Chris Marker
Chris Marker
Chris Markerwas a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La Jetée, A Grin Without a Cat, Sans Soleiland AK, an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Marker is often associated with the Left Bank Cinema movement that occurred in the late 1950s and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi and Armand Gatti...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionMultimedia Artist
Date of Birth29 July 1921
CountryFrance
What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.
An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.
And always the animals from each trip you bring back a gaze a pose a gesture that points to the truest of humanity better than images of humanity itself
Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.
We feel more emotion... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.
I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.
I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me,
When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.
I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling.
In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don’t choose your time.
...after a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us.
Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.
Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.
I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?