Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

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.

Thanks to Edo M for bringing these semi-precious gems of photographs by Chris Marker – who hit the streets on the occasion of the May 1st “celebration” in Paris – to our attention.

Et Chris Marker, le réalisateur du « Fond de l’air est rouge » et de « Chats perchés », ces deux films chargés d’histoire, de témoigner de cette obstination tranquille, de cette tension qui les tient, ces manifestants de l’an 09. Lui qui n’a cessé, depuis cet après-guerre pourtant salement noirci de luttes extrêmes jusqu’à ce début de millénaire désenchanté, à accompagner les mouvements sociaux, est à l’écoute—si tant est qu’un œil puisse être à l’écoute ! Observant comme nul autre la présence de jeunes, de femmes et de familles, hors des classiques bataillons syndicaux du 1er Mai, eux aussi mobilisés. Et si certains affichent un « Rêve générale », celui-ci, sous l’effet de la politique sarkozyste, vire au cauchemar généralisé…
annick rivoire, poptronics

Edo M also sent us something unbelievably special. Chasseur du maître-chasseur. Knowing the master’s predilection for staying behind the camera, it was a tough call, but here’s the link: www.arpla.fr. Scroll down to the bottom to see the photo and video: Vidéo (un plan de 73 secondes) faite avec un appareil photographique par Jean-Louis Boissier.

Given the immediacy of the gaze throughout Marker’s photographic work, we are reminded of a passage of his in A Farewell to Movies:

Reactions of people photographed or filmed outdoors are rarely hostile, but almost never natural. Either they cringe, be it in a wink, or they hide their camera-consciousness by overreacting. My dream was to be able to catch them as I did animals, in pure naturalezza. A new toy allowed me to try it: the Casio wrist camera. You ostensibly check the time, and the person in front of you is caught. That small apparatus immediately triggered the title I would give to the experiment: What time is she? (I’ve got an unfashionable tendency to prefer women in my lens). Then I carried on with different devices, but I kept the title.

Marker’s referenced photo series, “Qu’elle heure est-elle?” – which obviously loses time in the translation – is currently showing at the Peter Blum Gallery in New York, May 16 2009—July 31 2009.

Source: www.poptronics.fr. Thanks for enabling object embedding!

Thanks to Eupalinos Ugajin (an SL cipher we have yet to decipher) of webknot.net for publishing a saved chat of Chris Marker’s recent tour of Ouvroir in Second Life. The blog post is called “Chris Marker (Sergei Murasaki) présente son exposition dans l’Ouvroir” and provides a window onto the avatour recently hosted by the Harvard Film Archive. Marker, in the guise of Sergei Murasaki – montage that quickens the heart – touches on Tarkovsky, the La Jetée bar in Tokyo, his Staring Back photos of the trees at the Place de la République, the origin of the Petite Planète book series, Simone Signoret and much more. There are some classic one-liners, such as: “Memory was given to man for lying;” “Memory is made to tell fairy tales;” “She came to my place and looked interested” (on LEILA); “As if the God HE believed in had driven me to leave a testimony” (on Tarkovsky); and of course the quote in the title of this post. When asked about Guillaume, he replies “that, my dear, would take a whole evening.” On the possibility of a Second Life film, which is a tempting one no doubt, he comments: “I have already lots of rushes on my trips in SL what I need is again an extra life to work on them.” A third life, as Marker / Murasaki calls it…

View the full post here: “Chris Marker (Sergei Murasaki) présente son exposition dans l’Ouvroir” : Mai 17th, 2009 by Webknot

And we too tried to be no nearer
In “death’s dream kingdom”
Under our disguises
Cat’s coat, owlskin, and the rest
Behaving as cats behave
No nearer
Chris Marker, A Farewell to Movies, 35

I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, that is easy to pronounce in most languages because I intended to travel. You need search no further than that.
Sergei Murasaki

An interview conducted within Second Life, through the mediation of avatars and the conversational interface of textual chat. Folds within folds. This inter-face, playful subversion of the tête-à-tête, causing an aleatory truncation of discourse: la cristallisation presque instantanée d’une pensée infiniment alerte et malicieuse.*

Le Baroque ne renvoie pas à une essence, mais plutôt à une fonction opératoire, à un trait. Il ne cesse de faire des plis. Il n’invente pas la chose: il y tous les plis venus d’Orient, les plis grecs, romains, gothiques, classiques… Mais il courbe et recourbe les plis, les pousse à l’infini, pli sur pli, pli selon pli. [Gilles Deleuze, Le Pli: Leibniz et le baroque, Paris: Minuit, 1988].

Adorno stated exactly this about the essay form: It starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say. Both with and against the baroque comes Marker’s insistent dismissal of complication: the interviewers’ presumptions returned as small darts, and an artisan occupational designation as bricoleur. Je m’en tiens au bricolage, avec ce qu’il y a d’honorable dans l’artisanat. Miniaturization of product in Leila Attacks: the masterpiece as cinéma mineur. Epic poems reduced to haiku. The relation of the essay film to craft, seen too in Farocki’s elegies to the artisan, coded with the melancholy of the loss of craft in the desertified Real (“RL”) and its return in a minor mode of filmmaking. The essay relieves thought of the systematic and replaces abstraction with the concrete feel, taste and smell of materials placed next to each other with care, “cobbled” together. In this manner, a break is rendered possible: a break with the insane means of production of the cinéma majeur. An unheralded yet profound sensation of triumph that one is, finally, able to successfully write and distribute the “caméra-stylo.”

Pouvoir faire tout un film, Chats perchés (2004), avec mes dix doigts, sans aucun appui ni intervention extérieurs… Et ensuite aller vendre moi-même le DVD que j’ai enregistré à la braderie de Saint-Blaise… Là j’avoue que j’ai eu un sentiment de triomphe : du producteur au consommateur, direct. Pas de plus-value. J’avais accompli le rêve de Marx.”

To be able to make a whole film, The Case of the Grinning Cat [2004], with my own ten fingers, without any external support or intervention . . . and to then go sell the DVDs I’d burned myself at the Saint-Blaise market . . . I confess, I felt triumphant. From producer to consumer, directly. No surplus value. Marx’s dream come true.

* Original SL entretiens with lesinrocks.com available here. Translation by Dorna Khazeni for Criterion.com.