Each week we pay homage to a select “Original Creator”—an iconic artist from days gone by whose work influences and informs today’s creators. These are artists who were innovative and revolutionary in their fields. Bold visionaries and radicals, groundbreaking frontiersmen and women who inspired and informed culture as we know it today. This week: Chris Marker.
With over half a century of work to date and an impressive filmography, Chris Marker enjoys a rare prestige that few living contemporary directors can boast of. The first mark of his success, which appears contradictory if judged by superficial standards alone, is that he’s never directed a “cult film.” Marker’s films slowly permeate their era, with no unnecessary commotion, leaving a lasting impression on those in the know. And although a contemporary of the greatest artists and most avant-garde trail blazers of his time—such as William Klein, Alain Resnais, Ghislain Cloquet—he never found himself coalesced into any particular intellectual or artistic “scene.” This is as much to do with his ensuing underground, highly singular, and free-spirited practice, very much like that of Robert Bresson.
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The most obvious sign of distance between his work and the accepted structural norms of the cinematic industry can be found in the organized confusion he manufactures between documentary and fiction. With Marker, these two formats serve the same purpose and method—narration through image and a realism that knows how to play by its own rules, as well as in accordance with the established norms of artistic representation. This systematic blurring of boundaries between documentary and fiction echoes the work of his contemporary Peter Watkins, with whom he shares certain views on mise-en-scène and photojournalism aesthetics.
Marker employs cinema as a tool for working through and settling philosophical and political dilemmas. His more experimental films, which border on science fiction (La Jetée [The Pier]), address foreseeable issues at stake in a radical way, avoiding a veer into futuristic ‘pop philosophy,’ an often errant and ill-applied subject that typically comes across as dystopic and adolescent, as evidenced in The Matrix saga. His openly political films, which clearly acknowledge social issues at stake, overcome the predictable obstacles of engaging in partisan cinema.
Les statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die]Les Statues meurent aussi [Statues Also Die] is Marker’s second movie and his first collaboration with the highly respected Frech director Alain Resnais, two years before Night and Fog. This documentary was originally a commissioned work for the Art and History review “Présence Africaine” and it questions political issues through a cultural and historical angle summarized in this preliminary question: “How come ‘Nigger’ art can be found at the Museum of Anthropology while the Ancient Greek and Egyptian art are displayed at the Louvre?”. This subversive and anti-colonialist documentary is a genuine tour de force, because of the way it offers an anthropological questioning in a movie where Man is almost never on the screen, replaced instead by his cultural legacy, art. The radical point of view expressed by Marker and Resnais led to a long censorship of the movie, who was eventually released more than 10 years after its production.
The second collaborative work between the two directors, this film sees Marker acting as assistant director to Resnais. The latter released the first and most poignant documentary on occupied France and the arrest, and subsequent deportation, of Resistant fighters and ‘terrorists”—as they were labeled at the time—by the Nazi forces on the basis of the “Night And Fog” (Nacht und Nebel) decree passed in 1941. To this day, it remains one of the most respected and accurate accounts of the history of the interior Resistance, and is still traditionally screened for all French Junior High School pupils in History class.
La Jetée [The Pier]The Pier is probably the most emblematic movie of Marker’s oeuvre, even though it breaks every convention of traditional storytelling and cinema. Its popularity is somehow similar to that of the director himself: both international and confidential, ‘canon’ and avant-garde. In this “photo-novel,” made of still black and white images edited together with a voice-over, he questions the boundaries between the mediums of cinema and photography, giving a new edge to the notion of motion image, while reinventing the conventions of science fiction. The plot, set in a post-apocalyptic Western World, articulates the past, the present and the future, and eventually gave birth to its most famous Hollywood remake, Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys.
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