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

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