The Owl’s Legacy

If the first wave of posthumous publications collecting and recontextualizing the creative life of Chris Marker tells us anything, it is that 12 years after the death of this self-described “bricoleur,” we are still in a discovery phase when it comes to his boundless body of work. Even before he started making films in the early 1950s, Marker was active as a journalist and designer, and as a kind of community organizer for Travail et Culture, a cultural organization dedicated to popular education. One tributary for this work was Esprit, a magazine emerging from the Catholic left in France that provided an intellectual home for André Bazin’s film criticism. Two new anthologies of English translations of Marker’s writings draw from his contributions to Esprit and other French publications, written between 1946 and 1955.

Early Film Writings (University of Minnesota Press) and Eternal Current Events (Inpatient Press) are nicely complementary books, with the former limiting itself to film-related articles while the latter sweeps up a splendid miscellany. Eternal Current Events is a typical small-press affair: a little thin on illustrations and footnotes, but beautifully designed and inventively arranged. Early Film Writings, by contrast, is an academic production and thus duty bound to be unlovely and formal in its presentation (it hardly needs saying that Marker’s own work is dead set against conventional forms of seriousness). I was a little alarmed by editor Steven Ungar’s introductory claim that even “ardent” Marker fans have not dealt with his legacy as a writer (au contraire!), and was frankly flabbergasted by a closing filmography that consists only of English-language home video (and is incomplete at that).

Get past these appendages, though, and there is much to recommend in Early Film Writings. Marker’s interest in film was idiosyncratic, inquisitive, and sociologically alert from the start. A passionate 1951 piece on the aesthetics of animated film begins by championing a young Parisian woman’s unpublished dissertation on the subject as “an important event in the history of filmology” and ends by lashing out against “Mr. Disney’s creative impotence, with all his factories, machines, and strikebreakers.” Another Esprit article considers the pedagogical possibilities of film by reviewing proposals to adapt Pierre Corneille from students at Sèvres High School (“All ten papers I received are interesting. In one, a touch of humor, in another a discovery, and elsewhere a commonsensical reflection”). He cheers Henri Langlois for working to address film history’s gaps, but, as if anticipating our nostalgia for a golden age of cinephilia, goes on to poke fun at the Cinémathèque Française’s uncomfortable screening space: “Spectators are crushed, churned, laminated, and purified in such a way that binds them to the screen as if it’s their only lifeline. In memory of what they have just endured, cinema appears as a true Paradise.” Though lavish in his praise for Dreyer and Cocteau—and the Dr. Seuss–conceived short Gerald McBoing-Boing (1950)—he generally seems much less interested in establishing canons of film art than in finding out where the medium can go.

For me, the key revelation of the book is its depiction of the time Marker spent reporting in Los Angeles in the early 1950s, connecting with the likes of Irving Lerner, whose Man Crazy (1953) he praises as a film “worthy of all the virtues normally tied to [neorealism].” Marker seems energized by technological developments growing out of the industry’s panicked response to television, finding particular promise in Cinerama, which reminds him of Mexican murals. The somewhat confusingly titled “Hollywood on Location,” the jewel of this collection, turns out to be a remarkably precise analysis of the Blacklist, which Marker attributes less to radical film content than to the renewed labor activism spreading through the industry.

After plodding through Early Film Writings’s scaffolding, it’s a relief to leap into Eternal Current Events with little more than a title page and an epigram. The Esprit articles assembled here are split between longer pieces, primarily speculative fictions, and clusters of shorter bulletins that in their playful mix of fact and fancy offer a closer approximation of Marker’s own films than does any of his film criticism. A montage of “newsreels,” for instance, splices together statistics and news reports of suicides in much the same way as the indexical litany concluding Le joli Mai (1963).

While there is much in this volume that will be inscrutable to anyone not steeped in this period of French culture, several pieces paint a vivid picture of the interregnum between the Second World War and the as-yet-unnamed Cold War. In “Cross My Heart and Hop a Train,” for instance, he recounts his dizzying encounter with a veteran of the Wehrmacht on a train. Responding to Marker’s insistence on the imperative to remember the concentration camps, “He . . . makes that gesture of erasure that only Germans know how to make, moving his forearm in front of his face like a windshield wiper—a magical gesture, an exorcism that makes it so that the rejected thing ceases to be . . . and five years of war in the West were erased; the guy was ready to fight the Russians alongside this morning’s enemies, with no ulterior motive.” Marker is pessimistic about the political realignment exemplified by this good soldier, but the story represents a striking example of his ability to metabolize current events with irony.

The best pieces collected in Eternal Current Events remind me of Joseph Roth’s definition of the feuilleton form as “saying true things on half of a page.” In this spirit, Marker argues for a free Métro, meditates on writer Boris Vian’s catalyzing role in the French appreciation of jazz, deplores the police, and tenders an early entry in his lifelong identification with the feline kind (“Might we not better understand their discreetness, their duty to remain invisible, the unremitting effort they put toward taking an interest in mice, in balls of yarn, in other kitties too, as a way of making us respect their anonymity as gods?”). Many of the longer pieces, however, are opaque and, I hate even to say it, boring. It must be noted that Marker, who was much given to revising his earlier work (“You never know what you’re filming,” says a narrator in 1977’s A Grin Without a Cat), did not return to these articles in his lifetime.

The superlative new edition of Le Dépays (The Film Desk), by contrast, resurfaces a 1982 photobook that originated as a companion piece to Sans soleil (1983), and which Marker himself saw fit to translate into English. If, pace Ungar, Marker the writer remains too little known, then what of Marker the book designer? Take a look at his dynamic designs for the Petite planète travel series, or the two volumes of Commentaires (collections of the texts he wrote for his early films)—which are said to have inspired Richard Hollis’s design for John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972)—and it becomes clear that Marker’s “writing” is as much a matter of layout as prose.

Le Dépays, which derives from the same travels in Japan as Sans soleil, is an elegant object lesson in his talent for opening an imaginative space on the printed page. In practical terms, the book comprises three brief essays, each separated by black-and-white photographs that are crisp, curious, and often droll. The text component is justified to the far right of the page, with an equivalent space left to us. A “reader warning” at the outset advises that “[the] text doesn’t comment on the images any more than the images illustrate the text. They are two sequences that clearly cross and signal to each other, but which it would be pointlessly exhausting to collate. One should therefore accept them in their disorder, simplicity, and division in two, as with everything else in Japan.”

Following that unusual yet entirely characteristic disclaimer, Marker observes daybreak in Tokyo as it plays out on its televisions:

The static of the still-flickering TV is soon to fade behind the first test pattern, but at this moment it resembles nothing so much as one of those square white lanterns you see on the televised tales of ghosts and samurais, like a tube within a tube. The Lady of the Morning News appears on the screen, or the first commercial, or Doraemon the cat-robot. So, you say, another day has passed. As though it were only upon waking and looking back that one could take the true measure of this day lived outside time, in a zone of silence amid sound, in the taste of eternity that we’ll call Japan. 

This is the same kind of thing Marker was after in the pieces collected in Early Film Writings and Eternal Current Events, but the limpid prose of Le Dépays is light years ahead. Though the book shares its subject matter with Sans soleil, the treatment is calmer, even soothing, without the film’s dense soundtrack and detours to Guinea-Bissau, San Francisco, and other ports of call. In her insightful introduction to the new edition, editor Sadie Rebecca Starnes points out that the title is a French neologism “drawn from dépaysement, a nearly untranslatable feeling that approximates the thrilling disorientation of being abroad, of being uncountried.”

Marker himself retitled the work The Disorient when he translated the book’s text into English for Immemory, the rhizomic CD-ROM he created in 1997. Starnes reads the pun as a sophisticated play on words, but it’s worth emphasizing the degree to which Marker, whose second film (1953’s Statues Also Die) after all argues for the repatriation of African art, undermines orientalism. Where the colonialist invariably seeks to generalize and control, our author relishes all that is fleeting, contradictory, and indeed untranslatable. This can lead to its own brand of mystification, to be sure, but the characteristic motion of Marker’s narration is one of spinning off rather than summing up.

In Studio: Remembering Chris Marker (OR Books), a 2017 volume that pairs an essay by the British film scholar Colin MacCabe with photos of the auteur’s atelier by Adam Bartos, MacCabe writes of Marker, “He said to me more than once that old age was particularly difficult for him as he had been so good at being young.” By these lights, it’s a testament to his work’s long arc that Le Dépays is the most youthful of the three books under review. All are worthy additions to the Marker shelf, but only the last is—to quote Sei Shōnagon via the once-removed narrator of Sans soleil—one of those “things that quicken the heart.”

Max Goldberg is an archivist and writer based in the Boston area.