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...
CHRIS MARKER [catalog] Cinémathèque française, 2018. Direction d'ouvrage: Raymond Bellour, Jean-Michel Frodon et Christine Van Assche. En collaboration avec Florence Tissot. Read on for complete table of contents.
Le Coeur Net by Chris Marker Thanks to John H. for the gift of this PDF scan of the French original of Marker’s early novel Le Coeur net, published in 1950 when Marker was 29 or so. We append to it the English translation from the following year. Chris Marker, Le Coeur Net, Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1950. Préface de Jean Cayrol. Chris Marker, The Forthright Spirit, trans. Robert Kee and Terence Kilmartin, London: Allan Wingate, 1951. Here’s how it...
Wooden Cross & Iron Path Translation © Sophie Kovel, 2017Original: “Croix de bois et chemin de fer,” Esprit, (Jan. 1951), 88-90. Please note that this is a partial translation; the text continues beyond where we left off here, with Marker’s conversation with the German soldier focusing in on the concentration camps. There are also 5 footnotes. We will be updating this page with the full translation asap. At Ploen (Schles-wig-Holstein) I ride...
It was a strange thing. A small box of metal with irregularly rounded corners, with a rectangular opening in the middle and in front of it a tiny lens, the size of a euro. We had to slip a piece of film – real film, with perforations – that was pressed by a rubber wheel, and by turning a button connected to the roulette, the film was unrolled one by one. Actually, each image represented a different scene, so that it seemed more like a...
Here is the English translation of the recently unearthed ‘Lettre à Alain’, originally published in Libération to highlight the 1991 debut of the film L’Annonce faite à Marie, under the title “Chris Marker: ‘Something of a Miracle’, with the sub-title ‘In 1991, for the release of the first projections of L’Annonce faite à Marie [The Announcement Made to Marie], Chris Marker wrote to the ‘young’ filmmaker...
Published here: sergedaney.blogspot.co.uk Trafic and Serge Daney Raymond Bellour When Serge Daney decided to found Trafic, a ‘cinema review’, at the start of the 1990s, he began from the ‘realisation that the intellectual landscape in which cinema exists has changed a great deal. Changed to the extent that the traditional ways of writing about cinema do not “bite” anymore in relation to the reality of classic literary cinephilic consumption’. (1) Daney aimed thus...
Is there no one to keep the moon from disappearing, to tie the morning sun beneath the horizon? Then I would live one more day. (Story of Sim Chon) Due to the out of print status of the English translation of Chris Marker’s Coréennes, I have scanned my copy to make this text available to English readers. The photographs from the original French and, subsequently, Korean editions were recently on display at Peter Blum’s Gallery in New York. For those who...
I just published a text sent by Chris Darke, who has seen to its translation and encouraged its publication here, for which I am profoundly grateful. The text is one Marker wrote at the request of Jean-Jacques Birgé, answering the question Images gravitate around music. Which has marked you the most? You can find the text as An Image Just Appeared by Chris Marker. The text shows the remarkable blend of keen memory, eye for emblematic images, and historical...
Cliquez ici – an illustrated journey through the pages of Chris Marker Claire de Rouen Books, First Floor 125 Charing Cross Road, London WC2H OEW Friday 30 May, 6-9pm Chris Darke will talk on the significance of the book format for the French filmmaker’s methodology. He’ll look especially at Petite Planète, the series of travel books that Marker edited from the 1950s to the early 1960s. Featuring: the printed page, sound, projection, still and...