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Chris Marker Guest Page

Part of the Chris Marker World Wide Web Site.
Written by Adrian Miles.

This page is for those people working on Chris Marker, or related material, to place a comment about themselves and/or their work.

Where possible a HTML hotlink will be provided so that visitors to the site, and this page, can contact other people working in this area.

To be placed on this page please send me email (click on my email address at the bottom of any page).

Daniel Potter.

"I've been tracking down the literature and films of Chris. Marker for quite a while now. I still remember the fascination with which I watched Sans Soleil about 10 years ago in the Roxie Cinema in San Francisco; this type of filmmaking didn't have a name for me yet, but produced a new type of thought pattern in my brain: creative cognitive dissonance, intellectual stimulation, appetite for more...

Whenever a Marker film was shown, I would make the pilgrimage. Later, in graduate school at Cornell in the field of Comparative Literature, I set out more systematically to study the history of European documentary film, focusing on directors who were equally authors, having fulfilled the predictions of Alexandre Astruc formulating a new cinema, that of the "camera-stylo," the camera-pen.

I - and others, as the references Adrian Miles has gathered here attest to - began, vaguely at first and then with gathering momentum, to perceive the contours of the "essay film," and to investigate the conjunction of writing and filmmaking that each (Marker, Alexander Kluge, Trinh T. Minh-ha, Harun Farocki, Hartmut Bitomski, Johan van der Keuken and others) pursued with interdisciplinary fervor.

This terrain led to a dissertation topic on the "essay as film." This dissertation is still in progress, still fragmentary but gradually gaining coherence. In it, I look back at Montaigne and the traditions of rhetoric and the art of memory, and forward to the era of "future libraries" and on-line audio-visual archives - such as the Web is fast becoming. The historical detour has proved near-fatal to completion, but was a necessary intellectual journey, and for anyone schooled in Marker the detours are the journey.

Of course, it is nearly impossible to keep up with the intensity and productivity of Chris Marker, whose most recent multimedia piece Silent Movie is currently on display at Ohio State University, the prospectus of which announces a new feature entitled Level Five, as well as an upcoming autobiographical CD-ROM, Immemory. As we approach the year 4001, the year of perfect memory, we also approach the immensity of Marker's work, which incessantly looks toward the future for changes that history has left incomplete. I would be happy to continue, through email or other means, the dialogue that this work began."

Professor Timothy Dugdale

Professor Dugdale in email wrote:

"I hit your site because I writing a paper on why Sans Soleil is not a very good film. Sorry. But I am sure you are familiar with all the arguments against this work already."

But he also wanted to be on this page to find out what other film scholars "who are suspect of post-modern theory and its validity in film theory, particularly to someone like Marker who strikes me as being very modernist and rationalist."

So, if you want to pursue these ideas with him, email away...

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