Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

This piece is one of two by a certain “Kosinki.” On closer look, Kosinki is the channel (which you can subscribe to) and Guillaume is the user (age: 40; country: France). The other is called LEILA ATTACKS, and it rocks. In both, obviously, Marker’s senses of humor and composition are alive and well.

LEILA ATTACKS is at once a parody of the faux gigantism of blockbuster PR and a morality tale (it’s tempting to say allegory) of a surprising turnabout in power relations. It is not without self-parody either, as one of the Soviet-meets-grunge style opening titles declares Chris Marker “the best-known author of unknown movies.”

It seems Marker’s “farewell to movies” lingers on, ever more whimsical, practically aphoristic. Could the aphorism film be the heir, within the very personal and web-disseminated form of a cinéma mineure, to the essay film?

It’s an off week in the waning era of imperfect memory. So in weak association to the spiral trope in Chris Marker’s vision of time, we offer you a link to spiral images on a site dedicated exclusively to . . . stairs: Justin Anthony’s www.stairporn.org/spiral_stairs/

Hotel Josef in Prague

Sans Soleil Spirals

He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory—insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.

He had driven up and down the hills of San Francisco where Jimmy Stewart, Scotty, follows Kim Novak, Madeline. It seems to be a question of trailing, of enigma, of murder, but in truth it’s a question of power and freedom, of melancholy and dazzlement, so carefully coded within the spiral that you could miss it, and not discover immediately that this vertigo of space in reality stands for the vertigo of time.

He had followed all the trails. Even to the cemetery at Mission Dolores where Madeline came to pray at the grave of a woman long since dead, whom she should not have known. He followed Madeline—as Scotty had done—to the Museum at the Legion of Honor, before the portrait of a dead woman she should not have known. And on the portrait, as in Madeline’s hair, the spiral of time.

And then in its turn the journey entered the ‘zone,’ and Hayao showed me my images already affected by the moss of time, freed of the lie that had prolonged the existence of those moments swallowed by the spiral.

PS: Here’s another tidbit on the 50th anniversary celebration of Vertigo held recently last month in San Francisco: sfcitizen.com.

Texts courtesy of markertext.com. Photo of Hotel Josef in Prague courtesy of stairporn.org. Thanks to our photographer and feline-loving friend mica for the spiral staircase link. For more on sacred geometry, here’s a jump start.

My constant comings and goings are not a search for contrasts; they are a journey to the two extreme poles of survival.
– Sans Soleil

Wandering about the web jump-started by my daily Google Alert that had done its little job of combing the blogosphere for newly birthed Chris Marker reflections, I found a LiveJournal entry by a certain Clifford that just sort of summed up, elliptical and on the mark, that ineffable, je ne sais quoi quality of the essay film, the signature of the “editor of ideas.”

I’ve mentioned this before, but this is something that is very important when you are making a film…there is only one rule to the best kind of filmmaking: what you think you see and hear is not really the thing you see and hear. It’s most clearly that image from the magic trick–the magician says, hey, I will make this disappear, it disappears, and then I will make it return, and then it returns. This trick never fails to wow someone who is watching a film. But it is ambitious of Marker to do this every time…he is a fantastic editor of ideas…like the shots of the dying Giraffe that pop up well before it arrives at that topic, a subliminal inkling of what Marker achieves….

Read the whole entry, which is short and worth it and also delves into Alan Moore and an inkling of the future of what Foucault calls "le panoptisme," here.

The picaresque might be seen as a gathering of impressions by wandering, an itinerant or even nomadic mode of assembling images and sounds, experiences and ideas. It is there at the birth of the novel, in Don Quixote and on through Tristam Shandy or On the Road, mutating in film into the road movie (Easy Rider and much of Wim Wenders) and the essay film as exemplified by Sans Soleil (though the elided “hero” of the latter is admittedly far from the rogue that typically defines the genre). It is there in the meandering brilliance of Montaigne’s Essais. In truth, its origins lie much further back, in Homer, Virgil and Dante. Nel mezzo del camin, di nostra vita, mi ritrovai per una selva oscura, che la diritta via era smarrita. Sounds like a wandering rogue to me…

Panoptism is the apparatus of centralized control, where the Eye of Mordor looks out along all vectors for transgressions in the cells of circular prisons. It is an architecture and a technology of control, the institutional and strategic mode of over-sight.

It is also, on the level of personal filmmaking – whose full flowering emerges in Marker and full banality in YouTube – there in tactical mode in the editor’s station, where all the gathered images are assembled, ordered, juxtaposed, compressed, engaged in dialogue. Some are thrown in the virtual trash can; others live on an unsung life in the archive; others emerge into the light of day of a final edit. When too many come to light, nothing is seen at all anymore; a kind of post-optical blindness ensues. The caméra-stylo represents, among other things, a tactical move to take the picaresque recording series through the personal panopticon, transforming it in the process into an anti-prison, the reverse of the Jeremy Benthem’s ahrimanic invention. Clifford again:

That against the panoply of vision, this barrage of watching he will be able to extract something not there, something that is concealed with futurity.

People have wondered in recent weeks about the source of the runaway box office success of the new Batman movie Dark Knight. Strange how this Knight uses a panopticon-inspired technology to find a needle in a haystack, rather than gather data on all civilians per se, and uses it only to destroy it. It may be a weak critique of the Bush-era stripping of civil rights (mired, as many Hollywood productions that take on the evil eschatology of technology by using those same means of technology, in a spiraling contradiction) through surveillance, and it may not be in any way related to the fascination this movie has produced, but it remains interesting to reflect on the fact that millions upon millions of viewers have seen the panopticon in its 21st century incarnation, and seen it destroyed ensuite, for all the right reasons.

On August 9, 2008 at 11:30am at the Roda Theatre in Berkeley, Chris Marker’s 1960 essay film / documentary about Israel, Description of a Struggle, will be screened as part of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival. It is being shown in conjunction with an homage documentary entitled Description of a Memory directed by Dan Geva. Quoted descriptions for both from the SFJFF website are below. Thanks to Adrian Chan of Gravity 7 for the heads-up.

Description of a Struggle

A young boy joyfully rides a pushcart down the hilly streets of Haifa, a humped camel crosses a street, and an innocent girl paints an unseen picture in what may best represent the emergence of a new country and its unknown future. These are the arresting images captured by internationally acclaimed filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jetée, Sans Soleil) in his 1961 travels to Israel. Winner of the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival, Marker’s remarkable documentary thoroughly examined, critiqued and predicted the newly created state’s past, present and future. Striking in the beauty of its images, ranging from the vastness of the desert landscape and the tranquility of the sea to the hubris of Tel Aviv, Description of a Struggle allows a rare and memorable glance at an Israel in the making.

sfjff.org

Description of a Memory

Nearly 50 years after Chris Marker’s landmark 1961 documentary about Israel, Description of a Struggle, Dan Geva’s film engages with and pays tribute to its progenitor. Clearly Marker’s film left a lasting impression on the Israeli-born Geva, who uses images from the original film as a springboard to uncovering the many changes that have taken place in the physical and political landscapes of Israel and in its inhabitants. Attempting to answer questions originally raised by Marker, Geva tracks down some of the people featured in Marker’s film (what did happen to that young girl at the easel?), with surprising and emotionally complex results. Description of a Memory is an intimate portrait of the nature of change in a multifaceted land where history and memories intertwine to create an odyssey both personal and universal.

sfjff.org
Be sure to check out the trailer, which shows the author studying Marker’s earlier film on a screen within the screen.

I have no memory of the first time I saw your film. To recall the beginning, I’ll have to rewind to the moment before it all began.

Combat Intérieur

Marker’s commentary opens by posing, insightfullly, prophetically, the problematic of an ultimate (and unfilmable?) struggle (”…perhaps the only decisive one”): le combat intérieur:

Nation élue, nation errante, nation matyre, nation ressuscitée, Israël a connu le combat sous toutes ses formes.

Il en découvre aujourd’hui une nouvelle — le combat qu’un jeune État plein de forces doit mener contre lui-même pour rester fidèle, dans la victoire, à ce qui fut sa gloire dans l’oppression.

Sous les images de la vie quotidienne en Israël, se livre à chaque instant ce combat intérieur, moins apparent que celui des armes, et peut-être le seul décisif.

Chris Marker, Commentaires 1. Paris: Éditions du seuil, 1961, 116.

Rough Translation

Chosen nation, wandering nation, martyred nation, revived nation, Israel has know struggle in all its forms.

It is discovering a new one today - the struggle that a powerful young state must engage in with itself in order to remain faithful, in victory, to that which was its glory in oppression.

Beneath the images of daily life in Israel, this interior struggle – less apparent than that of armaments, and perhaps the only decisive one – reveals itself in each moment.

Musing on a gem

For me, this priceless gem of a video (a lightly edited recording leaning, like a cat’s paw on a keyboard, on the playback of another recording) takes us, as the image of the three children in Iceland that commences Sans Soleil, into another moment of happiness, or more than a moment – a lazy, timeless dream-stretch of happiness. Happiness here is stretched out over the length of a treasured song, the unclockable duration of a catnap, the extent without end of a loving gaze that could go on forever and yet is somehow captured in time. Time is marked by the pulsing of the lights, the periodic twitching of Guillaume-en-Egypte’s ears during particular sonic surges, the languid shifting of position, the stretching of a paw in a miniature feline yoga. Whereas the children in Iceland were placed at the beginning of a film to represent happiness, a happiness both eclipsed and preserved by the blackness that follows, this piece is placed as the entr’acte in a film about filmmaking, creativity truncated on all sides by the State and a man who once-upon-a-time made a film called Happiness. It is an intermission as détente, but one during which you won’t want to leave your seat. It is nested, an homage within an homage, in the eye of the storm. It is a light step taken out of history and into memory, where time loses its linearity and events dissolve into dreamtime. It is the record of two beings in absolute accord with each other.

History of a gem

The video [Chat écoutant la musique] is actually one of three parts to a ten-minute video anthology called Bestiaire. I haven’t seen the other two segments that follow this one. The middle piece deals with owls (cats with wings) and the final bit apparently shows animals in a zoo, gradually revealing their sad situation. Bestiaire itself was used by Marker as part of a larger video installation piece called Zapping Zone (Proposals for an Imaginary Television), in which Bestiaire and many other short video pieces (including excerpts from Marker’s longer films) played simultaneously on various TV screens stationed throughout the Pompidou Center. ZZ was mounted in 1990, and I believe Bestiaire was compiled in 1988. I’ve seen various resources cite the taping of this particular segment as taking place in 1985. […] I took the video from the European DVD for Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (1992), which uses the three minutes as an intermission [Entr’acte], of sorts, between the feature’s two halves.

cansesclasseled.com

Far from Vietnam Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda (France, 1967).
Rarely shown in its entirety, Far from Vietnam is a unique collaboration by seven noted directors that, incredibly, looks like a unified work. Much of the credit for this goes to Chris Marker, who put it all together. But there was also a team spirit created by the situation in Vietnam that led the artists to want to speak out, directly and boldly, in a group work. Resnais: “Far from Vietnam is a film of question marks, of questions we ask ourselves as often perhaps as you. It’s for that reason that we put them on the screen: after all, it is as natural for filmmakers to speak on a white canvas as in a cafe.” Klein: “On the corner of 42nd Street and 8th Avenue in New York, a guy is reciting a poem consisting of the syllables na-palm. And no one knows what napalm is. It showed me how blind people become to something they hear referred to all day long. So, we decided to do something a little like Picasso confronted by the bombing of Guernica.” The result is a provocative treatment of footage shot in Vietnam, France, the U.S., and Cuba.

Commentary by Jean Lecouture. (120 mins, In French with English subtitles, B&W/Color, 35mm)

Back to that balcony at the Place de la République where all huge demonstrations have always started or ended. I manage to frame again the top portion of my old photograph. In between I have been in Japan, Korea, Bolivia, Chile. I have filmed students in Guinea-Bisseau, medics in Kosovo, Bosnian refugees, Brazilian activists, animals everywhere. I covered the first free elections in East Germany after the fall of the Wall, and I sniffed the first moments of perestroika in Moscow, when people weren’t afraid to talk to each other anymore. I traded film for video and video for the computer. In the middle, on the balcony, the tree has grown, just a little.

Within these few inches, forty years of my life.

Chris Marker, Staring Back, 43.

They walk. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates.

Ils marchent. Ils s’arrêtent devant une coupe de sequoia couverte de dates historiques.

Chris Marker, La Jétee ciné-roman.
…

The small Victorian hotel where Madeline disappeared had disappeared itself; concrete had replaced it, at the corner of Eddy and Gough. On the other hand the sequoia cut was still in Muir Woods. On it Madeline traced the short distance between two of those concentric lines that measured the age of the tree and said, “Here I was born… and here I died.”

He remembered another film in which this passage was quoted. The sequoia was the one in the Jardin des plantes in Paris, and the hand pointed to a place outside the tree, outside of time.

Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, markertext.com.

We received a thoughtful note from Don Livoni @ fogblog regarding his recent discovery of Chris Marker. Crafting a haunting film from stills is a discovery that evidently can be made without prior knowledge of La Jetée. It’s a bit like Leibniz and Newton, albeit with a time “differential,” if you like ;). While Mr. Livoni’s films (for example, “Rosie’s Girls” and “DNYK Dreamer”) evoke La Jetée by the skillful sequencing of stills, they also display a stunning sense of chromatic hypersensitivity and palimpsest layering. Meanwhile, the site’s motto – it is without sun, it is memory – aptly summons the spirit of Sans Soleil. Here’s a bit of the note we received, a brief homage to Chris Marker’s sensibilities by a new-found fan:

i love his sense of wonder at what the camera sees and what we remember. i so admire the enigmatic intellect of the narrations, the beauty of the images and the sound juxtaposition, the economy of the technique. it’s all so personal and masterful, mysterious yet historically mindful. i’m looking forward to “discovering” more of his work.

If that were not enough, fogblog presents a stunning set of faux High-Renaissance portraits of (in large part) aristoc(r)atic felines: “L’Histoire des Grands Chats—Religious Leaders, generals, courtesans and clowns” which would no doubt offer a pleasing Sunday afternoon virtual museum expedition for M. Marker himself.

A finely crafted film by the unique film-poet, Chris Marker, The Loneliness Of A Long-Distance Singer aims to convey two aspects of the actor/singer Yves Montand: his political conviction and his artistic integrity. In February 1974, Montand agreed to prepare in one week a performance of some of his best-known songs for the benefit of the Chilean refugees after Allende’s overthrow. In this remarkable film, we see the anxious tension, the moments of relaxation, everything which went into his polished appearance on the stage at the Olympia in Paris. The skillful cuts back and forth between the final performance and the rehearsals the week before allow us to see how carefully the show is put together by Montand. He tests every gesture, goes over and over every rhythm change. His accompanist and friend, Bob Castella, emerges as a warm, appealing personality, who in one excellent scene must stand up to Montand’s explosive anger when there is a discrepancy between the music and the words. As we continue to be entertained by Montand’s virtuoso singing, we are led by Chris Marker into a deeper understanding of the man. Montand talks about politics, about women; we get film clips from some of his best roles (La Guerre Est Finie, Z, The Confession, and so on). In the end, we understand Montand when he says: “I sing today so that we don’t forget the blood of yesterday.”

Directed by Chris Marker. (1974, 60 mins, color, English titles, Print from Icarus Films)