Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

New York’s Museum of Modern Art will show restored versions of both Loin de Vietnam and—wonderful news indeed—the incomparable Le Joli mai, in their upcoming To Save and Project international film preservation festival, which showcases re-releases of recently restored cinematic masterpieces.

Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker, Pierre Lhomme, 1963, 163 min.) will screen Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 1:30 p.m., while Loin de Vietnam will screen Friday, November 13, 2009 at 5:00 p.m. and Saturday, November 14, 2009 at 1:30 p.m.

MoMA’s site offers the following cogent synopsis of this pioneering work in the then nascent genre of so-called cinéma vérité (not a term we can see Marker embracing then or now, probably):

Le Joli mai
1963. France. Chris Marker, Pierre Lhomme. 163 min.
Saturday, November 14, 2009, 1:30 p.m.
Theater 1 (The Roy and Niuta Titus Theater 1)

Le Joli mai
1963. France. Directed by Chris Marker, Pierre Lhomme. Marker had recently made essay films about contemporary Israel and Cuba—films with a decidedly revolutionary bent—when in the spring of 1962 he decided, for the first time, to take the pulse of his own country. With the French-Algerian War coming to a bitter and brutal end, Marker joined now-legendary cameraman Pierre Lhomme in conducting hours of interviews on the streets of Paris. The result is a fascinating political and social document, a snapshot of French citizens reflecting on the meaning of happiness, whether personal or collective, even as they confess anxiety about the future of their families and their nation. Restored by the Archives françaises du film du CNC, this original French release version features voiceover narration by Yves Montand, through which Marker offers his own wry and poignant commentary—as he does with some cleverly revealing interpolations of image and sound—and music by Michel Legrand. Courtesy Sofracima. In French; English subtitles. 163 min

For more information, see the New York Times article Prints That Shine Anew: Cassavetes, Bergman and More at MoMA and, at the MoMA site, To Save and Project: The Seventh MoMA International Festival of Film Preservation. The festival runs October 24, 2009 through November 16, 2009.

While browsing the Wexner Center Chris Marker Store of late, along with the recent release of the English text of Coréennes with letterpress cover, we came upon an additional collector’s item created by Chris Marker—a set of 10 postcards re-visiting, from a cat’s perspective, the History of Art. The set is published by Peter Blum, curator of the recent extensive gallery show of Marker’s photographs and installations in New York, and offered for sale by Wexner.

While we haven’t seen the postcards yet, we can’t help but think of the virtual gallery tour of “Pictures at an Exhibition,” which also revisits the history of art from an irreverent digital bricoleur’s perspective. Marker’s productions ‘d’ocassion,’ such as these seem to be, each grow from the previous, with modified perspectives and end products—rhizomatically, as it were. The Museum, in the process, reappears in miniaturized and parodic form; the monolithic cultural storehouses of the past seem to receive and inexorably incorporate material from other time zones and other realities. On the level of production-scale, one can see once again the fruits of the ‘caméra-stylo,’ a further avenue of expression for the one-man, many-cats production team.

Chris Marker: how a grinning cat visits the History of Art – 10 Postcards
Chris Marker
Peter Blum Editions

Chris Marker’s trademark grinning yellow cat pops in to works of art by Goya, van Gogh, Picasso, and others in this set of ten postcards collected in a transparent envelope.

We also have a limited number of special signed editions for $60.

$20.00 | Member price: $18.00

Thanks to one of our readers for pointing out the screening, at the British Film Institute’s 53^rd London Film Festival (14—29 October 2009), of Loin de Vietnam [Far From Vietnam], the collaborative film contributed to and edited by Chris Marker in 1967. It is especially exciting to hear news of this film’s recent restoration by the Archives françaises du film du CNC together with SOFRACIMA. The restored film was screened at Cannes as well earlier this year.

As our correspondent aptly points out, while not explicitly credited as editor, Marker’s “fingerprints seem to be all over the film”. (As is often the case, Marker’s signature is more indelibly imprinted in his productions than his physical presence or official credits). He goes on to mention that “an announcement at the beginning of the screening stated that the Archives were using Loin Du Vietnam as a flagship restoration and would be restoring some of the lesser known works of the new wave directors and directors associated with the group. Might this possibly mean a new Marker restoration in the works? From what I could gather, it might be worthwhile to keep an eye out for possible restoration releases from the Archives.” Indeed.

Clive Jeavons writes on the BFI Festival site:

Films against war can never go out of fashion, and this revival of the (mostly) French ‘new wave’ directors’ collective protest against the Vietnam War in 1967, restored by the Archives Françaises du Film (CNC) in collaboration with SOFRACIMA, needs no excuses. A classic example of what documentary historian Erik Barnouw has called guerrilla filmmaking in its angry, violent denunciation of American aggression in Vietnam, the co-operative project brought together Agnès Varda, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, co-ordinated by Chris Marker, who mobilised 200 technicians, cameramen, editors and the like for more than four months to knit together imagery of the war, interviews, intellectual styles, fictional incursions and documentary footage in a bid to counter and interpret the intensive media coverage and propaganda manipulated by the American government. Necessarily dated and unwieldy though the film may now seem, it was a group film-making effort unique in the cinema’s history and remains a powerful and passionate plea for peace. William Klein summed it up thus: ‘How to make a ‘useful’ film? Fiction, agit-prop, documentary, what? We were never able to decide, but we had to do something.’ The film has been restored from the original reversal 16mm print and blown up to 35mm.

Wexner Center for the Arts continues to offer delights to Marker fans, most recently by offering an English translation of original text of Coréennes. This item, with letterpress cover and translation by Brian Holmes, ships with the purchase of the Korean version of the full book. It’s a companion piece, and bundled as such. For more information, go to the Chris Marker Store.

Available only with purchase of Coréennes. Colors distributed at random. Please contact shopweb@wexarts.org if you’ve purchaed the book without translation.

The text is an English translation of the French text originally appearing in Coréennes. Also included are an afterword and several notes written by Chris Marker in 1997.

Text provided by and used with the permission of Chris Marker
Translation: Brian Holmes

Cover printed by letter press at OSU Libraries’ Center for Book Arts, The Ohio State University, in an edition of 200. Designed by Erica Anderson.

This strange and poetic film, a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photo-montage, creates in its unique way a series of bizarre images of the inner landscapes of time. Apart from a brief three-second sequence—a young woman’s hesitant smile, a moment of extraordinary poignancy, like a fragment of a child’s dream—the thirty-minute film is composed entirely of still photographs. Yet this succession of disconnected images is a perfect means of projecting the quantified memories and movements through time that are the film’s subject matter.

The jetty of the title is the main observation platform at Orly Airport. The long pier reaches out across the concrete no man’s land, the departure-point for other worlds. Giant jets rest on the apron beside the pier, metallic ciphers whose streamlining is a code for their passage through time. The light is powdery. The spectators on the observation platform have the appearance of mannequins. The hero is a small boy, visiting the airport with his parents. Suddenly there is a fragmented glimpse of a man falling. An accident has occurred, but while everyone is running to the dead man the small boy is looking instead at the face of a young woman by the rail. Something about this face, its expression of anxiety, regret and relief, and above all the obvious but unstated involvement of the young woman with the dead man, creates an image of extraordinary power in the boy’s mind.

Years later, World War III breaks out. Paris is almost obliterated by an immense holocaust. A few survivors live in the circular galleries below the Palais de Chaillot, like rats in some sort of abandoned test-maze warped out of its normal time. The victors, distinguished by the strange eye-pieces they wear, begin to conduct a series of experiments on the survivors, among them the hero, now a man of about thirty. Faced with a destroyed world, the experimenters are hoping to send a man through time. They select the young man because of the powerful memory he carries of the pier at Orly. With luck he will hom eon to this. Other volunteers have gone insane, the but extraordinary strength of his memory carries him back to pre-war Paris. The sequence of images here is the most remarkable in the film, the subject lying in a hammock in the underground corridor as if waiting for some inward sun to rise, a bizarre surgical mask over his eyes—in my experience, the only convincing time travel in the whole of science fiction.

Arriving in Paris, he wanders amon the strange crowds, unable to make contact with anyone until he meets the young woman he had seen as a child at Orly Airport. They fall in love, but their relationship is marred by his sense of isolation in time, his awareness that he has committed some kind of psychological crime in pursuing this memory. As if trying to place himself in time, he takes the young woman to museums of paleontology, and they spend days among the fossil plants and animals. They visit Orly Airport, where he decides that he will not go back to the experimenters at Chaillot. At this moment three strange figures appear. Agents from an even more distant future, they are policing the time-ways, and have come to force him back. Rather than leave the young woman, he throws himself from the pier. The falling body is the one he glimpsed as a child.

This familiar theme is treated with remarkable finesse and imagination, its symbols and perspectives continually reinforcing the subject matter. Not once does it make use of the time-honoured conventions of traditional science fiction. Creating its own conventions from scratch, it triumphantly succeeds where science fiction invariably fails.

Transcribed from mat3i.tumblr.com

We received this thoughtful reprise of the “moment of happiness” in Sans Soleil via email today:

Cet été en Islande j’ai vu sur les îles vestmann une image qui m’a fait penser au premier plan de Sans Soleil. C’était un groupe de jeunes filles blondes + un petit garçon. J’ai pensé “c’est la même image”. Je viens de revisionner votre film et découvre que vous aviez tourné ce plan sur la même île, je ne me rappelais pas de ce détail. En visionnant ce plan de nouveau j’ai pensé : “on dirait que c’est au même endroit”. Peut-être est-ce les petits-enfants de vos enfants ?

Avec respect,
Bien à vous,
B.D.

Happy Birthday to Chris Marker, born this day July 29th in 1921. The old neighborhood of Ulan Bator just hasn’t been the same since you left, but we trust you are thriving in your Parisian arrondissement and enjoying a fabulous 88^th birthday. Bon anniversaire! The assorted cats and owls whose paths you have crossed and crisscrossed send their fond regards. Please add your best wishes in the comments. Let’s see how many wishes we can gather here!

«Ah ! le réseau ! (…), le réseau des réseaux, qui permettait de se brancher gratuitement sur n’importe quelle banque de données de la planète. Au temps préhistorique du Minitel, on utilisait des pseudo, ici, on pouvait emprunter des masques virtuels. Laura passait beaucoup de temps sur le réseau à la recherche de témoins et d’informateurs sur Okinawa, bien sûr, main comme sur tous les réseaux, on y faisait toutes sortes de rencontres. Il paraît même que les initiés arrivaient à se connecter sur le système nerveux de leur correspondant. Enfin, c’est ce qu’on disait…»

«Si un jour un ethnoloque du futur voit ces images, il en tirera des conslusions sur les rites funéraires de ces étranges peuplades de la fin du XX^o siècle. Je me ferais un plaisir de lui donner des détails. Oui, c’était une pratique courante chez ces peuplades de s’adresser à un esprit familier et protecteur qu’on appelait “computer” dans certaines tribus et “ordinateur” dans d’autres. On lui demandait son avis sur tout, on lui confiait sa mémoire. En fait, on n’avait plus de mémoire. Il était votre mémoire. Ça s’accompagnait de tout un rituel».

Chris Marker, Level Five, quoted Guy Gauthier, Chris Marker, écrivain multimédia ou Voyage à travers les médias, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2001, 176-178

We have just re-published Rainer J. Hanshe’s article, “The Crisis of Cognition: On Memory & Perception in Chris Marker’s The Hollow Men.” It is available here (as a page rather than a post). We would like to take this opportunity to thank Mr. Hanshe. The essay truly provides a wealth of inspired reflections, and it is an honor to be able to present this in-depth treatment of a more or less unknown and very recent work of Chris Marker’s. The article was originally published in the online journal Hyperion, Volume IV, issue 1, April 2009. Please refer to that publication for the definitive version, which contains the meticulously selected images that accompany the text.

Thanks to Tyler Beaman for pointing us to this growing archive of Chris Marker aka Sandor Krasna photography. No stranger to new media, Marker’s pseudonymous forays into social media sites are atypical not only of his generation, but several following ones. An artist of many media, an Eye with many names, a being of “unzeitgemäße Betrachtungen,” out of or beyond time yet always keenly in the present, he retains his inimitable interest in the conjunction of the human visage and the display of resistance to power that can still, at times, leave the screen-world and take to the streets. Check out the Sandor Krasna Flickr photostream at flickr.com.