Category — Video

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.

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

“Travel between the extremes.” – Daedelus to Icarus [Ovid, Metamorphosis, Book VIII]

Once focused on the lofty institutional market, Icarus Films, located in Brooklyn, New York, has followed the destiny of its name and opened its Home Video online shop, with a high concentration of Chris Marker DVDs. The CM page is located at homevideo.icarusfilms.com[...]. This site is currently offering the following:

1. The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004)
2. Remembrance of Things to Come (2001)
3. The Last Bolshevik (1993)
4. The Sixth Side of The Pentagon (1967)

In addition, these titles are listed but not as yet available, confirming rumors of important upcoming DVD releases:

1. One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999)
2. A Grin Without A Cat (1977)
3. À bientot, j’espère (1968)

The Case of the Grinning Cat includes Chris Marker’s Bestiary (1994) and Three Cheers for the Whale (1972). The Sixth Side of the Pentagon includes The Embassy (1973). Sale prices for DVDs currently range from $24.95 to $29.95. The site also includes short video excerpts.

Chris Marker’s 1981 short film Junkopia is now available for viewing online at Ubu.com. Thanks to Nate Lavey for the heads-up. Notable are the foregrounding of the sonic elements that were always present in Marker’s films, yet often took a more subliminal position in deference to the commentary, which here is explicitly abstained from, as the add-on “framing” of the film provided by arte points out.

This style of sound painting recalls Holgar Czukay and David Sylvian’s Plight and Premonition and Biosphere’s Substrata – ambient atmospherics integrating radio wave sampling that Marker’s otherworldly sonic backdrops predate by a long shot (watch La Jetée someday with your eyes closed :>).

Commuters from the East Bay to San Francisco will be familiar with this no man’s landscape in Emeryville culled from the floatable spare parts of the city, washed ashore. The animal forms, such as the watchful tinfoil owl above, receive their due attention, as is so often the case in Marker’s productions, whatever the scale.

Thanks to Second Life chronicler lucien bookmite for drawing our attention to this new work by Kosinki on YouTube. Could the music be Arvo Pärt? This series of photographs, seemingly run through the Animoto engine, harks back to Staring Back, and more distantly – in this viewer’s mind at least – to Si j’avais quatre dromedaires. Ever new surprises from the master behind the camera, but rarely in front of it.

All women have a built-in grain of indestructibility. And men’s task has always been to make them realize it as late as possible.
Sans Soleil

Chris Marker roves the international press after the victory of US President-elect Barack Obama and presents us with this celebratory Animoto video on YouTube. Here is evidence of the global import of this moment in history. This press coverage, tracked with the tenacity of a grandmaster archivist, represents, in a sense, the public face of a deep joy that erupted worldwide.

This piece is one of two by a certain “Kosinki.” On closer look, Kosinki is the channel (which you can subscribe to) and Guillaume is the user (age: 40; country: France). The other is called LEILA ATTACKS, and it rocks. In both, obviously, Marker’s senses of humor and composition are alive and well.

LEILA ATTACKS is at once a parody of the faux gigantism of blockbuster PR and a morality tale (it’s tempting to say allegory) of a surprising turnabout in power relations. It is not without self-parody either, as one of the Soviet-meets-grunge style opening titles declares Chris Marker “the best-known author of unknown movies.”

It seems Marker’s “farewell to movies” lingers on, ever more whimsical, practically aphoristic. Could the aphorism film be the heir, within the very personal and web-disseminated form of a cinéma mineure, to the essay film?

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.

For more information on Chris Marker’s contributions to Second Life, see NPIRL ["Not Possible in Real Life"]. The official site for Second Life is www.secondlife.com.

According to NPIRL, Guillaume qualifies as a “furry,” though we’re hoping that doesn’t exclude him from being a whirling dervish. Do you know what “furries” are? If so, you are more in the loop than a blind librarian. Here’s a summary of a sub-culture that is happening, growing and evolving at a pretty lively pace, and expresses itself in a prominent contingent of sentient beings that populate Second Life:

Furry fandom is a fandom devoted to anthropomorphic animal characters. Since the 1980s, the term furries has come to refer to such characters. Fictional work celebrated by furry fandom typically attributes high-level intelligence, human facial expressions and anatomy, speech, bipedalism, clothing, or other attributes to otherwise animal characters. Work in any medium that includes such characters may be considered part of the furry genre, although they are most often seen in comics, cartoons, animated films, allegorical novels, and video games. Members of the furry subculture are often known as furry fans, furries, or simply furs.They commonly interact online and at furry conventions.

– Wikipedia, “Furry fandom”

Video courtesy Guillaume-Luddy Relay™