Offscreen Notes
Chris Marker: 1921-2012
Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, the great French filmmaker Chris Marker passed away on July 30, 2012 at the age of 91. Marker was part of the golden age of French intellectual and artistic experimentation in France circa the 1950s, becoming an important figure among the Left Bank artistic community. France in the 1950s was a heady place to be, influenced by the recently deceased philosopher Henri Bergson, and other philosophers and film thinkers Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Emmanuel Mounier, Andre Bazin, and Alexandre Astruc. Marker soaked in all of these ideas into what would become one of the most unique contributions to cinema, forming an original essayistic style of filmmaking that shred through established boundaries such as fiction, documentary, and experimental. If Marker would only have made one film, La Jetée (1962) he would have earned his place in film history. Composed almost entirely of still images (showing the influence of photography, the photo-roman, and comic books on Marker), the nearly thory minute La Jetée is arguably one of the greatest meditations on time, memory, and by extension, science-fiction time travel. The themes of time and memory would haunt Marker (as well as his colleague Alain Resnais) for the rest of his life, even extending to the medium of interactive CD art with his now classic ‘Immemory” CD. I urge you to read The Guardian obituary for the details of Marker’s fascinating life history.
