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...
According to amazon.com’s page on this new DVD: “This title will be released on November 13, 2018.” Below is a fantastic summary of the different ‘chapters’ of the work, as presented by Icarus Films. Directed by enigmatic and brilliant documentary essayist Chris Marker, THE OWL’S LEGACY is an intellectually agile, engaging, and sometimes biting look at ancient Greece, its influences on Western culture – and how many eras have...
I received a note that left the fog of regret and irony lingering in the back of my mind these last weeks… Chris Marker’s epic 13 part television series L’ Héritage de la chouette / The Owl’s Legacy (1989) was translated recently into a version with Greek subtitles and posted to YouTube. So far so good – all assembled (and recently released on DVD), together they become a beautiful kind of living curriculum about ancient Greece, gathering experts from there and in...
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...
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...