Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image

by Gavin Keeney

Dossier Chris The Suffering Image is a study of a late-modern chiasmus, impersonal-personal agency, as it comes to expression in the works of French artist and filmmaker Chris Marker as the dynamic interplay of political and subjective agency. As chiasmus, the complementary halves of this often-apocalyptic dynamis (a semi-catastrophic, temporal or historical force-field) also - arguably - secretly agree to meet, through the work of art, in the futural. Consistent with the classical figure of Concordia discors, these irreducible warring aspects of life experience are, in fact, resolved in an atemporal and a historical moment that inhabits the work of art from its inception. This redemptive aspect in art is also the ultimate gesture of the artwork as mask or screen for forces that reside beyond the frame of the image or work, as its proverbial Other, or within the frame, as other to that Other. A topological knot, or ontological problem, it is this very conflict that animates all of Marker's extensive works - filmic and otherwise.

Genres: Nonfiction

302 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2012