Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée, A Grin Without a Cat, Sans Soleil and AK, an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.
An enigmatic writer, photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist who pioneered the flexible hybrid form known as the essay film, he died on Sunday in Paris. He was 91.
An enigmatic writer, photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist who pioneered the flexible hybrid form known as the essay film, he died on Sunday in Paris. He was 91.
Chris Marker, left, with Alain Resnais in 1954
Helene Chatelain in 'La Jetee'
Made entirely of still images, save for one brief moving sequence of a woman closing her eyes, La Jetee is Marker's best-known film: set in Paris after World War III it was to become the basis for Terry Gilliam's 'Twelve Monkeys'.
A transmedia artist long before the term was coined, Mr. Marker resisted categorization throughout his career; he once referred to “career” as “that despicable word.”
In Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983), a fictional cameraman (a Marker surrogate) tries to make sense of the cultural dislocation he feels in Japan, West Africa and Iceland.
More than 20 years after his first film on the subject, and after the fall of Soviet communism, Marker returned to Medvedkin in Le Tombeau d'Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik, 1992). The film is a series of video letters to Medvedkin (who died in 1989) and provides a broader, incisive meditation on the nature of reality, fiction, art, ideology and history.
At VIDEODOGS you can find all these Marke films, as well as 'A Grin Without A Cat' and 'A Day In The Life Of Arseny Arsenivitch' on Tarkovsky. See all titles here.