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Chris Marker
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$ 27.75
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| Item Number |
303964 |
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Item Description...
Chris Marker is one of the most extraordinary and influential filmmakers of our time. In landmark films such as Letter from Siberia, La Jetée, Sans Soleil, and Level Five, he has overturned cinematic conventions by confounding the distinction between documentary and fiction, writing and visual recording, and the still and moving image. Yet these works are only the tip of the iceberg; Marker's career has also encompassed writing, photography, television, and digital multimedia.
Chris Marker is the first systematic examination of Marker's complete oeuvre. Here, Catherine Lupton traces the development and transformation of the artist's work from the late 1940s, when he began to work as a poet, novelist, and critic for the French journal Esprit, through the 1990s and the release of his most recent works, including Level Five and the CD-ROM Immemory. Lupton explicates Marker's work as a circular trajectory, with each project recycling and referring back to earlier works as well as to a host of adopted texts, always proceeding by oblique association and lateral digression. This trajectory, which Lupton outlines with great care and precision, is critical to understanding Marker's abiding obsession: the forms and operations of human memory. With this theme as her architecture, Lupton presents the most comprehensive and incisive analysis of Marker to date.
Incorporating historical events and cultural contexts that have informed each phase of Marker's career, Lupton gives readers access to an artist who stands outside of the mainstream and thus defies easy explanation. There is no better guide than Lupton's to this modern master's prolific and multidimensional career.
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Item Specifications...
Pages 256
Dimensions: Length: 0.5" Width: 5.75" Height: 7.5"
Weight: 1 lbs.
Binding Softcover
Release Date Oct 15, 2004
ISBN 1861892233
EAN 9781861892232
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Availability 1 units.
Availability accurate as of May 23, 2012 04:09.
Usually ships within one to two business days from Momence, IL.
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About this Author/Artist Catherine Lupton is Lecturer in Film Studies at the Roehampton Institute, University of Surrey, UK.
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Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Magic Marker Apr 2, 2006 |
It's hard for a biographer to sink her teeth into an elusive figure like Chris Marker, for Marker is famous for not allowing himself to be interviewed, or even photographed, and when fans write to him asking for a signed photo, he sends back a picture of a cat, or sometimes an owl. He seems to see himself as an owl and made a great picture recently screened here in San Francisco called THE GRIN OF THE OWL. And by the way, Chris Marker isn't even his real name. And no one knows for sure if the legends about his early life are true. For example, people say he was the youngest member of the French Resistance. That would certainly be romantic if it were true. But what if his background wasn't exactly as "PC" as the myth?
Catherine Lupton explores all these quandaries and more in her new guide to Marker's life and work. Of course the work deserves the extended treatment that she gives it. His body of work is little known in the USA, for only a few of his films have gained purchase even in the "cinematheque" set, and if you tried something like Netflix I shudder to think what would turn up, they would probably send you Gilliam's TWELVE MONKEYS. Marker has a tortured relationship to his own films, and in recent years has taken on the extended project of re-working, re-editing, and re-presenting his earlier films in a new, gallery based context which is quite site-specific. It would probably be easy enough to catch a showing of LA JETEE, and here in San Francisco the later SANS SOLEIL has a lot of cult appeal, for its beautiful shots of our wonderful city are as dazzling as any Richard Lester captured in PETULIA. But the rest of the films are a terra incognita and we are lucky to have such a careful, scrupulous and intelligent commentator as Catherine Lupton to narrativize them o skillfully.
Of the ones she describes, I am looking forward most to seeing IF I HAD FOUR CAMELS and REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME (co-directed with Yannick Bellon). There is one sequence in LA JETEE, otherwise composed--like CAMELS and REMEMBRANCE--of still photos, held in frame for slightly varying lengths of time--in which a flash of movement rips through the film, and shakes the whole world of cinema to its foundation. It is like watching movies for the very first time. Marker is quite old now, I suppose, perhaps 85, so maybe he wasn't the YOUNGEST member of the Resistance, just the most legendary. He still sounds as though he has plenty of tricks left in his bag. As the years go by his experiments with texture and "truth" seem more and more relevant, so that as Fellini (for example) seems less and less interesting as an artist, the balance tips the other way in the direction of "nonfiction" and Chris Marker. | | | | Chris Marker: Memories of the Future Jun 28, 2005 |
Marker's extraordinary filmography includes Letter from Siberia (1958), La Jetee (1962), Sans Soleil (1982) and Level Five (1996). The works of this French, "techno-shaman" exceed the boundaries of conventional cinema, often by using only still photographs and music in a film. Marker's body of work is international in scope and includes the mediums of writing, photography, filmmaking, video, television and digital multimedia. The biographer, Catherine Lupton, is a Senior Lecturer in Film & Television Studies at Roehampton University in London. She describes Marker's odyssey from the late 1940s, when he began to work as a critic and writer for the French journal Esprit with Alain Resnais and other intelligentsia, to his most recent work, a multimedia CD-ROM called Immemory. Not much is known about Marker's life pre-World War II, other than he served as a parachutist with the U.S. Army and was involved with the French Resistance. Other oddities about Marker include his abstinence from being photographed, unless he is hidden behind a camera. Media requests for a picture of the auteur usually result in an image of a cat or an owl. Even his name is not real, as Chris Marker is one of several pseudonyms used by the 84-year old enigmatic filmmaker. Marker's relationship with Yves Montand and Simone Signoret is discussed in the book, as well as his fascination with the Russian kino-train director, Alexander Medvekin. In 1962, two of his films, the 29 minute La Jatee (the source for Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys) and the feature, Le Joli mai, are two of the major highlights in a long and experimental career of this modern-day master, whose films were created in France, Russia, China, Africa and the United States. Marker's life is nearly as obtuse as the hidden meanings in his works.
© 2005 Harlan D. Whatley | | | Write your own review about Chris Marker
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