<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px;"><font class="Apple-style-span" color="#000000"><b><br></b></font></div><br><h1 class="entry-title instapaper_title">Chris Marker, Pioneer of the Essay Film, Dies at 91</h1>
<ul class="entry-meta"><li class="byline author vcard first">
<i>by</i> <span class="fn">DENNIS LIM</span>
</li><li>
July 31, 2012
</li></ul>
<div class="shareTools shareToolsThemeClassic articleShareToolsTop shareToolsInstance"> </div> <div class="articleBody"><p> <a name="rdb-footnote-link-1" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/person/101279/Chris-Marker?inline=nyt-per" title="" class="meta-per rdb-footnoted">Chris Marker</a>,
the enigmatic writer, photographer, filmmaker and multimedia artist who
pioneered the flexible hybrid form known as the essay film, died on
Sunday in Paris. He was 91. </p> </div><p> His death was announced by the French Culture Ministry. </p><p>
A transmedia artist long before the term was coined, Mr. Marker
resisted categorization throughout his career; he once referred to
“career” as “that despicable word.” His sprawling and constantly
evolving body of work, which ranged from books to installations to
CD-ROMs and included more than 50 films of varying length, was at once
fragmentary and cohesive, united by an abiding interest in the nature of
time and memory and by a strong physical and intellectual wanderlust. </p><p> Mr. Marker’s best-known film, the 1962 short <a class="rdb-footnoted" name="rdb-footnote-link-2" title="The film." href="http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4536409644066983943">“La Jetée,”</a> about a man haunted by a childhood memory, was the basis of the 1995 Hollywood movie<a class="rdb-footnoted" name="rdb-footnote-link-3" title="Trailer for the film." href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBNMEwNx9x4"> “12 Monkeys”</a>
starring Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt. Whether taking the form of
time-warp science fiction like “La Jetée” or archive-rich historical
surveys like “A Grin Without a Cat” (1977), about the fate of the New
Left after the pivotal year 1968, most of his films involve a kind of
time travel. </p><p> A lifelong leftist and perennial globe-trotter, he
documented almost every political hot spot of the mid- and late-20th
century: the Soviet Union, China, the new state of Israel, Cuba after
the revolution. </p><p> In his later works — like the installation <a name="rdb-footnote-link-4" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/44686/Silent-Movie-Movie-/overview">“Silent Movie”</a> (1995) and the feature <a name="rdb-footnote-link-5" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/136588/Level-Five-Movie-/overview">“Level Five”</a> (1997) — he was also an early explorer of video, digital technology and cyberspace. </p><p>
Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921, Mr. Marker
hid many aspects of his biography. He once claimed he was born in Ulan
Bator, Mongolia, though some sources have cited his place of birth as
the Parisian suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. He granted few interviews and
typically refused to be photographed. Information about his survivors
was not immediately available. But in his work, at least, Mr. Marker was
not anonymous so much as he was playfully evasive. </p><p> His films
often feature a first-person narrator, a device he once called “a sign
of humility.” They abound with avatars and alter-egos, including his own
cat, Guillaume-en-Egypt, which sometimes appeared, in the flesh and in
cartoon form, as his surrogate. </p><p> The pseudonym Chris Marker —
which originally appeared in print as “Chris. Marker” — dates from the
late 1940s, when he published criticism, editorials, poetry and fiction,
including a novel, “Le Coeur Net,” set in Indochina. </p><p> After his first directorial effort, <a name="rdb-footnote-link-6" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/146631/Olympia-52-Movie-/overview">“Olympia 52,”</a> about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games, Mr. Marker wrote the narration for the documentary <a class="rdb-footnoted" name="rdb-footnote-link-7" title="View the film." href="http://www.ovguide.com/statues-also-die-9202a8c04000641f800000001e15a82e">“Statues Also Die”</a>
(1953), which he directed with Alain Resnais. Ostensibly about African
art, the film doubled as a critique of French colonialism. It received
the prestigious Prix Jean Vigo but was banned by French censors for more
than 10 years because of its political content. </p><p> Mr. Marker refined his signature approach to voice-over narration, at once intimate and quizzical, in the early works <a name="rdb-footnote-link-8" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/149157/Sunday-in-Peking-Movie-/overview">“Sunday in Peking”</a> (1956) and <a name="rdb-footnote-link-9" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/150040/Letter-From-Siberia-Movie-/overview">“Letter From Siberia”</a>
(1957). The latter film’s provocative rethinking of the relationship
between word and image — one sequence replays the same shots with vastly
different commentaries — prompted the critic André Bazin to use the
term “an essay documented by film.” </p><p> Borrowed from the poet Henri
Michaux, the opening words of “Letter From Siberia” — “I write to you
from a far-off country” — could serve as Mr. Marker’s motto. He had a
foreign correspondent’s drive to “capture life in the process of
becoming history,” as he put it, but there was also a science-fiction
strangeness to many of his travelogues. </p><p> He retained his outsider’s perspective, his taste for oddity and digression, even when shooting at home. The ambitious <a name="rdb-footnote-link-10" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/28641/Le-Joli-Mai-Movie-/overview">“Le Joli Mai”</a>
(1963) was an attempt to map the national psyche as the Algerian War
drew to a close, culled from dozens of man-on-the-street interviews in
Paris. The film is often called an early example of the documentary mode
known as cinéma vérité. But Mr. Marker rejected the term and proposed a
more modest alternative: “ciné, ma vérité” (“Cinema, my truth”). </p><p>
On days off from “Le Joli Mai,” Mr. Marker embarked on a photography
project that became the half-hour “La Jetée.” Composed almost entirely
of still images, this recursive loop of a film was both an homage to a
beloved movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s <a name="rdb-footnote-link-11" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/gst/movies/titlelist.html?v_idlist=52324;142365&inline=nyt_ttl">“Vertigo,”</a> and a self-reflexive testament to cinema as a time machine. </p><p>
Like many of his peers, Mr. Marker became increasingly politicized in
the 1960s. In 1967, he formed a film collective called SLON (Russian for
“elephant” and also an acronym for Société pour le Lancement des
Oeuvres Nouvelles, or Society for the Launch of New Works). </p><p>
SLON’s documentaries include “À Bientôt, J’espère,” about a strike at a
French textile factory, and “The Sixth Side of the Pentagon,” about an
antiwar march on the Pentagon. One of the collective’s major initiatives
was the omnibus film “Far From Vietnam,” a protest against American
involvement in Vietnam, with contributions from Mr. Marker, Mr. Resnais,
Jean-Luc Godard and Agnès Varda, among other filmmakers. </p><p> <a name="rdb-footnote-link-12" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/42824/Sans-Soleil-Movie-/overview">“Sans Soleil”</a>
(1982), often acknowledged as the masterpiece among Mr. Marker’s late
works, is one of his least classifiable, a free-associative mix of
ethnography, philosophy and poetry. Purporting to be the footage of a
fictional cinematographer accompanied by his letters to a nameless
woman, the film roams from Iceland to Guinea-Bissau to Japan, a favorite
destination of Mr. Marker’s since “The Koumiko Mystery,” which he shot
in Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics. A bar in Tokyo’s famous Golden Gai
district is named for “La Jetée” — an honor that Mr. Marker once said
was “worth more to me than any number of Oscars.” </p><p> Mr. Marker
also turned his attention to fellow filmmakers. He made two essays on
Soviet cinema and history centered on the neglected director Alexander
Medvedkin (“The Train Rolls On,” <a name="rdb-footnote-link-13" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/147259/The-Last-Bolshevik-Movie-/overview">“The Last Bolshevik”</a>),
one elegy to his friend Andrei Tarkovsky (“One Day in the Life of
Andrei Arsenevich”) and a portrait of Akira Kurosawa on the set of the
1985 film <a name="rdb-footnote-link-14" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/40236/Ran-Movie-/overview">“Ran”</a> (<a name="rdb-footnote-link-15" class="meta-objTitle rdb-footnoted" href="http://movies.nytimes.com/movie/123582/A-K-Movie-/overview">“A.K.”</a>). </p><p>
He remained active into his 70s and 80s. His last film appears to have
been a short about the history of cinema, commissioned as a trailer for
the 50th anniversary of the Viennale Film Festival in October. The film
is scheduled to be shown at the Locarno Film Festival on Saturday. </p><p>
Mr. Marker gave one of his final interviews — in 2008 to the French
magazine Les Inrockuptibles — through the virtual medium of Second Life.
In response to a question about pseudonyms as masks, he said: “I’m much
more pragmatic than that. I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker,
pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling.
No need to delve further.” </p><br>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-align: -webkit-auto; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>Diniz Cayolla Ribeiro</div><div><a href="mailto:dinizcayollaribeiro@gmail.com">dinizcayollaribeiro@gmail.com</a></div><div><br></div></div><br></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></div></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"></span><br class="Apple-interchange-newline">
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