Chris Marker
Chris MARKER (1921-2012, France) is regarded as one of the most innovative film and documentary makers of the 1960s and 1970s. The 16mm documentary Olympia 52 about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games was his first film. Marker was best known for his award-winning documentary Sans soleil (1982) about human memory. His documentaries about Beijing, Siberia and Cuba have come to be regarded as classics. Not much is known about his life: Marker (pseudonym of Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) shunned interviews and invented biographical ‘data’. Before focusing in the early 1950s on non-dogmatic, Marxist-oriented documentaries, he wrote several articles, essays, poems and a novel. Chris Marker passed away in 2012 at the age of 91.
Filmography
(selection) Olympia 52 (1952, short doc), Les statues meurent aussi/Statues Also Die (1953, short doc, co-dir), Dimanche à Pekin (1955, short doc), Le mystère de l’atelier (1957, short), Lettre de Sibérie (1958, doc), Les astronautes (1960, short), Description d’un combat/Description of a struggle (1960, doc), Cuba si! (1961, doc), Le joli mai (1963, doc), La jetée (1964, short), Le mystère Koumiko/The Koumiko Mystery (1965, doc), Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966, doc), La sixième face du Pentagone (1968, short doc), A bientôt j’espère (1969, short), La bataille de dix millions/Cuba (1970, doc), Les mots ont un sens (1970, short doc), Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977), A.K. (1985, doc), Berliner Ballade (1990, TV, short doc), Le tombeau d’Alexandre (1993, doc), Le facteur sonne toujours cheval (1994, TV, short), Level Five (1997, doc), Un maire au Kosovo (2000, short doc), Remembrance of Things to Come (2001, short doc), Chats perchés (2004, TV doc), Leila Attacks (2006, short), Stopover in Dubai (2011, short doc)
More info: Wikipedia, Chris Marker
Chris Marker at IFFR
-
The last bolshevik
Marker rewrites part of Soviet Russian history via portrait of Soviet film-maker Medvedkin.
-
The Embassy
Portrait of an embassy of a fictional country where a coup has just taken place.
-
Les statues meurent aussi
First documentary by Marker and a cooperation with Resnais. About the role of the West in the demise of African art.
-
Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch
Documentary by the great French director Chris. Marker about one of the greatest of Russian feature-makers, Andrej Tarkovsky, is a must for every s
-
Stopover in Dubai
Chillingly simple and riveting found-footage documentary on a reconstructed murder. The original film was produced by the Dubai State Security serv
-
Sans soleil
Travelogue on the nature of memory and time. A woman reads letters from a cameraman who travels around the world.
-
Les statues meurent aussi
First documentary by Marker and a cooperation with Resnais. About the role of the West in the demise of African art.
-
Description d’un combat
With this film, the Rotterdam Film Festival is paying homage to the Dutch-born jack-of-all-trades Wim van Leer, who died on 13 April 1992.îChris Ma