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Chris Marker:
Notes in the |
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In the spirit of montage, I begin this piece with the juxtaposition of two commentaries from the same historical moment on the filmmaker Chris Marker [1921-2012] – commentaries that are so different that they seem to inhabit two, incommensurable worlds. In the high-selling, much-admired (why?) book Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time (Picador, 2007), the cosmopolitan, Australian-born novelist-essayist-TV personality Clive James devotes a hundred critical essays (arranged alphabetically) to significant artists, thinkers and scientists of the 20th century. Chris Marker makes the cut. James makes a valuable historical observation: that “some of the young writers who would later earn a crust in British television” were influenced by Marker’s documentary-essays of the late 1950s and early ‘60s, such as Letter from Siberia (1957) and Cuba Si! (1961). But, after that point, things turn bad for Marker. In James’ view, Marker’s “atmospherics tend to the specious and the arguments to the fraudulent”. La Jetée (1962) provides the final, damning proof for James that by “the early 1960s, the bulk of his most vital work was already behind him”. That film was his “premature epitaph”, but James allows that “the lasting strength of his influence demands that attention be paid to his later showpiece Sans soleil (Sunless, 1982)” – although he himself pays no attention to it whatsoever. The rest of James’ chapter on Marker is devoted – in an essayistic swerve no doubt inspired and authorised by the films themselves – to Australia’s refugee crisis (the notorious Tampa incident) of 2001. He comes back to his nominal subject only at the end, to make the damning, Bernard-Henri Lévy-style observation – a key, recurring theme of his book – that in the late ‘50s, “a man as intelligent as Chris Marker could still feel that there might be such a thing as a totalitarian answer to the world’s miseries”. Marker is truly a man of the past in this account: James notes that although, on the evidence of Sans soleil, he was “already born for the Internet”, he had “arrived in the world of information a few decades too early”. Cut to Les Inrockuptibles, a weekly French guide to all things pop culture, and a breezy mix of intellectual sophistication and fashionable trendspotting. In April 2008, the magazine offered (in print and on-line) a glimpse into the literal second life of Marker (at age 87) as a multi-media artist: an interview arranged by him in the virtual world of Second Life, with him as the avatar Sergei Murasaki and his two interlocuters as Iggy Atlas, taking place on the imaginary island of Ouvrior. Accompanying this lively exchange is a digitally animated ‘guided tour’ by Guillaume-en-Egypte (Marker’s alter ego) to the exhibition A Farewell to Movies held at the Design Museum in Zurich during 2008. James’ epitaph dated to 1962 was, clearly, a premature burial. Marker – despite his taste for privacy and anonymity – has never been more present in global culture. As of mid-2008, two respectful studies (by Nora Alter and Catherine Lupton) have appeared from university presses, alongside a steady stream of thoughtful appreciations in journals, magazines and online; the handsome ciné-roman of La Jetée (a film from which, according to James, “everything is absent including him”) has been reprinted, at the same time as a stunning new collection of reworked photographs, Staring Back; his dramatic installation from 2005, Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, continues to tour the world, from US to Australia to Zurich; occasional texts written by him appear. [2024: The publication list has since expanded to two Marker essay compilations translated to English.] At last, the back catalogue of his career is becoming available on DVD, from the collective works of Les Groupes Medvedkine (“To film the photos, texts, demos, moments of our life, because … film is a weapon!”, shouts the cover of this superb Editions Montparnasse release) to the generous cascade of The Last Bolshevik (1993), The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), The Sixth Side of the Pentagon (1967), Remembrance of Things to Come (2001), One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999), and A Grin Without a Cat (1977) from First Run/Icarus Films in USA. And then there are the projects to come, such as a rumoured epic-in-progress for the Pompidou Centre to rival Jean-Luc Godard’s Histoire(s) du cinéma … [2024: for a discussion of the subsequent and posthumous fate of Marker’s works and archive beyond 2008, see here.] Nonetheless, for all this visibility, Marker’s essay-films invariably pose a problem for their commentators. To put it bluntly: what can you say about an essay-film that it doesn’t already say about itself? Marker fans dutifully slog through analyses that rehearse the themes of time and memory, the personal and the political, travel and globalisation, in words that are usually far more prosaic than those composed by Marker himself for his soundtrack narrations. It is tough work for most academic writers to match the effects of lyricism and epiphany – such as the ending of Andrei Arsenevich, with its evocation of Tarkovsky’s career unfolding “between two children and two trees”, a reference to the first shot of Ivan’s Childhood (1962) and the last shot of The Sacrifice (1985) – that structure Marker’s works. Worse still, films that are so eloquent about their own intentions, effects and meanings run the risk of seeming, in a way, superficial – lacking that dimension of a hidden, inner logic which it is, traditionally, the role of criticism to find and elucidate. This is why, I suspect, even though Marker is so widely regarded today, his films rarely make it to the canonical Best of All Time lists. [2024 note: The widely publicised Sight and Sound poll of 2022 proved me wrong, twice – both Sans soleil and La Jetée made into the top 70.] For their part, the irritated critiques of Marker – and of the Marker cult or mystique – also tend to miss the mark. Clive James’ odd caricature of Marker as the Last Marxist, trying to ward off the coming disenchantments of history with comforting ideological delusion, cannot wash with any sensitive spectator who has seen the profoundly self-aware and self-critical A Grin Without a Cat, an account of the fate of many social revolutions in the decade following 1968. More intriguingly, in a Film Comment review of Staring Back published in 2007 (the uncut version is here), essayist-critic-novelist Phillip Lopate raises another set of questions. With all due reverence, I – to be honest – sometimes wonder whether there is not something coy and self-indulgent in the private mythology Marker has been spinning over the years: his grinning cats, his owls, Guillaume-en-Egypte, his female assistants … And the somewhat loose hermetic nature of his pronouncements frustrate the essayist in me, who would prefer that he grapple with what he seems to mean and wrest as much clear understanding as can be had. It strikes me as peculiar that our greatest essay-filmmaker should traffic so willingly in the enigmatic, the borderline-sentimental, and the faux-naïve. Are we almost back to James’ charge of “specious atmospherics and fraudulent arguments” here? Not quite; Lopate happily admits that Marker is “one of the most important filmmakers in the history of cinema”. But he twists the critical knife further when he adds the following. What also disturbs me is that those who have personal access to the Master, through e-mail correspondence and personal visits, have set up such a fond protection wall around him against critical judgment, accepting everything that emanates from him as a kind of indivisible pre-posthumous miracle, that it inhibits the making of distinctions about his stronger and weaker expressions. Pre-posthumous is a little rough on a filmmaker who remains so active and chameleon-like; nonetheless, Lopate’s cautionary remarks should indeed push his devotees to a higher degree of precision in praise of his work. The Case of the Grinning Cat offers an intriguing litmus test. Digital video footage of street demonstrations in Paris during the early years of the 21st century alternates with an investigation into the origins of an odd figure appearing in the colorful graffiti on local walls and surfaces: a joyful ‘Mr Cat’. It is, at first blush, among the more whimsical and cutesy of Marker’s documentary-essays: again (to check off Lopate’s list) there are the ubiquitous feline creatures (real and drawn), the freeze-frames on striking-looking women in the crowds, Guillaume on the front cover of the DVD arm in arm with Mr Cat … But there is more to this disarming, not-quite-hour-long piece. It resonates with the history of Marker’s output. For instance, in the brief installments of the Cinétracts series made collectively during the events of 1968, it is easy to tell which of them Marker oversaw (and even easier to distinguish them from Godard’s strident contributions) when a flurry of images – mixing up real people and figures drawn on posters – is pulled together by an intertitle: “Strange creatures began to appear … ”. More profoundly, The Case of the Grinning Cat is a new-century response to A Grin Without a Cat, less spectacular and less loaded with explicit political ideology; but optimistic where the latter is pessimistic, enchanted where the latter is disenchanted. With the novelistic flair that made Marker famous (as far back as, in fact, his 1949 novel Le Cœur net, translated into English as The Forthright Spirit), The Case of the Grinning Cat threads his personal and creative obsessions into the unfolding events of his time: the disappearance of a homeless person’s well-known cat in the subway spells impending doom, while the apparition of Mr Cat amidst street protest banners signals a new hope, a new spirit of resistance for a generation that continues the work (perhaps without knowing it) of the ‘60s … Paradoxically, what makes Marker’s work hard to speak about it is precisely its simplicity. His most brilliant French commentators of the ‘50s had already articulated the elementary but hard-to-wrangle fact that his films reduce the cinematic medium to the relation between images and spoken words: Cahiers du cinéma’s André Bazin coined the term horizontal montage in 1958 to track those meanings that move “from ear to eye”, while Positif’s Roger Tailleur (whose 1963 classic “Markeriana” can be found translated here) posited a more dialectical, transformative, surrealist play between pictures and sounds. Almost four decades later, Remembrance of Things to Come returns, strikingly, to the form of La Jetée: only the three elements in play of still photos, voice-over commentary, and music (frequently of a discreet, ambient variety in Marker). But, even when the images are in movement and the montage of image-types more elaborate, there is still, usually, a relatively straightforward formal mechanism that lays out its moves and procedures very clearly for the viewer to see and experience (a point made eloquently by Jean-Pierre Gorin on the bonus materials of Criterion’s DVD of La Jetée paired with Sans soleil). Pressed to define his vocation in the Inrockuptibles interview, Marker agrees to label himself as a “multimedia bricoleur” – bearing in mind that, in French, bricolage has an everyday, handyman connotation, rather than the theoretical gloss it has gained in Anglo-American cultural studies; then again, moving as he once did, in a highly coherent and cross-referencing way, between writing, book design, still photography and filmmaking in the ‘50s, Marker was multimedia way avant la lettre. Marker, again in Inrockuptibles, speaks of the technological side of this simplicity; here is how he responds to the question, “Have the new technologies changed in some way your relation to images, to sounds, to what you make?” Definitely. To be able to make a film, The Case of the Grinning Cat, with my own ten fingers, without any support or outside help … and then to go sell the DVD myself at the Saint-Blaise flea market … right there, I admit to a feeling of triumph: direct from producer to consumer. No surplus value. I have fulfilled Marx’s dream. The reference to those “ten fingers”, however, indicates a special aspect of Marker’s work, increasingly prominent since the inaugural ‘retrospective’ films Grin Without a Cat and Sunless, and especially the CD-ROM Immemory (1997): Marker has become someone who sifts and treats the images and sounds he has gathered over a long lifetime – 87 years is, after all, serious history as the Australian critic Ross Gibson remarked – at his computer. Exactly like Godard in the Histoire(s) series and its many spin-offs, Marker mixes almost home movie-like documents captured with his video camera (interviews, conversations, street reportage) with perpetual remixes from his vast personal archive of moving and still images, spoken and musical sounds. Sometimes a slightly more elaborated and staged framing context is required – like the scenes of Catherine Belkhodja narrating to camera in Level Five (1996) – but finally it will all come back to that species of montage-tinkering, word against image, which is immortalised in the scene of The Last Bolshevik juxtaposing a tale of historical crisis with sampled old footage of a train on a collision course with some hapless individual. In one of his rare interviews in recent decades, Marker expresses his fondness for the work of another border-crossing essayist-filmmaker, Argentine-born Edgardo Cozarinsky [1939-2024], specifically the 2001 story collection, The Bride from Odessa. In Marker and Cozarinksy (whose films include One Man’s War [1982] and Citizen Langlois [1994]), we find a very similar conception of what it means to represent, and comment upon, history – in both its social and personal forms. And, in particular, what it means to fashion a narration, in the broadest sense of the term, from the scattered, archival materials of history: a story, anecdote, vignette, telling connection, or surprising epiphany. Cozarinsky’s story “Christmas ‘54” puts this well. This story has no plot, other than that of History itself. It is barely more than the impression left by an instant, a spark produced by two very different surfaces rubbing together. Marker and Cozarinsky may love the grand traditions of storytelling – from classic Hollywood melodrama to contemporary serial television – but, in their own works, they shy away from full-blooded fiction, and usually prefer to dwell (like Gorin or Harun Farocki [1944-2014]) amidst the many possibilities of the loose essay-documentary form. Sticking close to the facts and traces of history – which they happily embroider with myriad imaginative speculations, metaphors and puns – they require only the merest spark of a fictional intrigue: a chance encounter, a momentary crossing of two life-trajectories, a street poster glimpsed, a song overheard … Both filmmakers hold, in this sense, to what the Argentine theatre creator Vivi Tellas (with whom Cozarinsky collaborated) calls the Minimal Threshold of Fiction, a condition most suitable to the interweaving of fact and fancy, autobiography and narration. Another story by Cozarinsky, “Days of 1937”, presents the tale of its central character’s curious death as a secret allegory of the art of turning history into a narration or essay. At its conclusion, it conjures the possibility that something comes into being, at the moment of a person’s ‘passing over’ to the other side. … like islands floating in a nighttime sea, fragments of awareness, memories, voices and images, remnants of the gradually dimming existence, temporary baggage the traveller clings onto for a brief but imprecise length of time that our instruments cannot register. […] Perhaps all that clings to [those islands] is flotsam from a shipwreck. It would be useless to expect that these scraps, which crumble even as we name them, could provide us with a portrait of the person crossing the divide. Perhaps it is only precisely as shards that they can catch the attention of any improbable observer who stumbles across them: their condition as brief fragments of a truncated story, the random pieces of a jigsaw that will never now be completed. In this allegory, the historian-storyteller is the “improbable observer” who tries to pull together the mute, often seemingly meaningless traces of the past. Marker’s powerful installation The Hollow Men – revisiting the historical life-span that begins (as Raymond Bellour reminds us) with the First World War that profoundly touched the artist’s childhood, with T.S. Eliot’s poem, suitably fragmented, as an aid – throws up deliberately ‘corrupted’ documents, undated and unidentified, that are endlessly reshuffled in the digitally programmed combinatory system (as usual, it’s the simplest computer technology available) of the piece. One feels while watching it – in an appropriately darkened space and with Toru Takemitsu’s “Corona” for piano echoing loudly – that anything, grabbed from any time or place, could be made to signify World War I in this work. And, conversely, that all the time-bound signs of this terrible event stand a chance of being freed into our present-day cyber-ether. It’s the same spirit of imaginative liberty which, in the mode of everyday whimsy, emanates from one of Marker’s loveliest video shorts, Cat Listening to Music (positioned as an unlikely ‘intermission’ mid-way through The Last Bolshevik): critic and video artist Jean-André Fieschi called the starring creature here precisely a “montage-cat”, because of the playful way its discontinuous gestures are turned into a tiny fiction, a dance of cause and effect, by the editing in time to Federico Mompou’s gentle electric piano music. And it’s across these two works, The Hollow Men and Cat Listening to Music – and in many such correspondences across Marker’s career – that we can begin to grasp the deep connections and resonances between the cute cats and the deadly bombs, the surreal dreams and the historic miseries, the individual women’s faces and the abstract masses of crowds or cities. Who knows, maybe Chris Marker will decide to call his magnum opus for the Pompidou Cultural Remembrance: Notes in the Margin of My Time? MORE Marker: The Owl’s Legacy
© Adrian Martin July 2008 |