Chris Marker

Question asked by Time Out this week is why are they showing the French language version of San Soleil when there is an official English one out there (not as if there is a dubbing problem).

The Soundtrack... pure analog goodness: Tomita's take on Mussogorsky(sp)'s Pictures At An Exhibition/Onhe Sonne, Sibelius' Valeste Triste, really NASA sounding... stunning.

You don't need to be hard pressed, you've said it a few times on here..

(and the others were "Experiment In Terror" and "Superstar", obv.)

gygax is this nationwide?

jess, i'm not sure where you are but it was at nga earlier this month... :(

mark s, ooh harder!

Tough call, though.

"sans soleil" is indeed miraculous. "la fond..." is extremely interesting and worthwhile but more esoteric perhaps, it presumes a knowledge of and interest in european and worldwide left-wing movements of the 60s and 70s.

would that more of marker's vast ouevre be screened more often. i'm particularly fond of "letter from siberia" and "description of a struggle" (the latter about israel). oh wait i mentioned that upthread.

anyone else have "immemory," his handmade cd-rom? i was first a bit disappointed by it, expecting a labyrinth along the lines of contemporary video games. once i got used to its limits i found it extremely charming and diverting, but not really much more than that.

i'm reminded of my experience with renoir's "the river," which bazin among others praised for its richness and humanity, traits i observed as well, alongside some very dated colonialist nostalgia and orientalist "eternal india" nonsense.

but what i think mary observed is just, in part at least, marker's mode.... he takes much the same approach to observation other places--siberia, israel, korea, even france--and it would perhaps get precious save for his self-deprecating sense of humor (he has an extraordinary sense of humor) and the fact that most of the observations are posed as questions, or as ruminations.

god mark, i dunno, itv1 show 'loin de vietnam' on loop and still you persist in ignoring them...

interested parties may contact me via email

sorry for being cagey

-- Eric H. (ephende...), October 30th, 2004.

i can ask my collector friend about it. are you in the states or what?

i met the producer of this film recently.

I implore you! I would be eternally in your debt just for questioning. (Yes, I'm in the states.)

http://www.pimpadelicwonderland.com/havesgenres.html#Anchor-documentaries-43793

la jetée is both very atypical of marker and quite representative of his concerns and obsessions (some of them)

there is a sans soleil/la jetee dvd in the uk. and one in france.

his film "ak" is on certain deluxe editions of kurosawa's ran.

and inevitably there are things available in japan.

but otherwise, nothing.

most of his films have never enjoyed very good distribution, even some of the most famous ones like le joli mai.

i have some of his films on video dubs, but i can't make further copies for anyone, don't have the technical capabailities.

i'd like to see le mystere koumiko, cuba si, description d'un combat, etc. more widely available. not to mention le fond de l'air est rouge.

also, sans soleil is (or at least was) available on vhs here.

these, sadly, are the only 2 i've seen.

-- mark s (mar...), November 19th, 2003.

ha!

Perhaps the luckiest "catch" I've ever had in my moviegoing life. Actually, scratch that "perhaps."

Well, I'd imagine that I'll just buy the DVD burn of Vietnam and hope it's a little bit less chatty than Sans soleil or Last Bolshevik.

Immemory

and here also

Chris Marker CD-Rom

almost missed this, closes this weekend. now, could be extended to the 10th.

http://www.peterblumgallery.com/soho.html

http://www.peterblumgallery.com/images/aliocha_orly.jpg

http://filmjourney.weblogger.com/2008/10/22/cats-go-barack/

'la joli mai' at NFT today and tomorrow

a fav

must read for fans of marker and/or vertigo:

http://www.chrismarker.org/a-free-replay-notes-on-vertigo/

I think we're still catching up with things Marker was thinking about decades ago.

this rings true but tbh felt sorta overwhelmed by sans soliel to the point of not really feeling/thinking anything at all

Only feels like a 'catch up' because his work isn't v available.

Sans Soleil is nowhere near as good la joli mai.

not really impressed by 'grin w/o a cat'

seems really credulous politically

or that's what i thought, watching it, and then towards the end it makes allende look like a complete dick... but my impression was that he was meant to be one of the heroes?

wonder what was in the four-hour cut that got left out

I've seen the four hour cut, I thought it was great

i had no idea this guy had made so many films. La jetee and sans soleil are totally major imb but i've never seen anything else and i get the feeling u cant just buy them on amazon.

some of it was impressive, but a lot of it was very boring and humbug-packed speeches.

marker's cutesy cat thing rubs up all weird with his softness towards dictators: cats, he says, never respect power. which is great because power is always bad -- except when it isn't. not sure what the appeal of a lot of it is unless you specialize in the history of the french far left: all of the hatred for the union of the left is, im sure, fine (and a lot more directly put than his pretty mild critique of euro-maoism), but he's way more specific about all that than, say, the nature of the democratic socialist project the film is allegedly devoted to. that is a sort of shadowy ideal, and the allende-makes-a-dick-of-himself moment is directly related to it. he's whinging that -- shocker -- workers don't turn up to meetings on the weekend to discuss factory policy. he's all like 'it's your factory' and they're all like 'w/e'.

xpost

he's kind of suppressed his pre-jetee/joli mai stuff. some of it gets shown sometimes, but not much. i'd love to see 'description of a struggle', which *does* get shown a bit.

I think you can get this and The Last Bolshevik and maybe Case Of The Grinning Cat

xp

erm you can buy a three hour version of Grin... on amazon, but if its originally 4 hours then I'd assume any argument would be damaged by the shortening? xxp

it's just as possible that the argument in the 1977 version was even worse!

it doesn't exactly have an argument, just kind of an idea that there was a non-aligned democratic-socialist left in the 1960s, particularly in czechoslovakia and chile, that failed because the US and USSR wanted it to fail.

it's not a fully coherent argument coz castro, not exactly non-aligned, seems to be pretty much a hero throughout -- not entirely, but pretty much.

well, ok, whatever the idea, it might be more fully fleshed out, which might make it more hateable - who knows, maybe that's why all that is easily available on dvd is Sans Soleil and a short film.

it's not hateable exactly, it's just that CM has a reputation as a tip-top intellectual film essayist and this is a let-down. i guess i would rather see the original warts-and-all 1977 one, coz this one ends *really* abruptly with the collapse of the USSR. some of it is dazzling, but not enough! a lot of it is just speeches. the early travelogues don't do that.

i was watching that "letter to jane" thing last night and i was like "u know i really like film essays maybe" and i was thinking about this guy and i still havent seen anything beyond la jetee and sans soleil but i dled loin du vietnam and im gonna watch it tonight but then i was like o hey what other things should i maybe see (i dont even know if this vietnam thing is gonna be any good) also like agnes varda she doesnt have a thread

harun farocki is ya boy

if you can find jean-pierre gorin's southern CA trilogy anywhere, watch those, they are great

orson welles' 'f for fake' (art forgeries!)

haha i really like a lot of these too i guess

oh ok thats the guy godard is talking to in letter to jane?

yeah. they were both part of dziga vertov group (of whom i've seen one film; it was, uh, 'difficult')

cool, i can never think of anything to watch when i wanna get a movie

the gorin trilogy isn't on dvd in the states i think, dunno about anywhere else

but yeah, FAROCKI: if you like the marker vietnam film, check out HF's short 'inextinguishable fire' about american chemical companies and napalm manufacture in vietnam (then check out the paper i wrote about it as an undergrad, or, yknow, don't)

Donna OTM. That Gorin trilogy is amazing. There were supposedly Criterion editions in the works, but I guess JPG had some sort of falling out with them. Janus did restore them, though, so I imagine they'll become available in some form. Farocki is also great. Inextinguishable Fire is the real canonical one. I like Workers Leaving the Factory and Images of the World and the Inscription of War better.

I've never regretted seeing a Marker film, but there are definitely ups and downs. I'd most strongly recommend Grin Without a Cat and Le joli mai on top of the ones you've seen.

"Film essay" is an increasingly capacious label, and people get pretty defensive about the parameters (you should track down Philip Lopate's (written) essay "In Search of the Centaur") . There are a million of these things now. Without thinking too long about it or worrying too much about definitions, I'd also suggest Patrick Keiller's Robinson trilogy, Jon Jost's early films, Thom Andersen's Los Angeles Plays Itself (which you can find on Youtube), Trinh T. Minh-ha's Reassemblage (which I believe is also on Youtube), anything by Morgan Fisher, anything by Bill Brown, Histoire(s) du cinema, Adam Curtis' tv work (start with The Trap maybe?). I'm forgetting tons of great stuff, but this is probably already more than you were looking for.

x-ps

Isn't Letter to Jane a Vertov Group film?

i think sans soleil is one of like three movies where ive gone back and watched the bits i fell asleep through

i think it is, technically xp to c0l1n

shit yeah, 'los angeles plays itself' is fantastic (i watched it in chopped-up segments on youtube, which suited me fine given its length)

Really liked Le Mystère Koumiko (1965) (on youtube) - the girl he interviews/edits/lets take over is 'mixed up' and, similarly, CM adopts that as a strategy on Japan. Could've been really embarrassing but its actually fab.

The BFI shop have that three hour cut of Grin Without a Cat NRQ talks about, or should I really try to torrent(?) the four cut (when I get into torrents) (assuming someone has that)

From the description Grin... and Carlos would be the most exciting double bill, but also the most deadly for your circulation - maybe one to watch over a flight to Australia.

A/K is a curiously flat (not as a criticism) portrayal of a nice Japanese man who happened to have made a brilliant set of films. Surprising, but only watched aout half of it.

i don't agree with NRQ re marker's attitude to castro at all: he doesn't denounce him openly (he doesn't denounce anyone really) but he really isn't treated as the hero of the second half, anything but

That Gorin trilogy is amazing. There were supposedly Criterion editions in the works, but I guess JPG had some sort of falling out with them. Janus did restore them, though, so I imagine they'll become available in some form.

eclipse set coming out in january btw

Watched Grin.. over Xmas and its a remarkable montage. Since then I've seen The Last Bolshevik, L'Ambassade (his other fictional film, which is wonderful although no La Jetee), If I had 4 Camels (in the same format as La Jetee but just the most exciting travelogue, as if someone showed slides from their world tour but its so well scripted, soundtracked and narrated -- like all his stuff, pretty much)

And I agree that Grin... doesn't make Castro a hero at all, but he doesn't demonise him either...although he jently mocks him (when he talks about how he taps the microphone when making speeches). So the 'portrait' makes his turns.

Allende 'made to look like a dick' also sounds wrong.

There is a HUGE universe to this stuff: Far From Vietnam, The Battle For Chile, Ivens' A Valparaiso, Statues Also Die. All great pieces of filmmaking he had a hand in producing or assisting, and which I've been v lucky to see in the last few months.

Has anyone here read his novel?

Some stuff to chase here -- fairly gd piece in terms of info, although uncritical (how does the analysis in Hour of the Furnaces hold up?). I don't know if neglecting the 2nd part is exatly a wise move -- it doesn't support Peron wholeheartedly, it does look at his time in office as a halfway-house, an unfulfilled revolution. It does apply some of their analysis given in the 1st to comment on the situation in Argentina in the 2nd part. The film ends in interviews w/activists who were imprisoned and tortured, some harrowing stuff. Overall its quite a package.

http://www.bfi.org.uk/sightandsound/feature/49831

The film’s renewal of the economic-political treatise as cinematic form can be traced in many subsequent films whose activism operates through similarly diverse experimental energies: Godard’s Le Rapport Darty (1989), Raoul Peck’s Profit & Nothing But! Or Impolite Thoughts on the Class Struggle (2001), Erik Gandini’s Surplus: Terrorized Into Being Consumers (2003), Alexander Kluge’s Notes from Ideological Antiquity: Marx-Eisenstein-Capital (2008), Lech Kowalski’s The End of the World Begins With One Lie (2010) or John Gianvito’s Vapor Trail (Clark) (2010).

Has anyone seen much from this batch?

Quite a lot to unpack in the trade-off between style and activism, whether one can exist w/the other or not. Cash is needed, how is this funded and by whom? Interesting that Marker is only mentioned as collaborator and Grin... isn't mentioned...then there are narrative films of the 2nd cinema that work toward the struggle, surely? I know what the author means as not quite enough, but again, there is a hole there.

RIP

RIP indeed. That link includes a video of the full version of La Jetée.

Rest In Peace.

odd that just yesterday I reserved The Last Bolshevik at the library.

My rep for repping De Palma aside, Chris Marker is/was my very favorite director. RIP

oh shit.

RIP.

reap

:(

RIP. Sans Soleil is a movie I haven't watched in several years but I'm thinking about it all the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KalkgX5Igwo

I showed that video to a big time cat person and their response was "I want my 3 minutes back." I don't think I've ever come closer to crying at someone's wildly divergent take on a movie.

Last time I looked, there was a Marker-style cat painted on a brick facade near my old job on West 26th St; wish I had pointed it out to you, Eric.

you should have said i want our years of friendship back xp

Instead, I tied her down and forced her to watch all 3 hours of A Grin Without a Cat.

All the while pointing out with every passing minute how awesome the movie is.

Ehrenstein parses and supplements CM's Wiki entry:

http://fablog.ehrensteinland.com/2012/07/30/christian-francois-bouche-villeneuve-aka-chris-marker/

RIP. I've tried to hack Sans Soleil a couple of times but it always puts me to sleep; I ought to rectify that sometime soon.

don't hack it, watch it

usual bunch of Keyframe links (I wd esp point toward excerpt of Marker's piece on Vertigo that Glenn Kenny has):

http://www.fandor.com/blog/daily-chris-marker-1921-2012/

yes that was great

http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m7y98wx2H11rw6lx6o1_500.gif

oh, and the former Steve Shasta linked the Vertigo essay way above.

that vertigo essay's incredible.

RIP, Cat-man.

RIP. Sans Soleil is such a beautiful movie

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d4_YKpMQLc

Brody, with a link to a 2003 interview that needs to be translated.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/movies/2012/07/in-memoriam-chris-marker.html

also, Film Comment has put a host of Marker material online:

http://www.filmcomment.com/issue/may-june-2003

http://www.filmcomment.com/issue/july-august-2003

Very sad to hear about this.

I'm Marker's senior by a dozen or so years. When he was a young journalist on Esprit magazine Chris wrote to me expressing admiration for the cat mosaics I was making at the time, and asking for advice on how to get established as a cat mosaicist himself. My response was that he should pose as a Maoist, then slowly work more and more cats and mosaics into his work.

I also suggested that Christian should change his name and make up some juicy lies about his past in order to make himself sound more mysterious, while at the same time refusing to confirm or deny anything. For instance, Chris was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, which is a pretty boring and bourgeois suburb of Paris. This would never do for a Maoist-mosaicist, so I told him to spread the rumour that he came from Ulan-Bator in Mongolia. This he did, although not quite as consistently as I would have liked. He also claimed to have been a NASA parachutist, to have saved Fidel Castro's life on three occasions, to come from the future, and to suffer from a rare medical condition for which the only treatment was to drink a litre of boiling hot flamingo blood each week.

Only last week I emailed Chris suggesting he tell people he was suffering from a case of Morgellons picked up from Joni Mitchell, and had coloured threads in the shape of cats' whiskers growing on his upper lip. Unfortunately, Chris stopped responding to any of my communications in 1962. I think the success of La Jetée went to his head a bit, to be honest.

Oh well, see you back in the future, Chris!

http://nelliek*ll*an.tumblr.com/post/28354641278/chris-markers-favorite-photo-from-may-68-je

Brody, with a link to a 2003 interview that needs to be translated.

i could give this a shot if you want

i got beaten to it:

http://www.filmcomment.com/article/marker-direct-an-interview-with-chris-marker

thx, I was wondering if it was in the FC package

I'm Marker's senior by a dozen or so years.

Hang on.... what?

Either that's a piece of absurdism, or penned by Manoel de Oliveira.

lol guys

:-(

I've just watched first episode of The Owl's Legacy. holy shit it really is just some interesting and/or super-knowledgeable people (Vernant - Castoriadis - Xenakis why not) talking about the legacy of ancient Greece for 6.5 hours, this is the best thing ever, thank you Chris Marker.

whoa

Saw Sans Soleil and La Jetee tonight. (I saw what was probably the same double-bill 10 or 15 years ago.) They showed them in that order, with a short break between.

I had a real tough time with Sans Soleil. The problem for me is that I need time to process the non-stop stream of aphorisms, fragments, riddles, and the rest that make up the narration. I had that problem to a degree with A Grin Without a Cat, but at least there I was always interested in what was happening on-screen; my attention never flagged. I just didn't find the visuals in Sans Soleil all that compelling. La Jetee was great; I'm glad it found a place on the Sight and Sound list. I wonder if showing them out of chronological order helped a bit--truthfully, it was a major relief not to have to read and really be able to appreciate the beauty of the images.

They showed Sans soleil with the French soundtrack but La Jetee with the English one? Odd.

The English narration was so good for La Jetee (in terms of catching the right tone), it was almost confusing--it just didn't seem like something that was slapped on in place of the original French. I know I'm short-changing Sans Soleil, but that's what happens with me when I have to divide my attention with dense subtitles. It'd be nice to see it with an English audio track as good as La Jetee's.

Yeah, I don't think Sans soleil suffers from the alternate English narration at all (it's on the DVD). I'd imagine it feels a whole lot less dense that way.

(I say that because it's the only way I've seen it, in English.)

Marker 6-pack in new Senses of Cinema:

http://sensesofcinema.com/issue/64/chris-marker-64/

I watched the first half of Sans Soleil last night. It's way more up my alley than La Jetee was.

Man, Sans Soleil.

I could watch this forever.

ha i felt like i WAS watching it forever the first time but maybe i was in a bad place. I need to try again because i know it's better than i think it is.

Strange, I was really taken with it the first time then really bored the second.

I had a couple of false starts & decided to 'come back to it in a bit' (ie forget it exists for 18 months), but loved it when my mood and its tone finally came together.

Old-timey ilxor on Grin Without a cat

i think we agreed this is the agnes varda thread; seventeen of her films streaming for free, here, inc. cool stuff like daguerréotypes, http://dafilms.com/event/107-retrospective-agnes-varda/

I watched 'The Sixth Side of the Pentagon' and 'The Embassy' yesterday - both very good. Lots of the 'Sixth Side' footage pops up in 'Grin Without a Cat', though. Looking forward to watching the Varda stuff too.

Good work schlump - will look at a couple of those films over the w/e.

So far:

RÉPONSE DE FEMMES (Orig.) / 1975 / France / 8 min
ELSA LA ROSE (Orig.) / 1965 / France / 20 min
LES DITES CARIATIDES (Orig.) / 1984 / France / 13 min

Elsa is p/fascinating, how a woman not only stands besides the artist but is crucial in seemingly bringing it to existence. Elsa herself does not acknowledge her role in this, its either sad or just something there, to be contemplated and never to be answered for definite, an unwilling agent, which goes against the women of Reponse de Femmes, who hate what men make of them and want to be left alone (if that's what it takes).

Another thing is for ear and text and architecture - she is so on.

The LA years:

MUR MURS (Orig.) / 81 / France / 80 min
DOCUMENTEUR (Orig.) / 1981 / France / 63 min
UNCLE YANCO (Orig.) / 1967 / France / 22 min
w/Black Panthers which I'd seen before, ads to an an amazing programme of works and portraits of peoples and landscapes of LA: love letters to Bohemia on one hand, the other side of escape from another life on another, esp if you are a single mother or black and live in a tough neighbourhood, and how you can use art to deal with the pain. Because ultimately there is always pain and life is hard. Mur Murs is incredible all by itself: a plot of how a public art might work, but how it is still grubby art -- made by artists still in service of the money men (and govt bodies) who fund it -- but allows for a completely different interaction w/people and the environment. And at the end, the way it ends as rubbish, as decay...well that is a price that seems well worth paying.

She is so good with people, so witty and so interesting and interested, her antennae is truly wide and picks up one everything, but its not frightening at all. Its about letting yourself be opened up: Varda is an alert, model citizen.

In the middle of a long-weekend program at the Cinematheque: Remembrance of Things to Come/La Jetée/The Sixth Side of the Pentagon on Friday, A Grin Without a Cat last night, The Case of the Grinning Cat/One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich tonight. (I skipped Sans Soleil this time.) Thanks to English narration, I had an easier time with A Grin Without a Cat than when I watched it at home last year. Such a dense sprawl, though...it pushes my powers of concentration to the limit, and I still come up a little short when he leaves the USA. (By which I mean I just don't have enough background knowledge about Prague and Paris and the rest to connect the dots; I still find the images and dissonances compelling.) Liked seeing Ed Sanders (part of the footage taken from the Pentagon film).

I was there last night! Great stuff.

So was I! I was hoping for more of Marker's comnmentary on the images that we get in the early sequence, but enjoyed it nonetheless.

By which I mean, I was hoping for more discussion of the images themselves in general.

One of the most interesting things about Grin for me--and one of the reasons I have a hard time pinpointing Marker's view of these events a decade after the fact (somewhat rueful but not bitter?)--is that you get his words read by a variety of other people.

Did you guys stop by the photo exhibit on the fourth floor?

i love grin. i saw the whole thing with my mom years ago. there's some pretty accurate/brutal stuff leveled at french maoists, and a whole soliloquoy (sp?) delivered to (unnamed) JLG.

clemenza i think marker is ambivalent and that def. comes through.

The Godard soliloquy must have went right past me.

Ambivalent is a good description. That's there in The Case of the Grinning Cat, too, which I saw last night. I didn't much care for that one--the events in A Grin Without a Cat are so momentous that the ambivalence feels tragic, but in the second film, it wanders off into whimsy. I did like how clear-eyed he is about hyperbole, though; when the one French conservative gets compared to a Nazi by the left, Marker responds with the most withering "Really?" imaginable.

he was in the resistance; he should know right

Exciting!

Healthy film programme (seen most of them, no reason not to attend a screening or two) + nice catalogue.

the documentary about marker's early (pre-cinema) years should be interesting. like rohmer he lived something like a full life before cinema.

Comments by William Gibson and others:
http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/apr/15/thrilling-prophetic-chris-marker-experimental-films

yeah I'm gonna go to this although I prob won't make any screenings which :-(((((((( but this should be cool, love this dude

damn, have no idea where the whitechapel gallery is but wish i was near there!

london. *dreams*

Love Whitechapel. Haven't been in ages, work near it for the next couple of months so great excuse to go more regularly.

Brooklyn retro in August

http://www.bam.org/film/2014/chris-marker

Region 2 release:

http://chrismarker.org/2014/06/chris-marker-collection-english-released/

Oh, I just bought that - didn't realise it was new. Watched the first disc, which was very good.

I've just watched first episode of The Owl's Legacy. holy shit it really is just some interesting and/or super-knowledgeable people (Vernant - Castoriadis - Xenakis why not) talking about the legacy of ancient Greece for 6.5 hours, this is the best thing ever, thank you Chris Marker.

i have this but without subtitles and my french isn't quiiiiiiite good enough :(

I watched it on dailymotion or something w/ subs iirc – that version seems to be on youtube now

will look, thanks

Saw the Whitechapel exhibit - There were 5-6 rooms when really you only needed 2-3. Marker made bits of video art but it was hard to get a handle on how out there this stuff was for the time.

Attended a couple of screenings: Sunday in Peking looks gorgeous. I have almost all of these in shagged out copies from a few years ago, when Marker was alive and wouldn't authorise release. Its interesting as to why he thought the early stuff wasn't much cop. I mean he is alert: writing great narration (all with blink-and-you-miss subtle criticism), displays a great eye for colour and its depths (the market in Peking). Really was this stuff worse than some of the late works? I did watch one and the soundtrack was crappy electronica, the narrator's voice was off...

A biography of him would be amazing. Give the criticism (as evidenced by the exhibit) is lacking I bet a Coca-Cola it'll be terrible.

Someone should translate his novel tho'.

his Level Five (1996) opens in NY/LA today

http://www.fandor.com/keyframe/daily-chris-marker-bam

I know a number of Marker stans who can't stand that one. But of course, I'll watch anything he's done, so.

i've seen the CM 'biggies,' anything i should target in the Brooklyn retro that you might've seen?

You've probably seen what I've seen ... everything that's been released on DVD + La Joli Mai, basically.

Level Five isn't great - and it's not helped by lots of ancient computer graphics. It has some great parts to it, though, and it's certainly not without something to say. There's just something about how fragmented it is that doesn't work.

Saw digitally restored Letter from Siberia, which is typically light (animation, playful voiceover) but not frivolous. Also a (faded to pink) print of the 20-min Sunday in Peking, prob the most filmic images of '50s Chinese life I've seen.

(some old codger exiting was grumping about "propaganda," not sure which film he meant)

full house for this, tho it was a room of about 150 seats probably.

They're really lovely films, but very light. I'm not sure how much he associated them with his later work, a bit workmanlike. But charming. I suppose people might wonder about them being propaganda seeing as they don't explicitly condemn either government? But it's not likely they would.

Icarus Films will release Level Five on DVD and VOD on October 7.

Cool

that's one i've never seen! i don't think it ever got much distribution in the states.

i got that UK "chris marker collection" thing and have been making my way through it. his documentary about israel (description d'un combat), which i hadn't seen in 15 years, is so moving. i wish that lanzmann's "porquoi israel" was more readily available, the two films would make a fascinating comparison.

might as well add susan sontag's "promised lands" to that list. one thing i like about all three films is their complete absence of glibness. we could use more of that anguished searching now.

Level Five isn't great - and it's not helped by lots of ancient computer graphics. It has some great parts to it, though, and it's certainly not without something to say. There's just something about how fragmented it is that doesn't work.

― Spaceport Leuchars (dowd)

OTM. Not a particularly great transfer either.

Yeah, the ancient computer graphics combined with VHS bleed kind of make you want to poke your eyes out. I remember there were a couple of interesting ideas (a meditation on footage of a woman jumping to her death?) but nothing that has stuck with me.

recent addition to my living room - really happy with the job the framers did on this!

http://i38.photobucket.com/albums/e128/ilxalbums/c245a5e2-0a4a-43b8-be38-6492943d72f9.jpg

Beautiful.

if you type chris marker into amazon prime search, it comes up with three chris marker films plus "dilbert: the complete series"

So incredible, watch while you can - the most suppressed of Chris Marker's films, for years was near impossible to find, perhaps because it's his most personal. Vividly restored, and one of the first verite portraits of Post-war Japan from a Western perspective. https://t.co/Xl1nQnOzhE

— Aaron Stewart-Ahn (@somebadideas) June 21, 2019

He’s not hiding behind a big orange cat it that one, is he?

I haven’t seen it! Mainly putting this here to remind myself to watch

I was just joking. When Agnès Varda passed recently I saw a few films of hers in which he appears and because he is camera shy she always obscured him in the fashion described.

Yeah I got that

Oh, okay

Thanks for posting. Much, much cleaner than the DVDR copy that I lost a couple moves ago.

Thanks for posting!!

Seems that French language version just showed up a few weeks ago of La Jetée on Criterion. Hadn’t realized that English language version had equal status.

Dope!

Re: wins post, thx wins

Yeah, thanks, wins.

I can't seem to find any prior post, from myself or otherwise, but I really dug this installation he did I saw at MoMA which was called Silent Movie.

https://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/1995/videospaces/marker.html

http://www.mfj-online.org/journalPages/MFJ29/McElhaneyMarker.html

Haven't reread those links recently. My memory was there was a five high stack of video monitors four around looping black and white footage of a glamorous lady or an old school phonograph, along with mash-up film posters on the nearby walls of things like a Maciste movie directed by René Clair, say.

I... had no idea!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6U9oKZAaEY

Wow. Did he do one for The Psychedelic Furs as well? #OneThread.

Fantastic.

100th birthday today

Saw that on Mubi

Haven't reread those links recently. My memory was there was a five high stack of video monitors four around looping black and white footage of a glamorous lady or an old school phonograph, along with mash-up film posters on the nearby walls of things like a Maciste movie directed by René Clair, say.

I used to walk by this interesting-looking super high-window office in Soho which turned out to be for the publishing company Seven Stories Press. Soon I found out that a guy I knew worked there so one day he invited me in. On the walls there were some really interesting posters and drawings. On one wall was a bunch of doodles done by Kurt Vonnegut illustrating the seven (?) basical plotlines such as Man Falls in Hole. On another was a poster full of cool-looking /slightly-pulpy paperback covers that didn’t look quite real. I said “that looks like a Chris Marker thing” and he said “it is!”

An almost complete collection of Chris Marker's filmography (1952-2011)

52.57 GB

70 films including 40 shorts and 12 features + his 13-part documentary "The Owl’s Legacy"

Subs: eng, spa, fre and pt-br whenever foundhttps://t.co/pYIklYm6Tp pic.twitter.com/xv9OOlE5pc

— Serkan (@Serpotkine) January 31, 2026