Chris Marker,
Immemory: Gutenberg Version
(Exact Change, 2025)

When film critic Raymond Bellour first encountered Chris Marker (then 42 years old) in 1963, the filmmaker-writer-designer suddenly stopped, midway down a flight of stairs, gripped the young man’s arms, and demanded: “Don’t ever write a book about me, OK?” (Bellour kept that pledge, even beyond Marker’s death in 2012.)

Immemory, first released as an interactive CD-ROM in 1997, is thus not Marker’s autobiography, no grand monument to himself: in its rich florilège of written, visual, and audio materials, it is an invitation to anybody to shape the narrative of their life through a similar spread of memories, impressions, sensations and traces. An auto-portrait (as the French say) that may be very personally revealing, but is not, for all that, self-centred.

I once spent many hours, downstairs in a Melbourne art gallery, working my way through Immemory in its initial, digital, slightly clunky form. But the technology that seemed so democratic and Utopian to many of us in the late 1990s was soon bedevilled by dastardly planned obsolescence and incessant software upgrades.

A fascinating reflection from my old friend Guillaume Ollendorff on the format and experience of the original Immemory can be found here.

Immemory survived in Flash form on a website, and as a CD-ROM until 2008, But Marker, by then, already envisaged a ‘Gutenberg’ (i.e., printed book) version, a “brand new object”.

Today, thanks to the intrepid publishers at Exact Change, this object exists – and what a rich, wondrous trove of treasure it is. The book’s design and organisation aim to convey the poetic, associative logic of Marker’s original ‘architecture’.

The result is not (at its maker’s stern insistence) a “Marker Encyclopedia” – but, at 454 pages, it comes pretty close.

Every Marker fan needs a copy of this gorgeous, endlessly fascinating book.

© Adrian Martin 9 October 2025