Bøker av Chris Marker

Formative writings by French avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker   It is hard to imagine French cinema without La Jetée (1962), the time-travel short feature by the reclusive French filmmaker Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, better known as Chris Marker. He not only influenced artists ranging from David Bowie to J. G. Ballard but also inspired the cult film 12 Monkeys. Marker’s influence expanded beyond his own films through his writings for the French monthly Esprit as well as anthologies and newly founded film publications.   This first English translation of Marker’s early writings on film brings together reviews and essays, published between 1948 and 1955, that span the topics of film style, adaptation, and ideology, as well as animation and the debates surrounding 3-D and wide-screen technologies, ranging from late silent-era films to postwar Hollywood’s efforts to contend with the rise of television. Readers will find commentary on Laurence Olivier’s 1944 screen adaptation of Henry V, a scathing review of Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), critiques of Walt Disney productions, a discussion of the pitfalls of prioritizing commercial success over aesthetic values, and more.   An indispensable resource for cinephiles and scholars alike, these texts document the emergence of Marker’s critical voice and situate him alongside such contemporaries as André Bazin and Eric Rohmer, as well as the future French New Wave figures Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. They show how his remarks on individual films open onto his engagement with films as social and cultural phenomena.

Photographs by one of French cinema's most influential and enigmatic artists.Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jetée (1962)—a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995). His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films (which include Le Jetée, Sans Soleil, ¡Cuba Si!, and The Case of the Grinning Cat), others are portraits of famous faces (Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa), but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world (an extra who appeared in Kurosawa's Ran, a woman seen on a street in Siberia). The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies. The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos. The book—which appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University—also includes essays by Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and art historian Molly Nesbit.