Chris Marker

  • Chris Marker – Lettre de Sibérie (1957)

    1951-1960AnimationChris MarkerDocumentaryFrance

    Quote:
    Chris Marker’s ethnographic essay-documentary on Siberia, made in 1957, remains fresh and relevant today. Combining fantasy animation (of woolly mammoths and mammoth buildings) and documentary photography shot by Sacha Vierny, Marker displays above all his amazement at the diversity of Siberia, at once almost pre-historic and post-revolutionary. On the film’s revival at the 1982 New York Film Festival, Village Voice critic Carrie Rickey called it “compassionately detached, playful and eclectic…. What still thrills about Letter from Siberia 25 years after it was made is Marker’s sympathetic ethnography, so much against the grain of the partisan American documentaries of the ’50s where the omniscient voice told you how to read each image.” In one hilarious segment, Marker does include that voice – repeating a scene with a Capitalist-propaganda voice-over and then with a Soviet one.Read More »

  • Chris Marker – ¡Cuba Sí! (1961)

    1961-1970ArthouseChris MarkerDocumentaryFrance

    Documentarists tend to be an eccentric breed. They need to be, since none of the main film festivals allow their films into competition (an incomprehensible decision), and to get a documentary into a cinema these days is a fraught process. But there is no more highly personal yet elusive film-maker than Chris Marker. His importance lies not in how many audiences have been affected by his films, but in how many of his fellow film-makers regard him as something of a genius.Read More »

  • Chris Marker – Dimanche à Pekin AKA Sunday in Peking [ENGLISH] (1956)

    1951-1960Chris MarkerDocumentaryFrance

    Director Chris Marker begins by recounting his childhood dream of visiting the city of Peking – a city he was once only able to admire in books. The viewer is taken on a journey through this city, as if experiencing it from the mind and through the eyes of Marker. His thoughts and observations about the traditions, history, and banalities of everyday life in Peking are woven together in elegant fashion.Read More »

  • Chris Marker – La solitude du chanteur de fond AKA The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Singer (1974)

    1971-1980Chris MarkerDocumentaryFrancePerformance

    In 1974, Marker made La solitude du chanteur de fond, which follows Yves Montand as he
    prepares a benefit concert for Chilean refugees. That Montand had not performed live in many
    years made his participation in this concert all the more significant. The portrait of Montand
    is intercut with footage from films in which he starred, including Costa Gavras’s Z (1969) and
    L’Aveu (1970), both filmed in Chile with the support of Allende. Montand reflects on the role
    of politics in culture and on the nature of political films, themes of considerable interest
    to Marker. In addition, the film includes footage smuggled out of Chile that tracks the final
    days of the democratically elected government of Allende before the coup of September 11, 1973.
    Chris Marker, Nora M. Alter, 2006Read More »

  • Chris Marker – L’ambassade AKA The Embassy (1973)

    1971-1980Chris MarkerFrancePolitics

    An unexpected response to Pinochet’s 1973 coup d’etat in Chile. A Super-8 film apparently found in an embassy -as it’s written in the original title-, where political activists had taken refuge after a military coup d’état. But the events -and their setting- are not what they first appear to be.Read More »

  • Chris Marker – Description d’un combat AKA Description of a Struggle (1960)

    1951-1960Chris MarkerDocumentaryFrance

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    Winner of the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival, Marker’s documentary film, Description d’un combat/Description of a Struggle, examines the condition and circumstances of the young state of Israel and its citizens. The film was made at the time when the Israeli state was 12 years old, and borrows its title from Kafka’s short story. It explores the historical, social, cultural and ethical contexts at the heart of Israel’s existence, and the impact of the tragic and not so distant past on the collective psyche of the nation.Read More »

  • Chris Marker – Lettre de Sibérie AKA Letter from Siberia (1957) (HD)

    1951-1960Chris MarkerDocumentaryFrance

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    Review from senses of cinema:
    Pick any recent book on documentary and you’re likely to find mention of Chris Marker’s oeuvre, usually characterising him as an essayist or even perhaps a poetic ethnographer. While there is some truth to this what most commentators have avoided recognising is Marker’s chameleon-like shift from photography to film, film to analogue video, analogue video to DV, and more recently from DV to multimedia. In retrospect, Marker would seem to be less the filmmaker and more an explorer and creator of audiovisual memes, of the passages of memory and reverie that lie somewhere between the usual stuff of documentary and what another age might have called ‘fancy.’Read More »

  • Chris Marker – Le fond de l’air est rouge AKA A Grin Without a Cat [Marker’s 1993 re-edit] (1977)

    1971-1980Chris MarkerDocumentaryFranceThe Films of May '68

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    Synopsis:
    French essay film focusing on global political turmoil in the 1960s and ’70s, particularly the rise of the New Left in France and the development of socialist movements in Latin America.Read More »

  • Chris Marker – Si j’avais quatre dromadaires AKA If I Had Four Dromedaries (1966)

    1961-1970Chris MarkerDocumentaryFranceShort Film

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    Composed entirely of still photographs shot by Marker himself over the course of his restless travel through twenty-six countries, If I had four camels stages a probing, at times agitated, search for the meanings of the photographic image.Read More »

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