While the initial reception of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) was unspectacular, it made its presence felt in a host of other films–from Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983) to Brian De Palma’s Obsession (1976), and David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive (1999). What seemed to have eluded the critics at the time is that Vertigo is a film about being haunted: by illusive images, turbulent emotions, motion and memory, the sound and feeling of falling into the past, into a...
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...
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...
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...
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 starts: Un...
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 the Kiel...
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 slideshow than...
