Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

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)

Now available at The Wexner Center for the Arts’ Chris Marker online store, A Farewell to Movies | Abschied vom Kino, ed. Andres Janser, the catalog for the Chris Marker exhibition at Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, 2008. The catalog is 162 x 108 mm, 64 pages, 38 b/w ill., with texts in German and English.

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.