________________ David Cranmer made this deceased badger even creepier by turning it into a functioning, and playable, theremin. He calls it the Badgermin. The Badgermin’s guts are now composed of electronics from a PAiA Theremax theremin kit, with an 8mm removable antenna sticking out of the back of its neck.
______________ Idiots Art Collectivevarious (2012)
_______________ Igor K-ChmRobot squirrel (2013)
_______________ Rowland WardUntitled (1934)
_______________ Abbas AkhavanFatigues (2014)
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p.s. Hey. A loyal reader of this blog who wishes to be known locally as Your Cell Mate thinks it has been far too long since the blog had a taxidermy-focused post, and I heartily agree, and hence I have handed the blog over to them today so they can make their case to you. Please enjoy and, if you don’t mind, say a word or so to your guest-host who’ll be out there somewhere watching what transpires. Thank you, and thank you heartily YCM. ** jay, My pleasure, naturally. That sounds like that might be the equivalent, relatively speaking, yes. There are still sex shops with video booths into which I assume more than one person can cram themselves as well. I hope you celebrated in a most celebratory way. Wow, ‘Babygirl’, really? You’re brave (or something). ** James, My hope is to de-stranger-fy people to as many unfairly obscure things as I can, so … cool. The first six or maybe seven pages of ‘Tropic of Cancer’ are exciting, but then it kind of blahs out. I predict you will at one point start giving readings of your stuff aloud, and you will be heartened by the occasions when sincere applause erupts when you step away from the microphone. France is quite chilly but not torturously so. Well, good porn doesn’t involve actual acting per se, good porn is more like a documentary that is well shot and edited. My mom used to nose around through my stuff when I was at school, so I put a padlock on my bedroom door, and she was too afraid to take that as a sign that I knew she was nosing around to say anything. The art show was great. It was a big show of James Turrell pieces. One of them was absolutely incredible and one of the best things I’ve ever seen by him. (If you read ‘I Wished’, you know his stuff interests me.) What three books? May your week begin with the waving of checkered flag. ** Misanthrope, We’re cold but still merely moist in the boring, old fashioned way. Whatev’, right? ** CAUTIVOS, Wow, hi there. It has been a very long time. I too have accrued signs of aging since we met, so we’re even. Thank you about my books. No sign of new translations, so you may have to read the new, recent ones in English if you so choose. This year is still a wait-and-see situation for me, but hopes run high. Again, great to see you. Do visit whenever you feel like it. All the best! ** Tyler Ookami, Oh, shit, I was hoping the commenting access thing was getting easier. Curious what you’ll think ‘Jerk’ if you want to share. Oh, it was just a usual sort of IMAX film about dinosaurs. We just wanted to go sit in the big, silver sphere in which the theater is housed. I’ve heard of Tapeworms, but I don’t think I know them firsthand. Thank you, I’ll use the links. Thanks a lot! ** Bernard Welt, The B returns. Well, assuming the visa is granted, yes. I’ll have to keep renewing it and proving my worth as an artist ‘temporarily’ housed in France, but better than being exiled for sure. Glad and I guess unsurprised that you like Marker. I found new things I hadn’t seen by him when I updated the post. That little piece where he filmed a cat listening to music was quite lovely, for instance. ‘Artists and Their Autobiographies from Today to the Renaissance and Back’: I guess I’ll pray that zLibrary gets its paws on it or something, which is not impossible. Nice! Oh, right, so you’re off to Mexico City right away? There’s that market that sells voodoo and magical and evil stuff, I can’t remember the name, but it’s famous. If you get a chance, eat a Cheese Gordita for me. Boy, do I miss those. ** _Black_Acrylic, Oh, no, penultimate, so soon? Eek. Excited, though. Everyone, _B_A’s amazing musical podcast Play Therapy 2.0 just launched its second to last ever episode, and I encourage you to luxuriate in its luxurious output. Go here, or, as the maestro himself says, ‘I know it’s late, but this is someone new. I couldn’t say no.’ ** Dominik, Hi!!! As birthdays go in my realm, it was perfectly fine. A dog from hell? That’s a scary idea. I’m sure all he really wants a nice little head pat. Love stinks, G. ** Måns BT, Coucou, Måns. Thank you. Yes, he did, as you know. Well, I’m just waiting for Zac to give me feedback on the first draft of our new film script, and he promised to do so in the next few days, so hopefully I’ll be a creativity human-shaped whirlwind very soon. Having lots of great ideas is all you need. Well, and the time to tap them into concrete. But your whirling brain is exciting to hear about. That ramen place! Lucky, lucky. Bisons galore, man! ** Bill, Hi. Thanks. Marker is so wonderfully all over the place. Zac’s noodles have turned my stomach into a throne. Stephen Beachy … I wonder what he’s up to. I’ll check. ** Uday, What kind of dogs do you have? I’m guessing not poodles. Sneaking around, ooh! I never wear suits, no. I have an allergy to fabrics and dyes, and I think organic suits are probably pretty ugly. No, I’m a 24/7 Bohemian sort of dresser. It’s weird because the photo of me on the cover of that book ‘Wrong’ about me and my stuff shows me in a suit, and that photo was literally the only time I put on a suit other than the two or three times I was forced to go to church when I was a kid. Antoine Monnier style jeans: wow! The mind boggles. Or mine does. ** Lucas, Hi. Sick again? A lot of people here are not really fighting off sickness at the moment too. My weekend was nice. The writer Robert Gluck is here, and I saw him. And … other things I can’t remember. No, I’m hoping the visa lawyer sends me the list of what I need to do today. I’m still waiting. Thanks, pal. Feel much better! ** Steve, Thank you. Everyone says I should be able to get the visa without problems, but we’ll see. Wow, ‘Wattstax’, I remember that. Worth a rewatch? The weekend was perfectly doable, yours? Much walking albeit with occasional brr-ing. ** Cletus, Oh good. I’m going get the laser game the minute I finish Paper Mario, i.e, this week. Sure, of course you can mail it to me. Of course! Yeah, I’m super extremely behind on email, but I’m trying to catch up. It’s kind of nice to get the family awareness of your work out of the way. For better or worse I foisted my stuff on my family very early, and, after that, they quickly realised they shouldn’t me ask my writing ever again, and it’s been peaceful (if full of visibly repressed fear) ever since. ** HaRpEr, Pretty amazingly cool teacher to have at 15! I went to an all-boys school, and a number of the teachers were repressed pedophiles who were visibly trying to keep their tongues from hanging out of their mouths most of the time. I’m glad you’re liking ‘Shame’, obviously. You should send those postcards to him if you want. From what I understand, he is desperately longing for real world contact. He’s almost completely shut off from everything. No internet or anything. Just a landline phone he’s allowed to use for a very short period on weekdays and only for fifteen minutes at a time. The Quick! I never loved a band the way I loved them. I must have seen them live around 50 times. Sadly, none of the recorded demo stuff lives up what they were actually doing. They were just a year or two ahead of their time. Just after they broke up, Power Pop happened, and they would have ruled that roost, but no labels had any foresight and wouldn’t sign them. And back then you had to be on a label. Amazing band, a tragic loss. I’m glad you’re liking what exists of them. The guitarist, Steve Hufsteter, was the band’s mastermind genius, and he wrote everything. He also wrote a lot of the very best songs by The Dickies. ** Darbz.⛄️, Hi. Oh, shit, my friend, you’ve been through so much since I last saw you. Look, you’re amazing and tough, and all these fuckers and their small mindedness and bullshit are going to be so far in your rearview mirror, and just try to keep them and everything stupid at bay whatever that takes, and keep your great mind focused on getting out of there in a realistic way. Which of course I know you’re already doing. My LA place is safe, my stoner roommate too, but, yeah, a lot of my friends had everything burned and are completely fucked. It’s really, really terrible. So, you’re out of there now, right? You met some pretty interesting sounding people at least. So sorry, Darbz, which is such an obvious and dumb thing to say, but you know what I’m thinking and feeling between the lines. I think it is not only okay but an excellent idea for a 20 year old to fuck a 31 year old who the 20 year old think is a super cool person. Absolutely. Go for it. Thanks about the visa thing, It’s stressful, but everyone tells me not to worry, so I’m trying not to. Lots of love to you, my pal, and I hope to hear more soon. xoxo. ** Justin D, Hi, J. Thanks for the heads up on ‘Flow’. I’m looking for it. My weekend was pretty fine. Today Zac and I have a big meeting with a producer who we hope will take over the duties of producer for our new film, so I’ll be happy (I hope) when that’s over. I hope your Monday does you proud. ** Okay. You know what’s up there, and I hope you have an interesting period of time with it. See you tomorrow.
‘Chris Marker dislikes making personal appearances (at film festivals and such things) and he has a policy about not doing interviews. It’s as if, deep down, he felt he had a better chance of being understood or recognised by the cats and the owls. And these days, knowing the kind of inflated public persona that film-makers seem required to absorb along with mother’s milk or their first cocaine, you could begin to get the notion that Chris Marker is just some mysterious if ideal figure, a hope or a dream more than an actual person.
‘He is often credited with conceiving the cinematic essay form, with which such disparate filmmakers as Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jon Jost, Chantal Akerman, Wim Wenders, Harun Farocki, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Jonathan Demme, Abbas Kiarostami, Nanni Moretti, Terry Zwigoff, and Agnès Varda have had varying degrees of success. Film school textbooks and books on film history have arrived at a general agreement to treat any French filmmaker working outside of (or alongside) the French New Wave as secondary: exclusions include Jacques Tati – who, like so many other giants in the medium, worked on a wave of his own design – and the filmmakers who belonged to the Left Bank group. While one normally pictures such Cahiers du Cinéma graduates as Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer when discussing the French cinema of the late ‘50s and early-to-mid ‘60s, there also existed the Left Bank directors, who, according to Richard Roud, included three people: Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Chris Marker.
‘La Jetée is Marker’s best-known work, thanks to 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), which adapted its premise to suit a 129-minute movie with high-profile stars (Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe) and a 29 million dollar budget. The original film is much more modest, obviously, but also much more graceful. Clocking in at 28 minutes, La Jetée is one of the strangest movies ever conceived, and also one of the most beautiful and sad. It’s made up almost entirely of black and white still photographs, depicting the events of the narrative. (There is one single, haunting exception – the woman, in repose, fluttering her eyelids open.) These stills are governed by a third-party narration – the only voice we hear – as well as music, and sound effects.
‘I’m of the mind that art can make the world a better place, that it can create a fertile environment for the human mind to evolve in its sense of self, its environment, and its place in the global culture, and I don’t think it’s naïve to suggest that there are certain great works of art that should be viewed as tainted goods if they in any way promote destructive ways of thinking and acting, like racism, colonialism, sexism, and the preservation of ignorance. How unusual is it, then, that Chris Marker has that rare quality that doesn’t make him more than a journalist as it makes him more of a journalist than his colleagues – the ability to find, extract, reflect upon, and use as the binding element of his theses, the elusive poetic quality, the vital force, of the persons, places, and things he sees.’ — Jaime N. Christley, Senses of Cinema
Cinema, photo-novels, CD-roms, video installations – is there any medium you haven’t tried?
Chris Marker: Yes, gouache.
Does the democratization of the means of filmmaking (DV, digital editing, distribution via the Internet) seduce the socially engaged filmmaker that you are?
CM: A necessary caution: the “democratization of tools” entails many financial and technical constraints, and does not save us from the necessity of work. Owning a DV camera does not magically confer talent on someone who doesn’t have any or who is too lazy to ask himself if he has any. You can miniaturize as much as you want, but a film will always require a great deal of work – and a reason to do it. That was the whole story of the Medvedkin groups, the young workers who, in the post-’68 era, tried to make short films about their own lives, and whom we tried to help on the technical level, with the means of the time. How they complained! “We come home from work and you ask us to work some more. . . .” But they stuck with it, and you have to believe that something happened there, because 30 years later we saw them present their films at the Belfort festival, in front of an attentive audience. The means of the time was 16mm silent, which meant three-minute camera rolls, a laboratory, an editing table, some way of adding sound – everything that you have now right inside a little case that fits in your hand. A little lesson in modesty for the spoiled children of today, just like the spoiled children of 1970 got their lesson in modesty by putting themselves under the patronage of Alexander Ivanovitch Medvedkin and his ciné-train. For the benefit of the younger generation, Medvedkin was a Russian filmmaker who, in 1936 and with the means that were proper to his time (35mm film, editing table, and film lab installed in the train), essentially invented television: shoot during the day, print and edit at night, show it the next day to the people you filmed (and who often participated in the editing). I think that it’s this fabled and long forgotten bit of history (Medvedkin isn’t even mentioned in Georges Sadoul’s book, considered in its day the Soviet Cinema bible) that underlies a large part of my work – in the end, perhaps, the only coherent part. To try to give the power of speech to people who don’t have it, and, when it’s possible, to help them find their own means of expression.
Do you prefer television, movies on a big screen, or surfing the Internet?
CM: I have a completely schizophrenic relationship with television. When I’m feeling lonely, I adore it, particularly since there’s been cable. It’s curious how cable offers an entire catalog of antidotes to the poisons of standard TV. If one network shows a ridiculous TV movie about Napoleon, you can flip over to the History Channel to hear Henri Guillermin’s brilliantly mean commentary on it. If a literary program makes us submit to a parade of currently fashionable female monsters, we can change over to Mezzo to contemplate the luminous face of Hélène Grimaud surrounded by her wolves, and it’s as if the others never existed. Now there are moments when I remember I am not alone, and that’s when I fall apart. The exponential growth of stupidity and vulgarity is something that everyone has noticed, but it’s not just a vague sense of disgust – it’s a concrete quantifiable fact (you can measure it by the volume of the cheers that greet the talk-show hosts, which have grown by an alarming number of decibels in the last five years) and a crime against humanity. Not to mention the permanent aggressions against the French language. . . . And since you are exploiting my Russian penchant for confession, I must say the worst: I am allergic to commercials. In the early Sixties, making commercials was perfectly acceptable; now, it’s something that no one will own up to. I can do nothing about it. This manner of placing the mechanism of the lie in the service of praise has always irritated me, even if I have to admit that this diabolical patron has occasionally given us some of the most beautiful images you can see on the small screen (have you seen the David Lynch commercial with the blue lips?). But cynics always betray themselves, and there is a small consolation in the industry’s own terminology: they stop short of calling themselves “creators,” so they call themselves “creatives.”
And the movies in all this? For the reasons mentioned above, and under the orders of Jean-Luc, I’ve said for a long time that films should be seen first in theaters, and that television and video are only there to refresh your memory. Now that I no longer have any time at all to go to the cinema, I’ve started seeing films by lowering my eyes, with an ever increasing sense of sinfulness (this interview is indeed becoming Dostoevskian). But to tell the truth I no longer watch many films, only those by friends, or curiosities that an American acquaintance tapes for me on TCM. There is too much to see on the news, on the music channels or on the indispensable Animal Channel. And I feed my hunger for fiction with what is by far the most accomplished source: those great American TV series, like The Practice. There is a knowledge in them, a sense of story and economy, of ellipsis, a science of framing and of cutting, a dramaturgy and an acting style that has no equal anywhere, and certainly not in Hollywood.
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23 of Chris Marker’s 62 films
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w/ Alain Resnais Statues Also Die (1953) ‘Statues Also Die is a 1953 French essay film directed by Alain Resnais, Chris Marker, and Ghislain Cloquet about historical African art and the effects colonialism has had on how it is perceived. The film won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo. Because of its criticism of colonialism, the second half of the film was banned in France until the 1960s.’— Wikipedia
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__________ Letter from Siberia (1957) ‘One of the first films by the French inventor of the cinematographic essay. An account of a journey to the Soviet Union, in which Marker loosely and sometimes even humorously portrays the Siberia of 1957 as a landscape between the Middle Ages and the 21st century, a country of contrasts, grand emotions and raw, earthly poetry. Incorporating various film sources, photographs, cartoons, news casts and landscapes in colour, black-and-white and sepia, he tells the history of Siberia in an associative style. From the Western-like gold-digger stories, via the cave dwellers in prehistoric times to the space industry of the Soviet Union and back. He shows every image a number of times: once to criticise the Soviet Union, once to applaud it, and once again to show it ‘like it is‘. By doing so, he demonstrates that nothing simply is like it is.’ — idfa
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La Jetee (1962) ‘Viewers emerge from Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962), a film made almost entirely of still photographs, marked for ever by its imagery yet somehow unsure exactly what they have seen. It is a film that mines deep seams of memory, but whose surface, though hardly forgettable, remains enigmatic in retrospect. After almost half a century, it is still hard to say what Marker achieved in his masterpiece. On the face of it, the half-hour film ought to be easy to précis, because its futuristic plot is familiar to the point of banality. (In Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam’s hyperactive “remake” of La Jetée, it’s only the clichés that remain.) In the aftermath of a nuclear war that has destroyed his native Paris, a prisoner is dispatched across time to secure the resources that the present lacks. Chosen for his attachment to a childhood memory – the image of a man shot dead on the observation pier at Orly airport – he spirals inevitably back to that moment, which is revealed as the scene of his own death.’— Brian Dillon
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w/ Pierre Lhomme Le Joli Mai (1963) ‘In “Le Joli Mai,” Marker and Lhomme offer longer interviews than those in “Chronicle”; they present a wider range of characters, in more varied circumstances, and they delve more deeply into the expressly political aspects of their participants’ daily lives. They make more explicit reference to such significant and shocking events as a police massacre, on February 8th of that year, of anti-O.A.S. protesters. The filmmakers’ intervention—whether by way of editing, titles, or voice-overs (spoken by Simone Signoret and Yves Montand)—is more modest, more recessive. Yet Marker and Lhomme made a more determined, more doctrinaire film. When they question stockbrokers, they seem to restrain themselves from pushing the camera into their teeth; when they speak with a priest who has become a factory worker and a Communist, there is a virtual halo over his head; when they speak with three unemployed women, or a sentimental soldier and his young fiancée, their sympathy and their tenderness blend with pity.’— Richard Brody
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_____________ Rhodiacéta (1967) ‘1967 was also the year an important strike broke out at Rhodiaceta, a textile plant owned by the Rhone-Poulenc trust in the city of Besançon, France. The strike was unusual in character because the workers refused to disassociate the industrial conflict from a social and cultural agenda. The workers’ demands concerned not only salary and job security, but also the very lifestyle imposed on them by society. So it was only natural that Chris Marker, along with other technicians and members of SLON, would visit Besançon to document the strike, and the lives and attitudes of the workers. The film’s most important moments are composed of conversations with workers and their wives. They believe the working class is increasingly at the mercy of a system that gives them no power, a system that would like them to remain powerless. And so it was that their local demands grew into questions about the larger political system.’— Icarus Films
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______________ Puisqu’on vous dit que c’est possible (1973) ‘In 1973, after the failure of wage negotiations with the management of the Lip factories, the workers decided to take over the factory and take over the work in self-management.’— IMDb
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A Grin Without a Cat (1977) ‘One of the most towering and extraordinary films to grace the screen! Staggering in its depth and scope. The subject at hand is how, in the sixties, the ‘universal standard of civilization’ assumed from the fifties began to collapse. The war in Vietnam – that ‘nation placed at the convergence of the world’s contradictions’ – was the watershed, and Marker skillfully and hauntingly depicts its effect. He goes on to show the many civilian-police battles throughout Europe; the revolution within the revolution in Asia, South America, and Czechoslovakia; the space between the police and union stewards into which the French Left rushed in May ’68; the assassination of princes (Che Guevara) and the deposing of kings (Richard Nixon); and those Cheshire Cats commonly known as politicians who cannot explain why what was in the air never quite materialized on the ground.’— Pacific Film Archives
the entire film
________________ Sans Soleil (1983) ‘It would take a book to unravel all the strands of Marker’s work. He’s a master editor, and his images and sequences rush by propulsively, often with playful connections: Japanese girls dancing; rituals for the repose of the souls of broken dolls and later for broken scraps of things; prayers for departed animals at a Tokyo zoo followed by a giraffe being clumsily shot in Africa; Krasna attempting to get women of some African islands to gaze back at his camera as he records them; a sequence of faces that stare out at the viewer from Japanese television. In one spectacular sequence, Marker edits footage of a Japanese train, a cartoon of a train, and video-treated images of samurai, horror, and sex films that isn’t just a virtuoso display but a key to perception.’ — Henry Sheehan
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2084 (1984) ‘Chris Marker plans the question in the future and imagines a television news of 2084 for the anniversary of the second centenarian and three possible scenarios: the grey hypothesis, that of the “crisis”, ” a fearful society which hums and gives itself false safeties in the hope of a balance always questioned “; the black hypothesis, ” a world where technique took the place of ideologies “; the blue hypothesis, finally, that of the dream and the imagination.’— Art Torrents
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__________ A.K. (1985) ‘A.K. is a French documentary film directed by Chris Marker about the Japanese director Akira Kurosawa. Though it was filmed while Kurosawa was working on Ran, the film focuses more on Kurosawa’s remote but polite personality than on the making of the film. The film is sometimes seen as being reflective of Marker’s fascination with Japanese culture, which he also drew on for one of his best-known films, Sans Soleil. The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival.’— Wiki
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_____________ Mémoires Pour Simone (1986) ‘It’s very difficult to be a star and it’s very difficult to remain a star. But it must be horrible to stop being one.’— C.M.
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_____________ Cat Listening to Music (1988) ‘Chris Marker films a cat reacting to the sound of a piano playing.’— Letterboxd
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_____________________ The Owl’s Legacy (1989) ‘Chris Marker’s epic series The Owl’s Legacy is neither a deeply ‘auterist’ work nor a brilliant piece of Cinema. It is, plainly, the documentation of a thirteen-part symposium on Ancient Greece enabled by the Onassis Foundation and conceptualized by Marker. However, the amount of ground it covers and the number of new directions it opens up for us to think about cotemporary politics, science, culture, law, economy and art (specifically, cinema) makes it one of the richest works of criticism that I’ve come across.’— The Seventh Art
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______________________ The Last Bolshevik (1992) ‘One of the major essays of Chris Marker–which automatically makes this one of the key works of our time–this remarkable video (1993) is provisionally about his friend and mentor, the late Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989), in the form of six video “letters” sent to him posthumously. More profoundly, this is about the history of Soviet cinema and the Soviet Union itself, about what it meant to be a communist, about what these things mean now…. Eloquent and mordantly witty in its poetic writing, beautiful and often painterly in its images, this is as moving and as provocative in many respects as Marker’s Sans soleil (1982), which places it very high indeed.’ — Jonathan Rosenbaum
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_____________ Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993) ‘This documentary tells the story of film director Aleksandr Medvedkin, throughout his life a sincere believer in communism, whose films were repeatedly banned in the Soviet Union. Modern Russian film students express their excitement at seeing his film HAPPINESS for the first time, and his contemporaries shed light on his life and work.’— IMDb
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_____________ Level Five (1997) ‘If Level Five, originally released in 1996, could be reduced to essentials, the pungent, bracing ingredients of its perfect Crème de la Chris Marker recipe would include: virtual realities and the immaterial figurations of the Internet, the fateful Battle of Okinawa in 1945 (as concrete history, as disremembering, and as a potential video game), mass suicide and cultural dictation (vis-à-vis the shifting meanings of “sacrifice”), a fable-like tale behind David Raksin’s composition of the theme from Laura, a terrifying bullfight (two bulls roped together head to head, goaded on by grunting trainers), tourists guided through the bunkers of Okinawa like chattering lemmings, Yves Klein blue horizons, computer- generated voices reminiscent of Alphaville and Stephen Hawking, prophetic networks of knowledge and (dis)information, masks/avatars draping counterfeit skin over old ceremonies, grainy footage of women jumping off cliffs like people leaping from the Twin Towers…’— Howard Hampton
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_____________ Immemory (1997) ‘Immemory is the first CD-ROM project by French filmmaker Chris Marker. Marker’s recent works have explored computers, multimedia, and non-linearity, traversing the passages between documentary and fiction. In Immemory, Marker charts a haunting journey through memory, cinema, photography, war and literature, tracing an itinerary or map of an imaginary country. This voyage takes us from the “Madeleine” at the intersection of Proust and Hitchcock through an archive of image and text, and culminates as a self-portrait. Marker states that his object was to “present the ‘guided tour’ of a memory, while at the same time offering the visitor a chance for haphazard navigation.”‘— eai
How to Watch Chris Marker’s CD-ROM “Immemory” on a Computer
_______________________________________ One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (1999) ‘Master documentary filmmaker Chris Marker directs this loving tribute to the late great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky, who made such classics of art cinema as Andrei Rublev (1966) and The Sacrifice (1986). The film opens with documentary footage of the tearful reunion between the director and his son, after the latter finally got an exit visa from Soviet officials. Though he was ailing from the cancer that would eventually kill him, Tarkovsky cheerfully talks with his family while drinking champagne. Relying on Marker’s lyrical commentary, the film juxtaposes sequences of Tarkovsky on his deathbed, footage on the set of The Sacrifice, and material from his many films.’ — allrovi.com
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_____________ E-clip-se (1999) ‘Thus, every self-portrait (unlike autobiography which even when it resorts to a myth such as that of the four ages, is limited to an individual’s memory and to the places where he lived) ceases to be essentially individual except, of course, in a purely anecdotal sense. The writing machine, the system of places, the figures used – everything in it tends towards generalization, whereas the intra-textual memory, that is, the system of cross-references, amplifications, and palinodes that supplants a memory turned towards ‘remembrance,’ produces the mimesis of another type of anamnesis, which might be called metempsychosis; it is, at any rate, a type of archaic and also very modern memory through which the events of an individual life are eclipsed by the recollection of an entire culture, thus causing a paradoxical self-forgetfulness.’— Michel Beaujour
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________________________________ Remembrance of Things to Come (2001) ‘Remembrance of Things to Come may sound from its title like a cute turn on Proustian concerns, but it is actually a haunting examination of another photographer’s work, a body of pictures that Marker seems to conclude reflect the parallel existence of past and future in much the same way he earlier proposed via sci-fi parable. Marker sees Denise Bellon (whose daughter Yannick Bellon co-directed this film with Marker) not quite as a photojournalist, not quite as a documentarian, not quite as an aesthetician. ellon’s work coincided not only with her association with the rise of surrealism, but also the false sense of social and political lull that assuaged Europe between the two World Wars. Marker thoroughly mines her photography for all the ethnographic, artistic, historic and philosophical merit it’s worth, and if the sensory results are, typical of Marker, more difficult to explain than most other films, the implications he suggests (without ever actually outright pushing) have an intimidating clarity.’— Slant Magazine
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_____________ Leila Attacks (2007) ‘LEILA ATTACKS is at once a parody of the faux gigantism of blockbuster PR and a morality tale (it’s tempting to say allegory) of a surprising turnabout in power relations. It is not without self-parody either, as one of the Soviet-meets-grunge style opening titles declares Chris Marker “the best-known author of unknown movies.” It seems Marker’s “farewell to movies” lingers on, ever more whimsical, practically aphoristic.’— blindlibrarian
the entire film
_______________________ Pictures at an Exhibition (2008) ‘Cinema’s best known film essayist is still alive and kicking, at age 88, living quietly in Paris. Chris Marker’s Pictures at an Exhibition is a walk through a gallery of his photoshopped détournements commenting on art and world history. This is, of course, poles apart from agitprop. The combination of rich and affectively engaging imagery (with a kind of cross-historical hyperlinked quality), subtle humor and light-footed pacing, sutured together with Pärt’s delicately uplifting music, moves me into the kind of heartfelt meditative space the Buddha would approve of — as if we’re walking alongside Paul Klee/Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, in a space capsule hovercraft scanning its monuments, but with humor and gentle compassion and curiosity, coming so close to the bodies lying on the battlefield we can touch them, feel their breath, and maybe give them some solace with our touch.‘ — Immanence
Overview
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p.s. Hey. ** Marc Vallée, Thanks, Marc! ** Montse, Montse! Thank you so much, my pal. And for playing GbV! My LA friends are all alive but the places where some of them live aren’t. Shocking. Major hugs to Xet, and love to you, and I hope to get to see you before too, too long. ** Jamie, Hi, Jamie! So good to see you, It’s been ages. I reposted a guest-post by you not long ago. How are you? Maybe your comment getting in means you can come here and blab when you feel like it, I hope? Take the best care, my friend. ** Steeqhen, Thanks. Oh, yeah, that area near Moulin Rouge is Paris’s only real grungy area. It almost reminds of pre-gentrified NYC there. I’m glad your time is being really fruitful, and I hope you had fun with your friends. If you’re heading back today, and I think you are, easiest trip! ** Dominik, Hi!!! Yesterday was nice. I saw some art and an IMAX film and ate (see: love’s imminent statement). Speaking of which, your love hit the nail on the head yesterday. Love explaining to the so-called ‘Mexican’ restaurant where I ate my birthday dinner last night that three flat corn tortillas displayed like they were little sculptures in a museum with a dollop of cooked mushrooms in the middle of each one is not Mexican food, G. ** Misanthrope, Thanks, pal. Well, I hope you don’t have to drive through piles of snow today at least. ** Lucas, Thank you, and thank Nero too. This will be my first real experience with French bureaucracy, so I’ll find if it’s as laborious as it is supposed to be. Kafka can be great. Me too, I read ‘Metamorphosis’ in high school and thought it was dumb and it took me years to try him again after that. xoxo, me. ** Cletus, Thank you for the birthday salute and especially for your very kind words. ** Dom Lyne, Thanks, Dom. My day was nice. Xmas/NYE were pretty much completely inconsequential. So sorry about your cat, but I’m glad you’re barreling along. Hugs galore, me. ** Joe, Hi, Joe. Thank you. I’ll go find your email. I got a ton of emails yesterday, and I was out, so I’m more behind than usual. Wall of Voodoo is a really great band. One of my favorites. Severely underrated, if you ask me. All the ultra-best. ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Thank, buddy. You will always be a highly discerning and trustworthy cultural critic, sir. ** Larst, Thanks a bunch, L, and love back to you. ** Sarah Cummins, Hi, Sarah. Thank you so, so much! ** Derek McCormack, Mr McCormack, my partner in literary crime! My gratitude for your birthday wish is boundless. xo, me. ** Charalampos, Thank you. Pinback: talk about a really great and really underrated band, wow. ** A, Hey there! It’s been a bit, yes. So sorry to hear about your uncle. My uncle killed himself too. Our film is going to finally premiere this spring. Love back to you. Let’s simultaneously conquer the year, what do you say? ** Bill, Thanks, Bill. Yes, I stole the title from that porn film. It wasn’t a very exciting film, but what a title, eh? Not last and, in fact, almost in the middle. Weird, huh? Birthdays change things, I guess. ** jay, Thanks a lot, Jay. Oh, nice, about my age number. I could use some mysticism for sure. Amazing weekend to you and to your nice friends too. ** James, No, I feel neither older nor wiser. Funny, that. Uh, I just saw the gif and thought, oh, that would be a good header. Nothing more than that as far as I can tell. I usually dread reading my work aloud, and I usually feel like I didn’t do it justice afterwards, but once in a while it turns out okay. A mood thing, I guess. An anti-ABBA guy, yawn. Guyotat is a must, I’d say. I think Barrett-era Pink Floyd is genius, and then I think there were a few years when they were still experimenting, and that was cool, but starting with ‘DSotM’ I think they turned into heavy handed hags. There must still porn theaters somewhere. But, yeah, when I was young that was the only way to see filmed porn unless you bought 8mm porn movies through the mail and watched them in your bedroom with the door locked. Other than fending off old guys trying to hit on you, it was pretty much like watching any movie in a theater. For me. That was a cool day you had. I went out to the suburbs to look at a big art show, but it was too cold to walk very far, and it was my b’day, so we splurged for a taxi. Have a superlative-accruing weekend. ** Florian S. Fauna, Thanks a bunch, Florian! Yes, I’ll write to you pronto. Happy next couple of days (and beyond, of course). ** Steven Purtill, Thanks a whole lot, S. I hope your neck of the woods is conducive to whatever you do. ** h, Wow, h! It’s been serious ages. I’ve been wondering how you are. And you’re in Seoul! Just temporarily, or … ? Yes, it’s really rough back in LA. Terrible stories, terrible losses, really hard to believe it’s all real. Much love to you! ** Steve, Thanks, Steve. Well, Hard Rock Cafe closed down about five months ago, so I am now deprived of my birthday ritual. I did get cold sesame noodles made by Zac, but I haven’t stuck my chopsticks into them yet. No, ha ha, no rare GbV, sadly. ** Justin D, Oh, cool, thanks. Annoying, trivial things on my birthday, what?! Actually, there were a few trivial, annoying things on my birthday here too, so you’re not alone. I ate sort of over-designed so-called Mexican food. It was good but it wasn’t Mexican. I ended up bailing on the festival. Just wasn’t in that mood. How was ‘Flow’, if you watched it. I’m very curious. ** Bernard Welt, Well, well, well, Mr Welt. Or welt, welt, welt, Mr. Well. Your choice. Nice, gosh, you’re living the life. Never been to Mexico City. It does seem like a place one could get a serious crush on. Fun. Every day I hear of two or three more LA friends whose houses burned down, artists who lost all of their work, everything. Artists had migrated to Altadena in the last ten or so years, and now the whole city is gone. The horror is incredible. Media-wise, I just follow the progress and look at photos, and that’s it. I’m about to apply for a long term Artist residency visa, which I pray will work, and seems like it’ll work. It’s mostly a matter if how quickly I can get it. French bureaucracy is notorious. Oh, nice, about that book. What’s the book? I loved ‘Rumours’. Thanks for coming in, my pal. ** Steven Trull, Thanks a lot, Steven. I hope you’re doing great. ** Uday, Thank you! I didn’t end up going to the concert, but oh well. Yes, sorry about how demanding my birthday was on your and others’ tech. I swear I didn’t do that on purpose, but, in retrospect, yes, I should have thought a little more broadly. ** Jacob, Thank you, Jacob! Enjoy the mountains. Amidst snow, I gather? Take care, and, yeah, it would be lovely to catch up and engage whenever you see fit. ** Okay. Back to normal. I thought I would bring back this old post with some updating so you could spend time again with the great and mysterious Chris Marker. See you on Monday.
FLUNKER, six fictions, 124 pp., coming from Amphetamine Sulphate in July. US, July 4: Preorders open. UK/Europe, July 19: Preorders open. Cover by Michael Salerno.
* POSTPONED: May 27 – 31: Paris @ Théâtre du Châtelet: THIS IS HOW YOU WILL DISAPPEAR * POSTPONED: October (dates TBA): New York @ Brooklyn Academy of Music: CROWD
Now available in North America 
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