Chris Marker (1921)
France

"Training

Chris Marker worked as a critic and journalist from a very young age. He cut his teeth in the magazine Esprit, which deciphers social, cultural and political developments in France and around the world. By publishing numerous articles there between 1946 and 1955, he already appears as a witness engaged in his time. At the same time, he was very active within Peuple et Culture, an organization dedicated to popular education, where he met, among others, André Bazin and became friends with Alain Resnais. With the latter, in 1953 he made Statues Die Too, a short film on “negro art”. This film, an indictment against colonialism, will be censored in France for eleven years. With his first feature film, Olympia 52 on the Helsinki Olympic Games (1952), which can be described as a "subjective documentary", Marker adopts an original perspective by giving the text the same importance as the images.

Career in cinema

Writer, photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist, Chris Marker is the author of a protean and innovative work, centered on the relationship between image and memory, and which questions the deep substance of civilizations.

A spectator engaged in the political upheavals of the 20th and 21st centuries, "cinema-traveler", Chris Marker inaugurated with Sunday in Beijing (1956), shot in China in the midst of communist change, a series of films in which he offered his personal vision of the revolutions socialists going on around the world. This short film (a genre which will be his preferred mode of expression) reinvents the documentary form by introducing a new relationship between image and commentary. After Letter from Siberia (1957), then Description of a Combat (1960), a look at Israel, he shot Cuba Si! (1961) on the Cuban revolution. Chris Marker moves freely between films and books, as evidenced by the collection of Korean photographs and texts, published in 1959 after a trip to North Korea, which he describes as "a short film made with still images". With the taste for experimentation which characterizes all his work, he directed La Jetée (1962), his most famous film, the problem of which would haunt his cinema. Made up of a montage of still images, La Jetée is a fascinating fable about time, memory and subjectivity. The film overturns all the conventions of cinematic storytelling and will inspire Terry Gilliam for his film Army of the Twelve Monkeys (1995). Also in 1962, for Le Joli mai, Marker roamed his camera freely around Paris, interviewing passers-by for a collective portrait in the spirit of cinema verite promoted at the same time by Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin.

The year 1967, with See you soon, I hope, a documentary on the strike at the Rhodia factory in Besançon, opened for Marker a fertile period of activist cinema, inseparable from his political commitment to the left. In the excitement of these revolutionary years, the filmmaker began to reflect on the ideological role of cinema in the capitalist system. It materializes through the creation and management of SLON (Service for the Launch of New Works), a “cinematographic cooperative” which wants to experiment with new means of production and distribution and free cinema from the manipulation of political power. SLON produced between 1969 and 1973 a series of "counter-information" documentaries, under the generic title We're talking to you about..., presenting political news in Brazil, Chile, or Czechoslovakia from the point of view of the political movements. protest, and not the official media. The high point of Marker's activist years was 1977's Le Fond de l'air est rouge. Originally conceived as a collage made from fragments of film material from SLON, the film provides a lucid but never bitter assessment of the revolutionary movements of the 20th century.
At the beginning of the 1980s, Sans soleil (1982) opened a new period which saw Chris Marker's reflection on the interweaving of individual memory and History come to the fore. This essay film takes the form of a series of cinematic letters from a fictitious cameraman. It connects two geographical spaces, Japan and the former Portuguese colonies of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, which Marker defines as "the two extreme poles of survival". With subtlety, Marker speaks about time, memory, human fragility and the way these societies live and exist beyond what can cost them their lives. Starting in 1985, the filmmaker produced a series of filmed portraits, some of them posthumous or late tributes to friends or admired artists. He engages in an attempt to decipher the past where he places these memories (his own and those of others) within the framework of a history which integrates and goes beyond them. He thus speaks in a melancholy way to deceased filmmakers like Akira Kurosawa (A.K in 1984), Alexandre Medvedkine (Alexander's Tomb in 1992), or even Andreï Tarkovsky (One Day in Andrei Arsenevitch in 1999).
In the years 1990-2000, politics always remained at the forefront, notably with the Balkan wars of which Chris Marker became an active witness in three films. Chats perchés (2004) is a testimony to this. At the same time, he finds extraordinary possibilities in new digital technologies for the development of his aesthetic issues. In 1990, Marker designed a multimedia installation entitled Zapping Zone for the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris. Proposals for an Imaginary Television. In 1996, Level five used computer resources to explore the relationship between real and virtual. Marker finds in digital optical disc technology new ways to map "the complex architecture of one's own memory." In 1998 he designed the CD-ROM entitled Immemory, whose multi-dimensional structure allows him to go beyond temporal linearity. Continuing his exploration of the new media resources of his time, in 2008 he created a virtual world on the Web, L'Ouvroir on the Second Life platform, including, among other things, a virtual museum and a projection room. Under the pseudonym Kosinki, he publishes videos on YouTube, such as Leila Attacks (2006), featuring a cat, the favorite animal in his bestiary. Chris Maker died on his 91st birthday, leaving behind a rich and unclassifiable body of work.

Other activites
Chris Marker published a novel, Le Coeur net in 1949, poems, and an essay on Jean Giraudoux entitled Giraudoux by himself in 1952.
At Éditions du Seuil, in 1954 he created, then directed, a collection of innovative tourist guides, Petite Planète, in which images are no longer relegated to the sole status of illustration of the text.
He filmed a series of 13 episodes for television (broadcast on La Sept in 1989) where he explored the contemporary uses of ancient Greek thought in the modern world, The Legacy of the Owl.
Marker multimedia artist and photographer, is active through numerous international exhibitions including Staring back (2007) and Passengers (2011)." (Source, website, ciné-Ressources, French cinema library)

Work :

• Matta (1985)