CHRIS MARKER – 100

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CHRIS MARKER – 100

2021 marks the 100^th anniversary of one of French and world cinema’s most unique masters – Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, better known as Chris Marker (1921-2012).

Since the late 1950s Marker was a seminal figure in French and world cinema. Not really a part of the French New Wave or the Left Bank film movement, although very closely associated with masters like Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and Jacques Demy, Chris Marker was unique to the point of being unclassifiable. Nevertheless, he is credited with mastering the personal film essay genre, creating one of the most fascinating expressions of an audiovisual stream of consciousness.

While talking about his 1983 film Sans Soleil, Chris Marker said: “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. Was 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.”

In many ways, it is that unfiltered sincerity and unbiased vision that make his cinema so unique. In his lifetime, Marker made around 75 short and feature-length films, creating a haunting library of images and scenes filmed all across the globe and exploring the ever-changing circumstance of life in the late 20^th century. His films mainly deal with the issue of how our perception of the world and people around us changes over time due to the peculiarities of human memory and technological breakthroughs and film itself that deeply affected how mankind experiences life. It is no coincidence that Alain Resnais called him “the prototype of the twenty-first-century man.”