Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

I found a poetic evocation of Chris Marker and his trans-temporal take on earth history, memory and compassion in Sans Soleil on a blog today called simply politics. The entry starts out by making an auspicious connection between the Zapatistas of Chiapas, who “call their gatherings to build international solidarity ‘Intergalactic,’” and the spirit of Marker’s films. It goes on to point out that Marker is known to film buffs much more widely than revolutionaries, noting that voice-over narration has at times been associated with a maligned “Voice of God,” but that ain’t necessarily so, and Marker has provided the template for a true alternative. I’m in tune with this blog man; Marker is not Euripides; his commentaries come at the image track not as a deus ex machina to explain all and wrap all up, but to infuse questions, associations, parables and compassion to the mix, always leaving space (and time) for the viewer to travel back and forth and make new connections.

He riffs on, half-quoting half-paraphrasing some major nodes of Sans Soleil:

That’s just it, he can’t understand. He hasn’t come from another planet he comes from our future, four thousand and one: the time when the human brain has reached the era of full employment. Everything works to perfection, all that we allow to slumber, including memory. Logical consequence: total recall is memory anesthetized. After so many stories of men who had lost their memory, here is the story of one who has lost forgetting, and who—through some peculiarity of his nature—instead of drawing pride from the fact and scorning mankind of the past and its shadows, turned to it first with curiosity and then with compassion. In the world he comes from, to call forth a vision, to be moved by a portrait, to tremble at the sound of music, can only be signs of a long and painful pre-history. He wants to understand. He feels these infirmities of time like an injustice, and he reacts to that injustice like Ché Guevara, like the youth of the sixties, with indignation. He is a Third Worlder of time. The idea that unhappiness had existed in his planet’s past is as unbearable to him as to them the existence of poverty in their present.

- “Marker, again,” June 16, 2008, politics-live.blogspot.com

How close the phrase “long and painful pre-history” is to the current hullabaloo around 2012, earth rebirth and the shift to the Mayan calendar (Carl Johan Calleman, Daniel Pinchbeck, José Argüelles, Barbara Hand-Clow et alii). With these writers, prophets and mystics we again encounter the themes of time travel, co-existing time patterns, non-linear time and the role of suffering, personal and historical, as experience redeemed through cataclysmic change. Marker has never been explicit about our future, but he provided, well before the new century and its eschatologist-prophets of Earth Apotheosis, a diverse set of audio-visual documents about history and memory, and a few poetic clues about where the Earth Experiment might be heading.

…Marker’s mode was always the personal documentary — a non-fictional amble between political fact and subjective, and often poetical, observation, and over the years, practically under the oblivious noses of the filmgoing world, it’s become one of the medium’s most insightful, humane and profound strategies.

- Michael Atkinson, ifc.com

Sarajevo

flickr.com » Ben Otopalik

His cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, played an intregal part in some of his other work, as cats always do. It’s not difficult to see that cats and this cat in particular play as significant a role in Marker’s life as anything, and therefore this brief piece of video (accurately described in Film Comment’s filmography a few years back as “warm”) takes on greater resonance… as though here is Marker, briefly, laying aside all else to try and capture his own personal Madeline. Guillaume-en-Egypte’s langorous slip into contented unconsciousness perpetuates the unknowability of the filmed transaction. Marker’s history is the cat’s nap. And the video remains only a record of the beautiful sunny day Marker remembers, not the event itself.

- “Chat écoutant la musique (Chris Marker, 1988),” cansesclasseled.com

This enigmatic diagram was found at the Pacific Film Archive in 1990. It seems to provide a kind of map for the locations and temporal flow of Sans Soleil. We welcome your interpretations. Click the image for a larger view.

“Avec ses quatre dromedaires
Don Pedro d’Alfaroubeira
Courut le monde et l’admira.
Il fit ce que je voudrais faire”
- Guillaume Apollinaire

Epilogue to Chris Marker, “Si j’avais quatre dromedaires” (1966)

A couple of blasts from the past came to town this weekend, one bringing the other. Dirk K., a longtime Chris Marker fan, touched base and we met for extended coffee and cigarettes, like a Jim Jarmusch outtake scene. DK brought a gift of utmost rarity: a hardcover copy of the 1950 Club francais du livre’s reprinting of Le Coeur net (Roman de Chris Marker, Préface de Jean Cayrol), numbered 1618 out of 3000. The novel, Marker’s first (La Jetée, being a hyphenated novel (”photo-roman”), qualifying for the genre as well), was originally published by Editions du Seuil in 1949.

Dirk brings at once a unbridled imagination and a computer scientist’s mind to his Marker fandom. He has been my most long-lasting correspondent about CM. During this visit, he offered a perspective that seemed to suit the spirit of Marker’s work: the best homage to a piece of art that has touched us is to follow it with another act of creation, rather than analysis. So stay tuned; he may have more gifts up his sleeves. We also talked about Berlin before the wall came down (strip searches by the GDR, hitchhiking, bookstores), the potential role of AI in internet security and cinema whose visible and audible skin covers (or is lined with) an invisible core or dimension.

It’s strange to revisit the odd, fatherly preface of Jean Cayrol in light of the 58 years that have passed since it was written. Cayrol writes as a established member of the French literary community welcoming a first-time author into the circle of the blessed. He seems at once alienated by Marker’s youth and – almost despite himself – deeply enamored of the novel.

Ce soir, je viens d’achever la lecture du Coeur Net. On est toujours ému devant un grand livre. Nous nous en détachons avec précaution. Nous mesurons le merveilleux bienfait de son hospitalité. Et nous restons devant le livre fermé avec une folle envie de «sonner à la porte», de nous faire accueillir à nouveau. Nous sentons inexorablement toute la tristesse d’un départ et nous pressons pas de prendre le prochain roman.

Nous restons encore sous le charme de cette étonnante jeunnesse du verbe de Chris Marker, de ces phrases qui ne sont jamais repues de leurs images, de cette grandeur d’un style qui garde «la coupe» juvénile et la métaphore dépeignéee, de ces mots choisis en plein vent, d’une magie personnelle de l’expression qui fait feu de toute son inspiration. Quelle richesse déployée sans vergogne, quel butin rapporté de la solitude!

Looking back from 2008, we can’t help but be struck by the prescience of these impressions / expressions: phrases qui ne sont jamais repues de leurs images; mots choisis en plein vent; and magie personnelle de l’expression—seeds that sprouted, grew and blossomed in the years and media to come. We also know well the “mad desire” to “ring the bell” again at the door of his films. Revisiting Marker is what we do naturally, any chance we get. Who among you has been content to watch La Jetée or Sans Soleil a single time?

One fine morning, K received this thoughtful note:

dear blind librarian,

between may 18 and 24 there is an interesting cinema event in zagreb, croatia called subversive ff (they don’t have a webpage). i attach the programme, it’s a combination of lectures and films connected to the revolutionary year of 1968, and in it will be screening a number of chris marker films/collaborations.

keep up the great work with your site. it’s a wonderful resource.

with best from a faithful marker devotee,
alexis tioseco

The program pdf sent unfortunately isn’t working once uploaded to the web (locally I can open it), so here’s a screengrab of most of it. [Update: festival web site]. It takes some guesswork & deciphering on the part of non Serbo-Croatian literates, but a few things are clearly showing: À bientôt j’espère, the Marker-edited omnibus film Far From Vietnam (Godard, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais and Varda), Le fond de l’air est rouge, and various Cinétracts, plus a lot of Godard’s and even Kluge’s collaborative work of the era.

Presentations are also scheduled; the star of the show seems to be Slavoj Žižek, the infamous psychonaut +/- hermeneut who to my knowledge shares at least (but probably only) two things with Chris Marker: a repetition-compulsory taste for Hitchcock and a sly wit capable of producing sentences whose associations run in oblong, tangential and lateral directions, laughter mitigating the bruising your brain is taking. Age before beauty – or should we say age and beauty before cleverness. In other words, we’re hoping SZ doesn’t bring his lacanian arsenal to bear on CM, and if he does, we’re rooting for the earlier generation. “Does that mean I can dodge bullets?” asks Neo. Morpheus answers: “No, when the time comes, you won’t have to.”

The line-up shows how important working together in teams and distributing the means of reproduction were in 1968 and thereabouts: collective names such as The Dziga Vertov Group, Les Groupes Medvedkin and S.L.O.N. populate the era as a new form of author or director. It’s always been harder to find this teamwork and active anonymity in the academic setting (hard sciences excluded), where the rule is Jeder für sich, und Gott gegen Alle. One thinks of some exceptional exceptions, though: Socrates & Plato; Marx & Engels; Kluge & Negt; and last but certainly not least, Deleuze & Guattari, who took the collaborative spirit of the souxiant-huitards to a whole new plateau:

The two of us wrote Anti-Oedipus together. Since each of us was several, there was already quite a crowd. Here we have made use of everything that came within range, what was closest as well as farthest away. We have assigned clever pseudonyms to prevent recognition. Why have we kept our own names? Out of habit, purely out of habit. To make ourselves unrecognizable in turn. To render imperceptible, not ourselves, but what makes us act, feel, and think. Also because it’s nice to talk like everybody else, to say the sun rises, when everybody knows it’s only a manner of speaking. To reach, not the point where one no longer says I, but the point where it is no longer of any importance whether one says I. We are no longer ourselves. Each will know his own. We have been aided, inspired, multiplied.

– Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism & Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1987, 3

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™

by John Fitzgerald

I didn’t see A Grin Without A Cat when it first came out in 1977. My first encounter with it was this past year on a small monitor in a university library – even Kim’s in the East Village didn’t have a copy. From the first few frames I could sense what a monumental film it was: shots of people in the streets, on the march, all over the world. But, being so monumental, I realized also it was something that really needed to be seen in the dark, in a theater, on a big screen. Marker has said: “The reception of a film on television and in a movie theater is quite different. The difference is more or less the same between thinking and dreaming. In that sense, I compare dreaming to cinema…”

So we went to see it on Tuesday at the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York as part of their 1968 cinema retrospective. The turnout was surprisingly good – at least fifty or sixty people, probably more. Part of me felt like we all should have just exchanged numbers and formed our own little film society right there. How often are you in a room with fifty other people who have even heard of Chris Marker? Many, no doubt, had gone to the Film Forum screening last summer of Sunless, which also had an excellent turnout (though the fact that Werner Herzog was there to introduce the film probably had some effect on attendance). Of the film itself, what can one say? Who else but Marker could collect all the collapsed hopes of socialism’s success in China in an evocative dance sequence layered over echoes of music from La Jetée? Or capture the Soviet Union’s totalitarianism in another sequence that showed Castro’s penchant for moving around the microphones at the lectern during speeches, and how the microphones, during an address in Moscow, wouldn’t budge? Of Watergate, Marker notes that by the seventies no one marched in the streets any more; the nation experienced it through a series of congressional hearings on television, thrown into the network lineup with sitcoms like All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but in response I might point out that at least then we had congressional hearings. For the crimes being committed in Washington today go well beyond Watergate, and we don’t even have those…