{"id":813,"date":"2012-07-31T09:37:12","date_gmt":"2012-07-31T16:37:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=813"},"modified":"2012-07-31T09:37:12","modified_gmt":"2012-07-31T16:37:12","slug":"my-chris-marker-tribute-post-for-open-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/?p=813","title":{"rendered":"My Chris Marker tribute post for Open Culture"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/BGAMY0xZlVQ\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/center>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>The filmmaker <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/film\/2012\/jul\/30\/chris-marker\">Chris Marker<\/a>, who passed away Sunday on his 91st birthday, rose to cinematic respectability amid the storm of press surrounding the French New Wave and Left Bank Film Movement in the fifties and sixties. Publicity-averse and deliberately enigmatic, he always seemed to stand, untroubled, within the storm\u2019s eye, and there found just enough space for his enduring productivity. \u201cMarker struck foreign observers as being by far the best [political] mind of the movement,\u201d wrote Clive James in an essay on the director in his book <a href=\"http:\/\/amzn.to\/Qg7xpv\"><em>Cultural Amnesia<\/em><\/a>. \u201cAdmittedly the competition wasn\u2019t strong.\u201d Having made such favorites of the international hard left as\u00a0<em>Letters from Siberia\u00a0<\/em>and\u00a0<em>\u00a1Cuba S\u00ed!<\/em>, Marker at some point lost the will to promote the notion that, in James\u2019 words, \u201cthere might be such a thing as a totalitarian answer to the world\u2019s miseries.\u201d Only after rejecting the overtly political did he make the picture for which history will most readily remember him: 1962\u2032s\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/BGAMY0xZlVQ\"><em>La jet\u00e9e<\/em><\/a>, a science-fiction short on the nature of memory and the fate of humanity (two career-long preoccupations) shot almost entirely with a simple still camera.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/xH3ncUmjxVc\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/center>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>When Marker began traveling to Japan, his work deepened again. In Tokyo to shoot the 1964 Summer Olympics (a project that ultimately fell to Kon Ichikawa),\u00a0he met Koumiko Muraoka, \u201cover 20, but less than 30,\u201d \u201cnot an example of anything, either class or race.\u201d Marker\u2019s investigation into this young lady\u2019s inner life became a documentary \u2014 bearing in mind that the form turns into something considerably more elusive in this director\u2019s hands \u2014 called\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/xH3ncUmjxVc\"><em>Le myst\u00e8re Koumiko<\/em><\/a>. Through Marker\u2019s camera, we see Koumiko stroll the streets of Tokyo, get her fortune told by phone, light incense at a temple, and stare at westernized department-store mannequins. At the same time, we hear Marker ask her about her experiences, her culture\u2019s changing fashions, and the \u201cmixed up\u201d mind that comes from being a Manchuria-born, French-speaking, postwar Japanese woman. Even in the less-than-ideal condition of the video above, the film retains its stark, untroubled beauty, much like that of the classical,\u00a0<em>ukiyo-e<\/em>\u00a0angles of Koumiko\u2019s face. \u201cI ought to have been born very much earlier,\u201d she laments.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p><center><iframe loading=\"lazy\" src=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/1HrujmaJ5zU\" frameborder=\"0\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\"><\/iframe><\/center>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>As for Marker, cinematic colleague Alain Resnais called him \u201cthe prototype of the twenty-first-century man.\u201d James wrote that \u201che was really born for the internet, but arrived in the world of universal information a few decades too early,\u201d citing especially his \u201cbrave attempt at the synthetic work that gets everything in,\u201d 1983\u2032s <a href=\"http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=2d4_YKpMQLc\"><em>Sans Soleil<\/em><\/a>. \u00a0No single medium could contain Marker\u2019s impulse to get everything in, and going into detail about every kind of work it drove him to \u2014 from his visual-art installations to his photo book on North Korean women to his CD-ROM <em>Immemory<\/em>\u00a0\u2014 would take all day. But the ten-minute profile from <a href=\"http:\/\/youtu.be\/1HrujmaJ5zU\"><em>Short Attention Span Cinema<\/em><\/a>\u00a0above, featuring interviews with directors Michael Shamberg and Terry Gilliam (whose <em>12 Monkeys<\/em>\u00a0took\u00a0<em>La jet\u00e9e<\/em> as an inspiration), gives you an overview. It even includes a reflection from the man himself:\u00a0\u201dThe <a href=\"http:\/\/www.lajetee.net\/\">La Jet\u00e9e\u00a0bar in Tokyo<\/a> is one of the things of which I\u2019m proudest. To think that Japanese cinephiles came every night to drink, often more than reason demands, beneath images from this film.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[I write on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.openculture.com\/\">Open Culture<\/a> five days a week, by the way.]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&nbsp; The filmmaker Chris Marker, who passed away Sunday on his 91st birthday, rose to cinematic respectability amid the storm of press surrounding the French New Wave and Left Bank Film Movement in the fifties and sixties. Publicity-averse and deliberately enigmatic, he always seemed to stand, untroubled, within the storm\u2019s eye, and there found just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-813","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=813"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":819,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/813\/revisions\/819"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=813"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=813"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.colinmarshall.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=813"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}