In Memoriam: Chris Marker

The very subject of Chris Marker’s work is memory; his death today, at the age of ninety-one (indeed, the day after his ninety-first birthday), elicits a simulacrum of memory, in tributes such as this one, where the contrast between the immediate significance (to the protagonist in the drama and to those who know and love him) and its public reflection is stretched to absurdity. For Marker, memory isn’t passive; it’s an act of resistance—the edge that cuts a path into the future—and the effective work of memory is the very definition of art. Marker was a master of film editing—the part of the filmmaking process that Jean-Luc Godard, another master editor and memory-artist, defined as holding past, present, and future in one’s own hands—and the very possibility of remembering Marker demands a little editing, a splicing-in of excerpts from a surprising and crucial document.

Marker gave few interviews and hardly ever allowed himself to be photographed; in one of the few interviews that he did grant—in 2003, to Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire, for Libération—he explained his reticence, calling himself “publiphobic”:

At the beginning of the sixties, that was well-thought-of, now it has become literally inadmissible. I can’t help it. That way of putting the mechanism of calumny in the service of praise has always rubbed me the wrong way, although I recognize that this diabolical sponsorship sometimes offers the most beautiful images one can see on a small screen (have you seen David Lynch with blue lips?).

In this remarkable text, he provides several signal examples of what he considered abuses of the press: the silence surrounding the 2002 reissue of a 1945 book by the novelist François Vernet, a friend of his who died at Dachau; the lack of discussion of a recording of songs by Viktor Ullmann of poems by Hülderlin and Rilke (“one is seized by the truly vertiginous idea that, at that moment, nobody glorified true German culture more than this Jewish musician who would soon die at Auschwitz”). Marker defined the problem:

The exponential progress of stupidity and vulgarity, everyone’s aware of it, but it’s not just a matter of a vague feeling of disgust, it’s a concrete fact, it’s measurable (it can be measured by the volume of the “Woof!”s that greet talk-show hosts, which has risen by an alarming number of decibels in the last five years) and which constitutes a crime against humanity. Not to mention the permanent assault on the French language.

It’s strange to hear (virtually) Marker speak for himself; in the interview, he describes his own ambition—in particular, regarding his longtime championing of lightweight and low-cost equipment: “Trying to give the floor to people who haven’t got it, and, when possible, to help them to find their means of expression. They’re workers at the Rhodia factory in 1967, but also the Kosovars I filmed in the year 2000, who had never been heard on television: everyone was speaking for them….” He spoke of teaching the editing of “Battleship Potemkin” to filmmakers from Guinea-Bissau and of the use of television equipment by Bosnian refugees, in 1993. But he distances himself from the label of “political” filmmaker: “What I’m passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.”

In his 1978 film “A Grin Without a Cat“—his vast and rueful look at what the events of 1968 actually were, and why they proved to be of so little consequence—Marker gathers an extraordinary set of documentary film clips and, assembling them along with his trenchant, provocative text on the soundtrack, brings them back from the dead. He infuses them—and, through them, history itself—with a shocking new energy. It’s as if his memory-piece—a memorial for dreams that died—actually reanimated the dreams and, by locating their traces in largely forgotten actions, offered a surprisingly practical map for making a glimmer of a stifled utopia burst forth with a new brilliance.

And as for the voice: as much as Marker masks his own—whether, literally, in Agnès Varda’s “The Beaches of Agn&#232” or virtually in his own distinctive reticence as a movie essayist who doesn’t speak of himself—he has made one of the greatest films about the use of the voice, “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Singer” (scroll down) in which he follows Yves Montand in the rehearsals leading up to a return to the stage after a six-year hiatus. Montand’s natural talent, his relentless practice and rigid self-discipline, his tightly-focussed and highly-principled purpose, and his charismatic presence all contribute to an art that is centered on the body, its presentation, its projection. Marker’s modesty is that of a devoted craftsman and an exquisite aesthete: a nonperformer, a nonsinger, a nonathlete, a former writer who didn’t continue—he did the one thing that he cultivated with an unyielding devotion. In so doing, he left on the history of cinema, and on history as such, a mark more enduring and decisive than that of mere personality. He made his own conscience, of the cinema as the living embodiment of history, into the conscience of his time—and, now that he’s not here, of future times already.

Still from “La Jetée.”