Chris Marker

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As an exhibition of the amazing images by the late filmmaker Chris Marker opens at the Whitechapel Gallery, Sukhdev Sandhu of the Guardian has an article about these visions, simultaneously dreams and nightmares, which have profoundly influenced the culture, even this modest blog. An excerpt of William Gibson’s comments:

I first saw ‘La Jetée’ in a film history course at the University of British Columbia, in the early 1970s. I imagine that I would have read about it earlier, in passing, in works about science fiction cinema, but I doubt I had much sense of what it might be. And indeed, nothing I had read or seen had prepared me for it. Or perhaps everything had, which is essentially the same thing.

I can’t remember another single work of art ever having had that immediate and powerful an impact, which of course makes the experience quite impossible to describe. As I experienced it, I think, it drove me, as RD Laing had it, out of my wretched mind. I left the lecture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, profoundly alone. I do know that I knew immediately that my sense of what science fiction could be had been permanently altered.

Part of what I find remarkable about this memory today was the temporally hermetic nature of the experience. I saw it, yet was effectively unable to see it again. It would be over a decade before I would happen to see it again, on television, its screening a rare event. Seeing a short foreign film, then, could be the equivalent of seeing a UFO, the experience surviving only as memory. The world of cultural artefacts was only atemporal in theory then, not yet literally and instantly atemporal. Carrying the memory of that screening’s intensity for a decade after has become a touchstone for me. What would have happened had I been able to rewind? Had been able to rent or otherwise access a copy? It was as though I had witnessed a Mystery, and I could only remember that when something finally moved – and I realised that I had been breathlessly watching a sequence of still images – I very nearly screamed.”

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“La Jetée” famously inspired “12 Monkeys.”

A nameless man on a futureless planet, the protagonist in Chris Marker’s perfect 28-minute film about post-apocalyptic Paris is held captive in a warren beneath the City of Lights, which has been reduced to radiated rubble during WWIII. The Man (Davos Hanich) defeatedly assents to be a lab rat for his captors, who want to attempt a time-travel experiment and send him back to the past to attain the materials that will make a future on the planet possible. But returned to a time and place he recalls from his childhood, the Man meets a Woman (Hélène Chatelain) who seems familiar–or perhaps she doesn’t. The pair struggle to grow closer inside what feels like a frustration dream, but just as they near an understanding, they face an end they didn’t see coming.

Rudely awakened from the experiment, the Man finds out that the past was merely a test run and it’s the future where he must go to find the elixir for the scorched Earth. But even if he is able to locate the antidote to apocalypse a thousand years hence, there will be no cure for him. After all, what good is tomorrow to someone who’s been poisoned with sweet dreams of perfecting yesterday?

Apart from one very brief passage, Marker uses no moving images in this film, just stark black-and-white still photographs, a chilling score and a measured voiceover narration. While he does more with less than any sci-fi director ever has, Marker is merely using the conventions of a genre picture to go where Proust and Resnais went: inside those temporal shifts that beat us about like waves at high tide.•

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