The story presents a kind of back and forth play of images and words, the images postcards from the rich space of the Ouvroir and neighboring or jump spaces within Second Life, the texts evocations of a search and encounter with a “sad angel” named Mary Céleste. The quote that serves as the epigraph of the site is from Giraudoux (subject of Marker’s 1952 book for Seuil Giraudoux par lui-même):

“Sa vie nouvelle éclatait déjà sur lui dans le miroir”

The archipelago, as thought-form, experience and poem, visualizes the concept of both the ancient art of memory and the bricolage of Second Life itself, a string of geographies with traversable passages between them: a hyper-natural arcade within which the poet-flâneur is guided by his avatar. The themes of fleeting personal sightings/meetings with a friend-stranger, of discreet moments of bonheur à deux that provide the emotional atmosphere of La Jetée are here, woven concisely into the stanzas (“Nous nous étions promis de nous revoir”).

The tricks of sight and memory are at play: most of the images seem phantasmatic, a mix of dream, hallucination and cinema: sometimes invisible, sometimes semi-transparent, sometimes caught within the process of mutation from one state of being to the next. The quest is less that of Marker’s photography, to capture as in a hunt, than to live within the indecisiveness of these states of image and perception.

Throughout, there is a pacing that is clearly remniscent of La Jetée and, further in the background, of the essay film, with its dense meaning yet light touch that transforms documentary into veiled self-portrait. Here the commentary of the essay film has migrated into poetry and so further condenses, like a white dwarf star. The voice seeks to find the phantom angel girl, not wishing to exhaust the images (or the angel) with words, only grace them with the touch of another medium, as if the image and the word were old friends, each aware of its particular powers, its valences and its limits.

As throughout Marker’s expeditionary career set to celluloid, the theme of traveling and its inter-spaces appears—architectures, visions seen and experienced in the process of moving from one place to another, fleetingly recorded then receding into the past of travel, space moving back into time. One of these images, which “create their own captions” (as Marker once stated as program and wish), attests to the “proof that an image can be a living organism.”

As in Sans Soleil and the book Staring Back, we brush up against the theme of the regard of and from the other. It is not now the length of a single frame of film, 1/24th of a second, nor of the desiring, voyeuristic photographer, but rather a gaze that sees through and beyond while remaining completely present. The gaze of the other shifts from an object of capture to a shared moment of being-together, inscribed emotionally rather than technologically. This is the feel of the encounter with the girl angel, black-haired with a hint of dreadlocks, pale, freckled and clothed in black. A fallen angel? Perhaps. Or an angel of history.

The presence of the encounter takes place within a respect for the intrusiveness of words: “J’évitais d’être trop bavard.” This respect keeps the encounter within the air of mystery that the seeking itself breathes. It also slyly refers to the over-abundance of words in the spaces of social networking, and how silences and listening can be as important as constantly informing an interlocutor, a stranger-friend, of every last detail. Restraint of voice becomes a respect for the miracle of the encounter, and for the unknowable palimpsest of identity. The masks of avatars reveal something already true in the event of meeting another human being: s/he is more than meets the eye. What do we really know, in an encounter, of the past, the durée, the origins and trajectory of this being?

Just as space is fluid, so too is time and memory. The poem speaks of “Deux jours, deux semaines / ou deux mois plus tard, je ne sais plus…”. Objects share this fluidity, and their world a sense of animism, as if all creations within this world were in some manner alive, negotiable in their being, ephemeral and evolving. The world is presented as a puzzle, or rebus, something to be put together to form a whole, itself part of some greater whole … in fractal succession.

The older media are not lost in this space; they become the content, as McLuhan (for whom Marker “gave up Gutenberg long ago”) promised, for the new medium: so projectors of film are themselves fluid objects embedded in the landscapes, sometimes floating freely in the air, at other times installed in intimate spaces that represent new ways of situating the moment of spectation.

The question of authorship is unimportant as fact, though it has its particles of evidence: references to Giradoux, to San Francisco (one thinks of Marker’s intensive encounter retracing the temporality and spatiality of Vertigo), to Cuba, to owls. Throughout there are images of the markerian past, including floating cubes holding images of Le Joli mai, Le Fond de l’air est rouge, Le Mystère Koumiko, and the recurrent image of Guillaume. In the thank you note on the site, the other Guillaume, Guillaume-en-Egypte, is credited as “assistant d’un photographe et vidéaste dont certaines images apparaisent ici furtivement.” That the whole production could have been put together by another, an imposter, a Marker simulacrum, only stitches it tighter into the weave of his oeuvre.

As with authorship, identity and authenticity, the primacy of the human is blurred too. Animals, angels, aliens, architectures and machines all co-exist in the phantasmatic space within which each traversing, each leg of the journey, becomes a unique experience—not re-playable, not monumentalized in any history, not encapsulated in a product with beginning and end, and as such marking another chapter, a further evocation of Marker’s “Farewell to Movies.” But every farewell holds within it the possibility of new encounters, and this work is a testament to those, even as these new encounters hold out finally the message of their own disappearance and sense of loss.

L’Archipel Fantôme: http://larchipelfantome.blogspot.com/

Thematic Cluster

Introduction – Peter Kravanja
The Imaginary in the Documentary Image: Chris Marker’s Level Five – Christa Blümlinger
Montage, Militancy, Metaphysics: Chris Marker and André Bazin – Sarah Cooper
Statues Also Die – But Their Death is not the Final Word – Matthias De Groof
Autour de 1968, en France et ailleurs : Le Fond de l’air était rouge – Sylvain Dreyer
“If they don’t see happiness in the picture at least they’ll see the black”: Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil and the Lyotardian Sublime – Sarah French
Crossing Chris: Some Markerian Affinities – Adrian Martin
Petit Cinéma of the World or the Mysteries of Chris Marker – Susana S. Martins

We will offer a more in-depth view into the state of Marker scholarship in an upcoming post discussing new books and recent articles, while adding a selected secondary references page to this site.

Prompted out of a kind of suspended time of my own by several emails from Christophe Payet, “journaliste pigiste,”  I found my one-d and zeroed way to the above image on poptronics’  site, and thought about the strange swirling of time, the wounds of time as they might possibly exist in the New Year within the being named Chris Marker. I wandered simultaneously upon a passage in Roberto Bolano’s 2066, which has been keeping me company late at night:

And then he spied a tremor in the sea, as if the water were sweating too, or as if it were about to boil. A barely perceptible simmer that spilled into ripples, building into waves that came to die on the beach. And then Pelletier felt dizzy and a hum of bees came from outside. And when the hum faded, a silence that was evenworse fell over the house and everywhere around. And Pelletier shouted Norton’s name and called to her, but no one answered his calls, as if the silence had swallowed up his cries for help. And then Pelletier began to weep and he watched as what was left of a statue emerged from the bottom of the metallic sea. A formless chunk of stone, gigantic, eroded by time and water, though a hand, a wrist, part of a forearm could still be made out with total clarity. and the statue came out of the sea and rose above the beach and it was horrific and at the same time very beautiful.

With the aforementioned emails came news of Guillaume’s farewell to poptronical submissions, and a kind of rumor wave of retreat or retirement rushed through the markerian emotional landscape at the speed of telepathy, dotted by these sundry asynchronous dates: 3009, the arrival of Guillaume at a ballardian drowned world in his sleek skimming time-travel merkabah vehicle; 2010 the faux-hollywood poster graphic of a kind of adieu – certainly seeming more that than an au revoir – clearly containing within it a parody of the hypertrophic apocalyptical thunderings of the as yet unseen movie 2012, combined with one interpretation, a hopeful one, of a  feline mutation to fit the times, like the origin of Batman or some other superhero, as if Guillaume’s wit and emblematic wry underminings of power in the form of collage barrage that have graced poptronics’ site were no longer enough, could no longer hold at bay another round of disappointment.

More wounds of history, more memories and more oblivion. And a rising from the ashes, a phoenix move on the part of the cat, or a vacation in time, considering… “Considering”* is a bit like the famous bon mot by André Gide when asked about the greatest French poet, his answer of course being “Victor Hugo, hélas”.  Best wishes, alas. And more dates: 2084, 2066, 4001 (the era of perfect memory). In a way, Guillaume takes off like Pacal Wotan takes off, in his spaceship-for-one. Marker may take off the way the Mayans took off, in mystery and grace and full of traces. Meanwhile, the disappearances continue: the world empties itself out, migrating in the manner of bees to an as-yet undisclosed location, a new world. There is a kind of cultural colony collapse disorder happening, as a Mandelstamian cry of “No!”  against those who would hold the suicidal oligarchy together with string and glue. 2010, alas. Happy New Year, horrific and beautiful.

For further reading:

• poptronics < 01′01′10 > 2010, les adieux de Guillaume-en-Egypte
• PressAgrume’s meditation on the news: Guillaume-en-Egypte se retire : « Farewell to Chris Marker » ?, from which the following quote is taken:

Après l’adieu aux films (Farewell to movies, 2008), ce départ de Guillaume-en-Egypte nous condamne-t-il à un silence définitif de Chris Marker ? N’ayant jamais été bien loquace, Chris Marker a su se faire maître dans l’art du « silence éloquent ». Guillaume, son « double bavard », à son tour retiré, voilà l’humanité privée d’un précieux observateur. N’allons toutefois pas trop vite en besogne. Notre élégie précoce n’est que souffrance amoureuse. Si à la chute de Guillaume, rien ne succède, alors il y a bien quelque chose qui pour nous s’éteindra.

* Marker explains his choice of the word “Considering”: “…considering est le point d’ironie qu’on ajoute à un bilan par ailleurs catastrophique (exemple : dans “Asphalt Jungle”, Louis Calhern à Marilyn Monroe qui vient de le balancer aux flics “You did quite well, considering”) s’achève un cycle…” [poptronics]

In the ongoing list of ‘things that quicken the heart,’ this tale certainly takes its rightful place. Marker does not wear his heart on his sleeve; rather, he places it carefully into his actions. In this clip of remarkable recollections by Guzmán of Marker, we see the emotional, inspiring result of several of those actions.

View original at http://www.nfb.ca/film/capturing_reality_patricio_guzman/

The Battle of Chile on DVD

In December 2009, Icarus Home Video released a deluxe 4 disc DVD edition of The Battle of Chile. Their site notes:

Long banned in Chile after Pinochet’s coup, only in 1997 could Guzmán return to show THE BATTLE OF CHILE there for the first time. CHILE, OBSTINATE MEMORY (included on the fourth disc here) is the extraordinarily moving record of that homecoming, and a fitting conclusion to a “thrilling documentary double feature,” “the unusual opportunity to see one film artist sustain an inquiry into the life of a troubled country over the course of decades.”

In the press kit [pdf] for the new DVD set, there is a section noting Chris Marker’s contributions, citing a 1975 interview with Guzmán by Le Monde film critic Louis Marcorelles:

Chris Marker played a fundamental role. He had translated into French for us El primero año; so, at the beginning of 1973, when we sensed that the great political crisis was approaching, we wrote to Chris and explained to him that we wanted to make a film which would be a vast panorama of everything that was taking place in Chile, but that we didn’t have any film because of the economic blockade. Chris wrote to me: ‘Very well, I will see what I can do.’ A very short letter. And at the end of three months, he alerted me that he was sending the material. Chris made no conditions on his shipment. He said to us: ‘The material is yours, film with it, all I can do is to send it to you.’

Icarus Films also presents a substantial overview of Guzmán’s life and work on this page. The more one learns, the more it becomes clear why Marker volunteered, in such direct but profound gestures, to become a kind of ambassador for both The First Year and The Battle of Chile — “one of the most eloquent and daring explorations of revolution and repression, hope and memory, to survive our sorry times” (as Ariel Dorfman is quoted) — to Europe and to the world.

In order to get more in, I pile up only the headings of subjects. Were I to add on their consequences, I would multiply this volume many times over. And how many stories have I spread around which say nothing of themselves, but from which anyone who troubles to pluck them with a little ingenuity will produce numberless Essays.

Neither these stories nor my quotations serve always simply for example, authority, or ornament. I do not esteem them solely for the use I derive from them. They often bear, outside of my subject, the seeds of a richer and bolder material, and sound obliquely a subtler note, both for myself, who do not wish to express anything more, and for those who get my drift.

Montaigne [quoted Reda Bensmaïa, The Barthes Effect: the essay as reflective text]

Throughout, the issue uses as backgrounds photographs, devolved to duotones, that seem to tease at revealing the working space of a cinephile, librarian, collector, cat lover, scholar, artist – enfin, bricoleur. One spots statues of cats and owls, DVDs, cassettes,  books (Nuit et brouillard, Tarkovsky interviews, Fritz Lang, Tel quel) all piled to the rafters like a wonderful personal museum conspiring to both present and hide decades of accumulation, research, gifts, cultural obsessions. The media are all there, old and new, and at one point Guillaume (the circumstantial origins of whose name is revealed in the answer to question number one) admits that the “new” media, far from being overwhelming, are not moving fast enough for him. Throughout, the irony, the winks and nods of a master migrated into second life bleed through the cartoon fabric, even as this fabric grows rich with exotic dyes and grunge layouts.

This poptronics poster-journal, released around the end of a major Chris Marker exhibition in São Paolo that garnered many tweets of adoring Brazilian fans, consists of an amazing array of cartoon productions featuring Guillaume, the ultimate avatar, presented in a dizzying collage format, along with a fanciful interview, with the following introduction:

Un chat pigiste mégalo. Un chat dessiné à la main et citoyen du Net. Guillaume-en-Egypte, avec ses traits noirorange et ses bulles drôlissimes, n’est pas un chat ordinaire. Plus avant-gardiste que ses cousins Krazy Kat et autres Grinning Cat, ce félin-là nage comme un poisson dans l’eau sur le site poptronics, média français des cultures électroniques, et vole dans Second Life. Pour rendre hommage à cette star du réseau, poptronics a conçu, sur invitation de son pop’commissaire au Brésil Benjamin Seroussi, ce pop’lab exceptionnel : un magazine qui traverse l’océan, de la France au Brésil, tente l’aventure bilingue et la prouesse graphique du deux en un (affichejournal), pour fêter son incroyable vie de fiction. Tête d’affiche côté face, Guillaume lève le voile côté pile sur ses « neuf vies » (pp. 04-17/32’), se laisse conter par Annick Rivoire, fondatrice de poptronics (pp. 20- 21/32’), Etienne Sandrin, du Centre Pompidou (pp. 24- 25/32’), et Agnès de Cayeux, artiste du réseau (pp. 28-29/32’).

Here’s the conversation of the Poptronics crew with the Cat himself:

1. Guillaume-en-Egypte, tu n’as pas grand-chose d’abyssin, alors d’où vient ton nom ?

Chat trouvé, on m’avait donné un nom quelconque. Un jour, Chris teste une caméra empruntée (du genre qui permet les sous-titres « de vacances »). Le possesseur de la caméra a un enfant nommé Guillaume, il vient de l’emmener en égypte, et le sous-titre est resté incrusté. Chris cadre la seule chose intéressante dans la maison – moi – et s’écrie : « C’est ton vrai nom ! » Or C’ÉTAIT mon vrai nom. (cf. le poème bien connu de T.S. Eliot : « Tout chat a un nom secret, qu’il est seul à connaître. »)

2. As-tu plusieurs vies comme tous les chats, celle du « vrai » chat qui aidait Chris Marker à monter ses films, celle du chat faxeur qui commentait le monde tel qu’il va mal pour son cercle d’amis, celle du chat guide numérique dans le CDrom « Immemory », dans « Chats perchés » ou sur Second Life, celle du commentateur acide sur l’Internet dans « Un regard moderne » et aujourd’hui sur poptronics ?

Ça n’en fait que cinq, Il m’en reste quatre mais ce sont mes quatre vies privées.

3. Pourquoi avoir choisi l’Internet comme territoire de chasse ? Et, accessoirement, pourquoi le site poptronics (et pas un grand média généraliste) ?

Pourquoi, il y a plus chic que poptronics ?

4. Un chat pigiste, franchement, qui tu crois que ça peut mystifier ?

Lincoln disait : « Un chat peut mystifier tout le monde quelque temps, quelquesuns tout le temps, pas tout le monde tout le temps. » Il ne me connaissait pas.

5. Techniquement, tu te prends pour qui ? Tes collages font penser à l’esthétique DIY (do it yourself), presque punk (post-Bazooka), en tout cas contemporaine du home studio et des pratiques culturelles sur les réseaux (les vidéos de partage sur Youtube, les photomontages potaches, etc.). Le mélange que tu concoctes de dessins, bulles de bandes dessinées et repiquage d’images d’actualité est volontairement réalisé « à l’économie ». C’est pour maintenir ton indépendance ou par souci d’efficacité ?

Simplement pour aller plus vite. Mes neuf vies sont très remplies, vous savez.

6. Te sens-tu appartenir à une famille, celle qui aurait comme ancêtre le Grinning Cat de Lewis Caroll, comme oncle d’Amérique Felix the Cat, comme cousin oriental « le Chat du rabbin », et comme petit dernier un peu hors-la-loi M. Chat ?

Et Krazy Kat, notre grandmère à tous ? Bien sûr que nous sommes tous cousins. Même si je n’ai pas beaucoup le sens de la famille.

7. Le papier, le journal, les médias, ce sont des univers du passé pour toi ? Tu avais occupé le quotidien « Libération » en 2004 mais d’une présence silencieuse. Et voilà que dans ce pop’lab tout à ta gloire, tu donnes de ta personne. Pourquoi ?

D’abord, je n’ai rien demandé. On m’honore, j’accepte, avec ma modestie naturelle. Mais d’ici peu, le papier sera le support le plus tendance, comme le vinyle et le mariage.

8. Comment expliques-tu que tu sois aussi à l’aise avec les nouvelles technologies ?

Frankly my deah, je ne me pose pas la question. Et puis nouvelles, nouvelles. . . Je trouve plutôt qu’elles ne vont pas assez vite pour moi.

9. Et d’ailleurs, pourquoi l’Internet est-il à ce point un repaire de chats (au point d’inventer la Journée sans chat sur l’Internet, le 9-9-9) ?

Internet reflète le monde, et il y a au monde deux choses inépuisables, et seulement deux : la musique et les chats. Vous ne supporteriez pas tous les jours vos films préférés, vos livres préférés, même pas vos amis préférés. Il faut des pauses. Mais l’émerveillement devant le chat, connu ou inconnu, et devant la musique, connue ou inconnue, ne connaît pas la pause, ni l’usure.

Bien sûr il y a des chats idiots, comme Garfield, et de la mauvaise musique, comme J.-M. Jarre – mais ceux-là s’excluent eux-mêmes de leur catégorie : ce sont des simulacres.

Chris, à qui il arrive de dire des choses sensées, parlait l’autre jour avec la correspondante d’un magazine américain. L’ingénue lui demandait : « Pourquoi cette préférence pour les chats ? Ce pourrait être un autre animal, le chien par exemple. . . » Réponse : « En somme, je fais un film sur une femme et vous me dites : pourquoi pas une vache ? »

10. Pourquoi venir faire un tour au Brésil, c’est la présence de Lula qui te motive ? Toi aussi, tu veux relancer l’amitié franco-brésilienne ?

Moi je n’ai rien à relancer. Ma relation avec le Brésil est ancienne, et multiple. Voilà deux exemples : Grâce à Chris, mon enfance a été bercée par la musique brésilienne. Je connais Chico Buarque par coeur. J’ai quelque part une photo dédicacée de Gilberto Gil. J’ai présenté, dans des ciné-clubs pour chats, « Os Fuzis » et « Antonio Das Mortes ». D’où l’hommage à Glauber ci-dessus. Mes amis brésiliens y ont vu une intention malicieuse : à Cannes, « Antonio Das Mortes » était en compétition avec « les Parapluies de Cherbourg ». Lien évident – sauf que moi, je l’avais complètement oublié.

11. Quelle relation entretiens-tu avec celui qui t’a mis sous la lumière, en photo puis en dessin ? Lequel des deux fait la leçon et indique la voie ? Qui de toi ou de lui est le plus aventureux des deux ?

C’est moi, bien sûr, mais je ne le dis pas trop. Il y a suffisamment de gens qui racontent leur vie à la télé. Disons que pour un humain, il est acceptable. On se complète. J’ai les idées, lui un peu de technique, on est comme Socrate et Platon. Cherchez qui est Socrate.

12. Tu te présentais il y a quelques années comme le « chat et l’assistant de Chris ». Est-ce que tu n’aurais pas un peu inversé les rôles, du fait d’une mégalomanie galopante ?

À votre avis, qui est la star ? le monstre ou le docteur Frankenstein ?

13. Tes pérégrinations dans Second Life ne t’auraient-elles pas un peu tourné la tête ?

On a facilement la tête qui tourne dans SL, mais je crois que c’est fait pour ça. Einstein : « La réalité aussi est une illusion, mais du genre qui dure. » Donc dès que ça dure un peu, on se demande de quel côté du miroir on est. Les gens que j’y rencontre sont un peu cinglés. à tous je dis : lisez « l’Invention de Morel » de Bioy Casares, et vous comprendrez où vous êtes. Certains l’ont fait, et m’ont remercié.

14. Qu’est-ce que tu aimes dans cet univers parallèle ?

Le monde de Bioy : un monde de fantômes, ces gens dont on ne sait rien, dont l’apparence est forcément un mensonge, mais où justement il est si facile de mentir que certaines âmes perverses, j’en suis sûr, éprouvent un malin plaisir à dire la vérité, juste pour ne pas être crues.

Maintenant, j’ai mon île dans SL. J’y donne des rendez-vous à des gens qui viennent de tous les coins du monde. Et c’est un fait qu’on y accomplit quelque chose d’absolument nouveau dans l’histoire de la communication. Ce n’est pas tout à fait la réalité, et pourtant. . . Le téléphone, les e-mails, même une vidéoconférence n’abolissent pas la distance, ils soulignent plutôt notre effort pour la surmonter. Dans SL, elle est abolie. On est là et on n’est pas là dans le même moment, comme mon autre cousin, le chat de Schrödinger. Jamais personne n’avait éprouvé ça.

Further Browsing:

• Museu da Imagem e do Som, “Chris Marker – Staring Back”
• poptronics.fr
• Bill Horrigan on Brazil exhibition of Staring Back, Wexblog
• icônica blog, brazil

The Institute in Lyons is home to a remarkable museum that presents the very origins of cinema, offering to visitors “un parcours esthétique, scientifique et historique sur l’histoire de l’invention du Cinématographe par Louis Lumière en 1895.” The collection includes the so-called Cinématographe  “n°1″,  which projected ten films the night of December 28, 1895 at the Grand Café in Paris in front of the 33 curious audience members who became cinema’s first spectators.

Chris is a kind of different planet. Still is, by the way. He’s an extraordinary person.

Costa-Gavras

The second collection is an issue of IMAGES documentaires, N^o 15 (1993), containing articles by François Porcile, Annick Peigné-Giuly, Gérald Collas, François Niney, Régis Debray, Olivier-René Veillon, as well as a lead piece by ‘Christian’ Marker entitled “Prince Bayaya de Jiri Trnca, une forme d’ornement,” originally published in Les Cahiers du cinéma, N^o 8, janvier 1952.

This early Marker essay brings to us – shameless collectors of Markeriana – some cause for intrigue and celebration, as it reveals an early and particularly playful exploration of the world of the cartoon, Marker’s early admiration of which (ever wonder where the site boingboing.net got its name?) returns in our new century in Marker’s alter-ego Guillaume’s diverse adventures in political commentary, Second Life and even within the self-portrait film of Agnès Varda, Les plages d’Agnès (2008).

Also of interest in this latter collection is Marker’s essay “Le Tombeau d’Alexandre,” in which he traces the Russian’s filmmaker’s life – in preparation, parallel and/or connection with the full-length film – against the events of the century:

Peut-on rêver meilleur fil conducteur pour explorer la tragédie de notre siècle? Son énergie, son courage, ses illusions, ses désillusions, ses compromissions, ses bagarres avec les bureaucrates, ses illuminations prophétiques, ses aveuglements, volontaires ou non, son humour indestructible et la lumière déchirante que l’effondrement de l’URSS jette rétrospectivement sur toute sa vie, ce sont ceux de toute une génération, et c’est le portrait de cette génération que j’entends tracer à travers le portrait d’un ami.”

Though not unimaginable, one has yet to see such an approach to Marker’s own life. For one, it might be impossible, given the very disappearance, or rather absorption, of this life in his work. For another, le maître ne le souhaiterait pas du tout.

We are so accustomed to viewing all films over and over again, the fictitious ones as well as those pertaining to our lives; we have been so thoroughly contaminated by a retrospective technique that we are quite capable, under the blow of contemporary vertigo, to rethread history as one threads a film wrong side up.

Jean Baudrillard, Reversion of History