Chris Marker

A film composed almost entirely of still images? Surely not. A bold experiment that works brilliantly as a new form of storytelling. The story explores the themes of memory, fate, and obsession. It uses no dialogue but instead a voice over to tell its poetic and philosophical story. Marker has created one of the best and most influential science fiction films ever. Gilliam adapted this short into his full length film 12 Monkeys. It undoubtedly influenced films like Blade Runner, Dark City, and City of Lost Children which also deal with themes of memory and loss introduced in La Jetee. Marker pays homage to his favorite film Vertigo in one particular scene and in various elements of the story. A lot has been said about the still images, which I think precisely emulates what our memories are. We remember the past not as moving pictures, but ones that remain forever still.

La Jetee has one of the greatest moments in cinema, one that is very subtle and last only a couple of seconds. A moment that captures both the birth of cinema and the essence of love and memory.

La Jetee can be seen on youtube but is best appreciated on the big screen with English dub.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nw0UIhLArTM

Along with Murnau's Sunrise, this is something of a cinematic miracle.

One of Marker's most ambitious films. At the end of his 'militant phase' Marker wanted to make a film made entirely from found footage, and this results in an extremely dense work exploring the rise and fall the new leftist movement throughout the world during the late 60's to 70's. While a lot of the footage is of the talking heads variety, they are edited in an associative collage form that doesn't cohere to a set message or idea but instead form a sort of dialogue that examines the events shown in relation to similar events during that period of time. I found this much harder to get into than Marker's other films because there is so much history and politics that I'm not familiar with. While there are some of Marker's humor and wry commentary, the long passages of talking heads does make a lot of the film quite dry. This was his last feature before Sans Soleil, and the use of color tinting hints to digital image manipulations in 'The Zone'.

A fascinating exploration of the history of the Soviet Union and early Soviet cinema through the figure of a repressed and forgotten filmmaker. Structured as a series of video letters addressed to his friend Alexander Medvedkin, a Soviet filmmaker who lived through the birth and chaos of the Soviet Union and whose films were banned before release, Marker's film traces the history of Soviet cinema through Medvedkin and his contemporaries Eisenstein, Vertov, Dovzhenko, and novelist Isaac Babelthis. I've already seen The Train Marches On, Marker's previous film on Medvedkin and his agitprop trains, and Marker incorporates some of it into this film. Continuing his obsession of the nature of images his so illustrated in Sans Soleil, Marker explores how fictional cinematic images, like that of the famous Odessa stairs sequence in Battleship Potempkin, become accepted as historical truth. Although I haven't seen any early Soviet films other than Potempkin and MWtMC, and can't tell the difference between a gulag and a kulak, I was completely captivated by Marker's insightful essay, which creates so many clever insights through his esoteric connections between fact and fiction, history and film.

Holy shaiza, this is top tier Marker. Following in the steps of Rouch/Morin's Chronicle of a Summer and even surpasses that in its expansiveness and its effortless integration of personal, social, and political to present a snapshot of the state of uncertainty in the minds of the Parisian population at the end of the Algerian war, and its critique of the isolation of bourgeois, their racism and materialism (all in good Markeresque humor). The first half of the film consist of Marker and the cameraman interviewing people from various strata of the population on what they consider happiness (and a whole slew of other topics) to be while adding their own opinions to the conversation. The second half places the interviews within the broader frame of contemporary politics and social concerns with newsreel footage. The associative editing prefigures that of Sans Soleil. Also, Marker, who provides plenty of screen-time to his favorite animal, meets his match when he interviews a costume designer who dresses her cat like a barbie doll.

Well it's no surprise that a film written by Marker and edited by Resnais ends up being really good. This is an extremely intelligent film in which Marker and Resnais offers a subversive critique of colonialism by asserting that the African art is removed from its original context as everyday and ceremonial/religious objects into mummified works of art in museums, then commodified goods by western culture's fetish for that exotic otherness. The voiceover is beautifully written though a bit too dry by Marker's standards. Even if the issue of colonialism is kind of dated, the exoticization of art is still as relevant today.

Well it's no surprise that a film written by Marker and edited by Resnais ends up being really good. This is an extremely intelligent film in which Marker and Resnais offers a subversive critique of colonialism by asserting that the African art is removed from its original context as everyday and ceremonial/religious objects into mummified works of art in museums, then commodified goods by western culture's fetish for that exotic otherness. The voiceover is beautifully written though a bit too dry by Marker's standards. Even if the issue of colonialism is kind of dated, the exoticization of art is still as relevant today.