Chris Marker

Born	July 29, 1921(1921-07-29) Neuilly-sur-Seine, Île-de-France, France
Died	July 29, 2012(2012-07-29) (aged 91) Paris, France
Web	UbuWeb, Aaaaarg, Wikipedia, Academia.edu, Open Library

Chris Marker (born Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve) was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983) and AK (1985), an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Marker is often associated with the Left Bank Cinema movement that occurred in the late 1950s and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi and Armand Gatti.

His friend and sometime collaborator Alain Resnais has called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man." Film theorist Roy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique...The French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."

Films

(directed films; in French unless noted otherwise)

Series

• L'Héritage de la chouette [The Owl's Legacy], 1989, 13 episodes x 26 min. English, and French, Georgian, Greek.

Feature-length films

• Olympia 52, 1952.
• Lettre de Sibérie [Letter From Siberia], 1957.
• Le Joli mai, with Pierre Lhomme, 1962.
• Cinétracts, with Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, silent, 1968.
• La bataille des dix millions, 1970.
• Le train en marche, 1971.
• La Solitude du chanteur de fond, 1974.
• L'Ambassade, 1975.
• Le fond de l’air est rouge [Grin Without a Cat], 1977. (link to a version with EN audio & EN subs), Part 2
• Sans soleil, 1982.
• A.K, 1984.
• L'Héritage de la chouette, 1989.
• Le tombeau d’Alexandre, 1992. [1]
• Level five, 1996.

Short films

• Les Statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die], with Alain Resnais, 1953, 30 min. (link to a version with EN subs)
• Dimanche à Pékin, 1956.
• Description d’un combat, 1960.
• Cuba si!, 1961.
• La Jetée, 1962.
• Le Mystère Koumiko, 1965.
• Si j'avais 4 dromadaires, 1966, 49 min.
• A bientôt, j’espère, with Mario Marret, 1967.
• La Sixième face du pentagone, with François Reichenbach, 1968.
• Le Deuxième procès d’Artur London, 1969.
• Jour de tournage, 1969.
• On vous parle du Brésil, 1969.
• Carlos Marighela, 1970.
• Les Mots ont un sens, 1970.
• Vive la baleine, with Mario Ruspoli, 1972.
• On vous parle du Chili, 1973.
• Puisqu’on vous dit que c’est possible, 1973.
• Junkopia, with John Chapman and Frank Simeone, 1981.
• 2084, 1984. (link to a version with EN subs)
• Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch, 1999.
• Le Souvenir d'un avenir [Remembrance of Things to Come], with Yannick Bellon, 2001, 42 min. (with ES subs)
• Chats perchés, 2004.

Other

• La brûlure de mille soleils, 1965. Directed by Pierre Kast, edited by Marker.
• On vous parle de Paris - Maspero, les mots ont un sens, 1970. François Maspero interviewed by Marker.

Commentaires 1-2. Log.

Writings, publications

• Le cœur net, Paris: Seuil, 1949, ARG. Novel. (French)
  • The Forthright Spirit, trans. Robert Kee and Terence Kilmartin, London: Allan Wingate, 1951, 191 pp. (English)

• Coréennes, Paris: Seuil, 1959. (French)
  • Coréennes, Seoul: Noonbit, 2008. (Korean)
  • Coréennes, trans. Brian Holmes, Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts, 2009, 31 pp, HTML. (English)

• Commentaires 1, Paris: Seuil, 1961. Transcripts of six films by Marker: Les statues meurent aussi (1953), Dimanche à Pékin (1955), Lettre de Sibérie (1957), L'Amérique rêvée (1959), Description d'un combat (1960) and Cuba Si! (1961). (French)

• Commentaires 2, Paris: Seuil, 1967. Transcripts of three films by Marker: Le mystère Koumiko (1965), Soy Mexico [an unfilmed project] (1965), and Si j’avais quatre dromedaires (1966). (French)

• Le Dépays, Paris: Herscher, 1982, [71] pp, HTML. [2] (French)

• Silent Movie, ed. Ann Bremner, Columbus, OH: Wexner Center for the Arts/Ohio State University, 1995, 40 pp. Catalogue for the installation. (English)

Documentary films

• The Invention of Chris Marker, dir. Matan Tal, 2020, 14 min. [3]
• Ten Lives of a Cat: A Film About Chris Marker, 2023. [4]

Literature

• Jean-Louis Schefer, "On La Jetée" [1991], trans. Paul Smith, in Schefer, The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts, ed. & trans. Paul Smith, Cambridge University Press, 1995. (English)
• Geneviève Daphne Van Cauwenberge, Chris Marker and Documentary Filmmaking: 1962-1982, New York University, 1992. PhD Dissertation. (English)
• Chris Marker: Around the World with Chris Marker: Lost Horizons / Time Regained, Film Comment, May-June and July-August 2003. Two-part feature on Marker. (English)
• Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, Reaktion Books, 2005. (English)
• Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker, University of Illinois Press, 2006, 232 pp. Publisher. (English)
• DO revue pro dokumentarni film 5: "Chris Marker", Prague, 2007. (Czech)
• Image & Narrative 10:3 (2009): Chris Marker (I), Leuven. (French)/(English)
• Image & Narrative 11:1 (2010): Chris Marker (II), Leuven. (English)
• François Lecointe, "The Elephants at the End of the World: Chris Marker and Third Cinema", Third Text 25:108, Jan 2011, pp 93-104. (English)
• François Lecointe, "Tombeau pour Chris Marker", Esprit, 18 Oct 2012. (French)
• David Cenek, Chris Marker, Prague: JSAF & NAMU, 2012, 424 pp. (Czech)
• Catherine Lupton, Thom Andersen, Chris Petit, Jem Cohen, John Gianvito, Patrick Keiller, Sarah Turner, Kodwo Eshun, José Luis Guerín, Agnès Varda, "The Owl’s Legacy: In Memory of Chris Marker", Sight & Sound, Oct 2012. (English)
• Chris Marker: inmemoria, eds. Maria Fortes and Lorena Gómez Mostajo, México, D.F.: Ambulante, 2013, 255+40 pp. (Spanish)
• La zona Marker, eds. Ricardo Greene and Iván Pinto, Santiago de Chile: FIDOCS, 2013, 177 pp. (Spanish)
• Maroussia Vossen, Chris Marker: le livre impossible, Tripode, 2016, 128 pp. Memoir. Publisher. [5] (French)
  • Chris Marker: The Impossible Book, trans. Andrew Castillo, 2020. (English)

• more, more
• Marker on Monoskop Log

Links

• ChrisMarker.org
• ChrisMarker.ch
• Finn Brunton, "Chris Marker, 1921–2012: Future anterior", Radical Philosophy 176, Nov/Dec 2012.
• http://www.theparisreview.org/art-photography/6819/chris-markers-studio-adam-bartos-and-ben-lerner
• Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat, retrospective exhibition, Whitechapel Gallery, London, 2014. Curator's introduction.