He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, in Neuilly-sur-Seine, Hauts-de-Seine, Île-de-France, France, 29 July 1921.[1] (The 1949 edition of Le C?ur Net specifies his birthday as 22 July.) In World War II he joined the Maquis (FTP). After the war he began to write and make films. He traveled to many socialist countries and documented what he saw in films and books. Les statues meurent aussi (1953) which he codirected with Alain Resnais was one of the first anticolonial films. Anatole Dauman produced his earliest films of Chris Marker and two more later, Sunday in Peking and Letter from Siberia.
Beginning with Sans Soleil he developed a deep interest in digitaltechnology, which led to his film Level 5 (1996) and Immemory (1998, 2008), an interactive multimedia CD-ROM, produced for the Centre Pompidou (French language version) and from Exact Change (English version). Marker created a 19 minute multimedia piece in 2005 for The Museum of Modern Art in New York titled Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men which was influenced by T. S. Eliot's poem.
Chris Marker lives in Paris and does not grant interviews. When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers a photograph of a cat instead. (Marker was represented in Agnes Varda's 2008 documentary "The Beaches of Agnes" by a cartoon drawing of a cat, speaking in a technologically altered voice.) Marker's own cat is named Guillaume-en-egypte.
In the 2007 Criterion Collection release of La Jetée and Sans Soleil, Marker included a short essay "Working on a shoestring budget". He confessed to shooting all of Sans Soleil with a silent film camera and recording all the audio on a primitive audio cassette recorder. Marker also reminds the reader that only one short scene in La Jetée is of a moving image, as Marker could only borrow a movie camera for one afternoon while working on the film.
Note: In a 1995 interview Resnais states that the final version of the commentary was a collaboration between Marker and Jean Cayrol (source: Film Comment).
Les hommes de la baleine (Ruspoli 1956)
Note: under the pseudonym "Jacopo Berenizi" Marker wrote the commentary for this short about whale hunters in the Azores. The two would return to this topic in 1972's Vive la Baleine (Film Comment).
Le mystere de l'atelier quinze (Resnais et Heinrich 1957)
Note: Marker wrote the commentary for this fictional short (Film Comment).
Le Siècle a soif (Vogel 1958)
Note: Marker wrote and spoke all the commentary for this short film about fruit juice in Alexandrine verse (Film Comment).
Note: Marker was eventually credited as a writer for this one, apparently, he wrote the dialogue (Film Comment).
Django Reinhardt (Paviot 1959)
Note: Marker narrated this one (Film Comment).
Jouer à Paris (Varlin 1962)
Note: This was edited by Marker - essentially, this film is a 27-minute postscript to Le Joli Mai assembled from leftover footage and organized around a new commentary (Film Comment).
A Valparaiso (Ivens 1963)
Note: This gem was written by Marker. It feels like a Marker film.
Les Chemins de la fortune (Kassovitz 1964)
Note: Marker apparently helped edit and organise this Venezuela travelogue (Film Comment).
La Douceur du village (Reichenbach 1964)
Note: Edited by Marker.
La Brûlure de mille soleils (Kast 1964)
Note: Marker edited this (mostly) animated science-fiction exstentialist short and (possibly) collaborated on the script (Film Comment).
Encyclopedia
top
