We scratch the surface of the recent secondary literature on Chris Marker, finding means of better getting at insightful articles, in this case using Zotero to build a mini bibliography of articles that are no doubt behind pay walls of various sorts. This is the tower referred to in the title: it once was ivory, now it bears the logos of Visa and MasterCard, Discover and American Express, Paypal and Square, the warfare of fintech to leave many out of the...
The Archive, Darke relates, homes two treasures: the film’s twin – an alternative version of La Jetée – and a workbook ‘containing an editing plan and a collection of correspondence between Marker and Jacques Ledoux, the former director of the Film Archive’ (13), both of which served as principal displays in Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, the Whitechapel Gallery installation that Darke co-curated in London with Christine van Assche and Magnus Af Petersens...
Chris Marker, encyclopedist… The article translated by Sophie Kovel is really more of a condensed thought-association that starts with the publication of a willfully obscure volume of a kind of anti-encyclopedia, and goes on to play with some of the words contained therein, such as “hectoplasm”, “et cetera” and “exaggeration.” Marker is at his dry, wittiest self here. The piece, published under the rubric “Science and...
Thesentür: Conscientious Objector to Formalism is a series of minimal image- and quotation-based works using poetry to confront mainstream art criticism and art history, to look beneath the surface politics of aesthetics and formalism in a presentation of art that is not self-referential or to put a Black face on the art history of imperialism.
CinémAction – Chris Marker: pionnier et novateur Thanks to Chris Darke for alerting us to this new publication with some familiar names contributing articles to CinémAction 165: Chris Marker: pionnier et novateure. L’interactivité filmique, initiée de manière radicale dès 1950, permet d’appréhender une démarche polyphonique qui n’a cessé de montrer et commenter l’histoire du XXe siècle. Ciné-voyageur, Chris Marker reste, de fait...
I’m seaching still for the full text of this presentation, published in Théorème 6: Recherches sur Chris Marker (Paris, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002), and whose table of contents were published here a while back. Hopefully it might be available still somewhere, as it contains a great selection of texts on Marker. An excerpt follows, and then a link to the presentation (no embed code was available). “La Jetée” de Chris Marker ou le...
I received an email from Ricardo Greene with news of a new, important book on Chris Marker in Spanish: La Zona Marker. The book is published by Ediciones FIDOCS (Culdoc series) in Santiago, Chile. It presents a collection of essays by Ricardo Green, Iván Pinto, Patricio Guzmán (“Lo que debo a Chris Marker”), Trevor Stark, Carolina Anaral de Aguiar, Chris Marker himself (“El ùltimo bolchevique”), Maria Paz Peirano, Maria Luisa Ortega...
Guillaume, Guillaume, Guillaume (The cat named Guillaume) Visiting Chris Marker in Second Life Katie Rose Pipkin I never really lived in Second Life. As an artist working in digital spaces this is patently uncool. But it is true; by the time I stumbled onto the massively multiplayer simulation it was already empty, a shrinking economy and user-base spread across a vast and often-private landscape leaving the world desolate at best. Around this time, I attended a...
Trans. Dave Kehr, © Cahiers du Cinéma, published in Film Comment, 2003. Chris Marker, as you may remember, wrote the narration for Bibliothèque Nationale (Toute la mémoire du monde) and Statues Also Die (which the public still has only been able to see in a version cut to half its length by the censorship board). These incisive, powerful texts, in which cutting irony plays hide and seek with poetry, would be enough to secure their author a privileged place in the...
I’m still seeking to understand this piece of writing, which forgoes a close reading of Marker’s The Last Bolchevik for something else, something akin to thinking out loud in a somewhat associative manner, while using a film – a moment of a film removed from context – for purposes having only tangential connections with the film itself. It strikes me as the philosophical opposite of letting the object speak that Benjamin practiced beautifully and Adorno...