JANUARY 31 AT 7:33 PM The House of Sachs: A Museum of Intersubjectivity
An in-depth discussion between film makers David Cox and Lynne Sachs on subjects ranging from logocentrism to detritus and fragments and the world the structuralist legacy left us. Lynne takes us on a film makers journey through her method both ideological, thematic and technical.
Lynne Sachs is an American experimental filmmaker and poet based in Brooklyn, New York. Strongly committed to a dialogue between cinematic theory and practice, she searches for a rigorous play between image and sound, pushing the visual and aural textures in each new project. Over the course of her career, Lynne has worked closely with fellow filmmakers Craig Baldwin, Bruce Conner, Barbara Hammer, Chris Marker, Gunvor Nelson, Carolee Schneemann, and Trinh T. Min-ha.
Chris Marker’s studio on the Rue Courat, Paris, April 4, 2007. Photo by Adam Bartos. Courtesy of the artist.
In San Francisco in the mid-1980s, I saw French filmmaker Chris Marker’s expansive, enigmatic ciné meditation Sans Soleil (1983). 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 quasi-autobiographical movie blended an intense empathy with a global picaresque. It presented the possibility of merging cultural theory, politics, history, and poetry—all aspects of my own life I did not yet know how to bring together—into one artistic expression. I wrote my own interpretation of the film and then boldly, perhaps naively, sent it to Marker in Paris.
Several months later, his response arrived with a slew of cat drawings along the margins. Marker also suggested that we continue this conversation in person, in San Francisco. Not long afterward, I found myself driving Chris from his hotel in Berkeley to Cafe Trieste, one of the most famous cafes in North Beach. There we slowly sipped coffees in the last relic of 1960s hippy culture, talking about his films, his travels, and my dream to become a filmmaker. As the afternoon came to a close, I politely pulled out my camera and asked 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.
American film scholar Colin MacCabe struck up a similar friendship with Marker, one that began in 2002 with the transport of an obscure VHS tape from film enthusiast and producer Tom Luddy in Berkeley (once again) to Chris’s studio home in Paris. Over the next ten years, MacCabe would welcome any excuse for traveling from his home in Pittsburgh across the Atlantic Ocean to France. MacCabe’s longing was not for the food, wine, River Seine, or joie de vivre, but rather for the sheer pleasure of conversing about history, the dilemma of the twentieth century, cinema, technology, and the French actress Simone Signoret with Chris Marker. From the very first moment that MacCabe crossed the threshold into the lair of this quiet lion in the world of personal and political cinema, he knew it would change his life. The range and depth of topics these two men discussed is exhilarating. In reading MacCabe’s new short, anecdotal memoir, Studio: Remembering Chris Marker, we can easily glean that the passage of thoughts from-lip-to-ear-and-back-again between these two cerebral fellows left an indelible imprint on MacCabe. Marker’s place of creation, his home on the Rue Courat in a less-than-famous but spectacularly diverse neighborhood of Paris was a magnet for Macabe; he would travel there whenever possible, even if the two men’s tête-à-tête only lasted an hour. MacCabe explains that as revered as he was by filmmakers, essayists, poets, thinkers of any kind, Marker had two fundamental qualities: “a generosity of spirit and… a genius for friendship.” Having read many a text on Marker, never have I come across such an intimate, respectful recounting of his personal life. Little did I know, for example, that the highlight of his studies at the Sorbonne was working with Poetics of Spaceauthor Gaston Bachelard; that his admiration with the French Resistance network was grounded in his infatuation for its beautiful leader Marie-Madeleine Fourcard; or that “The experience of fighting as an American soldier, for which he received a personal letter of thanks from Eisenhower, meant that Marker could not countenance any of the knee-jerk anti-Americanism that so disfigures the thought of the European left.”
Both MacCabe’s and my communications with Chris evolved simultaneously. Chris made extraordinarily good use of the new epistolary canvas: email. I can only guess how many people around the world cherish such correspondence (most often with the subject heading News from Guillaume, Guillaume being his cat.) In 2007, I assisted Chris on the creation of an English version of Three Cheers for the Whale, his short 1972 film. There in the same loft apartment Adam Bartos so exquisitely photographed for Studio, we talked about everything from his friends Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver and American documentarian Robert Kramer to Russian films he’d pulled from the Internet, cats, and tea—themes he would explore deeply with MacCabe as they parsed through texts they each were writing or reading.
“It was one of Marker’s absolute principles that he could not appear in public alongside his works. It was an ultimate taboo. I have often surmised that it was linked to a fantasy of death— that were he and his work to appear together his death would ensue,” explains MacCabe. Marker’s aversion to being photographed was profound. Type his name into Google and the only pictures you will find are in black and white, an archeological tracing that probably ends in the 1960s. And so it is that we turn each delicately folded folio page in Studio to reveal the place where Chris Marker lived and collected and edited the media-based projects of the last decade of his life. Here, in all its ecstatic detail, we are able to take account of a visible manifestation of the artist’s mind, a mind turned inside-out, the components of his practice revealed through the detritus and treasures of our technological culture. In Bartos’s images, we see numerous Apple computers, catalogues from Marker’s 2005 Museum of Modern Art installation “Owls at Noon,” an array of electronic keyboards, a signed photo of Kim Novak, and a 9/11 Commission Report. Of course, these are only the things I saw, what other viewers would notice would be completely different. While we do not witness Chris Marker in a photographic portrait, I would claim that we learn far more from this precise documentation of objects. They testify to the vitality of Marker’s personal space, to the grandness of his editing process and appreciation for the culture in which he was born.
Just before I left Marker’s home, he showed me a scrapbook he’d been compiling for several years, one he probably shared with MacCabe too. Marker had accumulated hundreds of pictures and articles on a young African-American politician who had just embarked on a campaign to become the next president of the United States. Chris was one of the wisest and most prescient human beings I have ever encountered; he was convinced that this virtually unknown candidate could stand up to a historically racist country and win. I was doubtful at the time.
Now, upon rereading Ben Lerner’s eloquent introduction to Studio, I realize that MacCabe’s text and Bartos’s photos are here together to articulate the multi-faceted ways that Chris Marker attempted to “depict old futurisms, a special case of anachronism.” From his wordless narrative science fiction film La Jetée (1962) to his epic reflection on the turmoil of the ’60s Grin Without a Cat (1977) to his visionary CD Rom Immemory (2002), he was committed to pulling us forward and backward in time through both celluloid and digital forms. Studio: Remembering Chris Marker is a testimony to this remarkable quality, albeit in an old-fashioned yet expansive book form.
Lynne Sachs makes films, performances, and web projects that explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together poetry, collage, politics, and sound design. Her most recent film, Tip of My Tongue, premiered at the Museum of Modern Art’s 2017 Documentary Fortnight. In 2014, Lynne received a Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts.
SAT. 11/16/13: LYNNE SACHS’ YOUR DAY IS MY NIGHT + CHRIS MARKER Prodigal daughter Sachs returns with a dramatic ethnography on a little-seen subculture: older residents of “shift-bed” apartments in New York’s Chinatown, where immigrants are jammed into shared rooms, beds in use around the clock. Non-professional actors play out issues of privacy, intimacy, and ownership, as their shift-bed experience finds cinematic expression through vérité conversations, character driven fictions, and integrated movement pieces. Collaborating with cinematographer Sean Hanley and composer Stephen Vitiello, Sachs’ mixture of reportage, play-acting, and memory opens up an Other hidden world. Preceded by: Lynne’s collaboration with Three Cheers for the Whale, directed by Chris Marker with Mario Ruspoli.
Chris Marker: A Symposium | Things That Quicken the Heart
Friday, March 15, 2013 – 5:30pm – Saturday, March 16, 2013 – 6:00pm
Slought Foundation, 4017 Walnut Street, Philadelphia
Things That Quicken the Heart | Chris Marker: A Symposium
The symposium will explore the work of the late French filmmaker Chris Marker, who passed away in July 2012 at the age of 91 and is widely acknowledged as one of the most prolific and inventive media artists in the history of cinema. Working continually since the 1940s, Marker directed some of the most important films in the history of world cinema, including La jetée (1962), A Grin without a Cat (1997), Sans Soleil (1982), and multi-media projects Level 5 (1996) and Immemory (1998, 2008).
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Participants include:
Raymond Bellour, researcher, writer, Director of research emeritus at C.N.R.S., Paris, is interested by literature, romantic (the Brontës, Ecrits de jeunesse, 1972; Alexandre Dumas, Mademoiselle Guillotine, 1990), and contemporary (Henri Michaux, 1965, edition of his complete works in “La Pléïade”, vol. I, 1998, vol. II, 2001, vol. III, 2004, Lire Michaux, 2011) and by cinema (Le Western, 1966, L’Analyse du film, 1979, Le Corps du cinéma. Hypnoses, émotions, animalités, 2009). He is interested also by the mixtures, the passages, the mixed states of images – painting, photography, cinema, video, virtual images – as well as by the relations between words and images (the exhibition Passages de l’image, 1989 ; the volumes L’Entre-Images. Photo, cinéma, vidéo, 1990, Jean-Luc Godard: Son+Image, 1992; L’Entre-Images 2. Mots, images, 1999, La Querelle des dispositifs. Cinéma – installations, expositions 2012 ; the exhibitions States of Images : Instants and Intervals, 2005, Thierry Kuntzel, Lumières du temps, 2006, Thierry Kunztel-Bill Viola. Deux éternités proches, 2010). He has been involved from 1991 with Serge Daney in the creation of Trafic, “revue de cinéma”.
Dominique Bluher is Lecturer on Film Studies at Harvard University. She studied in Berlin, and received her Ph.D. in film studies from Université de Paris 3. Prior to her appointment at Harvard, she has been Maître de conférences at the Université Rennes 2, where she has also been the director of a research program, and coedited two anthologies devoted to French non-fiction short films in the 1950s and 1960s. She has been an editor of the bilingual journal Iris, and served as the French correspondent for the Internationales Forum des jungen Films at the Berlin Film Festival. Her publications on French film theory, French cinema, and autobiographical filmmaking have appeared in many international journals of film theory. In 2009, she curated for the Carpenter Center of the Visual Arts Agnès Varda’s first video installation show in the United States. She is currently working on two books related to autobiography in cinema.
Christa Blümlinger, Professor in Film Studies at the University Vincennes-Saint-Denis (Paris 8). She formerly taught at the University Sorbonne Nouvelle and at the Free University Berlin. She is currently research fellow at the IKKM (Bauhaus University, Weimar). Her publications include the edition of writings of Harun Farocki (in French) and of Serge Daney (in German) and books about essay film, media art, film aesthetics and Austrian cinema. She published recently in german Kino aus Zweiter Hand. Zur Ästhetik materieller Aneignung im Film und in der Medienkunst, Vorwerk 8, 2009 (about appropriation in film and media art, forthcoming in French in 2013), and in French, Théâtres de la mémoire. Mouvement des images, co-ed. with Michèle Lagny, Sylvie Lindeperg et alii, Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, «Théorème 14», 2011.
Sam Di Iorio is Associate Professor of French at Hunter College in New York. He has written about filmmakers like Chris Marker, Jean Rouch, François Truffaut, and Jacques Rivette.
Renée Green is is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought. Her exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennales and festivals. Her most recent project has been the creation of the Media Bichos for MoMA Media Lounge, in New York City. Ongoing Becomings, a survey exhibition of 20 years of her work was organized in 2009 by the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; in 2010, Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams, a survey exhibition highlighting her time-based work was organized by the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco. She the Director and Associate Professor in the MIT Program in Art, Culture and Technology.
Bill Horrigan founded the Media Arts program at the Wexner Center for the Arts, at the Ohio State University, in 1989, and became its Curator at Large in 2010. He’s developed numerous film series and gallery exhibitions in those capacities, including projects with Chris Marker, Todd Haynes and Christine Vachon, Josiah McElheny, Mark Dion, Antonio Muntadas, Johan van der Keuken, Phil Collins, Paper Tiger Television, Bruce and Norman Yonemoto, Shirin Neshat, Julia Scher, Annie Leibovitz, Zoe Strauss, William E. Jones, Robert Beck, Inigo Manglano-Ovalle, Adi Nes, and John Waters, among others. He is presently co-authoring the second and final volume of the catalogue raisonne of Andy Warhol’s films, for the Andy Warhol Film Project (Museum of Modern Art/Whitney Museum of American Art/Andy Warhol Museum).
Gertrud Koch teaches cinema studies at the Free University in Berlin where she is also the director of a research center on aesthetic experience. She has taught at many international universities and was a research fellow at the Getty Center, as well as at UPenn 2010 and Brown University’s Cogut Center for Humanities in 2011. Koch has written books on Herbert Marcuse and Siegfried Kracauer, feminist film theory, and on the representation of Jewish history. She has edited numerous volumes on aesthetics, perception and and film theory. She is also a co-editor and board member of the journals Babylon, Frauen und Film, October, Constellations, and Philosophy & Social Criticism.
Lynne Sachs explores the relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences by weaving together film, collage, painting, and sound. Her essay films have taken her to Vietnam, Bosnia, Israel and Germany — sites affected by international war — where she works in the space between a community’s collective memory and her own perceptions. Lynne’s films have screened at the New York Film Festival, Sundance, San Francisco’s beloved Other Cinema and Brooklyn’s one and only Union Docs. Her most recent film Your Day is My Night premiered at the Museum of Modern Art’s Documentary Fortnight in February, 2013. Find out more at www.lynnesachs.com
Hito Steyerl. Filmmaker, writer. Berlin.
Agnès Varda is one of the leading female directors of Cinema today. Her self-funded debut, the 1956 fiction-documentary hybrid La Pointe Courte is often considered the unofficial first New Wave film. In 1962, she released the seminal nouvelle vague film Cléo from 5 to 7; a bold character study that avoids psychologizing, it announced her official arrival. Over the coming decades, Varda became a force in art cinema, conceiving many of her films as political and feminist statements, and using a radical objectivity to create her unforgettable characters. She describes her style as cinécriture (writing on film), and it can be seen in audacious fictions like Le bonheur and Vagabond as well as revealing autobiographical documentaries like The Gleaners and I and The Beaches of Agnès.
Rick Warner is Assistant Professor and Kenan Fellow in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. His published articles have addressed such topics as the multimedia work of Chris Marker, the use of the long take in New Taiwanese Cinema, the critical reception of Alfred Hitchcock’s films in post-World War II France, and the videographic experiments of Jean-Luc Godard. He is guest editor of the Critical Quarterly special issue, “The Late Work of Jean-Luc Godard” (2009), and co-editor with Colin MacCabe of True to the Spirit: Adaptation and the Question of Fidelity (for Oxford University Press, 2011). He is currently at work on a book concerning cinematic uses of the essay form.
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Symposium ScheduleFriday, March 15th
5:30-6:00pm | Opening Remarks by Nora M. Alter and Timothy Corrigan
Raymond Bellour, Marker Forever Coming back on the unique reality of La Jetée in film history and art, considering the experience and the statements of Immemory about a possible end of cinema, this presentation will try to follow how Chris Marker has been led from his first major installation work, Zapping Zone, to his last major film, Level Five, so to open a new space of reality through the internet, leading to his magic island of “Second Life”, in which all his previous work has been lightened, encapsulated, duplicated.
Agnès Varda
7:30-8:45pm | Reception
Saturday, March 16th
10:00-12:00pm | Elephants – An Auteur without an Image: Marker in History | Moderated by Louis Massiah
Dominique Bluher, Marker, and the “golden age of short films” In 1958, in his article on Letter from Siberia André Bazin celebrates the birth of a new film genre. Did the formation of this new cinematic form take place overnight, or can we discover its formation not only in Marker’s earlier work, Dimanche à Pékin (1956), but also in films made by the new generation of filmmakers and producers who shaped significantly the production of non-fiction short film after WWII? This period was so fertile and inventive that it has since been referred to as the “golden age of short films.” The other cineastes of the so-called Left Bank Group (Georges Franju, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda), and others, also created imaginative short films. Several of these cinematic experimentations present affinities with the essayistic approach, and converge and diverge with Marker’s aesthetics and politics in his early essays.
Sam Di Iorio, Buried structures, half-finished Thoughts: Statues Also Die and Night and Fog This paper returns to the seldom-acknowledged connections between Statues Also Die and Night and Fog, the two short films Chris Marker and Alain Resnais worked on during the first half of the 1950s. I examine how these films draw on postwar understandings of colonialism and fascism, and analyze their place within more recent debates about cinematic modernity.
Rick Warner, The Screen Pedagogies of Marker and Godard This paper will contextualize Marker’s work in its middle and late stages through a comparison with the investigative methods of Godard during the same stretch. While the affinities between these two prolific essayists of the cinema and other audiovisual media have been frequently observed, commentators have tended to focus on their differences in order to privilege the one figure over the other. This paper will offer a fresh take on their kinship by examining how they both practice a “pedagogy of perception” following their disenchantment with political militancy. Crucial to this shift is the effort to forge a more intimate relationship with a certain kind of viewer, one who is able to take part in the experiment at hand, its risks and its rewards. At stake is not just a dialogical rapport or condition of tacit interaction but a process of “becoming dividual” into which the filmmaker and the viewer both reflectively enter. This paper will tease out and explore the ways in which Marker and Godard both devote themselves and their work to this ambition.
1:30-3:30pm | Owls – Remembrance of Films to Come: Marker and Future Media | Moderated by Timothy Corrigan
Christa Blümlinger, The Museum’s Attraction Whether they include visits to galleries or present “found objects” or photographs to the viewer, in Chris Marker’s early films the museum exhibition constitutes a major element. The way the Rive Gauche filmmaker weaves together images, sounds, music, and commentary posits a complex relationship between movement and stillness. This in turn resonates with a kind of museum-like gestalt that prefigures his late installations and digital creations.
Gertrud Koch, When Is It History: What And How To Remember
In many films by Marker memory is seen as a function of the future and history as an open end of unfinished business. “Will the cats come back?” is a guiding question in “Chats perchés” (2004), and I will try to ask why questions of this type are crucial for Marker’s poetics. In this context my focus is on the fictionalization of history as an unsettled future.
Bill Horrigan, Some Productions Beginning in the early 1990s, Chris Marker worked with me and my colleagues at the Wexner Center for the Arts on producing a series of exhibition projects that subsequently would have a wider public circulation. I’ll discuss the development of these two projects – “Silent Movie,” a 1995 multi-media installation, and “Staring Back,” a 2007 photo exhibition – in the context of commissioning artists to develop projects for gallery presentation.
4:00-6:00pm | Wolves – The Cinema Rolls On: Filmmakers Under the Influence | Moderated by Rea Tajiri
Renée Green, Cinematic Migrations Desire for cinema perhaps existed before its creation. Questions regarding this speculation and the variety of ways this longing has been addressed in the past and present form the basis of inquiry in the Cinematic Migrations Project, which Green initiated at MIT. The name, Cinematic Migrations, can encompass these processes as well as myriad “radical aspirations” igniting engagements with moving image forms used by people historically and in the present worldwide. Chris Marker’s work has been a touchstone in thinking about the potential, as well as realizations, of the variety of possible convergences this porous term invites. Green will discuss some of these migrations in reference to both Marker’s and her own interpretations of these possibilities.
Lynne Sachs, Pieces of Chris Marker In 1986, filmmaker Lynne Sachs saw Chris Marker’s “Sans Soleil”. Soon after, she wrote Marker a fan letter along with a personal interpretation of the film to which he surprisingly responded. They soon met, marking the beginning of a twenty-five-year friendship that culminated in 2007 when Sachs assisted Marker on one of his projects. In her presentation, Sachs will explore their shared interest in the film portrait. The talk will examine “pieces” by both Marker and Sachs and the ways in which each artist combines cinematic fragments to document the complexities of real people’s lives.
Hito Steyerl, Lucky Cats and Other Gestures When men die, they enter history.
When statues die,
they enter art.
Marker/Resnais
When cinema dies
It acquires a body
Steyerl/von Wedemeyer
Some reflection on the death of cinema and it´s posthumuous body, based on projects of Clemens von Wedemeyer and myself.
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Associated Screenings
Saturday, February 23 | 2:00pm & 7:00pm Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat (1977)
Chris Marker’s Level Five (1997)
International House | 3701 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia
March 16 | 7pm
Chris Marker’s Early Collaborations: Walerian Borowczyk’s Les Astronautes (1959, 12 min)
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Toute la mémoire du monde (1956)
Alain Resnais and Chris Marker’s Les Statues meurent aussi (1953)
Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog – Nuit et brouillard (1955)
International House | 3701 Chestnut Street, Philadelphia
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Acknowledgements
This program is made possible thanks to the generous support of Temple University’s Department of Film and Media Arts, University of Pennsylvania’s Cinema Studies Program, and Slought Foundation. Additional support has been provided by University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Fine Arts, Department of French Studies, Department of English, Penn Humanities Forum, and School of Arts and Sciences. We also acknowledge the collaboration of International House of Philadelphia and Scribe Video Center.
Jointly organized by Nora M. Alter, Timothy Corrigan, Jean-Michel Rabaté, Aaron Levy, and Nicola M. Gentili.
Chris Marker Makes a Special Guillaume cat cartoon for Maya & Noa Street-Sachs
Some Thoughts on my friend Chris Marker
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 request for a job, Marker cleverly explained that, unlike in the United States, French filmmakers could not afford assistants. And, 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.
Over the next two decades, Chris and I spoke on the phone periodically and I attended several of his rare public presentations. In 2007, Jon Miller, president of our mutual distributor Icarus Films, contacted me to see if I would be willing to assist Chris in the making of a new English version of his 1972 film “Viva la Baleine”, a passionate, collage-based essay film on the plight of the whales. Of course, I was honored and immediately said yes. For one whole year, Chris and I corresponded weekly as we re-wrote and updated the narration and I searched for a male and a female voice-over actor to read the two parts. He renamed the new 2007 version of his film “Three Cheers for the Whale”. It is distributed with other “bestiary” films he has made including “The Case of the Grinning Cat”.
After we had completed the film, I traveled to Paris with my daughters to talk with Chris about a wide range of things — our collaboration, Stokely Carmichael (a Black activist in the American civil rights movement), Russian documentary, cats and tea. Just before we left his home, he showed me a scrapbook he’d been collecting for several years. Chris had accumulated hundreds of pictures and articles on a young African-American politician who had just embarked on a campaign to become the next president of the United States. Chris was convinced that this virtually unknown candidate could stand up to a historically racist United States of America and win. I was doubtful.” (Lynne Sachs)
More recently, he sent me this letter which I feel I can now share:
Chris Marker's Guillaume in Arles
Hi Lynne. Please don’t mention dates, it’s so depressing… Let’s say we met -some time ago. And a little earlier I had lunch with Robert Flaherty in Germany. Such are the dots along the strange line they call a life. A life that becomes more and more filled with daily tasks as time goes, which explains why I can’t consider any participation to any project, mines being already enough to keep me breathless. Tell that to your friend, with my warmest wishes.
I had recently a large exhibition in Arles, where Peter Blum, my New York galerist, acted as emcee. And guess who was there.. Show it to the girls, whom Guillaume and me fondly salute.
And here is another owl images he sent me recently.
Lynne Sachs worked for a year with Chris Marker, her friend of more than twenty years, on rewriting and researching for a new English version of his 1970’s collage film on whales.
Chronicles the history of mankind’s relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry.
Chris Marker’s co-director, Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986), descendant of an aristocratic Italian family, had been a journalist, painter, and ethnologist before discovering his vocation as a documentary filmmaker. In the Sixties he became one of the founders-along with Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, and Chris Marker-of the “direct cinema” movement, pioneering in the use of new lightweight cameras and synchronous sound recording equipment. Ruspoli’s eclectic filmography includes documentaries on medical, scientific, anthropological and historical subjects.
“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 request for a job, Marker cleverly explained that, unlike in the United States, French filmmakers could not afford assistants. And, 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.
Over the next two decades, Chris and I spoke on the phone occasionally and I attended several of his rare public presentations. Three years ago, Jon Miller, president of our mutual distributor Icarus Films, contacted me to see if I would be willing to assist Chris in the making of a new English version of his 1972 film “Viva la Baleine”, a passionate, collage-based essay film on the plight of the whales. Of course, I was honored and immediately said yes. For one whole year, Chris and I corresponded weekly as we re-wrote and updated the narration and I searched for a male and a female voice-over actor to read the two parts. He renamed the new 2007 version of his film “Three Cheers for the Whale”. It is distributed with other “bestiary” films he has made including “The Case of the Grinning Cat”.
After we had completed the film, I traveled to Paris with my daughters to talk with Chris about a wide range of things — our collaboration, Stokely Carmichael (a Black activist in the American civil rights movement), Russian documentary, cats and tea. Just before we left his home, he showed me a scrapbook he’d been collecting for several years. Chris had accumulated hundreds of pictures and articles on a young African-American politician who had just embarked on a campaign to become the next president of the United States. Chris was convinced that this virtually unknown candidate could stand up to a historically racist United States of America and win. I was doubtful.” (Lynne Sachs)
