Traveling man

Chris Marker's not-so-accidental tourist

by Chris Fujiwara

Chris Marker, one of the three directors spotlighted in the Harvard Film Archive's "Left Bank Revisited" series, has been called a documentary filmmaker, but in fact he is the cinema's great essayist. Traveling around the world with his camera, he has made discreet, labyrinthine, emotionally overwhelming films characterized no less by their elegant spoken commentaries than by their crystalline, taut, enigmatic images.

Any Chris Marker film is a matrix for all the others: his themes intersect with one another, forming a map of memories, ideas, resistances. Each film takes up the themes of the preceding ones and tests them in new configurations and contexts. His latest, Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch ("One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch," 2000; June 29 at 7 p.m. and June 30 at 7 p.m.), is a study of Andrei Tarkovsky that's thoroughly Markerian in its insights and textures. The recurrent high angles Marker points out in Tarkovsky's films, expressive of the point of view of "man in the sky, looking down at the earth," remind you of the high angles in his own Le joli mai (1963; June 20 at 7 p.m.), in which the camera surveys Paris. For a testimonial to Tarkovsky, Marker turns to another filmmaker, Alexander Medvedkin, the subject of Marker's The Last Bolshevik (1993; June 24 at 9:15 p.m.). And when Marker reminds us that Tarkovsky, asked whether he would like to make a film about Soviet dissidents, replied, "And why not a film about the kolkhoz?", we might recall that we owe to Marker the rediscovery of Medvedkin's extraordinary collectivization classic, 1935's Happiness.

Medvedkin led a group that took a "cine-train" to remote areas of the Soviet Union to make agit-prop films about local conditions, films were intended for regional audiences. It's easy to see why Marker is attracted to Medvedkin: Marker's own movies are journey films. His protagonists -- among others, himself (usually an implicit rather than explicit presence in his films) -- are all displaced. At the beginning of Une journée d'Andrei Arsenevitch, Tarkovsky's son and mother-in-law arrive in France to be reunited with the dying exile. The son looks out the window of the car carrying him to the city: the narrator (Marina Vlady, of Godard's 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d'elle) has just commented, "Andryusha found himself thrown onto another planet." Marker himself resembles a visitor from another planet, or perhaps, like the hero of La jetée (1962; June 16 at 8:30 p.m. and June 17 at 9 p.m.), from another time. Every image of his films seems to appear cut out against a horizon, which is that of his capacity for involvement in what he sees. This horizon is always present in Marker's films, if only in the implicit awareness that every encounter is going to be a memory. Sunday in Peking (1955; June 19 at 9 p.m.) opens with the words "Nothing is more beautiful than Paris, if not the memory of Paris. And nothing is more beautiful than Peking, if not the memory of Peking. And in Paris, I remember Peking, and I count my riches." These words tell us nothing concrete about the person who utters them. They define him only as a third term that mediates the relationship between two cities, between two absences. By temperament, Marker subtracts himself from his films as an individual with a home and a personal history, only to re-enter and pervade them as a homeless consciousness searching for history through cinema.

In Le joli mai, Marker questions Parisians about their lives, their values, their hopes for the future, their social and political views. His perspective is that of an outsider -- but an insistent, obsessive outsider, constantly seeking to re-establish the links between his subjects and their society, even as they try to disavow these links, claiming that they don't worry about current events and wish only to pursue their private interests. The film shows the Parisian crowd as "a sum of solitudes" -- and the central solitude, reflecting and coordinating all the others, is that of the filmmaker himself. The film is dedicated "to the happy many"; the word "happiness" resonates throughout (as it does throughout Marker's career), and the film ends by questioning its very possibility.

"Happiness" is recovered, through memory, in La jetée, one of the most haunting films ever made and Marker's best-known effort (along with 1983's Sans soleil, which is not included in this series). The protagonist, a survivor of World War III, undergoes a series of experiments aimed at enabling him to re-enter the past in order to summon help for the post-holocaust civilization. The still images that make up La jetée are entrapments of movement, at the heart of which lies, buried but still volatile, real movement itself. All Marker's films are flights in search of that impossible moment when consciousness is at one with the world.