Chris Marker

At 91 years old, Chris Marker has this physical status:

Chris Marker (29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) was a French writer, photographer, documentary film producer, multimedia artist, and film essayist.

La Jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), and Sans Soleil (1983) are two of his best known films.

Marker is most popular with the Left Bank sub-wave, which occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s and included Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy. Alain Resnais, his mentor and sometime collaborator, described him as "the model of the twentieth-century man." "Marker is unclassifiable because he is special," says French Cinema's film critic Roy Armes, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker.

Early life

Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, a born in France, was born Marker. He was always vague about his past, and he was known to refuse interviews and not permit photographs to be taken of him; his place of birth is also controversial. According to some sources and Marker himself, he was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. According to other accounts, he was born in Belleville, Paris, as well as others in Neuilly-sur-Seine. Le Cur Net's 1949 version celebrates his birthday on July 22nd. "Marker told me straight that Mongolia is correct," film critic David Thomson said. I have since found that Belleville is accurate, but that does not take away Ulan Bator's spiritual truth. When asked about his espionage, Marker replied, "My films are sufficient for them [the audience].

Before World War II, Marker was a philosophy student in France. He became a member of the French Resistance during the German occupation of France (FTP). He left France and joined the US Air Force as a paratrooper at some point during the conflict, but some reports disagree that this is not true. He began his career as a journalist, first writing for the journal Esprit, a neo-Catholic, Marxist magazine in which he met fellow journalist André Bazin. Marker wrote political commentaries, poems, short stories, and film reviews for Esprit.

Marker began traveling around the world as a reporter and photographer, a passion he pursued for the remainder of his life. Éditions du Seuil, a French publishing house, had him as editor of Petite Planète ("Small World"). Studio Vista and The Viking Press later published a one-page edition of each country with information and photographs, and Studio Vista and The Viking Press would later be released in English translation. Marker's first book, Le Coeur net (The Forthright Spirit), was about aviation in 1949. In 1952 Marker published an illustrated essay on French writer Jean Giraudoux, Giraudoux Par Lui-Même.

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Early career (1950–1961)

Marker became more interested in filmmaking and experimented with photography in the early 1950s. Marker encountered and befriended many members of the Left Bank Film Movement, including Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Armand Colpi, Armand Gatti, Armand Gatti, and the novelists Marguerite Duras and Jean Cayrol. This group is often associated with the French New Wave writers who came to prominence during a similar time period, and the groups were often associates and journalistic co-workers, and journalists are often associated with former colleagues and journalists. Left Bank was first coined by film critic Richard Roud, who said they had "fondness for a particular Bohemian life and an impatience with the Right Bank's conformation, a high degree of involvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a subsequent interest in experimental filmmaking" as well as a link to the political left. Anatole Dauman produced several of Marker's oldest films.

Olympia 52, Marker's first film about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, was released in 1952. He appeared on the documentary Statues Also Die in 1953 as a collaborator with Resnais. The film explores traditional African art, such as sculptures and masks, as well as its decline after the arrival of Western colonialism. It won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo but was barred from French censorship for its critique of French colonialism.

Marker made Sunday in Peking, a short documentary "film essay" that characterized Marker's output for the majority of his career after being assistant director on Resnais' Night and Fog in 1955. When traveling through China with Armand Gatti in September 1955, Marker shot the film in two weeks. Marker's commentary overlaps scenes from China, such as tombs that, contrary to Westernized interpretations of Chinese legends, do not contain the remains of Ming Dynasty emperors.

Marker continued to refine his style with the film Letter from Siberia after working on the commentary for Resnais' film Le mystère de l'atelier quinze in 1957. It includes Marker's signature commentary, which takes the form of a letter from the director, in the long tradition of epistolary treatments by French explorers of the "undeveloped" world. The letter examines Siberia's transition into the twentieth century as well as some of the ethnic traditions that have faded into the past. It includes a video from Marker's Siberia, old newsreel footage, cartoon sequences, stills, and even an illustration of Alfred E. Neuman of Mad Magazine, as part of a comedic take on Western mass culture. Marker's first filmic sequence uses the same brief filmic sequence three times, but with different interpretations—the first praises the Soviet Union, the second denouncing it, and the third adopting a more "neutral or "objective" approach.

Walerian Borowczyk produced Les Astronauts, Marker's animated film from 1959. The film was a mashup of traditional drawings with still photography. In 1960, he made Description d'un combat, a documentary about Israel that focuses on the state of Israel's past and future. At the 1961 Berlin Film Festival, the film received the Golden Bear for Best Documentary.

Marker went to Cuba in January 1961 and shot the film 'Cuba S! Fidel Castro is promoted and defended by the film, as well as two interviews with him. It comes as a result of an anti-American epilogue, in which the US is embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco and was later banned. The banned essay was included in Marker's first volume of collected film commentaries, Commentaires I, which was released in 1961. Coréennes, a collection of photographs and essays about life in Korea, was released by Marker the following year.

Multimedia and later career (1987–2012)

Marker's passion for electronics, beginning with Sans Soleil, piqued a keen interest in the area of emerging technology. He worked on a conversational platform (a prototypical chatbot) from 1985 to 1988, which he wrote in Applesoft BASIC on an Apple II. In comparison to the snippets of dialogue and poetry that "Computer" shared with the user, he embedded audiovisual elements. In 2015, version 6 of this program was revived from a floppy disk (with Marker's help and permission) and emulated online.

His fascination with digital technology led to the creation of Level Five (1996) and Immemory (1998, 2008), an interactive multimedia CD-ROM produced for the Centre Pompidou (French language version) and Exact Change (English version). Marker created Owls at Noon in 2005, a 19-minute multimedia work for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City influenced by T. S. Eliot's poem.

Marker stayed in Paris and was extremely rare to be granted interviews. In 2003, one exception stood out in an extremely long interview with Libération, in which he discussed his filmmaking approach. If you needed a portrait of himself, he usually suggested a snapshot of a cat instead. (Marker was included in Agnes Varda's 2008 film The Beaches of Agnes by a cartoon drawing of a cat, speaking in a digitally enhanced voice.) Guillaume-en-égypte, Marker's own pet, was named Guillaume-en-égypte. Marker hired an Avatar of Guillaume-en-Egypte to represent him in machinedine workshops in 2009. Exosius Woolley's avatar first appeared in Chris Marker's short film /machinima, Ouvroir the Movie.

Marker's 2007 Criterion Collection, which included a short essay titled "Working on a Shoestring Budget" was included in La Jetée and Sans Soleil's "Working on a Shoestring Budget." He admitted to shooting all of Sans Soleil with a silent film camera and recording all of the audio on a primitive audio cassette recorder. Marker also reminds the viewer that only one scene in La Jetée is of a moving picture, as Marker could only borrow a movie camera for one afternoon while filming.

Marker worked with art dealer and publisher Peter Blum on a number of projects that were on view at the Peter Blum galleries in Soho and Chelsea, New York City's Soho and Chelsea neighborhoods, from 2007 to 2011. In 2014, Marker's works were also on view at the Peter Blum Gallery on 57th Street. These include a number of printed photographs entitled PASSENGERS, Koreans, Crush Art, Quelle heure est-elle, and Staring Back; a series of photogravures titled After Dürer; a book, PASSENGERS; and digital prints of movie posters; whose titles were often adapted; and Rin Tin Tin; Noon Prelude - Silent Movie and Owls : The Hollow Men were on display at Peter Blum in 2009. These works were also on display at the Venice Biennale in London, Whitechapel Gallery in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the MIT List Visual Arts Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts in Geneva, Switzerland, the Walker Art Center in Geneva, New York, and the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley, California, all in Vancouver, Massachusetts, 2014. Peter Blum Gallery, New York, has been exhibiting Chris Marker's artworks since 2014.

Marker died on July 29, 2012, his 91st birthday.

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