Category — Video

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™