Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

The following is a press release we received from the Peter Blum Gallery in New York. If you’re in the Big Apple, enjoy!

Chris Marker
PASSENGERS

April 2 – June 4, 2011

Peter Blum is pleased to announce the exhibition Chris Marker, PASSENGERS. This exhibition, opening on April 2, 2011, will be presented at both Peter Blum Soho (99 Wooster Street) and Peter Blum Chelsea (526 West 29th Street). This will be Chris Marker’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.

The exhibition is comprised of more than two hundred photographs taken by Marker between 2008 and 2010. The series, which is Marker’s first in color, are images of passengers traveling on the Paris Métro.

PASSENGERS captures the many private actions and gestures that take place daily in the public sphere. Mothers cradling their children, couples whispering intimately, women wistfully staring out the window or into the middle distance, engrossed in their own personal thoughts. In several of the shots, we see whole train cars filled with similarly disengaged people. Taken as a complete body of work, this series very clearly illustrates the various ways in which people create invisible walls and boundaries in order to cope with modern urban life. Chris Marker further to the photographs he takes, enhances, changes or colors his images on the computer, giving them often an eerie, almost otherworldly presence.

All of the images will be reproduced in a book published by Peter Blum Edition, which will be released in conjunction with the exhibition. The book will feature over two hundred color images with texts by Chris Marker and Peter Blum.

The exhibition will travel to France where it will be included as part of the internationally renowned Les Rencontres d’Arles Photographie Festival in the Summer of 2011.

You can visit the Peter Blum Gallery’s Chris Marker page at www.peterblumgallery.com/artists/chris-marker.

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.

We keep one cheshire eye open on the blogosphere and notice lots of people in the first flush of their discovery of the New World of Chris Marker. Usually they are trying to get across some very impressed first impression of either La Jetée or Sans Soleil. There are so many blogs, so many opportunities to self-publish, and so much in Marker that appeals to the current Zeitgeist too that he truly has become “le plus célèbre des cinéastes inconnus.”

“Cheshire Cat,” Sergey Tyukanov

While there are gems to be found in the wild, there is also much unedited thought thrown out willy-nilly on the web. We’re reminded of Marker’s warning, in his Libération interview from 2003, about noise becoming a monopoly. In this as in much else, Marker was prophetic; the noise monopoly has spread, replicated, mutated. At times, it is as if some mesmeric force had stopped people from thinking for themselves but at the same time glued their hands to the keyboard. Marker’s concern at the time was both a cultural landscape over-supplied with mediocrity and the concomitant overlooking of the gems—the diamonds in the rough—by a media sphere on auto-pilot.

A necessary caution: the “democratization of tools” entails many financial and technical constraints, and does not save us from the necessity of work. Owning a DV camera does not magically confer talent on someone who doesn’t have any or who is too lazy to ask himself if he has any. You can miniaturize as much as you want, but a film will always require a great deal of work – and a reason to do it.

It’s that the noise, in the electronic sense, just gets louder and louder and ends up drowning out everything, until it becomes a monopoly just like the way supermarkets force out the corner stores.
Chris Marker

It is interesting how much noise comes from both the traditional media and the new media. They form the two Janus heads of the monopoly of noise. The means of reproduction sold en masse as product to the jumpstart artist (or given away with advertising space attached); the public sphere with the volume of the Babel channel of social media maxed; the traditional media, print and television, screaming for attention, in the death throes of empire and ‘repositioning’; the absorption of brick and mortar into the digital; the schizophrenic consumer caught in the spider’s web at the crossroads of the monopoly of noise. This is, roughly, our enigmatic cultural scene today.

Given the era of the monopoly of electronic noise, it’s nice (inevitable, really, given some patience) to come across a well-rounded, useful piece of writing on a subject of interest. That is the case with the article on “The Voice Imitator” blog reviewing Catherine Lupton’s book on Marker, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. You can read the piece at voiceimitator.blogspot.com. The author, Brian Rajski, gives quite a useful summary of Lupton’s book and in doing so one of the better short introductions to Marker, one that certainly goes beyond the usual repetition of repetitions we have become so used to seeing.

He quotes Lupton extensively, but also summarizes well, and manages to cover the arc of Marker’s career without too much effort and with no pretense.

One thing that was illuminating for me in reading this book review was the reminder of Lupton’s insight into how Le joli mai and La Jetée were made in the same year and about the same city—that they are connected in a subterranean way, two inspections of Paris 1962, one in the mode of “ciné / ma vérité”, the other the scifi “unconscious” of the documentary film, exploding Paris through WWIII and into an experiment of memory, time travel and the fragile extraction of happiness. It is interesting how the two vectors of these films—Le Joli mai being in some ways the most non-fictional film Marker ever made and La Jetée the most fictional—create in a sense two poles between which the essay film can find its path of synthesis and signature. In fact, the essay film is in full flower already in Les Statues meurent aussi: this is the 1953 river that divides in 1962 to test the extremes of the mode, before flowing back together, renewed. Coincidentally, the genesis of La Jetée is also revealed in the Libération interview:

It was made like a piece of automatic writing. I was filming Le Joli mai, completely immersed in the reality of Paris 1962, and the euphoric discovery of “direct cinema” (you will never make me say “cinéma vérité”) and on the crew’s day off, I photographed a story I didn’t completely understand. It was in the editing that the pieces of the puzzle came together, and it wasn’t me who designed the puzzle.

I was also reminded how Marker’s early film criticism and work on the Petite Planète book series serve as inaugural forays into the essay mode that would become over time a whole new genre of filmmaking, ever more influential on those expressing thought through visual means (Marker would no doubt defer the origins to Vertov, Eisenstein and Medvedkin). Lupton is quoted:

‘This developed sense of the physical world in film as the bearer of an inner imaginative reality sheds light on the way that Marker’s own films have used documentary footage of the actual world to map a subjective consciousness, via incisive dialogues between the spoken commentary and the assembled images. Even Marker’s engagements with political and historical subject matter would uphold this principle of revelation, by scrutinizing archival images for evidence of hidden historical realities.’

André Bazin

The review also reminds us of three components of Marker’s work as brilliantly laid out by André Bazin: (1) intelligence as the primary matter; (2) the personal essay as the operative mode; and (3) the multiplication & diversity of media: typewriter, Rolleiflex, 16mm film camera, Sony Handycam, Apple Mac. When Marker in recent years cuts to the chase and just says he’s a bricoleur (Lupton says ‘image-scavenger’), he is perhaps just crystallizing Bazin’s original insights, that have held true to this day.*

From this combination, we see how Marker involves himself all the more fully in his work as he sets up mediating personas and distancing effects. He does not speak in the I, but in transposed voices, the voice of the object, the empathic voice, the alias of the cameraman, the cat or the owl. The personas become as multiplied in the essay film as the media types listed above. Just as Marker was more than ready to give up Gutenberg for McLuhan, he is also seemingly always willing to say farewell to a medium, an apparatus if another suits his current purpose. And these farewells are always provisional, for writing returns in film, photography in the CD-ROM, film in the installation.

* Incidentally, there is a fascinating article on the relation of Marker and Bazin written by Sarah Cooper, entitled “Montage, Militancy, Metaphysics: Chris Marker and André Bazin.” It is published in the second issue of Image [&] Narrative dedicated to Marker (vol. 11 no.1, 2010). A pdf of the issue can be found here. Bazin describes the montage of Les Statues meurent aussi as: “tout à la fois poétique et intellectuelle, jouant simultanémenet du choc de la beauté des images, et de la conflagration de leur sens, cependant que le texte intervient comme la main qui entrechoque les silex.” For Bazin, Marker’s voice, his dialogic commentary, proves to be an avenue from the materialism of montage to the spiritualism of a new form of poetic image. He calls another of Marker’s films a “perfectly cut diamond.”

So this came in by catmail. Going through the archives, I found a 2010 “Year of the Tiger” image, a 2009 image posing as a 3009 time travel postcard after the flood ["Souvenir de Conenhague," the city underwater with Guillaume in a time travel capsule doing a fly-by], and a 2006 “Year of the Underdog [Snoopy 1951]” image. It seems we have a tradition on our hands, though gaps are to be expected. We wish all the cats under the stars a good new year, whether you’re leaking or leak-proofing. And that includes Al Stewart…

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This portent of breaking news came to our catmail account, a sole image bearing the title “GEE NObs.”

Les contenus exacts, des révélations sans doutes scandaleuses, sont actuellement pas disponisbles… Guillaume lui-même, tiré ici à ce qu’il paraît par les paparazzi, n’en dit rien.

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.

As a visual addendum to the recent Beaubourg + Second Life screening of La Jetée, organized by Les Films du Jeudi, we present some images Laurence Braunberger sent along, for which we are grateful. The cinema and the screening room for the event (and we hope of course that it is the beginning of a series) were constructed by Max Moswitzer aka MosMax Hax and the bar La Jetée (based on the famous Tokyo watering hole as seen, among other places, in Wenders’ Tokyo Ga) by Frederick Thompson aka Balthasar Truffaut.

Les Films du Jeudi informs us that on the front of the virtual cinema you could find this notice:

La Jetée (1962) is a 28-minute black and white science fiction film by Chris Marker. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. The film won the Prix Jean Vigo in 1963 for best short film.

Synopsis: In a Paris devastated in the aftermath of WWIII, the few surviving humans begin researching time travel, hoping to send someone back to the pre-war world in search of food, supplies and perhaps a solution to their dire situation. One man is haunted by a vague childhood memory that is to prove fateful.

Chris Marker aka Sergei Murasaki is a French Filmmaker, part-time photographer, computer geek, traveler, cat lover.

In virtual worlds, he deliberately enters the “Ouvroir” prepared for him by MosMax Hax aka Max Moswitzer and plays with his own work, in the company of his longtime guide, Guillaume-en-Egypte, a cat and a furry entity in Second Life. When asked for a photograph of himself, Chris provides one of his Guillaume-en-Egypte.

Childhood Amnesia (L’amnésie Infantile) (2009) is a 15 minute mixed media short born in SL. The film has been described as a cinematographic love letter to La Jetée of Chris Marker and as a response and answer to his cult film.

Synopsis: A gas is released making mankind immortal, but also sterile. Despite the infinite opportunities made possible, mankind quickly becomes disillusioned. To prevent widespread depression, a machine is invented to enable people to travel through memory…

Indira Solovieva aka Vivre Mai was born in India to a family of Russian/Polish artists. She currently lives in France. Until now, Indira’s primary media have been writing and musical composition. Childhood Amnesia is her first short film.

La Jetée bar is the famous Tokyo hang out for filmmakers around the world. Francis Ford Coppola, Wim Wenders (who immortalized the bar in his docu-pic, Tokyo-Ga), Martin Scorsese, Jim Jarmusch, Quentin Tarentino and of course Chris Marker himself each have their personal bottles, painted with a cat. This bar was specially recreated in SL by Frederick Thompson aka Balthasar Truffaut, a French media artist.

Though we missed the party, we did want to let you know about a unique event organized by Les Films du Jeudi, who on the 5th of November held a screening of Chris Marker’s La Jétee simultaneously at the Centre Pompidou and within Second Life.

Marker’s film, whose fame has grown by leaps and bounds worldwide since its 1962 release (one need only search for the title on Twitter to see the many tweets in myriad languages that reference the always-fresh frisson of discovery) and whose impact on viewers and place in film history has only deepened through time, was paired in the dual event with Indira Solovieva’s Childhood Amnesia (L’amnésie infantile) (2009-15mins).

As Marker’s Second Life installation Ouvroir, a virtual gallery of things past, cinematic homage and aleatory encounter, had already realized the dream of architecting a viewing space / screening room online, it is fitting that the distributor of some of his most sought after short films would layer this homage within a Zone of the space he embraced, within the gesture of a ‘farewell to cinema,’ as a destination for those traveling without moving.

We received a nice note, invitation and press release from Les Films du Jeudi, stating:

Even if only for an evening, I wanted to put together Chris Marker’s film-myth La Jetée (1962 -28 mins) with Indira Solovieva’s Childhood Amnesia (L’amnésie infantile) (2009-15mins) at Beaubourg and also on Second Life so that everyone, wherever they may be, may see or rediscover this movie.
Come and join us to find out why…
- Laurence Braunberger

Braunberger is, among other things, the Producer of Marker’s Chats perchés and, according to IMDB, the Manager of Les Films de la Pléiade, Producer and Manager of Les Films du Jeudi and Manager of Les Films du Panthéon.

Solovieva’s film receives the following synopsis in the accompanying press release for this event:

A gas is released making mankind immortal, but also sterile. Despite the infinite opportunities made possible, mankind quickly becomes disillusioned. To prevent widespread depression, a machine is invented to enable people to travel through memory…

The Chris Marker catalog at Les Films du Jeudi includes the following gems, some available as extras on existing DVDs, other still awaiting what one might wish could be a comprehensive DVD collection of the Marker’s wonderful, wide-ranging shorts:

• Berliner Ballade de Chris MARKER (1990) – 29 mns
• Casque Bleu de Chris MARKER (1995) – 26 mns
• Chat écoutant la musique de Chris MARKER (1990) – 2 mns
• Chats Perchés de Chris Marker (2003) – 59 mns
• Détour, Ceaucescu de Chris MARKER (1990) – 8 mns
• E-clip-se de Chris MARKER (1999) – 8 mns
• From Chris to Christo de Chris MARKER (1985) – 24 mns
• L’Ambassade de Chris MARKER (1973) – 20 mns
• Le 20 heures dans les camps de Chris MARKER (1993) – 28 mns
• Matta ’85 de Chris MARKER (1985) – 14 mns
• Sixième face du Pentagone (La) de François REICHENBACH & Chris MARKER (1967) – 27 mns
• Slon Tango de Chris MARKER (1990) – 4 mns
• Théorie des ensembles de Chris MARKER (1990) – 11 mns
• Trois vidéos Haïkus de Chris MARKER (1994) – 3 mns

You can view the Jeudi catalog here: www.filmsdujeudi.com.

You can view the invitation (again, late, we apologize) here, in pdf format.

I remember fondly a summer of research on Chris Marker in 1991, where I spent the month of July exploring the resources of the Cinématèque in Les Halles with its mezmerizing robotic retrieval system and personal viewing/research stations (at one of which Marker was himself working). I also remember the cassettes that could be checked out in much more manual fashion at the Centre Pompidou—most vivid is my one and to date only viewing at Beaubourg of Si j’avais quatre dromedaires—as well as encountering Marker himself at the Les Halles “Forum des Images” (which did much to ‘quicken the heart’)—a story for another time…