That said I'd like to share with those of you who may not know the man: Chris Marker. Marker affectionately known as 'the Frenchman with the English sounding name' is without a shadow of a doubt one of the greatest story tellers and innovators of French Cinema in the latter half of the 20th century. You may know him for his 1962 darkly surreal, post-nuclear, La Jetée. A 28min optically printed photomontage with minimal dialogue (aside from un-subtitled German muttering) strong narration and a brilliant score by Trevor Duncan. If you like La Jetée then I have a recommendation which is sure to please. Les Astronautes made three years earlier in collaboration with easily one of my favorite Czech stop motion animators Walerian Borowczyk. Borowczyk's brilliance can not be overstated, and I will make a point of writing up a post exclusively concerning the subject of him and his colleagues.
Les Astronautes is comprised of paper cut-out animation mixed with live action sequences, coupled with a sound track of sampled tunes, analog fuzz and all manner of machine age cacophony. The plot follows the inexplicable (sometimes voyeuristic) escapades of a scientist in space masterly executed without narration or dialog. Les Astronautes is fodder for the stop motion nut and is an example of early Czech innovations in a style that would be popularized years later by Terry Gilliam in Monty Python. Discovering it was like finding the missing link between early Dada films by the likes of Hans Richter and David Lynch's mind boggling student short Six Men Getting Sick Six Times. But like I said earlier I will dedicate a whole posting to the Czechs so I won't exhaust my limited knowledge of the subject just yet.
I want to return now to the reason why I regard Chris Marker as such an exceptional filmmaker. Although La Jetée is a wonderful piece it does not display what I consider Markers most revered trademark quality; the seamless blend of text and image. His 1983 masterpiece Sans Soleil in my opinion is the prime exemplification of his delicate negotiation of the conflicting notions of subjective reiteration (in the form of text) and seemingly objective visual representation. Sans Soleil is an essay on the experience of memory and the process of remembering, the reconstruction of personal histories through a collage of moments which seem all the more dreamlike the further we are detached from context. This is a subject which seems to be permanently logged into my perpetually melancholic Slavic condition, so I instantly begin to whimper like a 13 year old girl watching The Notebook for the first time.
The sensation I feel whilst listening to the narration written by Marker himself and remarkably delivered in English by Alexandra Stewart is a similar one to what I felt the first time I watched Tarkovsky's The Mirror, a partial relapse into a semi-conscious state of recollection. As I watch those images of Japan and Guninea-Bissau (although I have never been to either of those places) I feel like I'm entering an ambiguous world, familiar and at once strange, a placeless world which I'll call the collective unconscious. A place where the specificity of physical geography and empirical time seem to fade to abstraction, and become a shining representation of the global human condition, a solitary place in which each of us exist as collections of memory and experience. I become aware of the individual as being in constant dialog with existence and non-existence, dreams and reality, the internal and the external. This reminds me a lot of a quote by Tarkovsky regarding cinema: “Juxtaposing a person with an environment that is boundless, collating him with a countless number of people passing by close to him and far away, relating a person to the whole world, that is the meaning of cinema.”
As Marker sifts through the crowds of people littering his visual field he zooms in to examine each face and in some cases friezes the frame at a specific person. The viewer is forced to confront this stranger, this face which by virtue of its expression alone speaks of something too profound for words, too complex for explanation. He explores these individuals as if they were landscapes, physical records of a variety of forces acting to shape and reshape the individual. As I stare into this strangers face they become someone familiar and I begin to feel a sense of empathy. He makes us reconsider how we make sense of things, the shear impermanence of being and with that our relation to humankind in general and ultimately I find myself coming to understand what Marker calls 'the poignancy of things'. Whenever I encounter a filmmaker that is able to instill such a sensation in their viewer I am always in awe, especially because film as a medium is inherently a physical representation of a specific place, time, and society. So to be able to fully transcend the determined and the actual through editing, narration, and film techniques is an act which is in no way short of miracle. To create a film that speaks directly to something internal in each individual irregardless of culture or society is a feat of filmmaking and story telling in general.
I've watched Sans Soleil about 5 times last week in an obsessive attempt to understand and replicate the brilliance of his textual/visual composition. The more I watched it the more I understood its complexity and the more I felt like I knew the narrator and that that narration was part of my own story of my own experience of being. So if you haven't yet come to the conclusion on your own Sans Soleil is a must see and conveniently is part of compilation released by the ever impressive Criterion which includes La Jetée and tonnes of neat extras.
