Directed by Chris Marker, Yannick Bellon • Documentary • 2001 • 42 minutes
Chris Marker's "cine-essay" is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder of the agility, poetry, and power of his nimble, capacious mind.
Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades between 1935 and 1955, the film leaps and backtracks, Marker-style, from subject to subject, from a family portrait of Bellon and her two daughters, Loleh and Yannick (the latter co-authored the film), to a wide-ranging history of surrealism, of the city of Paris, of French cinema and the birth of the cinémathèque, of Europe, the National Front, the Second World War and Spanish Civil War, and postwar politics and culture.
"A dizzying, quicksilver imbrication of histories: artistic, political, domestic, cinematic, and (this being Marker) Olympic."—James Quandt's Best Films of 2003, Artforum
"Unforgettable... Mr. Marker's own intrigue with impatience—his fleet films dance by in an instant, while using the music of pauses and silence to convey an almost inscrutable density—is a marvel when married to an admiring biography."—The New York Times
Up Next in Featured Director: Chris Marker
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Far from Vietnam
Directed by Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Chris Marker, and Alain Resnais • Documentary • 1967 • 115 minutes
Initiated and edited by Chris Marker, FAR FROM VIETNAM is an epic 1967 collaboration between cinema greats Jean-Luc Godard, Joris Ivens, William Klein, Clau...
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The Sixth Side of the Pentagon
Directed by Chris Marker & François Reichenbach • Documentary • 1967 • 26 minutes
"If the five sides of the pentagon appear impregnable, attack the sixth side."— Zen proverb
On October 21, 1967, over 100,000 protestors gathered in Washington, D.C., for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam...
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Be Seeing You
Directed by Mario Marret, Chris Marker • Documentary • 1968 • 39 minutes
From 1967 to 1976 Chris Marker was a member of SLON (the 'Company for the Launching of New Works'), a group based on the idea that cinema should not be thought of solely in terms of commerce. 1967 was also the year an impor...
