REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS
TO COME:
NEW AND CLASSIC WORK FROM
CHRIS MARKER
"Our unknown cosmonaut"
– Jean Quevel.
"A kind of one-man total cinema" – Richard
Roud.
"The films of Chris Marker are unequalled in contemporary
cinema for their beauty, complexity, influence and inventiveness." – James
Quandt.
Chris Marker’s films are the kind of miracle you’d stopped
hoping for long ago, a Travelogue of Pure Mystery where "images appear like
confessions" (LA JETEE), where his beloved cats and owls materialize to remind
us just how far we have to go, how much we have to remember. His favorite medium is the
cinema essay: a series of impressions, snapshots, postcards from distant lands (Japan,
Africa, Russia, Greece), linked together by Marker’s enigmatic voice, described as
"the voice of an insomniac dreamer" (Bill Horrigan), or "a ghost whispering
in your ear" (Terrence Rafferty). Marker is in love with Memory, with its melancholy
beauty, and his films are an altogether heroic, perhaps doomed attempt to trace its stain
on our lives, like lifting rubbings from a gravestone. As Marker has said, "I claim,
for the image, the humility and the powers of a madeleine."
Marker himself is even more elusive than his work, a quicksilver
character in a world of klieg lights. He was born, apparently, in 1921 in the suburbs of
Paris (although he’s occasionally claimed his birthplace was Outer Mongolia). A
journalist, travel-writer and photographer before he took up filmmaking, Marker has
consistently refused interviews and has rarely been photographed himself. His earliest
films were made in collaboration with Alain Resnais, who shares Marker’s
preoccupation with time and memory; and while Marker’s career parallels the French
New Wave, his films have always been too singular to be easily grouped with Godard,
Truffaut and his other peers.
Since our first Marker series in 1997, he has produced a number of
major new works, including the dazzling REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME (made in
collaboration with Yannick Bellon) and ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI ARSENEVICH, a
haunting portrait of the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky – so what better
time to celebrate Marker’s unique, unforgettable vision than with this short series
of new and classic films?
All films in French with English subtitles except as
noted.
Friday, September 5 – 7:00 PM
Los Angeles Premiere!!
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO
COME (LE SOUVENIR D’UN AVENIR), 2001, First Run/Icarus Films, 42 min. Dirs.
Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker. Genius. The latest "cine-essay" of Chris Marker
is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder that his nimble, capacious mind has lost none
of its agility, poetry and power. Ostensibly a portrait of French photographer Denise
Bellon, focusing on the two decades between 1935 and 1955, the film leaps and backtracks,
Marker-style, from subject to subject, from a family portrait of Bellon and her two
daughters, Loleh and Yannick (the latter co-authored the film), to a wide-ranging history
of surrealism, of the city of Paris, of French cinemas and the birth of the
cinémathèque, of Europe, the National Front, the Second World War and Spanish Civil War,
and postwar politics and culture. Full of Marker jokes (a great one about artists and
cats), word play, filmic homages (Musidora makes a memorable appearance), peculiar art
history, a consideration of the 1952 Olympics, and astounding segues from French
colonialism in Africa to women in the Maghreb, to a Jewish wedding and gypsy culture in
Europe, to "Mein Kampf" and the Nazi death camps (Birkenau, Auschwitz), the film
opens with Dali and ends with Mompou, traversing in its short time a world of thought,
feeling, and history. A small masterpiece of montage, REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME is
from moment to moment reminiscent of Resnais, Ivens, even Kubrick, but in its deployment
of still photographs (as in LA JETEE), its theme of history and memory, its
subject-skipping montage and rapid shuttle of wit and philosophy, REMEMBRANCE is pure,
marvellous Marker. (Notes by James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario.) Note: this is the
English voice-over version, supervised by Marker himself.
LA JETEE, 1964, New Yorker, 30 min.
Marker’s most famous film (and his only work of pure fiction), LA JETEE is an
agonizing cry of love to a world gone by, the story of a man drawn through time by the
image of a woman standing on the jetty at Orly Airport. A candidate for one of the
greatest films ever made; certainly, it’s the most romantic.
STATUES ALSO DIE (LES STATUES
MEURENT AUSSI), 1953, Editions Presence Africaine, 27 min. Co-directed with Alain
Resnais, STATUES casts an ultra-critical eye on European culture’s misuse of African
sacred art; it also serves as a stunning testament to the art itself.
Friday, September 5 – 9:30 PM
SANS SOLEIL, 1982, New Yorker, 100
min. Dir. Chris Marker. How to describe SANS SOLEIL? A narrator (who we never see) reads a
series of letters from a distant world-traveling friend (who we never see), while a
haunting stream of images flash by like some techno-dream: temples in Tokyo dedicated to
cats (a Marker favorite), Vatican treasures on display in a department store, and an
animatronic John F. Kennedy singing "Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You
…" SANS SOLEIL is a film truly like no other, a love affair with textures,
sounds and ideas, with Marker himself as the Ghost in the Machine, pulling us towards an
uncertain future.
Saturday, September 6 – 5:00 PM
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME (LE
SOUVENIR D’UN AVENIR), 2001, First Run /Icarus Films, 42 min. Dirs. Yannick
Bellon and Chris Marker. (See 9/5 above for description.)
ONE DAY IN THE LIFE OF ANDREI
ARSENEVICH (UNE JOURNEE D’ANDREI ARSENEVITCH), 2000, First Run /Icarus Films, 55
min. Dir. Chris Marker. "The best single piece of [Andrei] Tarkovsky criticism I know
of, clarifying the overall coherence of his oeuvre while leaving all the principal
mysteries in his films intact. It becomes clear early on that Marker was an intimate
friend of Tarkovsky and his family, and was shooting home-video footage of some of
Tarkovsky’s final days in the mid-1980’s, when he was dying of cancer, for
Tarkovsky and his family’s use as well as his own. But this is handled throughout
with exquisite tact and restraint and is never allowed to intrude on the poetic analysis
of the features. In fact, the video interweaves biography and autobiography with poetic
and political insight in a manner that seldom works as well as it does here, perhaps
because personal affection and poetic analysis are rarely as compatible as Marker makes
them." – Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader
Saturday, September 6 – 7:30 PM
New 35 mm. Print:
THE GRIN WITHOUT A CAT (LE FOND
DE L’AIR EST ROUGE), 1977, First Run /Icarus Films, 180 min. Dir. Chris Marker.
As brilliant as it is indescribable, GRIN WITHOUT A CAT looks at the rise and fall of the
worldwide revolutionary movement, from France in May, 1968 to the anti-Vietnam riots in
the U.S., to the terrible crush of the Czech uprising. The French title of the film is
untranslatable in English; roughly, it means "Revolution Is In The Air," a
metaphor at once wistful and ever-hopeful. Given the current world situation, GRIN WITHOUT
A CAT is, now more than ever, an epic event not to be missed. In one of the film’s
many high points, Marker dissects the famous Odessa Steps sequence in BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN
– a revolutionary landmark that never actually occurred …
Sunday, September 7 – 5:00 PM
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME (LE
SOUVENIR D’UN AVENIR), 2001, First Run /Icarus Films, 42 min. Dirs. Yannick
Bellon and Chris Marker. (See 9/5 above for description.)
THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, 1993, First
Run /Icarus Films, 120 min. Dir. Chris Marker. If there’s anything to equal SANS
SOLEIL, it may be THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, Marker’s astonishing look at the history of 20th
century Russia through the life and work of his dear friend, the filmmaker Alexander
Medvedkin. Told in the form of six letters to the late Medvedkin, THE LAST BOLSHEVIK is a
film of heartbreaking devotion (to a friend, to an ideology, to film itself), of acidic
wit and endless curiosity – oh, hell, we’ve run out of superlatives on this one.
It’s simply one of the best films from the past decade – don’t miss it! |
