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Even though I live there, I still only with difficulty perceive Northeast Asia through any lens not borrowed from Chris Marker. This owes mostly to the influence of dozens of viewings of Sans Soleil<\/em><\/a>, his 1983 fact-and-fiction cinematic travelogue through places like Iceland, Cape Verde, San Francisco, and especially Japan, a feature-length realization of the peripatetic form of \u201cessay film\u201d he invented with 1955\u2019s Sunday in Peking.<\/em> Between that and Sans Soleil<\/em>, he\u2019d gone to Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics and come back with the materials for a 45-minute documentary about the titular young woman whom he happened to meet in the street there. Le Myst\u00e8re Koumiko<\/em><\/a> came out in 1965, just three years after his best-known work: La Jet\u00e9e<\/em>, the short drama of apocalypse, time travel, and memory made almost entirely out of still photographs.<\/span><\/p>\n
But Marker also made it, camera in hand, to the Korean Peninsula as well \u2014 and the northern half of the Korean Peninsula at that. He\u2019d accepted an invitation in 1957 to join a delegation of French journalists and intellectuals including Claude Lanzmann, Armand Gatti, and Jean-Claude Bonnardot: Lanzmann, so the legend has it, fell in with a nurse there. Gatti and Bonnardot, more productively, made the feature film, the first and only North Korean-French co-production, Moranbong<\/em><\/a> (not to be confused with the North Korean girl group<\/a> of the same name). Marker took the pictures that would, in 1962, appear as the photobook Cor\u00e9ennes<\/em>, titled with the feminine form of the French noun meaning \u201cKoreans.\u201d It brings to mind \u2014 or at least brings to my mind \u2014 Marker\u2019s quotable quote: \u201cIn another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don\u2019t choose your time.\u201d<\/p>\n