It all started on June 25, 1987. The project of a television program dedicated to Greek culture had just crystallized. We had before us the specter which haunts the continents of cultural documentaries, and which Chekhov has formulated for eternity: say things that intelligent people already know and that imbeciles will never know… It was Jean-Pierre Vernant who had the idea of the banquet, and of this conversation without borders. The large amphitheater of the...
I had overlooked this addition to the still-live Kosinki YouTube account that Chris Marker assembled near the end of his life. This video is a stark presentation without commentary of photographs of London shops after a riot, rioters throwing objects, trashed businesses with police "Do Not Cross" signs, broken windows in a Hi-Fi store... It's a story told in the timeless Before and After mode, though how Marker was able to capture the Before images is a great...
From describing visits to Krazy Katovich Chris Marker's atelier to a wide-ranging, associative reflection on Sans Soleil, Jean-Pierre Gorin travels through the cuts, sequences, illusions, allusions, sign-systems, methodology, non-methodology, historical moments from Sei Shōnagon to Rousseau to the very present NOW of a baby Martian girl learning the rituals of this planet.
A Wunderkammer gallery of books by, on or adjacent to Chris Marker. As Bellour has said, Marker was as much an écrivain as a regisseur., and he has inspired much additional writing. From Le Coeur net to Passengers, from A Farewell to Movies to Owls at Noon, from Petite Planète to ZOO, from le livre impossible to Untimely Affects, from Maspero to Bellour, from Gautier to Keeney, from Darke to Lambert, from Susan Howe to Mars, from Montaigne to Morel...
On the heels of the thrilling announcement of the new Blu-ray DVD of Sans Soleil, Potemkine Films has announced another exquisite package: La Jetée by Chris Marker in a new "Édition Collecteur," due out on February 2, 2021. The new release includes the 250 page ciné-roman book of La Jetée, as well as extra videos: "Regards sur La Jetée par Jean-Michel Frodon; Quand La Jetée croise Vertigo; Jean Négroni raconte le tournage de La Jetée, and Petite visite du bar La...
Here are the main details of the film, due to be released in February 2021. The packaging is beautiful, as are the iconic photograms selected for the cover, the typography, the extras—in short, everything speaks to a labor of love. To be sure, the great essay film Sans Soleil deserves this love, this work, and this edition. It is especially exciting for Marker fans to have access to the long out-of-print book Le Dépays, which Marker published in 1982, along with...
"When our dreams are intersected we are one. The amateur and as required by the movie itself, Chris Marker. While we were searching for December's language, the wizard loped and stepped into Utopia." December Seeds is a disorienting, convulsive audio-visual dive into street violence and guerilla filmmaking, It also happens to have several things to do with Chris Marker. He is evoked, an imaginary film of his is conjured up amidst the anti-narrative, and he may have...
In celebration of the collective hope that many felt today as we came to learn that our nefarious, narcissistic, lying and self-absorbed President was finally to be sent packing, I worked on a page that assembles 50 posts at a time, with another 50 upon refresh, using the superpowers of Elementor, the rising star in WordPress page builders. So please navigate to All Posts and you may find something of interest that has previously eluded you, as there are many...
A long time ago, we received a bundle of texts from the computer scientist and CM researcher DK: an online trove, practically a Passagenwerk for the preparation of Marker's work on Greece. It was and has remained a collection of quotes and notes that went into the organization of the vast investigation of the cultural, mythological, and philological legacy of Greece that comprises Chris Marker's The Owl's Legacy / L'Héritage de la chouette. It is unlikely to have...
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...
