Chris Marker: Memories of the Future by Catherine Lupton

by Catherine Lupton

Chris Marker is one of the most extraordinary and influential filmmakers of our time. In landmark films such as Letter from Siberia, La Jetée, Sans Soleil, and Level Five, he has overturned cinematic conventions by confounding the distinction between documentary and fiction, writing and visual recording, and the still and moving image. Yet these works are only the tip of the iceberg; Marker's career has also encompassed writing, photography, television, and digital multimedia. Chris Marker is the first systematic examination of Marker's complete oeuvre. Here, Catherine Lupton traces the development and transformation of the artist's work from the late 1940s, when he began to work as a poet, novelist, and critic for the French journal Esprit, through the 1990s and the release of his most recent works, including Level Five and the CD-ROM Immemory. Lupton explicates Marker's work as a circular trajectory, with each project recycling and referring back to earlier works as well as to a host of adopted texts, always proceeding by oblique association and lateral digression. This trajectory, which Lupton outlines with great care and precision, is critical to understanding Marker's abiding the forms and operations of human memory. With this theme as her architecture, Lupton presents the most comprehensive and incisive analysis of Marker to date. Incorporating historical events and cultural contexts that have informed each phase of Marker's career, Lupton gives readers access to an artist who stands outside of the mainstream and thus defies easy explanation. There is no better guide than Lupton's to this modern master's prolific and multidimensional career.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction, Art, Biography

Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book by Catherine Lupton is a survey of the work of French cinematographer and video artist Chris Marker from the long-lived auteur’s first efforts in the 1940s to all the way to 2005. It is important to emphasize that Lupton examines only Marker’s work, not his life. Chris Marker was an infamously private person, so private in fact that only a handful of photographs of him exist, let alone much in the way of biographical facts.

Cinephiles will, however, get a lot out of this book. While Marker’s films La jetée and Sans soleil have been widely available, especially thanks to the Criterion Collection, the rest of his output is lesser known. Lupton describes these works and as much of their background as possible (the forces with which Marker collaborated to make them, who funded them, etc.). Thanks to Lupton, I now understand who those stars of La jetée, who were not established actors, are. We get some idea of how Marker’s political philosophy evolved over time, from his early films sympathetic to French Communism to later creations that show a more nuanced, humanistic awareness of the flaws of the Soviet Union. The book is lavishly illustrated with stills.

Marker lived on for another seven years after Lupton published this book, and he remained productive, so an updated edition would be nice.

[Claude Bertout · Rating 4 out of 5]

Chris Marker is a secretive and influential film maker and writer who's played an active role on the French intellectual scene since the late 1940s. This book is one of the few ressources on Marker's works that presents a well-documented analysis of his oeuvre in a somewhat more detailed way than Nora Alter's volume on the same topic. These two studies nicely complement each other and are required reading for any Marker aficionado.

[mao · Rating 3 out of 5]

Unfortunately, the only book devoted to the work of Magic Marker in English worth looking at. Due to the difficulty in seeing his work, this book makes a nice accompaniment to the thought of a master.

[Julian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Impeccably written and immaculately researched biography about the life and work of the 20th century's enigmatic "cosmonaut of memory", that prefigurative 21st century man, Chris Marker. This is absolutely the best English-language study about him and his art that I have read and it has been genuinely indispensable to my research.

[Brandon · Rating 5 out of 5]

I watched 20+ Chris Marker films and used this book as an essential guide to help understand and connect the dots between them all. Probably if I'd just seen Sans Soleil then tried to read this straight through, I would've put it down... not so fascinating in itself, but along with the films it's great. I got excited towards the end and read ahead, so still got a few films to catch up with.