IT WAS an exciting moment: to be young, passionate about movies, still a believer in their political purpose (festivals prefer “impact”) and discovering, for the first time, the work of Chris Marker. At twenty I saw a 35mm print of his four-hour magnum opus A Grin Without a Cat (“scenes from the fourth world war”) at the Film Society of Lincoln Center, part of Richard Peña’s extraordinary “1968: An International Perspective” series commemorating that protest year’s 40th anniversary. To cite just one strand of Grin’s dense network of reportages: the film transitions from an American Nazi Party rally in midtown Manhattan to a sequence where a U.S. bomber pilot takes a gee-whiz delight in the volume of napalm he can drop on a Vietnamese village in one mission. This portrait of prowar nationalism was disturbing, breathtaking: a network of images made subversive by the post-facto realization they would never have been approved for broadcast on regular American TV. It suggests not a world of smoking guns but a world of coverups. (A Grin Without a Cat was not shot exclusively by Marker, but rather by a confederation of camerapeople1 belonging to the group SLON-ISKRA - but it trades on the sci-fi adjacent feeling that “the filmmaker” was inexplicably able to be at multiple different sociohistorical flashpoints at the same time.)
In 2011 I found myself participating in Occupy Wall Street, alongside friends who organized “Occupy Cinema” pop-up projections of essential political films - including, naturally, Grin. Marker had even contributed a graphic to the Occupied Wall Street Journal. The movement was fluid, combustible, messy: it was exciting because it was never clear how far Occupy would go, how legit it could become. On the one hand, it was an inspiring clutch of time. On the other, its growth allowed both young and old people the opportunity to draw an inevitable historical parallel which became wary-making in its obviousness, to say nothing of its implied pessimism: This is 1968 all over again! (A boomer friend countered with at least one crucial difference: “Maybe - but in 1968 there wasn’t so much camera equipment everywhere.”) Also irksome was the readiness of American protesters to posit Occupy as the logical climax of a global wave of rebellion ( the “Arab Spring”) that began in 2010 with the self-immolation of Tunisian fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi: maybe all struggles against autocracy are the same, but to me this felt like a conflation, a denial of first-world privilege. At any event: Occupy was crushed by Michael Bloomberg’s NYPD that winter in a series of protests of diminishing size, after the weather turned properly cold and the sympathies (or at least the attention) of the national public had moved on. Marker died the following year.
In the VHS era, Marker’s most recognized work had been the 28 minute short La Jetée (1960), because it was famously expanded by Terry Gilliam into his 1995 time-travel dystopia 12 Monkeys starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. But in the decade since Marker’s death, most of the longer essay / documentary films (The Last Bolshevik, Sans Soleil, Grin, Le Joli Mai, Letter to Siberia) have become available on home video by regular commercial means, a blessing. To me these films represented a bridge between the worlds of activism and the art gallery, or between direct action and polemical documentary: playful, self-aware, humanist, maddening, and always aware of their inherent contradictions. Typically, death has the effect of demystification: new clues emerge, humanizing the departed (for better or for worse), adding to a still-incomplete mosaic of facts and stories known to the survivors as a “life”. But Marker’s death had the paradoxical effect of making him more of a demigod, not less. He wasn’t just a documentarian but a media philosopher, a leftist gadfly who happily jumped platforms and channels as the winds of technology shifted. (Jonathan Rosenbaum called him a “freelance leftist”; film scholar Ian Christie called him a “techno-shaman”.) Each rerelease is a new occasion to try and sift a staggering body of work; each film invites a multiplicity of meanings and possible conclusions, which tends to lead to melodramatic puffery when film critics go searching for one. Near-every piece of English-language film writing I’ve seen about Marker since his death is either A.) racing to keep up with him in order to prove the author’s mastery of the given film-as-text, or, B.) delivered in a kind of gushy, rapturous tone that can sound more like a throwing-up of one’s hands at the futility of trying to decipher it all.
An unsexy but increasingly helpful word is ekphrasis, which means, in short, substituting overwritten description for analysis. You can see me attempt both A.) and B.) approaches at once in my ekphrasis-heavy reviews of Level Five (1997, released in 2014) and A.K. (1985, released in 2016). “Marker was a leftist who used his art to challenge 20th-century power structures,” I wrote. It’s wince-inducing: How did the art challenge the structures? Which structures? Did it work? David Wagner’s obituary in The Atlantic claimed that “Along with French contemporaries such as Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Agnès Varda, and Alain Resnais, Marker helped pioneer innovative techniques in the language of film, ushering the form into new intellectual territory.” Fine - but which new territory? And what happened once the form got there? I want to believe questions like this aren’t beyond the pale but rather, actively invited by the work. The irony undergirding it all is the fact that Marker, who was originally born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, fashioned the myth of “Chris Marker” (after the magic marker) as a means of preserving his anonymity while documenting, and participating in, political struggles around the world. His reliance on fake names and bogus biographies is quintessentially 20th century - a time when it was still feasible, if not always recommended, to forge papers, adopt a new name, move to a new town, rebuild your life from scratch et cetera - while it also anticipated the digital era’s potential for infinite anonymity. The search for the real “Chris Marker” becomes more frenzied, not less. Being the patron saint of this memory-meditation has turned him into something of a meme, a kind of Kilgore Trout (or Zelig, or Forrest Gump, or Max Headroom) of the Cold War.