Chris Marker

Sarah Cooper, Diana Holmes, Robert Ingram

• Éditeur: Manchester University Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526162892
• Sujet: Media & Performing Arts
• Sous-sujet: Film Direction & Production

Since the early 1950s, Chris Marker has embraced different filmmaking styles as readily as he has new technologies, and has broadened conceptions of the documentary in distinctly personal ways. He has travelled around the world, tracking political upheavals and historic events, as well as unearthing the stories buried under official reporting. This globetrotting filmmaker testifies to his six decades on the move through a passionate devotion to the moving image. Yet from the outset, his filmic images reveal a fascination with stillness. It is at this juncture of mobility and immobility that Sarah Cooper situates her comprehensive study of Marker's films. She pays attention to the central place that photographs occupy in his work, as well as to the emergence in his filming of statuary, painting and other static images, including the film still, and his interest in fixed frame shooting. She engages with key debates in photographic and film theory in order to argue that a different conception of time emerges from his filmic explorations of stasis. In detailed readings of each of his films, including Le souvenir d'un avenir andLa Jetee, Sans soleil and Level 5, Cooper charts Marker's concern with mortality in varied historical and geographical contexts, which embraces the fragility of the human race, along with that of the planet.

1 The early years: 1950–1961

The first decade of Chris Marker’s filmmaking career encompasses what Chris Darke terms the ‘lost period’ of his oeuvre (Darke 2003: 48). The years from 1950 to 1961 are the least discussed because the films made in this period are difficult to find. Reassuringly – for the passionate researcher, at least – the films are still held in French archives, and it is the fervent hope of those who see them that availability will widen beyond this one day. In this early period, Marker collaborated on a number of projects (see Alter 2006: 167–78; Dubois 2002: 171–72; and Kämper and Tode 1997: 371–76 for detailed lists of his collaborations). He co-directed one film with Alain Resnais (Les Statues meurent aussi (1950–1953)) and directed five of his own (Olympia 52 (1952); Dimanche à Pékin (1956); Lettre de Sibérie (1958); Description d’un combat (1960); and Cuba Si! (1961)): these six works are the focus of this chapter. Marker entered filmmaking in the first instance as a writer. His finely tuned skills in this capacity are evidenced from the outset in the richness and beauty of his poetic commentaries, all of which (with the exception of Olympia 52) are published in the first volume of the 1961 Seuil publication, Commentaires. This text also features the commentary of an unmade film, L’Amérique rêve (1959), about America’s dreams of other times and places – a new America to be discovered – whose present is set up prophetically in conclusion as the Europe of the future. Marker establishes himself as a globetrotter: his first film takes him to Helsinki. Thereafter, he is attracted to countries in transition, and he travels from China through Siberia and Israel to Cuba. This period bears witness to fruitful first contacts with two important French producers – Pierre Braunberger and Anatole Dauman – while testifying less happily to draconian censorship of his work in France and beyond. It is to the first of these encounters with the French censors that we turn as we take a chronological journey through the films of the early years.

Les Statues meurent aussi

Begun in 1950 and completed in 1953, Les Statues meurent aussi was commissioned by the organisation Présence Africaine. Ghislain Cloquet was the cinematographer, Resnais was responsible for the editing and Marker provided the commentary, which is read by Jean Négroni. It won the Prix Vigo in 1954, but has had an otherwise chequered history. As well as constituting a study of African art, the film is highly critical of colonialism, and links the disappearance of African art to the process of western colonisation. Its incendiary capacity in this regard resulted in it being promptly censored on 31 August 1953. In the letter to the directors from the Film Censorship Commission in Paris (reproduced in the appendix to Commentaires (Marker 1961)), there was no indication of what should be cut, even though the committee specified that the second half of the film was particularly problematic. Marker notes that the film came out in a truncated version (minus its second half) in 1963, with the agreement of the directors, on the condition that it be accompanied by a disclaimer: ‘Copie tronquée – à ne pas confondre avec l’original’ (Truncated copy – not to be confused with the original) (Marker 1961: 185). But the producer who agreed to insert this statement forgot at the last moment. It was not until 1968 that the film was shown in its entirety. On a more positive note, it is now readily available on the 2004 Argos Films/Arte DVD release of Resnais’s Hiroshima mon amour (1959).

Death is the leveller of manifold differences within this documentary that moves between statues and human beings from the outset. For Marker and Resnais, stone goes the way of all flesh: statuary crumbles, decomposes and reveals its mortality in the process. Yet this mortality is a sign of life that enables the filmmakers to mobilise stasis in the service of a political and ethical filmic critique. For Emmanuel Levinas: ‘Within the life, or rather the death, of a statue, an instant endures infinitely […] An eternally suspended future floats around the congealed position of a statue’ (Levinas 1998: 138). This severed link to a future locates the statue, and the artwork, outside of time for Levinas. In contrast, Marker and Resnais imbue their filmed statues with life beyond the eternal suspension of an instant. For both filmmakers, the African artwork is not cut off from time or history, and this is what sets their filming of it apart from its demise under colonialist rule.

At the start of Les Statues, culture is described by the commentary as the botany of death, and is introduced through images of sculptures scattered among grass and trees, some roughly hewn, others – stone faces, a headless bust – more finely honed but disintegrating. The documentary immediately encompasses a museum space to designate the place where the western world has hitherto confined African art, disconnected from the culture that produced it. The film will work gradually to reinstate this connection between art, culture and world. The animation of the inanimate is key to the life that this documentary breathes back into its subject, while it also resuscitates links to African culture. Suddenly, the art objects are freed from their captivity behind the glass of the museum cases and are animated through the mobile gaze of the camera. The statues and other objects appear to glide past as if moving of their own accord. Different intensities of light and dark heighten the transition that we witness from stasis to movement, facilitated at times by a smooth series of dissolves from one image to the next, and at others by crisp cutting. As the voice-over returns, we are reminded that all of this belongs to another world: the statues are mute and the eyes that we see do not see us. However, the rendering mobile of stasis here suggests that even the most fixed of positions can be subject to question and change, along with reinsertion into a more dynamic conception of temporality and history. The initial setting in motion of the African artwork is this film’s entry point to shaking a static colonialist and racist vision of African culture at its very foundations.

Contrary to an amnesiac colonising vision, Les Statues emphasises that African art and civilisation are as old as western and other cultures. The film as a whole strives ultimately to unite Africa, the West and the rest of the world in a fraternal embrace. At one point we are shown images of wood, cloth and earth, before the editing speeds up to such an extent that the surfaces we have been scrutinising become a hypnotic series of fast-moving wavy lines. The images thus question distinctions between different substances and suggest that the entire world is woven from the same material. The impact of the westerner’s arrival on African culture is understood to rip this fabric. Registered by the commentary over disparate extracts from archive footage filmed in Africa, the negative effects of colonialism are seen in the commercialisation and subsequent vulgarisation of African art, the importing of illness (although the film concedes that westerners have also been healers) and the introduction of money to this culture of gift and exchange. African culture is described as being torn between Islam and Christianity, and the attempt to create a bond between the two through art is said to have failed. Yet the film finds traces of a link between art and life elsewhere. The motion of athletes is said to be an art form and the struggle against death is discernible everywhere. Footage of African men working on machines tells of how mechanisation has changed things irrevocably, but there is an affirmation of parity between the gestures of the worker and the artist. In its penultimate sequence, the commentary declares that we (Africa and the West) cannot recognise ourselves equal in our inheritance of a past, unless this stretches into the present. The commentary concludes: ‘Les visages de l’art nègre sont tombés du même visage humain, comme la peau du serpent. Au-delà de leurs formes mortes, nous reconnaissons cette promesse, commune à toutes les grandes cultures, d’un homme victorieux du monde. Et Blancs ou Noirs, notre avenir est fait de cette promesse.’¹ Continuing the connection between art and culture, life and its double, a slow panning camera movement finally surveys an array of masks reputed to fight against death, and thus epitomises the overriding gesture of this film.

Today the vision of African culture glimpsed in Les Statues may seem all too simple, and the presentation of colonialism broadsweeping rather than specific to individual African countries, even though it is still abundantly clear that it comes from a committed antiracist and anti-colonialist perspective. Furthermore, the universalism of the film’s humanism, while it was essential to a drive towards racial equality at the time, levels out distinctions in favour of commonality, thereby forestalling the recognition of non-hierarchical differences – both within Africa and between Africa and the West – that the post-colonial era strives towards. Nevertheless, the film’s questioning of colonialism abides convincingly and powerfully in the context of its innovative reflections on African art. Through a very precise focus on statuary, Marker and Resnais reanimate the artwork in order to highlight and question manifold colonial injustices. The promise to the future that the commentary refers to in conclusion is thereby opened crucially to everyone and everything.

Olympia 52

While Marker and Resnais were still working on Les Statues meurent aussi, Marker completed and released Olympia 52 in 1952. It focuses on the fifteenth Olympiad, held in Helsinki in that same year. Marker was part of a team from the popular education organisation Peuple et Culture, established in the post-war period, who obtained the funding necessary to make a film on the games. Bénigno Cacérès, a key member of the group, recalls (as does the film commentary) that this was the first year that the USSR had participated in the Olympics, which made them particularly significant (Cacérès 1982: 35). In spite of the apparent contrast in subject matter with Marker’s previous co-directed film, the humanism of Olympia 52 takes up the earlier film’s concern with mortality in its different context. A connection between Marker’s work and that of Jean Giraudoux makes this thematic interest in mortal fragility even more resounding.

Marker’s book Giraudoux par lui-même came out in the same year as Olympia 52. Giraudoux’s second play, Amphitryon 38, reverberates like a distant echo in the title of Marker’s second film. According to Giraudoux, there had been thirty-seven dramatic adaptations of the legend of Amphitryon prior to his own play. When Marker writes the introduction to his critical study he picks up on this, and titles it ‘Giraudoux 52’ (this becomes ‘Giraudoux 62’ in the second edition, published in 1962), while saying that this is not to be understood in the sense that Giraudoux meant when he wrote Amphitryon 38 (Marker 1952: 5). Likewise, Olympia 52 is not the fifty-second film of the Olympics, but the implicit link to the focus of Giraudoux’s play is important. In the tales of antiquity, Jupiter regularly renounces his privileges of an Olympian God in order to conquer mortal beings. As in the myth of origin, Alcmène is the woman of Jupiter’s affections and is married to Amphitryon in Giraudoux’s play. Jupiter assumes the form of her husband to be able to have her through deception. His ultimate offer to her is immortality. Alcmène refuses this, however, having been steadfast throughout in confessing herself to be happy with her human status. As she says: ‘Devenir immortel, c’est trahir, pour un humain’ (To become immortal is a betrayal for a human being) (Giraudoux 1929: 79). Choosing to live with the imperfections of the human condition, Alcmène also speaks for the thrust of Olympia 52, which focuses on mortal limitations through the disappointments, as well as some of the undisputed achievements, in the 1952 Olympics.

Marker and crew left Paris for Finland on 10 July 1952. Images from their train journey across Europe at the start of the film lead into Helsinki’s preparations for the games. Thanks to an ever more rousing musical soundtrack, along with the anticipation of the commentary (read by Joffre Dumazedier, co-founder of Peuple et Culture), the pace at this stage suggests exhilaration. The stadium is empty and the workers who are finishing the grounds are defined as the true gods in this place. The streets bustle with people and vehicles, as we also see planes and luggage, and glean through the editing that everyone is heading for the same destination. Momentum gathers in a festival-like atmosphere before everything stops, for lunch. There are humorous touches here: we are told that one would expect a group of statues of workers to put down their working implements, but the union will not let them. And the first cut to a lunchtime meal is to a sea lion being fed in a zoo. (A white cat will make a brief appearance later, as Marker finds space for one of his signature animals in this early work.) As the commentary announces a date – 19 July 1952 – and the start of the fifteenth Olympiad, we see people in raincoats. Not without irony, we are told that this opening date was chosen because it had not rained then in Helsinki since 1902.

In his record of the trip, Cacérès remarks that the most useful word that they learnt while in Helsinki was Finnish for ‘sit’, in order to prevent people in the crowd from jumping up in front of the camera while they were filming (Cacérès 1982: 36). Quite how popular this made the crew with the spectators they sat among is not something he discusses, but the shots of the races from a spectator’s vantage point are admirably unobstructed. In some cases, close-ups of individual members of the crowd show them in more detail than the athletes they are watching. Dumazedier’s usually well-paced commentary speeds up from time to time, as he gets quite excited during some of the races. We see moments in which athletes bond with one another, in spite of the fact that they are in direct competition, or in which the montage establishes relations between ideologically opposed camps, which is the case of the US and USSR, still in the grips of Cold War hostility. The film lingers on training sessions, particularly those of the Americans and the Soviets (who will share most of the victories). They are filmed working hard, but also in more relaxed circumstances, with their families or signing autographs. Although the length of each event is obviously edited substantially, the pace of Olympia 52 still drags at times and its structure is loose. Nonetheless, there are moments of beauty and grace scattered throughout. The use of slow motion for selected events (most striking in the filming of the high jumpers and divers), and the rapid cutting between shots of wheels, bodies and heads in the cycling race are cases in point.

In a brief historical survey of the Olympics early on in the film, its darker moments are touched upon, and images from Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympiad (1938) feature as the Nazi associations of 1936 are broached. Finland is linked with a return to peace, yet this is not accompanied by a rose-tinted vision. The film cuts from a Greek statue to a photographic image of Baron Pierre de Coubertin (responsible for reinventing the games of antiquity at the end of the nineteenth century), followed by still images of winners of past Olympics. The narrative that introduces the former champions is not wholly c...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyrights
• Contents
• LIST OF PLATES
• SERIES EDITORS’ FOREWORD
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Introduction
• 1 The early years: 1950–1961
• 2 A second beginning: 1962–1966
• 3 Collective endeavour: 1967–1977
• 4 Continuity and change: the 1980s
• 5 To Level 5 and beyond: 1990 onwards
• Conclusion
• FILMOGRAPHY
• SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX