Chris Marker
Happy 100th Birthday!
Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France, Chris Marker was a cinematic essayist and audio-visual poet.
After the Second World War, Marker began as a writer, publishing his first book in 1949. In the 1950s he turned to documentary filmmaking. Among his classic works from this period are Letter from Siberia, Cuba Si!, Le Joli Mai, and La Jetée. In the '60s and '70s he was actively involved with SLON, a filmmaking collective dedicated to activist production.
Marker reemerged to make films under his own name again in 1977 with Le Fond de l'air est rouge (English title: A Grin Without A Cat).
Creatively reworking his life as if editing one of his own films, Marker made films on other filmmakers during the '80s and '90s, including the renowned One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich. He also explored video and computer-generated imagery with a continued emphasis on the intersection between personal and political themes in films such as The Case of the Grinning Cat, which was released in English in 2006.
A pioneer auteur filmmaker and an original voice in world cinema for over 50 years, Marker passed away on his birthday, July 29, 2012. He is widely accepted to be one of the most innovative and influential filmmakers in modern cinema history.
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The Owl's Legacy: Amnesty, or History on the March
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
Western history is said to begin with the Greeks—more specifically, with Herodotus, credited as the first historian. But the ancient Greek conception of history, based on the idea of self-examination, is very different from current conce...
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The Owl's Legacy: Mathematics, or the Empire Counts Back
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“Historians say Utopia doesn’t exist. It does! It’s the geometric space where everything is proven.” --Michel Serres
There is a narrative about ancient Greece and math: That the Greeks invented mathematics as we know it, that men such a...
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The Owl's Legacy: Logomachy, or the Dialect of the Tribe
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“The adventures of language may be the most meaningful thing in world history.” -- Nikos Svoronos
The word “logos” stands at the start of Greek philosophy. A word that defies simple translation, it lies at the root of terms including lo...
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The Owl's Legacy: Music, or Inner Space
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“The word was music before all else” -- Angelique Ionatos
What defines music? Soldiers marching in tandem create rhythms; Orthodox priests don’t simply speak when performing the liturgy, they chant and sometimes sing; the hammer banging...
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The Owl's Legacy: Cosmogony, or the Ways of the World
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“Harmony can only be divine and it is Man... who makes it go berserk.” -- Iannis Xenakis
This episode is classic Chris Marker, tying together an abandoned Athenian power plant turned cultural center, ancient Greek statuary, a department...
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The Owl's Legacy: Mythology, or Lies Like Truth
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“Myths fuel history.” --Mario Ploratis
A small number of Greek myths—Oedipus, Antigone, the Gorgon who turns people who gaze on her to stone—have fed our understandings of ourselves and each other through literature, religion, philosoph...
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The Owl's Legacy: Misogyny, or the Snares of Desire
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“Greek love, Greek eroticism, is a paradigm for us. But it’s something about which we are very hypocritical.” --John Winkler
Classicist Giulia Sissa takes center stage in this episode, which explores desire in ancient Greece (primarily ...
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The Owl's Legacy: Tragedy, or the Illusion of Death
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“The institution of tragedy plays a fundamental role in a democracy.” --Cornelius Castoriadis
Greek tragedies were originally like TV shows before the age of streaming. They were performed once, and only once says scholar Oswyn Murray. ...
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The Owl's Legacy: Philosophy, or the Triumph of the Owl
Directed by Chris Marker • Documentary • 1989 • 26 minutes
“The owl? What about it?” --Theo Angelopoulos
After a dozen episodes that begin and end with the image of an owl, PHILOSOPHY begins with the owl and its symbolism, and shows us how many of the participants in the series react to the bir...
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Three Cheers for the Whale
Directed by Chris Marker & Mario Ruspoli • Documentary • 1972 • 17 minutes
Chronicles the history of mankind's relationship with the largest and most majestic of marine mammals, and graphically exposes their slaughter by the fishing industry.
Chris Marker's co-director, Mario Ruspoli (1925-1986...
