Chris Marker

Biography: life and films

If Chris Marker is to be remembered it must be as one of the most eclectic, innovative and challenging artists of our time. In a highly productive career that spanned sixty years, he not only made a unique contribution to the art of cinema, he was also a prolific writer and important pioneer in the now burgeoning field of multimedia art. His friend and one-time collaborator Alain Resnais described him as the prototype for the 21st century man. Most of us will see him in more modest terms, as a dedicated artist driven by a passion to find himself in his art and uncover new forms of artistic expression. Whilst the world lives in complete ignorance of much of Marker's work, he is unquestionably one of the most important and influential creative talents of the last century. Marker is best remembered for his sci-fi short film La Jetée (1962) and distinctive documentaries Le Fond de l'air est rouge (1977) and Sans Soleil (1983), but these represent the merest fraction of his remarkably rich and diverse output.

Despite his reasonably high profile, very little is actually known about Chris Marker the man. An intensely private individual, Marker went out of his way to avoid journalists and seldom talked about himself (much of what he has revealed about himself, even to respectable biographers, has turned out to be fabrication). Even the name Chris Marker is a fiction, one of several noms de guerre that the elusive artist chose for himself in the course of his career. (The pseudonym Marker may have derived from the Magic Marker pen). The one thing we do know about him is that his real name is Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve and he was born on 29th July 1921, most probably in Neuilly-sur-Seine, in the outskirts of Paris, France (although Marker has stated that he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia).

Marker has given various contradictory accounts of his early life, but it is generally believed that during the Occupation he was active in the French Resistance. After the war, he worked for UNESCO for a time, before embarking on a career as a journalist and photographer. It was through his work on Communist-leaning publications that he came into contact with André Bazin, the founder of the film review magazine Les Cahiers du cinéma for which Marker would contribute several articles. In 1949, Marker published his first novel, Le Coeur net. This was followed by Giraudoux par lui-même (1952), a critique of the work of the playwright Jean Giraudoux.

Chris Marker's interest in filmmaking began in 1950, when he met Alain Resnais and other members of the so-called Left Bank Movement, including Agnès Varda, Marguerite Duras and Henri Colpi. His first film was Olympia 52, a documentary on the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games. Subsequently, he worked as an assistant to Alain Resnais on two important documentary shorts - Les Statues meurent aussi (1953), winner of the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo, and Nuit et brouillard (1955), a poignant meditation on the Holocaust. It was only with his next short film, Dimanche à Pekin, a documentary filmed in China, that Marker's distinctive style of essay film first became apparent. He developed the style in his next feature, Lettre de Sibérie (1957), an essay on the erosion of Siberia's cultural heritage which combines footage shot by Marker in Siberia with photographic stills, cartoons and newsreel footage - a compositional style that he would employ on many of his subsequent films.

Marker then won the Gold Bear for the Best Documentary at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival with Description d'un combat (1960), a documentary on Israel which sought to connect the country's troubled present with its equally turbulent past. Then came one of the director's most controversial films,¡Cuba Sí! (1961), a flagrant piece of propaganda for Fidel Castro which includes interviews with the Cuban dictator; the film was banned for its overt anti-American slant. After this, Marker made La Jetée (1962), a photomontage short film which brought him international renown. Ostensibly a science-fiction fantasy, the film explores one of Marker's main interests, the importance that memory plays in shaping our lives and our version of reality. La Jetée was later remade by Terry Gilliam as Twelve Monkeys (1995) and inspired Mamoru Oshii for his 1987 film The Red Spectacles.

Le Joli mai (1963) was compiled from 55 hours of interviews with people randomly selected on the streets of Paris in the spring of 1962. This won the award for the Best First Work at the 1963 Venice Film Festival. In his next documentary, Le Mystère Koumiko (1965), Marker takes us to present-day Japan and addresses one of his main concerns, the loss of a nation's cultural identity through globalisation. Marker's next film essay, Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966), is another photomontage, consisting of 800 photographs he had taken over the past decade.

Next, Marker worked on Loin du Vietnam (1967), a strident protest against the Vietnam War, which included contributions from several other important filmmakers of the time, including Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard and Claude Lelouch. This collaborative venture led to the creation of SLON (Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles), a left-leaning group of independent filmmakers which actively encouraged the creation of similar film collectives. Marker's first film for the group was Rhodiacéta (1967), followed by La Sixième face du pentagone (1968), another anti-war film, and Le Train en marche (1971), a documentary on the Russian filmmaker Alexander Ivanovich Medvedkin.

Marker then made La Solitude du chanteur de fond (1974), a documentary on his friend Yves Montand (another left-wing activist), made during the singer's benefit concert for Chilean refugees. After this, Marker made one of his best known and most ambitious films, Le Fond de l'air est rouge (a.k.a. A Grin Without a Cat) (1977). This four-hour long essay film examines the political turmoil of the 1960s and expresses the disillusionment that followed the high hopes of May 1968, the revolution that never amounted to anything. Influenced by Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin, the film asserts one of Marker's most deeply held beliefs - that truth is always a matter of perspective, the product of one's own experiences and interpretation of events. This idea, that all cinema (including documentaries) is inherently subjective is central to Marker's oeuvre, in particular his next great film, Sans soleil (1983). Part documentary, part fiction, part philosophical rumination, Sans soleil is Marker's most captivating and poetic film, a dazzling composition of images from around the world, a recognition of and tribute to the universality of human thought and feeling. This film fired Marker's interest in digital technology, which would predominate in his later work.

In 1985, Chris Marker was invited to make a documentary on the making of Akira Kurosawa's last Samurai epic, Ran. The film that Marker delivered, A.K. (1985), was more a profile of the 75-year-old Japanese filmmaker, arguably the most revealing and fascinating portrait of Kurosawa. Shortly after his friend Simone Signoret lost her battle with cancer, Marker made a moving tribute to his fellow campaigner with the documentary Mémoires pour Simone (1986).

Throughout the 1990s, Marker devoted most of his time to his multimedia work, which included his Zapping Zone installation at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Level 5 (1997) is a homage to the films of Alain Resnais, in which he further explored the possibilities of new video technology. Immemory (2008) is an interactive multimedia CD-ROM offering twenty hours of material, comprising clips, music, stills and sound fragments. In 2000, Marker was commissioned by the French TV series Cinéastes de Notre Temps to make Une journée d'Andreï Arsenevitch, a portrait of the Soviet filmmaker Andrei Tarkovski. His last film was Leila Attacks, a one-minute short which he released on the Internet in 2007. He died on 29th July 2012, on his 91st birthday.

Despite being one of the most secretive and little understood of all filmmakers, Chris Marker has acquired a worldwide following and is recognised as one of the great pioneers of film art. His work has delighted and inspired many people around the world, opening our eyes and our minds to the immense possibilities that film still offers. Does it matter that we know so little amount the man himself? All that matters, surely, is the work he leaves behind, those footprints in eternity.

Filmography

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