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Chris Marker has developed a singular vision of filmmaking throughout his 40-year career. Fluent in a variety of technologies from the 16 mm camera to current digital media, Marker has remained vital since his early days with the pioneering French Nouvelle Vague (New Wave) movement. In his unique synthesis of documentary and fiction, Marker sees in film a potential to realize the metaphor of memory, via the superimposition of different times – past and present. This concept of memory is key to understanding the artist’s films. Sans Soleil (1982) integrates Marker’s footage from travels in Japan and Papua New Guinea into a film-essay, narrated from the perspective of a woman receiving letters about the experiences depicted on film. A deceptive travelogue, the film’s real work lies in its simultaneous presentation of two mediations of direct engagement, through image and word, and the resulting dislocation this creates. Associations between the narration and the pictures fluctuate and the viewer cannot discern between the fictive and the real. Just as Marker mixes past and present in his filmmaking, the actual and imagined become indistinguishable.
Marker’s recent film, Chats Perchés (The Case of the Grinning Cat) (2004), details the filmmaker’s obsession with a mysterious piece of graffiti of a grinning yellow cat that has quickly spread all over Paris. Beginning his investigations in November 2001, just after the sobering tragedy of September 11th, Marker traces the locations of the enigmatic piece of street art, noting its adoption by the growing youth movement in Paris, who look to the cat as a symbol of procreativity in opposition to the destruction of war. An alumnus of the ’68 protests, Marker makes parallels between that fabled era and the contemporary moment, conflating elements of the past and present.
Marker distills the antagonism and unrest of previous movements down to a highly personal level in his newest project, a several chapter series of black and white photographs entitled Staring Back (2006) spanning several decades of image making. In the suite (comprised of several chapters, Beast of, I Stare, and They Stare) Marker strikes at the essence of the Unhomely, alternately documenting the confrontation between police and civilians and the simultaneous otherness yet familiarity of expectant human faces, staring back at the camera. An index of aggression and peace, Marker’s newest (and perhaps, also, some of his oldest) photos create an iconic picture of humanity – one that continues to mix temporalities in reference to his films and suggest the timeless and ever increasing need for expressions of neighborliness. (AC/JT)
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