Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory

From Chris Marker’s collection Bestiaire aka Petit Bestiaire (1990), consisting of three ‘video haikus’:
Chat écoutant la musique – 2:47 min, color, sound
An Owl is an Owl is an Owl – 3:18 min, color, sound
Zoo Piece – 2:42 min, color, sound

The tradition continues. Last year—it seems like yesterday—we received the Year of the Cat virtual postcard, with the Wikileaks theme. In 2010, it was the Year of the Tiger, as the beast came after a fleeing flying Guillaume, with the tagline "Best Wishes, Considering." In 2009, it was a crocodile surfacing from a drowned future Copenhagen of 3009 and the failure to deal with global warming, with Guillaume flying by in a mini time-travel ship. This year to come, the message is Occupy, with Guillaume sitting firmly on the tail of the dragon. The email subject line, by the way: OCCUPY THE WORLD!

We see these as part of the long history of emblems, visual crystallizations of concepts. Marker’s wry humor, political ire and digital composition skills create a personal greeting combined with a global summary of the Situation. We’re glad Guillaume doesn’t have to be wikiproofed or on the run in 2012. He’s holding his ground, as many are (even the girl with the dragon tattoo, which has walked off her back and on to this enigmatic rock against the apocalyptic sky).

“He always said that even the best actor knows that the camera is pointed at him, and that the spontaneity, the innocence, the beauty of expression on a face cannot be truly captured except when the person is not conscious of being photographed.”
Peter Blum on Chris Marker

First off, there’s the lingering taste of an assumption that borders on what once was called by the dialecticians of enlightenment the ‘jargon of authenticity.’ The mind drifts around the thought eddy that the human photographic subject as actor, by the mere conscious knowledge of being filmed or photographed, loses something ineffable, some bit of truth in self-presentation to the world. Clandestine documentary, on the other hand, offers heroically to capture this lost parcel of authenticity (the long lost Benjaminian aura?), the subject unaware of the means of reproduction that causes, if even minimally, a change in visual self-presentation.

One could surmise that, following Foucault’s ‘panoptism’, the world of the photographic unconscious—that is, the pristine subject—may actually have to a large degree disappeared; there is now, especially in urban zones, always the presumption of the camera—not the camera of the clandestine artist, but the surveillance apparatus: ubiquitous, proliferating, causing adjustments of behavior by its very presence, as did the central tower of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon, whether occupied by an agent of surveillance or unoccupied and merely virtually present as visual threat, implied in the very design that strips one of privacy. The Eye of Mordor, always searching for the Ring, and its bearer.

One might go further and think that the very proliferation of cameras in public spaces gives rise to a kind of disinterest or banality of the quotidian, such that the modification of one’s own comportment in public space undergoes a subtle reversal. The subject, in this scenario, grows so accustomed to the idea of being captured (literally and figuratively), inscribed into the machinic memory system, that it is no longer necessary to internalize the surveillance apparatus, no longer necessary to adjust one’s behavior always already towards auto-surveillance and self-policing.

One can see this small thought of liberation from panoptism play out in the occupy movements, as they escalate a reclaiming of public space to promote a disregard for the old kafka-type spys and the Panopticon in favor of a new modality. This new modality takes the means of reproduction available on cell phones, plugged as they are into the social media machine, and turns it against power, forcing the police into their own situation of panoptism, of the eternal possibility of being recorded, posted to a viral social media machine that propagates a kind of anti-panoptism, without central tower, without Castle, without Eye.

However, with these thoughts we are still in the mode of duality, of power and resistance—but the moment for this paradigm, long pronounced dead, to truly disappear may not yet have come, simply because the still somehow Empowered, fully equipped with their police forces, armies and crumbling economies, while certainly on their way out, have maddeningly not quite gone away. The King may be dethroned but then one has to deal with the military, as in Egypt.

Nonetheless, the Kafka informants, perhaps epitomized best in the DDR Stazi (that is, Stalinist) system of syping and informing on your neighbor, may have jumped ship and come to work for another, masterless enterprise that itself is less capable of or interested in hierarchical control due to its rhizomatic and viral nature—and for those very reasons baffling to the older machines of technology (panoptism) and social paranoia (informants).

For documentary theory, the real has long been suspect and documentarists, including Heisenberg and ‘reverse ethnographers’ (like the unsurpassed Jean Rouch), have long known that the camera trained on a subject changes the subject. Marker himself shows back in Lettre de Sibérie how montage of documentary footage combined with commentary can present a potentially endless series of possible realities, each virtually co-existing, products of choices of mise-en-scène, montage and the vital, flexible relations of voice/text and image. The old Kuleshov effect fed into a fractal generator…

Our thoughts here, laid out in some haste and worthy someday of greater elaboration, are triggered by this video (below) and in particular the quote (above) in which Peter Blum speaks of Marker’s photographs on the occasion of the recent exhibition at Arles. Revisiting Marker’s old metaphor of photography as a hunt: “La photo, c’est la chasse, c’est l’instinct de chasse sans l’envie de tuer. C’est la chasse des anges… On traque, on vise, on tire et — clac! au lieu d’un mort, on fait un éternel.” There is as much a recognition of the primordial violence of photographic inscription here as there is the dream of its transformation into an art of peace.

Video Source: Arte.tv: Arles : les portraits numériques de Chris Marker

Episode 1 of “Agnès de ci de là Varda” on arte.tv gives viewers a rare glimpse into Chris Marker’s atelier, replete with audio-visual & computer equipment, books, clippings, cats & owls, totemic miscellanea, and a bit of the voice-off of Marker himself. Here is an endless sprawl of creation out of the personal archive, the living space of the magnetic bible continuously remembering itself. Here the traces of travel, of nomadic photo- and cinematography—come to some sort of slow-spiraling gravitational orbit in the artist’s loft, a kind of ground zero of the mnemonic.

Agnes de ci de là Varda
Série documentaire réalisée et commentée par Agnès Varda
(France, 2011, 45mn)
ARTE F
Link: www.arte.tv/fr/Agnes-de-ci-de-la-Varda—15/4304968.html

Thanks to japanese forms for the letting us know about this fascinating mini-doc by Marker’s longtime friend and fellow filmmaker.

This video, “KINO”—subtitled “A short history of cinema”—appeared on Chris Marker’s Kosinki YouTube channel on October 5th.

Two days later, we receive another Kosinki video, on the mass media response to the bardo-traversing of Steve Jobs. Long live the archive and the archivist.

Thus, every self-portrait (unlike autobiography which even when it resorts to a myth such as that of the four ages, is limited to an individual’s memory and to the places where he lived) ceases to be essentially individual except, of course, in a purely anecdotal sense. The writing machine, the system of places, the figures used – everything in it tends towards generalization, whereas the intra-textual memory, that is, the system of cross-references, amplifications, and palinodes that supplants a memory turned towards ‘remembrance,’ produces the mimesis of another type of anamnesis, which might be called metempsychosis; it is, at any rate, a type of archaic and also very modern memory through which the events of an individual life are eclipsed by the recollection of an entire culture, thus causing a paradoxical self-forgetfulness.

Michel Beaujour, Poetics of the Literary Self-Portrait

I had always been convinced that in my small essays, the untold part was more meaningful…”
Chris Marker, Passengers

IMAGINE. Chris Marker’s enigmatic video of August 24, 2011, the day of Steve Jobs’ resignation, sent to some friends and associates without comment, in an email entitled “Guillaume’s Conclusion.”

As has become a mini-tradition, we would like to extend a very happy birthday to Chris Marker (a day belated).

Marker is now 90 years old and continues to intrigue and inspire, gather new interest among younger generations, and appear on the cultural radar globally—most recently with Les Rencontres d’Arles’ annual photography exhibition, the release of One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich on DVD, and the Passengers exhibition in New York at the Peter Blum Gallery.

There is so much to say, so much depth and inspiration in this life/work, that somehow the words fail to adequately express our gratitude.

So, we leave it to you, in all your languages, from all your countries… We would again appreciate it if readers could add their birthday wishes and reflections in the comments to this post!

As one of our most long-lasting correspondents  just wrote us of some recognitions:

In USA’s west coast:

press.exploratorium.edu/tribute-to-filmmaker-chris-marker-july-28-2011/

In France (Arles):

next.liberation.fr/culture/01012346912-a-arles-chris-marker-au-c-ur-des-rencontres

In Germany:

1hr Radio Essay on Chris Marker

(Bayern2 Nachtstudio, Forum Essay 2011, May 17 2011, 20.30 – 21.30) “Wenn ich vier Dromedare hätte” Porträt des Filmessayisten Chris Marker Von Ulrike Haage Podcast (54MB)

Another reader says in an email entitled “almost century man”: “ANYBODY NOTICED THAT CHRIS MARKER ACTUALLY REACHED 90 TODAY?” Another commment on a previous post: “I am writing on July 29th, 2011. Chris Marker is 90 today. Bon anniversaire, and long may he live.”

What do you have to say? Feel free to use this space as a canvas of your thoughts on how Marker has touched your life.

The release of Chris Marker’s heartfelt, heartbreaking film about Tarkovsky (“le maître” as he once confided), One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich [55 min./2009], is welcome news for both Marker and Tarkovsky fans—who tend to overlap, for reasons that are worth pondering. The film is accompanied by two other films hand-picked by Marker, Three Songs About Motherland by Marina Goldovskaya [39 min./ 2009] and In the Dark by Sergey Dvortsevoy [41 min./2004]. Marker notes that these are “magnificent examples of the present documentary work in Russia.”

Here is Marker’s evocation of the two accompanying films, a text that appears on Wexner’s site, where the DVD can be purchased:

THREE SONGS ABOUT MOTHERLAND, the title of Marina Goldovskaya’s inspired wandering throughout her country, could have been used as a general title for this DVD. Each of us in his manner sings the paean or the doom of a place on Earth that defies any rational grasp. I had the easiest task. Entering Tarkovsky’s world carries you within a sumptuous chorale, a multivoiced fugue that encompasses all that’s Russian. Marina, since years, pursued a patient pilgrimage home, with her unique gift to mix with people and extract the best of them. As for Sergei Dvortsevoy and his blind man, he illuminates the Russian way to embody what has been since Antiquity the natural hobby of sightlessness: prophecy. The night Stalin died, I was on Times Square, besides another blind man: Moondog, the musician. I couldn’t help feeling something metaphorical in this confrontation between blindness and History. There we were, like the apes at the beginning of Kubrick’s 2001, facing an opaque, indecipherable monolith. So is the blind man in his basement, facing the enigma of an opaque, indecipherable country which he manages to graze with the help of his companion the cat, the creature who sees what even the seers don’t see. Sometimes we come to the conclusion that Mother Russia just can’t be analyzed, criticized, dismantled, explained: too complex, too brutal, too elusive, too paradoxical, too cavorting… Sometimes even, to my dismay, she can’t be loved. But still, yes, she can be sung.

JOHN FITZGERALD

All images courtesy the artist and Peter Blum Gallery, New York.

PASSENGERS is Chris Marker’s second photographic exhibition featuring images from the Paris Métro. These days, if I wanted to somehow meet Chris Marker, I would probably go to Paris and ride the trains all afternoon hoping for a glimpse of him—it is becoming his natural habitat. But why is an artist/filmmaker/writer, whose work has literally taken him all over the entire world, now so intrigued by the transport system underneath the city in which he lives?

When I first saw Marker’s 1982 essay-film Sans Soleil—a film that defies synopsis—one of the immediate impressions it left me with was the vivid intensity with which the filmmaker was able to process the world around him, even the slightest things. One sequence in the film that lasts several minutes simply focuses on the faces of people riding the trains in and around Tokyo. At various points in the sequence, Marker inserts stills from old Japanese horror films, as if the faces on the train reminded him of the dream-like faces that he remembered from images on late-night television. The sequence thus became not merely a documentary montage of sleeping commuters on their way to the office, but a visual rendering of how the mind works—how memory works.

Marker is at it again in PASSENGERS. Comprised of over two hundred digital photographs taken in the Paris Métro between 2008 and 2010, the exhibition—spanning two galleries in SoHo and Chelsea—illuminates the beauty and poetry that is all around us in our everyday lives, if we only begin to look. Mounted unframed on the gallery walls, the images, predominantly of women, evoke the quality of portraits hanging in a museum. But what this exhibition shows us is that we do not need to take the Métro to the Musée d’Orsay to have the particular aesthetic experience that comes with viewing great art—the Métro itself will do.

This comparison to art comes across most strikingly in a series of larger images Marker calls “A Subway Quartet” arranged on the back wall of the SoHo gallery, which features insets of famous paintings that each image seems to recall. One photograph of a young woman in profile sitting by herself on the train is paired with an inset showing a detail of Nimue, in profile, from Burne-Jones’s Beguiling of Merlin. The strong jaw line, the pursed lips, the angular nose, the deep-set eyes staring straight ahead with intensity—the images match in almost every particular, right down to the woman’s coiled hair, calling to mind the coils around the hair of Nimue. Marker seems to have altered the image somewhat, imbuing it with a softness that is typical of the atmosphere in Burne-Jones’s dream-like paintings. In another photograph from this series, a young girl whom Marker seems to be sitting across from looks straight into the camera with an almost unsettling directness. Marker pairs the image with a detail from an Ingres portrait—which, again, bears a stunning resemblance to the photograph—though there is also a languidness in her direct gaze that is reminiscent of the barmaid from Manet’s Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère.

Of course, that is what is so exciting about Marker’s work. It is hard to view one of his films, or look at his photographs, without seeing connections of your own. There is almost an impatience one feels to leave the movie theater, or the art gallery, and to go out into the streets, or the trains, to begin to capture images yourself. For a full year after seeing Sans Soleil for the first time, a friend and I filmed sequences of daily life all over Manhattan, plummeting the mysteries of the quotidian like visitors from a far-off place. And after seeing this exhibition, I can confess to having photographed—with my cell phone—a couple women standing in a crowd and waiting for the train. Some might dismiss such images as purely voyeuristic, and there is an undeniable boldness in what Marker has done: taking photographs of women on the train, who often are not even aware that they are being photographed, and displaying those images in a New York art gallery and accompanying book. The sleeping woman on the Métro, perhaps coming back from a long day at the office, may have never noticed Marker at all sitting across from her. What would she think to know that her image now hangs in an art gallery juxtaposed to the portrait of the Mona Lisa? But voyeurism is indiscriminate—it is the gaze reacting to an image. Here, it is Marker’s extraordinary gaze that finds the image amid the crowd and isolates it.

“Cocteau used to say that at night, statues escape from museums and go walking in the streets,” Marker notes in a brief comment on the exhibition. “During my peregrinations in the Paris Métro, I sometimes had such unusual encounters. Models of famous painters were still among us, and I was lucky enough to have them sitting in front of me.”

Perhaps Marker’s attraction to the subway lies in the fact that it brings together people from all walks of life and forces them to confront each other, even if only for the length of time between two Métro stations—the Trocadéro and Rue de la Pompe or Pont Neuf and Châtelet. Something about the way that seats are arranged on the subway, how they face each other—unlike on distance trains (with the seats lined up row behind row)—makes the act of looking that much more inescapable. And in that act of looking, the question becomes: what do we see? “I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me,” Marker says at the beginning of Sans Soleil. “On this trip I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.”

In PASSENGERS, Marker has once again tracked his fellow human beings at their most unguarded and banal—nodding off after a hard day’s work, gazing blankly out the window and listening to an iPod, reading a book or a text message—and captured almost iconic images that linger in memory long after you have left the gallery. Anyone who has lived in a major city and taken the subway has seen these images before—but perhaps has never seen them before as images. The girl languidly resting her head against the window does not only exist in the Paris Métro—I have seen her in the subway in New York, I have seen her in a film that Marker made almost thirty years ago in Japan. Like Calvino’s Invisible Cities—in which it is eventually clear that all of Marco Polo’s ponderous descriptions of the cities that he has traveled to are actually descriptions of a single city: Venice—these images from the Paris Métro are truly images that are universal, images from every city. They capture the space in our day when we transition from one place to another, crowded together, but alone with our thoughts—moments that are at once private and public.

One of the most popular features on the Craigslist website is a section called “Missed Connections,” in which individuals write brief descriptions of someone they encountered in the course of the day whom they would like to find and meet again. In an age when technology has increasingly alienated us from real-life contact, these often forlorn messages evince our basic need to connect with someone—and the power of a glance exchanged from across a crowded train. The messages posted to this site are very often of people trying to reach out to someone they noticed, ever briefly, on the subway. The odds of finding the person they are trying to connect with are slight, but every day countless people make the attempt. A trip to Marker’s newest exhibition goes far toward explaining why.

PASSENGERS is on view at Peter Blum Gallery, New York through June 4, 2011. Take the N/R to Prince Street for Peter Blum SoHo (99 Wooster Street) or the 1 train to 28th Street for Peter Blum Chelsea (526 West 29th Street).