The early film writings of Chris Marker
Good morning. I'm here to join my colleagues and friends to talk about the book of Chris Marker's translations. We're gonna begin by introducing ourselves, and I will start. My name is Steve Unger. I'm a professor emeritus at the University of Iowa where I've taught French film studies comparative literature since 1976.
Steven Ungar:Before that, I taught for four years at Case Western Reserve University. This is the fourth book I'm publishing at the University of Minnesota Press. I've also published books on Roland Barthes, Michel Cleo de Saint Casette, and Popular Front Paris, and Maurice Blanchot. Excuse me. I was blocking the name.
Steven Ungar:I've also published over a hundred shorter pieces of articles and reviews, and I'm very happy to be here with you today. Sally, would you like to go on?
Sally Shafto:Hi. I'm Sally Schaftor, and I teach film studies at Framingham State University. It's a pleasure to be here today to speak about Chris Marker and his early writings on film. I was delighted when Steve Unger originally contacted me in January 2021 to, translate, this early work by Marker. This project follows on my two previous translations of filmmakers.
Sally Shafto:First, the writings of Jean Marie Straub and Daniel Yeh, published by Sequence Press. Then, of course, the book of interviews that Jean Michel Froden, here present, did with the Chinese director, Jia Janka, published by the film desk. Let me note that I will be pronouncing the filmmaker's name, a la American, since it is thought that Chris Marker adopted his surname alias after the magic markers that American GIs brought with them to Europe. Finally, I would like to say how excited I am to be here with Jean Michel and Sam because they are, in fact, our very first official readers.
Steven Ungar:Jean Michel.
Jean-Michel Frodon:Hi, everyone. I'm delighted to be with you. My name is Jean Michel Froden. I'm basically a film critic. I've been writing for, French daily, Le Monde.
Jean-Michel Frodon:I've been editor in chief of a Cahiers du Cinema. I now write online for various online magazines, French ones, obviously, but also for printed magazines in various countries, mostly in Spain and in South Korea. I also teach about cinema in Paris in political science institute, and I am occasionally a curator and programmer in various, conditions or frames to share, ideas and and love for for cinema the best I can. I have been knowing Chris Marker for a very long time, actually, since I was a kid. And then I've been working about what he did and, what he left to us after he passed away twelve years ago now.
Jean-Michel Frodon:And it's very important for me that this dimension of his work, which is not so much well known, is made available in English, thanks to Steve Hanger's and Sally Schaffter's work about the text written by Chris Marker.
Steven Ungar:Sam.
Sam Di Iorio:Hi, everybody. My name is Sam Diorio. I'm associate professor at Hunter College in New York City in the CUNY Graduate Center. I teach, French cinema and French film theory and and French literature there. My research concerns mid century French, France mostly, and French cinema.
Sam Di Iorio:And I'm been a a a great fan and a real follower of Chris Marker and many French film directors since the nineteen nineties, more or less. And I've written on Marker's work in various places for film comment and for traffic. And and I'm so pleased having done the legwork when I was a grad student of, photocopying article by article, from crumbling issues of Esprit from the University of Pennsylvania Library, the actual pieces. It's such a pleasure to have this book of translations in English easily accessible and, you know, readable by by new audiences. So thank you, Steve and Sally, for, making this happen.
Steven Ungar:Thank you. I'd like to move to round two. We each have time to make opening statements. I will start. I'm gonna read from the manuscript.
Steven Ungar:I cannot imagine post war French cinema without Chris Marker, that is without La Jetee, his time travel short composed almost entirely of still images, or Letter from Siberia, whose quirky commentary redirects conventions of the travelogue toward those of the filmed essay, or the epic account of the global left's failed revolutions in a grin without a cat, or the synth generated effects in his experimental sunless, or the nods to Marcel Proust and Alfred Hitchcock in his interactive CD ROM in memory. Still, even the most ardent fans of Marker's films and videos have yet to contend with the full import of a simple truth Chris Marker wrote. In fact, he wrote a lot. This was especially true between 1945 and 1955 when his publications included a play, a novel, short stories, a literary monograph, poetry, radio scripts, film commentaries, translations, and roughly 100 articles, essays, and book entries. The attention generated by Marker's photographs, films, videos, installations, and digital projects often reduces his writings, and his early writings in particular, to passing mention or summary.
Steven Ungar:Yet for Francois Cremieux, Marker's publications in the Parisian monthly Esprit starting in 1946 formed the basis of his subsequent work over the next six decades. Quote, his Esprit writings make of him what he will be. In other words, the moment when the man born Christian Hippolyte Francois Georges Bouche Villeneuve adopts the pen name Chris Marker coincides with his initial postwar publications, a majority of them in. Marker becomes Marker through the s his Esprit writings. This book began as a study of nine film based articles Marker wrote for Esprit between 1948 and 1955.
Steven Ungar:Its initial form was a paper I presented at a 02/2015 Yale University conference Dudley Andrew organized on Andre Bazin, post war French journals and the politics of popular culture. The project developed after I commissioned film scholar and translator Sally Shafto to translate Marker's film writings in Esprit along with others he contributed concurrently to the newly launched Cahiers du Cinema and Positif monthlies and to two anthologies. This expanded corpus of 20 texts tracks Marker from his mid twenties to his mid thirties as he thinks about film form, style, history, and adaptation. They document his contributions to the cinephilia Antoine de Bec characterizes as the invention of a gaze and the history of a culture from 1944 to 1968. Finally, they sketch a portrait of the writing marker in the guise of what Jacques Ranciere, via Roland Barthes, might have called a pensive spectator, Ranciere, attuned to the emotional charge, Barthes, of still and moving images.
Steven Ungar:Three goals for this project, to translate a formative dimension of Chris Marker's postwar activities that remains largely understudied and unaccounted for on both sides of the Atlantic. Update critical understanding of Chris Marker using materials his literary heirs have made available since his death in July 2012. Explore what these new materials contribute to ongoing reassessments of Marker's films, videos, and digital works. As is appropriate, I offer a final word from Marker's colleague, friend, and mentor, Andre Bazin. Quote, Chris Marker is of this new generation of writers who believe that the time of the image has come, but who do not find it necessary to sacrifice the power and virtues of language that remains the privileged interpreter of intelligence, which means that for Chris Marker, the commentary is not what is added to images chosen and edited in advance, but almost the primary fundamental element that nonetheless acquires meaning and usefulness only with reference to the images that accompany it.
Sally Shafto:Okay. That was great, Steve. I was, tasked in this project with translating a slim part of Marker's prolific literary output in the post war period. These articles have been meticulously called and assembled by Steve. At the Chris Marker conference in Paris in June 2022 titled Chris Marker, Chris Marker, a writer first and foremost, I delivered a paper that discussed translation as offering an X-ray into the person being translated.
Sally Shafto:And I do think that these 20 essays selected mostly from Esprit, but also from several other journals, do provide keen insights into the young Chris marker at a key transitional moment in his life. He was 27 in 1948 when he wrote his first essay on film, a review of Laurence Olivier's Henry the fifth, and 34 in 1955 when he wrote his last, a review of Alaia Kazan's On the Waterfront. During the seven years in which Marker wrote these essays, his literary activity reached an apogee. He wrote a novel, Le Coronet, several plays for the radio, and was also translating in this period. In this formative period of intense writing, Marker was also transitioning to becoming a new kind of author, a film auteur.
Sally Shafto:In 1947, he made his first film long lost titled The End of the World According to the Archangel Gabriel. During the time that he wrote these 20 essays, he made two more films, the documentary Olympia fifty two, a feature length documentary about the Summer Olympics, and Statues Also Die, co directed with Alain Resnet, the first of Marker's so called film essays. It was mostly fun translating Marker because of his sharp intelligence and fine sense of humor. He often ends with a sharp, invigorating turn of phrase. In one of his memorable bon mot, he describes Walt Disney, whom Marker disliked for his anti labor practices as an, quote, epicier d'artagnan or a colorblind, grocer.
Sally Shafto:Marcus' personality clearly shines through loud and clear in these essays. Initially, I was surprised that he rarely addresses French cinema other than a highly positive review of Cocteau's Orpheus and Dreyer's The Trial of Joan of Arc. Raymond Bellour has described Marco as Lamond, a world man. And it's clear that already in the late forties and early fifties, Marco was becoming engaged with what was going on outside the French hexagon in the humanist moment following the second World War. These 20 essays include two major essays on postwar German cinema, one on Mexican cinema, and two extended essays on American cinema, and they are all based on Marcus' firsthand experience in those countries.
Sally Shafto:A translator is well placed to be attuned to an author's frequent use of certain words, and I noticed a recurrence of two words in particular, or true and real. These repetitions triggered my memory of Marcus' use of them a decade later in La Jourte. I have a short clip from La Jourte where the film's narrator recalls seeing on the tenth day of the experiment. A real bedroom, real children, real birds, real cats, real graves, end quote. As if at the end of a war that had devastated a large portion of the globe, the real and the true had become a veritable obsession for Marker.
Sally Shafto:This emphasis both correlates to Bazin's contemporaneous concern with verite and post war realism even if, interestingly, Marco never wrote a single article on Italian neorealism. This emphasis on the Veret in turn anticipates the cinema verite movement in France with most famously Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronicle of a Summer in 1960 and the call for Drader Truth regarding the French government's use of torture in Algeria. Thank you.
Jean-Michel Frodon:So the first thing I would like to say here would be to praise Sally Shafter's work for this book because I I know how difficult it is to, deal with marker writing. It is a multilayer expression, multilevel way of addressing topics, which is at the same time the quality of his work and his, power to suggest several directions, several ways to understand, to address, to react, to move forward based on whatever he's dealing with. And it is really meaningful that there is a symmetry, so to speak, a similarity, at least, on the multiplicity of the practices Chris Marker had in his life. It has been said as a filmmaker, as a writer, but also he was a photographer, and he has an extensive work as a artist in photography. He was a musician and composer.
Jean-Michel Frodon:He was also what we would call a geek, somebody who'd been creatively using digital tools and technologies all the way through. He was a publisher and a designer of, publishing. So in marker practices, there were this multiplicity of, capacities, which I would say he he would, be excellent in each of them, but, not as separate practices, but as components as a coherent and comprehensive way to embrace the world and relate with the world. And this is what he's been, doing all his life. It is absolutely true and meaningful to remind as it has already been done here and that that it is very clearly done in Steve Hanger introduction for for the book that it comes from writing.
Jean-Michel Frodon:And writing is seminal to all the other practices. He started to write very young. He published, novels, well, short stories more exactly, and poems in as a teenager, even before World War two. And he was seeing himself as a writer when he was in his first, years, and he moved to other practices from the writing process. But, on the other hand, one could say that in sign, his practice of writing itself, he has been incorporating the multiplicity of ways to relate with situation, with people, with memories, with knowledge, with theories, with history.
Jean-Michel Frodon:And that translates in every piece of writing he's been doing, among so many things he was in his life. He was also a traveler, and he's been traveling the world extensively. He is a global artist and thinker ahead of many, others in the second part of the twentieth century. And traveling for him was a political act, and it related with politics. And, this means that he's been relating with different cultures, different way to, address the world, to understand relations between people and between communities.
Jean-Michel Frodon:And this is also feeding his writing. When he starts writing for Esprit in the in the second half of the nineteen forties, he's also involved in cultural practices, multicultural practices, especially inside what is known as public culture, people and culture, which was a huge organization after the end of World War two in France and then, in Western Europe, coming from the French resistance and intending basically to support the idea of peace through, sharing culture and sharing culture with people, with a large amount of people beyond the most educated and those who have the easiest access to culture, and that he was an activist in this. He was the head of a the journal of the People and Culture organization. He was traveling a lot at the time, and it translates as well in the list of the texts that Steve Hanger has collected. All of these, building this multilayer, this multilevel way of thinking, way of acting, way of acting, way of building relations between components which are usually separated.
Jean-Michel Frodon:And all of this is inside the writing itself. And this is what Sally Shasta had to deal with to translate in English a text which are already immensely complex for French readers. Complex doesn't mean difficult. The writing is not difficult, and it's not obscure. But it's always playing on many levels, like somebody, having several musical instruments at the same time, which are sounded together through his writing.
Jean-Michel Frodon:And the way it does translate, the way it is made accessible in English by, Sally's work is amazing because we know, even from from a French point of view, how complex it is. Again, it's complex, not complicated, but so rich that, this is defining a certain relation towards writing in general. And in our case, between a certain relation together, writing and cinema, since all these texts related with cinema, and this multilayer writing deals with a multilayer perception of what cinema is and what cinema can do.
Sam Di Iorio:I would like to just maybe add from what Jean Michel has said already. What struck me in reading the text really was something similar that I really was struck by the care and attention that Steve and Sally devoted to the presentation of these texts, both in the translations, as Jean Michel has already said, and and also in the annotations and making sure that the references and the text can really reach a contemporary English language reader in 2024. What you've really given us, you know, on the one hand, is kind of a treasure box. It's also a source book. There's so much, not only about Marker himself, but there's also a really interesting perspective on cinema that comes to the fore in these texts.
Sam Di Iorio:When I was a student, these essays were part of my film school. I think that they developed a real individual perspective on a cinema landscape, providing a kind of account of films that were being released at the time that's different from what Andre Bazin was writing or what Truffaut would go on to write or Steve, as you mentioned in the intro, what Romer would write about later as well. I think we get a fresh perspective on American cinema, which would be of great interest to anyone working on on American film history. There's a a choice of films, a selection of points of intervention, which I think are distinct from what Manny Farber was writing or James AG were writing in in The US, for example. And I also think we get as as, Sal, you noticed that the German cinema essays are super, super interesting, and the Mexican cinema essay is also really, really rich.
Sam Di Iorio:And there's a a whole kind of wave of films and directors and names and references, which I don't necessarily see in other places. I haven't read anyone who cared as much about Gerald McBois Point, you know, for example, or about the UPA, you know, film animation studio. And I think there's a film history dimension. There's a lot about animation here. There's a media archaeology kind of angle, which comes out in the essays about three d, especially in cinemascope.
Sam Di Iorio:And there's pieces about the avant gardes as well. In addition to, you know, Sally already mentioned, the unbelievably beautiful essay, An Orpheus by Cocteau and the piece about Joan of Arc by Dreyer, which are such models for engaged and passionate film scholarship. It was just such a pleasure to be able to read these essays again as if they were new.
Sally Shafto:Jean Michel, you very modestly forgot to mention that you were the cocurator of the twenty eighteen Cinematheque Francaise exhibition, Chris Marker, Les Setes Vites Des Senesas, as well as co editor of its accompanying catalog, Chris Marker, Lamond. But at the outset today, you mentioned that you knew Marker from when you were very, very young.
Jean-Michel Frodon:Okay. Well, it happens that, my parents were friends with somebody who was an editor, a woman, Jacqueline Mepiel, who's been working with with, Chris Marker extensively in the sixties, and especially when, Marker was coordinating the omnibus film Far From Vietnam in the middle of the nineteen sixties, and that he was there. I was a kid at the time, but, of course, we would have lunch on Sundays. And there was this, impressive man. Physically, Chris Marker was very impressive.
Jean-Michel Frodon:He was very tall. He looked a little bit like Nosferatu, and he had a very strange voice and, very metallic voice. We know his voice since he has a voiceover. It is very present. It is often present, not so much, but so from time to time present in his film.
Jean-Michel Frodon:As much as Marco was extremely reluctant to appear physically and from the end of the sixties, totally disappeared or almost totally disappeared from the audiovisual scene or any of photographs, etcetera, and would be seen even in public events. But he was, present through his voice in several occasions. So, this very specific voice can be heard and be, an art part of his personality. But he was a very bizarre kind of person who was very solitary and with a huge, huge amount of connection worldwide, but only on on a one to one kind of relations, and he would not be part of groups, never again. He was part of groups in the French resistance, obviously, and in the following years, and as a publisher in the Le Seuil, where he did an extensive work in book publishing.
Jean-Michel Frodon:But afterwards, he would be more and more solitary, especially after May. And at the same time, he would connect with people all over all over the world. Later on, in the late eighties, after he had become a film critic and journalist, we would meet again. And I would meet him repeatedly in his studio. He lived in a place which was at the same time the way he he was living in and the the way he he worked, which was an immense jungle of, working devices.
Jean-Michel Frodon:His own as a filmmaker, as a photographer, as an immense reader. He read extensively and having been in position to work on his archive after he passed away. It's a endless amounts of books, of course, but also of clips from, magazines and, so many kinds of archive. But, his photos, the music, and the recording, you you would record whatever he could with any available device at any time and accumulating all of this. And it looked like, it's a terrible mess, but it was not.
Jean-Michel Frodon:It was it was actually very well organized, but according to his brain. And it was not obvious for anybody else than him. And he was willing to discuss completely unpredictable topics. Nobody would have the time to say anything like, the weather is nice. Time was short.
Jean-Michel Frodon:Among things which were important for him were politics all over the world. He had immense documentation. We had to work on this for the exhibition you already mentioned, Sally. We worked on together, Raymond Bello, Christine Van Ash, and myself in 2018. We made in French Cinematheque.
Jean-Michel Frodon:But, we would talk about maybe the most important thing for him, which is cats. And about cats, it was an endless discussion because it was a very serious topic for him and how it related with issues of humans and nonhumans, but also about power and different kinds of power, relation and relation between the living and the dead. And it was really something that he would address as well as every known form of art of these kinds of things. As you can hear, I could start speaking about Chris for a very, very long time. But just to move forward, very fast, after he passed away in 2012, due to the proximity I had with him together with a small group of persons, approximately 20 persons in in Paris or nearby, including, for instance, Agnes Varda, we took care of what he left behind since he had no children.
Jean-Michel Frodon:And through various stories, which could be told elsewhere, it was, built to conditions to deposit everything he left behind, which is immense. Maybe the most complex being the hard drives, the huge hard drives with millions and millions of documents inside, organized like Marco's brain, was deposit to the French Cinematheque. And from this treasure, we built, among other things, the exhibition and the catalog, which is not only the catalog of the exhibition, but which tried to be a first comprehensive depiction of the various immensely various, facets of Marcquette's work and practices and the way it worked for him, what it meant poetically, intellectually, and politically all the way through until his last press.
Sally Shafto:Oh, that's really fantastic, Jean Michel. I might come back to the archives in a moment, but I wanna ask Sam a question. I've recently read your superb essay titled The Fragile Presence, Statues Also Die with Night and Fog. And I see that you had an epistolary relationship via email with Marker. And I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that, how long it went on.
Sally Shafto:You have a wonderful quote, from him in here about the making of a statue's also die.
Sam Di Iorio:Yeah. Thanks, Sally. I guess, there's not really a ton to say. I'd emailed Marker a a couple of times, and I think I was involved back in 02/2002 or 02/2003 with Film Comments. They did a pretty extensive dossier, of writing on Marker, and I I put a couple of pieces into those issues, with my friend Michael Chaikin.
Sam Di Iorio:And at that time, I entered into contact with Pierre Lom, and we sat down and had coffee one day at his apartment. And I started to email a little bit with Marco around those times. And I I had very specific researcher questions, which I soon realized were sort of pointless because it's not really fair to expect anyone to remember, you know, specific details about something that they did in something fifty years ago, you know, or whatever. But we had a few exchanges, and and he was very generous as he, you know, always was. And and I think that little paragraph that that's in the article was, very generous on his part to kind of talk about that film and where it came from and where the title came from, you know, which was modeled on according to Marker, Hangman also died by Fritz Lang.
Sam Di Iorio:That's the long and the short of it.
Sally Shafto:Yeah. Well, it's it's just a wonderful, piece. Steve, turning to you, you have this wonderful quote by Marker in your in-depth introduction where you say that Marker once said about Nicole Vaudres, j'elouis du d'ois tout. I owe everything to her. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?
Sally Shafto:In what sense did Marco owe everything to Nicole Voudras? And maybe you wanna begin by identifying for our audience who was Nicole Voudras.
Steven Ungar:Vedres was a filmmaker and novelist born in 1911 and died 1964. I think the film that really moved Marker was one of his first professional assignments was Paris Nineteen Hundred. And he saw in that film, or I say he saw, or I'd like to say he saw in that film, the use of documentary techniques with an edge, with an argument. And this is done cinematically. There's a moment forty five minutes into the film when a man jumps off, wants to fly, and he falls.
Steven Ungar:And that fall coincides with the movement toward the inevitability of war with Germany in 1914. And I think he needed a role model, and he had many role models, tutor figures, but Vedras was the one who took faith in him, who had faith in him, and that's why he plays such a large role.
Jean-Michel Frodon:They said it together, Chris Marker and Alain Resnet, how much they owe to Nicole Vedrais and how much Paris Milenaissance was seminal for them, especially in the work of editing or already existing footage and the way to make new works out of the preexisting, footage. She was so important compared to his almost forgotten position in the history of cinema.
Sally Shafto:Yeah. Well, certainly, she's not known here in The United States. I think she's a little better known in France. And, of course, Renee had been her assistant right on, Paris, Neuf Milcon. Steve, do you wanna say something also about another important figure in, Marcus' life in the immediate postwar period in addition to Bazin?
Sally Shafto:And that, of course, is Joseph Rouvent.
Steven Ungar:Well, Rouvent is the real name Rosenthal, was a German who adopted French culture in the nineteen forties and worked with marker on to organize seminars of goodwill and education between France and Germany. And this is a model for what he's going to do with Poplique Culture for the next five years following the end of the war, which is to make cinema a tool of education beyond book learning. To make it a popular, not just entertainment, but a tool to organize people's knowledge to get more out of life than material goods. And he wrote a book, I think the translation is, of a Frenchman who remembers having been German.
Sally Shafto:Yeah. It's he's a wonderful, figure in that post war period and so important for Marker and his growing interest in post war German, cinema. Two other questions. Jean Michel, you probably don't have the answer to this, but I'm gonna ask it anyway. As a scholar interested in archives, I wonder if you think a copy of his first lost film might ever turn up.
Sally Shafto:Films do occasionally resurface. I remember the surprise and delight that followed the rediscovery in 2014 of Philippe Garrel's short film Actuase filmed during the events of May after having been misplaced for forty five years, or Brissant's first film, Les Affair Publique, after it went missing for fifty years and was rediscovered in 1987. Could there be a copy of it in the Cinematheque?
Jean-Michel Frodon:My opinion, it is an only an opinion, is that this film does not exist. It's not that it is lost. It's that it was never shot or or that it is a construction of the mind, which has been useful for several people to accompany the relation towards cinema. The the track which led towards cinema, towards the world of images from the world of words regarding marker. So my guess but, again, I am not saying anything as a positive affirmation.
Jean-Michel Frodon:Just what I think is that this is part of storytelling. Marc has been telling a lot of stories all his life, and he was acknowledging that he had so many, pseudonyms, and, he was, play he was not cheating. He was playing with his birthplace, with his date of place, with his biography, with so many things. And I am guessing, but with a kind of insistent belief, that this is part of a meaningful storytelling. It's not meaningless at all.
Jean-Michel Frodon:It tells something through the process it is supposed to be part of, but because also what he says, what he writes when he shoots Olympia in in, 1952. You can tell his his first real essay as a as a filmmaker, his first try, and the way he discovers cinematic language at at this moment, even having been through other relations with filmmaking before, to working together with directors. And, of course, accompanying because public culture had many, various fields of activity, including film screenings and discussions, which he did together with Andre Bazin, among others. But, Bazin and him were close on this practice. So his relation with cinema is strong, and cinema is also part of the larger cultural activism, so to speak.
Jean-Michel Frodon:But the filmmaking is itself for me had not began with this dreamlike object, which I believe has a is very interesting as a dreamlike object.
Sally Shafto:Well, isn't there Steve, is it you who quotes a la renee as having seen the film?
Steven Ungar:Maybe they were in cahoots, as we say, in The United States.
Jean-Michel Frodon:That that that would be my guess.
Sally Shafto:I'm not so sure, but I think you lay out a really good theory there. Ma'am, I wonder if you, as we move on to the next segment, could talk about, in your opinion, Marker's place in postwar French cinema.
Sam Di Iorio:Yeah. That's a that is a really good question. For me, in reading these articles, and I I I spent the last week or so going back and rewatching some of the films, what really struck me in both cases was the combination of intimacy and distance that you get. It's a very personal, very idiosyncratic, almost intimate, you know, sort of form of address that we're getting in so much of this work. But by the same token, it's often filtered through different perspectives, through pseudonyms, through, illusions, quotations, literary style, and things like that.
Sam Di Iorio:And I think the really valuable thing that Marker develops over the course of his career, and Jean Michel sort of mentioned that the the drift from engagement with public couture and working with Said and engagement with the Gubemay Bettin, you know, to this more solitary moment is he really does put forward a very persuasive idea of the possibility of being an outsider. And that position of being on the outside doesn't necessarily mean at all that he's disengaged because we know very well how passionately he followed, you know, his interests as well as whether they were political or whether they were aesthetic. But I think that that idea of having an outside perspective with all the risks that that entails, There are certain things which become visible in his work because of that stance that are visible nowhere else. And I think that that kind of especially at a moment when everything is kind of devoured by this notion of industries and careers and personal brands and everything else, Marker makes it clear that you don't have to go to Cannes. You don't have to go to Sundance.
Sam Di Iorio:You can make films. You can do things. And he has a talent of not necessarily being an underground filmmaker or an experimental filmmaker, you know, of which there are many, but he was able to navigate between participation and recognition in a broader field of the industry while retaining his independence. And I think that's incredibly valuable as a model for filmmakers. It goes back to that quote that he liked to cite at various times about how he was the most famous of unknown filmmakers.
Sam Di Iorio:And I think that was kind of what he was striving for. And and that's something that we should, you know, all consider, you know, is whatever, as being a possible position to to occupy in the cultural field.
Sally Shafto:Great. That's really wonderful.
Steven Ungar:I have one more question for Jean Michel. As a member of the equip that's looking into the materials given to Cinematheque Francaise, is it fair to ask what percentage of these texts have been cataloged and will be made available to people for research?
Jean-Michel Frodon:Truth is I don't know. What I can say is that it's an, work in progress. A lot of work has been done, and a lot of works is still to be done, mainly if you, include the digital archive, which is huge and which, to my knowledge, has hardly been explored. There are nine very big hard drives. I had access to one of them.
Jean-Michel Frodon:I could spend the rest of my nights circulating into them. It's so rich. It's made of his own product or the things some things he he made up. Either visual or, written or sound, etcetera. But it's also, composed of thousands and thousands of elements he would grab from all over there.
Jean-Michel Frodon:I remember once going to meet him in his place. He had eight magnetoscopes, videotape recorder, each of them connected with some foreign television. And he was recording the Kazakhstan state television of the time, all day long and night long. I said, why? Why is it interesting?
Jean-Michel Frodon:I said, you never know. Maybe there is something there you can use someday. And he has this kind of accumulative madness, one one could say, or impulse at least, which translates into this immense amount of documents which are so interesting in their content but also in the way they are organized. They are put together by him. In the catalog, one of the most meaningful objects we we show is the the way he did with with books.
Jean-Michel Frodon:He didn't choose to write, take notes inside books, as many people do, but he would stuff books with other documents. So books becomes like magic boxes full of other other things. And the way they were organized in the in on his bookshelves were also very specific. So all of this makes it some way an endless work to catalog everything, to depict everything that he left behind. But there are already archives which are available and can be accessed too at the French Cinematheque for Researchers.
Jean-Michel Frodon:And if you ask two at the Bibliotheque du Film, you would have access to some of them, but it is only to my as far as I know, a small part of it.
Steven Ungar:Thank you. I wanted to comment a little bit after hearing the discussion today. The title I gave to the introduction is The Marker Moment, Writing in the Marker Moment. And I think I can become confessional here and say that my first Marker Moment was seeing La Jetee at the University of Wisconsin in 1964. And when that film begins, Wisconsin in 1964.
Steven Ungar:And when that film begins, I get goosebumps whenever I see it, and I see it quite often. But this project, for me, was inspired by a flash moment, another moment marker, which is the beginning of Letter from Siberia, which starts on a black screen and in which we hear the sound of a typewriter. So that writing, again, becomes the opening gesture for the film. And I think that we are moving toward a multiplicity of marker moments. I want to begin by saying, what do we do now?
Steven Ungar:What are the next directions? We're in a multiple series of marker moments. This year alone, there are English language editions of his nonfilm writings in Esprit. Another book came out translating Le DPA, and Sally and I have already come across two articles, one in German, but we need to translate that. So I believe, as you said, Jean Michel, this is an ongoing and endless topic.
Steven Ungar:And what we hope to have accomplished in this four years of work together, Sally and I, is to present a chunk, a coherent selection that would show the importance of this early period as formative and the role that writing plays in his ongoing evolution.
Sally Shafto:Yeah. I just want to second what Steve just said about us being in a marker moment. There is a a new book expected out called Eternal Current Events translated by Jackson b Smith, and he has translated an entirely different selection of Marker's writings from Isfri. Absolutely no overlap, between his book and our book. And in addition, the film desk, as Steve just mentioned, has brought out a beautiful edition of Le Depuy with an introduction by the poet Sadie Rebecca Starnes.
Sally Shafto:Finally, as translator, I would be remiss if I didn't also mention that Marker, who was hired by the US Army at the end of the war as interpreter, was himself active in this period as a translator. And his work as a translator really remains understudied. In 1952, he published a French translation of the James Thurber E. B. White, Is Sex Necessary, or Why Do You Feel the Way You Do?
Sally Shafto:And the following year, he published a translation of Will Cuppy's The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody. A full list of Marker's translations, as well as his other work, can be found on the superb Marker website, chrismarker.ch.
Jean-Michel Frodon:Sorry. No. I would like to to say a few more words about the text you already published because, of course, we've been talking about Chris Marker, and how important he is. And there is still a lot to say, including in terms of what's coming up or hopefully coming up in terms of publication. Raymond Bello and myself have been working on putting together all the comments he wrote.
Jean-Michel Frodon:The voice is over. He wrote for all the films he made plus a huge amount of films by other filmmakers who asked him to write the film comments because he was so great in this specific exercise, which is a kind of literature. Just briefly going back to the text you published, Stephen, and you translated, Sally, I would like to say how much important I think it is to read them now to have a very specific, maybe unique access to a way to address cinema. Cinema sometimes in terms of specific films or sometimes in terms of national films or styles or different kind of, angles to to relate with cinema, but in each of these cases, to develop this multifacet approach that is able to be at the same time. Sam used the words both intimacy and distance, but I would even go further because the distances are multiple.
Jean-Michel Frodon:It has very intimate he says I. He tells a personal story which relates with the world geopolitics, which relates with history of cinema, which relates with economy, which relates of literary backgrounds, which relates with the his knowledge of the personal history of several people involved in the topic he's addressing, which relates with the way it has been seen and commented elsewhere. And it's in our world where there is so many, kind of specialization and, reductive ways to write and talk about cinema and many other things, among these things, cinema. I think it is a kind of a exceptional model. It's about style.
Jean-Michel Frodon:But if you accept style in a very large and deeply meaning world of ways to relate with the world at large together with very specific object and your own knowledge and feelings that offers a, if not unique, exceptional, way to relate with with cinema. And for me, it should be read by students who will be writing about cinema in the future as something different from almost everything we and they have access to, in our days.
Sam Di Iorio:Jean Michel, you know, it was great, you know, what what you just said. And I think you see that even in individual pieces in the collection. I think that's why I like the Cocteau essay so much is because it starts out with this very specific description of a screening that was held from a specific audience. And so there's a little bit of reception history which Marco is very interested in at the time, I think. And maybe that's one big difference between the kind of cultural work that public culture were doing after the war and the nineteen thirties where there was this also desire to create the Maison de Cultural that you know, culture houses and make culture accessible.
Sam Di Iorio:It wasn't a kind of top down, like, let's teach the workers Shakespeare, you know, or whatever. It was really this idea of an exchange between the audience and the work. And and I think that comes to the fore in the anthology at multiple points, but the Cocteau essay starts there. And then from there, you get this much wider ranging essay which crosses over into an analysis of Cocteau's writing, which deals with Cocteau's history as a person, which goes on to reflections about aesthetics, which deals with death, which deals with cultural history. And it it's this amazing I think you're right, you know, Jamishah, sort of unique approach where in just sort of pulling on a tiny thread, you get the entire world that ends up coming out, you know, one way or the other.
Sam Di Iorio:And I would hope from here on out, I I think we all agree there's more work to do and there's that's really exciting. You The idea of bringing more of Bunker's work into English, making it more accessible and kind of continuing this process of it's a kind of democratization project, right? Because you just want accessibility, trying to make the work as accessible as can be to as large an audience as possible. And I would hope as well that that would maybe be accompanied by the reemergence of the broader field in which his work was taking shape. And I guess in particular, I'd love to see more Nicole Beatrice's work, whose work I love and have taught and and written about and defended for a long time.
Sam Di Iorio:And I know Ivan Seracina has recently translated a beautiful essay she did called Les Phaibouges and his work I think his his translation is called, The Leaves Are Stirring, which is the essay about the reinvention of editing in the French context in the post war period. It's an amazing essay that theorizes with a really, really light touch the idea of how to put images and sound and images and images together. And it's it's an amazing piece, and I would hope that since she also had a career as a writer and a filmmaker, we might see more of her work in time. And I guess even, Jean Michel, I wish your work were more accessible in English as well. I'm still waiting for the we're all waiting for the translation of, right?
Sam Di Iorio:The film history you work from the new wave to the present, which to me was another big part of my film school. And I I can't think of another we have Alan Williams' great book, Republic of Images in English, but your work is such a great counterpoint to that work which goes so deep in unfolding the multiple domains that and the multiple shapes that cinema has taken since the end of World War two. One would hope that this sort of marker moment might lead to bigger moments involving French cinema and the people who were close to him throughout his life.
Sally Shafto:I I'm available. I'm ready.
Sam Di Iorio:Let's make it happen.
Narrator:This has been a University of Minnesota Press production. The book Chris Marker, Early Film Writings, edited by Steve Unger and translated by Sally Shafto, is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.