#chrismarker

Shadow Tree Hands: Here I Was Born and There I …, 2025.

The spiral of memory and action is never linear. Perhaps one truly has to step back into the future.

Chris Marker's enthralling, globehopping essay is perhaps the finest first-person documentary, one that can leave you rivetingly unmoored. Ostensibly, we're following a world traveler as he journeys between locations, from San Francisco to Africa, from Iceland to Japan. A female narrator speaks over the images as if they were letters home ("He wrote me...") even though the episodes play out right in front of us. Each viewer is bound to have their own favorites: The playful, near-subliminal opening shot of three Icelandic girls walking down a rural road; the Japanese temple dedicated to cats (a very Marker place to visit); the illuminating aside on Hitchcock's Vertigo. The doc feels like a diary that's being written, reread and transposed to celluloid simultaneously, reinventing itself from moment to moment. You'll be mesmerized.

Merci à Boris Nicot pour ses "Notes sur Sans Soleil" qui accompagnent ici la sortie du numéro AMOUR (2023) de La mer gelée.

#WilliamKlein as “Man From The Future“ in #LaJetée (1962) directed by #ChrisMarker https://www.instagram.com/p/CicOG_HtWc6/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

I don't know if this answers really your questions, but at least you have an idea of the process. On a more matter-of-fact level, I could tell you that the film intended to be, and is nothing more than a home movie. I really think that my main talent has been to find people to pay for my home movies. Were I born rich, I guess I would have made more or less the same films, at least the traveling kind, but nobody would have heard of them except my friends and visitors. Camera was a little 16mm Beaulieu with 100 feet reels, silent (which means noisy) – the sound was made separately on one of the first small cassette recorders (not yet the Walkman), there isn't one synch take in Sans Soleil. I was naturally alone from beginning to end, but with some exceptions that's my usual way to work. I couldn't find the words to “explain” to an editor, for instance, operations that come instinctively to my mind when I'm at the editing table. The 16mm editing was transferred on 35mil for theater release. The shooting extended from 1978 to 1981, following haphazardly my alternate trips to Japan and Bissau (where I helped to build a cinema/video training center whose results were utterly destroyed this year by the civil war there, but that's another story…) and I couldn't tell at what moment these bits and pieces started to shape up into a real movie, that also belongs to the mysteries of existence.

La Jetée, 1962 #ChrisMarker https://www.instagram.com/p/CXJ2nM8tN2g/?utm_medium=tumblr