Happy Birthday, Chris Marker! Born today in 1921 as Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve (amongst many other alternate names), this French audio-visual poet, multimedia artist, film essayist, photographer, writer and documentary film director is often associated with the Left Bank Cinema movement. This movement occurred in the late 1950s.
More notably, it included such filmmakers as Alain Resnais ('Night and Fog','Hiroshima Mon Amour', 'Last Year at Marienbad') and Agnès Varda ('Cleo From 5 to 7', 'Vagabond', 'The Gleaners and I').
Marker had served as assistant director on Resnais' thirty-two-minute 1955 French black and white/color history war documentary short film 'Nuit et Brouillard' ('Night and Fog').
Other filmmakers of the Left Bank Cinema movement included French film editor and film director Henri Colpi and French playwright, poet, journalist, screenwriter, filmmaker and World War II resistance fighter Armand Gatti.
The corresponding "right bank" group is constituted of the more famous and financially successful New Wave directors associated with the French film magazine Cahiers du cinéma.
These included French-Swiss film director, screenwriter and film critic Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut ('The 400 Blows', 'Shoot the Piano Player', 'Jules and Jim', 'Day for Night', 'The Last Metro'), and French film director Claude Chabrol ('The Butcher').
Unlike the Cahiers group, Left Bank directors were older and less movie-crazed. They tended to see cinema akin to other arts, such as literature.
However, they were similar to the New Wave directors in that they practiced cinematic modernism.
Their emergence also came in the 1950s and they also benefited from the youthful audience. The two groups, however, were not in opposition; Cahiers du cinéma advocated for Left Bank cinema.
The term was first coined by American film critic Richard Roud, who described a distinctive "fondness for a kind of Bohemian life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank.
This contained a high degree of involvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a consequent interest in "experimental filmmaking", as well as an identification with the political left.
Jean-Pierre Melville ('Bob the Gambler','Le Samouraï'), Marguerite Duras ('India Song'), and French writer and filmmaker Alain Robbe-Grillet are also associated with the group. Each tended to collaborate with one another.
The nouveau roman movement in literature was also a strong element of the Left Bank style, with authors contributing to many of the films. This was a type of 1950s French novel that diverged from classical literary genres.
Marker was always elusive about his past and known to refuse interviews and not allow photographs to be taken of him; his place of birth is highly disputed.
Some sources and Marker himself claim that he was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Other sources say he was born in Belleville, Paris, and others, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.
After publishing his first novel, Le Cœur Net (The Forthright Spirit), he wrote his birthday as July 22.
British film critic and historian David Thomson has said, "Marker told me himself that Mongolia is correct. I have since concluded that Belleville is correct—but that does not spoil the spiritual truth of Ulan Bator."
When asked about his secretive nature, Marker said, "My films are enough for them [the audience]."
Among his credits, Marker co-filmed, wrote and directed on of the more notable Left Bank films. It is also the first film of which he is best known. This was the 1962 French black and white sci-fi/romance film 'La Jetée' ('The Pier').
The film has a runtime of only thirty minutes, and is constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel.
The following year, 'La Jetée' won the Prix Jean Vigo for the short film in the Cinema of France in 1963 Since 1960, the award is given to a director of a feature film and to a director of a short film. The award is usually given to a young director, for his or her independent spirit and stylistic originality.
Also among his credits, Marker composed (credited as Michel Krasna), shot (credited as Sandor Krasna), wrote (as Sandor Krasna) and directed the second and final film of which he is best known. This was the 1983 French documentary/experimental film 'Sans Soleil' ('Sunless').
The film collects footage recorded in various countries around the world and presents it in collage-like form.
It features no synchronized sound, but instead ties the various segments together with music and voice-over narration, which ponders the topics such as memory, technology and society.
As the scenes shift, locations range from Japan to Iceland to Africa, creating a truly international work.
'Sans Soleil' is a meditation on the nature of human memory, showing the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory, and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories is affected.
British film theorist and author Roy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique...The French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."
In the mid-1990s, Terry Gilliam's 1995 American sci-fi/thriller film '12 Monkeys' was inspired by and borrows several concepts directly from 'La Jetée'.
In 2010, Time ranked 'La Jetée' first in its list of "Top 10 Time-Travel Movies". In 2012, in correspondence with the Sight & Sound poll, the British Film Institute deemed 'La Jetée' as the 50th greatest film of all time.
In a 2014 Sight & Sound poll, film critics voted 'Sans Soleil' the third best documentary film of all time.
The film's title derived from the song cycle Sunless by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky "although only a brief fragment of the Mussorgsky's cycle of songs (a brief passage of 'Sur le fleuve'['On the River'], the last of the songs in the cycle, which concerns itself with death) is heard in the course of the film."
Marker passed on his birthday from natural causes in Paris, France in 2012. He was 91.
Marker was one of the most innovative filmmakers to emerge during the postwar era. His friend and sometime collaborator Resnais called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man."
Working primarily in the arena of nonfiction, Marker rejected conventional narrative techniques, instead staking out a deeply political terrain defined by the use of still images, atmospheric soundtracks, and literate commentary.
Adopting a perspective akin to that of a stranger in a strange land, his films -- haunting meditations on the paradox of memory and the manipulation of time -- investigated the philosophical implications of understanding the world through media and, by extension, explored the very definition of cinema itself.
Marker had been active from 1952–2012.
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