L'Héritage de la chouette (Chris Marker, 1989)

L'Héritage de la chouette [The Owl's Legacy], directed by Chris Marker plays on July 28 at Closeup Cinema in London. For this screening I have selected three episodes of the series around the themes of memory, image and cinema. – EK

Chris Marker's rarely seen magnum opus about the influence of the ancient Greek culture on the contemporary world remains his most elaborate project for television. Produced by the Onassis Foundation, Marker found the budget and freedom to invite some of the world’s leading philosophers, writers, logicians, politicians, artists and filmmakers (very often with explicit links to Greece, such as Theodoros Angelopoulos and Elia Kazan) to sit in front of his camera and, in a clear act of creating a cinematic forum, discuss thirteen themes, including Democracy, Nostalgia, Music, Cosmogony, and Misogyny. There is an abundance of Marker’s usual wit and his use of the image of animals for linking his philosophical investigation, here, in the form of the owl which was the symbol of wisdom for the Greeks. Marker’s words, in the English version, are spoken by Bob Peck.

Si j'avais 4 dromadaires (Chris Marker, 1966)

Playing at Closeup Cinema in London on January 29, 2023. There'll be some surprise shorts screened before Marker's film. – EK

Marker's underseen masterpiece, Si j'avais 4 dromadaires [If I Had Four Camels], with its originality and sole reliance on still photographs stands next to his best known work, La Jetée (1962). The photographs incorporated into the film were taken between 1956 and 1966 in many different countries (Greece, Russia, Iran, Cuba, China, France, Japan) as Marker was working for the Petite Planète travel guides or taking snap shots of his favourite people.  Here, he offers his own travel guide to a changing word, a "Marker Planet" narrated by a mysterious, world-weary traveller who speaks like a poet and thinks like a philosopher. The narration evolves into three voices with contrasting opinions about the role of photography in constructing collective cultural memory. With an endless sense of irony and the quiet investigating of photographic image, this is one of the great works of the 60s. – Ehsan Khoshbakht

Time Remembered: Chris Marker Picks His Favourite Bill Evans Recordings

Chris Marker in Telluride, 1987. Courtesy of Tom Luddy.

On the art of lyrical compilation, from one medium to another

“Until midnight music is a job, until four o’clock it’s a pleasure, and after that it’s a rite.” – Chris Marker

There are only indirect hints as to what Chris Marker liked and did beyond his films. In studying the world of this elusive director, every sign invites us to scrutinize it carefully. Marker appears in small details, such as the mix CD which one day arrived on my doorstep. If the address on the parcel hadn’t confirmed the sender as Tom Luddy, co-director of Telluride Film Festival and a close friend of Marker’s, I could have taken it to be Marker’s personal gift from the beyond.

The CD cover gave little away: Sandwiching a photo of pianist Bill Evans was his name and the words "joue pour Guillaume" [plays for Guillaume], along with an illustrated image of the Markerian animal familiar Guillaume, a wise if mischievous-looking cat, holding sheet music. A lyrical filmmaker, who could also compose and play the piano, had compiled his favorite tunes performed by the lyrical jazz pianist and composer Evans (1929-80). The fascination with compilation is also evident in the films. Marker would often juxtapose material from various sources—news footage, computer games, photographs and songs—to remarkable effect.

Tom Luddy recalls conversations about jazz with the filmmaker, who used to tune in to KJAZ whenever he was in the Bay Area. One of his favorite satellite TV channels was Mezzo, playing classical and jazz around the clock. While the genre didn't feature much in his films, one could argue that jazz for Marker, like cinema, was something both personal and political. His jazz-related writings for Esprit (“Du Jazz considere comme une prophetie”) and Le Journal des Allumés du Jazz seem to bear this out. Marker even made a small contribution to jazz literature by writing the narration for a documentary about Django Reinhardt directed by Paul Paviot, who'd previously produced Marker’s Sunday in Peking.

Chris Marker on Forough Farrokhzad

Forough Farrokhzad

The House Is Black (1962) will be screened next month as a part of Golestan Film Studio retrospective at Il Cinema Ritrovato. My good friend Rym Quartsi kindly took the time to translate this piece by Chris Marker from original French (first appeared on Cinéma 67, no. 117, June 1967, on the occasion of the death of Forough). Another friend, Laura Montero Plata, made a couple of editorial suggestions for which I should thank her as well.

***

Black, abrupt, ardent. These vague words make of her a portrait so precise that you will recognize her amongst thousands. February 13, at 4:30 PM, Forough Farrokhzad died in a car accident in Tehran. She was one of the greatest contemporary Persian poets, and she was also a filmmaker. She had directed The House Is Black, a short feature on the lepers, Grand Prix at Oberhausen, and beyond that practically unknown in Europe, and which is a masterpiece. She was thirty-three years old. She was equally made of magic and energy, she was the Queen of Sheba described by Stendhal. It was particularly the courage. She sought no alibis for herself, no pledges, she knew the horror of the world as well as the despair professionals, she felt the need to fight as well as the justice professionals, but she had not betrayed her deep chant.