects notes the current availability of a clip from Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy:

An extract from Chris Marker’s TV series on the culture of ancient Greece, The Owl’s Legacy, featuring contributions from Iannis Xenakis, George Steiner, Cornelius Castoriadis and Elia Kazan. Recently unearthed from obscurity as part of the Otolith Group’s room at Tate Britain for the Turner Prize. As the Otolith Group write in their accompanying artist book, this is exactly the sort of TV programme that simply wouldn’t stand a chance of being made today.

“It all began on a summer night in 1987. The idea for a television series based on Greek culture had just crystalized and we were facing a spectre which haunts the realm of the cultural documentary and that Chekhov defined for eternity: to say things that clever people already know and that morons will never know.”

The original title of the television series is L’Héritage de la chouette. Here are some production details reproduced from the Pacific Film Archive, which seems, along with the Otiolith Group, to be one of the few institutions to possess a copy:

‘Written by Chris Marker. Photographed by Emiko Omori, Peter Chapell, et al. Edited by Khadicha Bariha, Nedjma Scialom. With Iannis Xenakis, George Steiner, Elia Kazan, Theo Angelopoulos, Cornelius Castoriadis. (In English, and French, Georgian, Greek with English subtitles, Color, 3/4″ Video, projected, Cassettes courtesy Chris Marker with permission of Film International Television Production and La Sept).”

You can also consult our older post, “Inner Time of Television” and the full post of the PFA’s notes on The Owl’s Legacy.

One of the great reflections in 20th century philosophy on Plato’s cave and its myriad implications is Hans Blumenberg’s Höhlenausgänge [Exits from the Cave], which opens with an epigraph quoting a journal entry of Kafka’s: “Mein Leben ist das Zögern vor der Geburt.” [My life is the hesitation before birth]. Blumenberg, known for his work on metaphorology and myth but really an astounding polymath of many interests whose posthumous work continues to amaze (as it continues to go largely untranslated), produces in this work perhaps the most rigorous expedition into the many ramifications of the idea of the cave as it flows in and out of Plato’s Republic.

Blumenberg discusses in one chapter the “Escapes from Visibility,” a notion that resonanates for me with the transposition in Sans Soleil of Japanese television images into the dreams of sleeping commuters – creating a kind of cinema of the invisible within an object- and visibility-oriented documentary tradition. Of course the Zone of the same film, already making its presence known in the earlier Le fond de l’air est rouge, serves to de-realize the visible. But a documentary cinema of the invisible seems another thing entirely.

Der Mensch ist das sichtbare Wesen in einem emphatischen Sinne. Er ist betroffen von seiner Sichtbarkeit durch die Auffälligkeit des aufrechten Ganges und durch die Wehrlosigkeit seiner unspezifischen-organischen Ausstattung. Das macht ihn anfällig für die Lokung der Rückkehr in die Höhle. Sie ist die einzige Erfüllung seines tief in dieser Gattungslage verwurzelten Wunsches nach Unsichtbarkeit. [Blumenberg, Höhlenausgänge, 15]

[Man is the visible being in a most emphatic sense. He is struck by his visibility through the very appearance of his upright stance and the defenselessness of his unspecific organic configuration. That makes him susceptible for the seduction of the return to the cave. The cave is the singular fulfillment of his wish, buried deep in his genetic situation, for invisibility.]

Of interest in this regard – and to be explored further in future we hope – is the latest masterpiece of another great thinker who’s work suffers from under-translation: Raymond Bellour’s Le Corps du cinéma: hypnoses, émotions, animalités, in which he treats the notion of hypnosis in relation to spectatorship – a concept close to Plato’s parable. Bellour’s book is full of references to Marker, exploring most fundamentally the plethora of animality in Marker’s work.

Indeed, though Bellour does not go there, we might see the latest phase of Marker’s fun, willing usurpation by Guillaume, including but not limited to Second Life, as a kind of devenir-animal as discussed in Deleuze and Guattari’s Mille Plateaux [Chapter 10. 1730 - Devenir-intense, devenir-animal, devenir-imperceptible...]. For it seems that in becoming-animal there is somehow an additional process in motion, that of becoming-imperceptible. Could this be what Blumenberg had in mind in his evocation of the desire to return to the cave? To become, in an era of surveillance and omnipresent visibility, still present but in another guise? To mutate into something that can’t be recorded, or, if recorded, leaves traces that are on the side of disinformation rather than that of the archive, the state, the systematic digital privacy-stripping machine?

Long controlled and entertained by the caves of cinema and television, enmeshed now seemingly irrevocably within the digital screen, how do we forgo outright exit from the cave and find its internal exits, as it were? And how, as we are finding – or better, creating – these backdoors and Escher landscapes of paradoxical architecture within the greater media enclosure, do we prevent ourselves from becoming hypnotized – imprisoned within a state of control and occlusion without access to the demiurge projecting the film – and/or completely invisible, i.e. self-erased, excluded from the process of our own productions and projections?

Humor and transmutation (a concept familiar to neo-Platonists, as transmigration was familiar to Plato) rather than solipsism or hypnotic stasis seem more viable and life-affirming tactical options in response to the new sets of caves we have come to inhabit. It is along these lines (lignes de fuite?) that we perceive the ever-elusive Marker stepping lightly. Once again, he is no doubt one step ahead.

Source: www.beirutartcenter.org
Location: Jisr El Wati – Off Corniche an Nahr. Building 13, Street 97, Zone 66 Adlieh. Beirut, Lebanon.
Dates: November 25.10 – January 29.11
Opening reception: Wednesday November 24, from 6 pm to 9 pm

About the exhibition

“Beirut Art Center is pleased to present a solo exhibition dedicated to the influential French artist and filmmaker Chris Marker. Marker is best known for his cinematic essays that explore the notions of truth, history, and memory, and that push the boundaries of the documentary.

The show at Beirut Art Center will present Staring Back (2007), Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005) and Immemory (1997).

Staring Back is a collection of over 200 black and white prints selected from Marker’s personal archive of faces encountered by the artist throughout the course of his travels. Pivotal political events such as the riots of May 1968 and protests in Japan and Tibet loom large, alongside famous figures such as Akira Kurosawa and countless unforgettable and unknown others, in this hauntingly captivating portrait of humanity in the 20th century.

Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men is a multi-screen installation inspired by T.S. Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men (1925), a woeful elegy on the devastation wrought by World War I onto Europe. Marker combines his reflections on Eliot’s writing with images of atrocities, ruins, and victims in this morose commentary on the cyclical nature of violence throughout history and its lurking shadow in times of peace.

The CD-ROM Immemory is a poetic “voyage” into Marker’s inner world through text and photography. The work departs from fragments of the artist’s autobiography to touch on the social and political in its investigation of the relationship between time, memory and the world.

On the occasion of the exhibition, London based artists The Otolith Group will also present their work Inner Time of Television (2007), a collaboration with Chris Marker. The publication and thirteen-screen installation features a thirteen-part television program created by Marker on the cultural heritage of ancient Greece entitled L’Héritage de la chouette (The Owl’s Legacy, 1989). The Otolith Group’s oeuvre explores connections between the past, present and future, and is influenced by Marker in its investigation of memory through the image and its sharp criticism of contemporary politics.

The exhibition will be accompanied by a series of talks by curators and theorists as well as screenings of films by Chris Marker at Beirut Art Center and Metropolis.

The exhibition and accompanying screenings are supported by the Mission culturelle française au Liban.”

In parallel with the exhibition, the Beirut Art Center, in collaboration with Metropolis Cinema and the Mission culturelle française au Liban, will be screening a series of Chris Marker films December 1st through 18th, 2010. These include Sans Soleil; Loin du Vietnam; La Jetée; Les Statues Meurent Aussi; L’Ambassade; Le Fond de l’air est rouge; and Level 5.

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.