May 28, 2024
Please join me at @metrograph for a screening & conversation with artist Paul Chan and author @sadierebeccast in celebration of Sadie’s translation of Chris Marker’s book Le Depays @thefilmdesk .
Chris Market Shorts SATURDAY JUNE 1, 2024 at 2:30pm
@metrograph | 7 Ludlow Street, New York City
In San Francisco in the mid-1980s, I saw Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”. I witnessed his mode of daring, wandering filmmaking with a camera. Alone, he traveled to Japan, Sweden and West Africa where he pondered revolution, shopping, family, and the gaze in a sweeping but intimate film essay that shook the thinking of more filmmakers than any film I know. Marker’s essay film blended an intense empathy with a global picaresque. Simultaneously playful and engaged, the film presented me with the possibility of merging my interests in cultural theory, politics, history and poetry — all aspects of my life I did not yet know how to bring together – into one artistic expression. In graduate school at that time, I wrote an analysis of the film and then boldly, perhaps naively, sent it to Marker. In a last minute note, I also asked him if he would like an assistant in his editing studio.
Several months later, his letter from Paris arrived with a slew of cat drawings along the margins. In response to my semiotic interpretation of his movie, he explained that his friend (and my hero) Roland Barthes would not have interpreted his film the way that I had. Marker suggested that we continue this conversation in person, in San Francisco. Not long afterward, I found myself driving Chris from his hotel in Berkeley, California to Cafe Trieste, one of the most famous cafes in North Beach. There we slowly sipped our coffees in the last relic of 1960s hippy culture, talking about his films, his travels, and my dream to be filmmaker. As the afternoon came to a close, I politely pulled out my camera and asked him if I could take his picture. “No, no, I never allow that.” And then he turned and walked away, leaving me glum, embarrassed and convinced that my new friendship with Marker was now over.
We remained friends for the next thirty years.