1961-1970 Arthouse Chris Marker Documentary France

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

adminJune 13, 2020

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Quote:
Composed entirely of still photographs shot by Marker himself over the course of his restless travel through twenty-six countries, If I Had Four Dromedaries stages a probing, at times agitated, search for the meanings of the photographic image.
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An amateur photographer and two of his friends are looking at pictures that were made all over the world: the USSR, Greece, Cuba. They discuss what they see: images of streets, faces, landscapes, and animals. Si j’avais quatre dromadaires can be looked upon as an album with photographs. The title refers to a poem by Apollinaire:
“Avec ses quatre dromadaires
Don Pedro d’Alfaroubeira
Courut le monde et I’admira
II fit ce que je voudrais faire
Si j’avais quatre dromadaires.

Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, 103-104 wrote:
The terrain covered in If I Had Four Camelsis organized in two parts, “The Castle” and “The Garden”. Each explores different facets of human achievement and experience, and revisits the utopian ideals that Marker had admired in the work of Giradoux, and figured through African art and the Olympic Games in his earliest films. “The Castle” leans towards the pinnacles of human culture and civilization: cities, societies, art, religion and commerce. […] The photographer confesses that he cannot resist films that pass from country to country at a single moment in time, and, in narrating his own journey around the world via photographs, nods implicitly at those passages in Le Coeur net, Letter from Siberia and Cuba si that had established the route before it.

If “The Castle” leans toward culture, “The Garden” focuses upon human nature, treated as a native impulse towards fulfilment and happiness. Children and animals are shown as ideal representatives of ‘the law of the garden’, but the desire to achieve balance and satisfaction in the human condition is also expressed through the aspirations of revolutionary politics.