Chris Marker (born July 29, 1921) is a writer, photographer, film director, multi-media artist and documentary maker. He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, in Paris, France. He is best known for directing La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982).
Chris Marker studied philosophy under Jean-Paul Sartre. In World War II he joined the Maquis (FTP). After the war he began to write and make films. He traveled to many socialist countries and documented what he saw in films and books. Les statues meurent aussi (1953) which he codirected with Alain Resnais was one of the first anticolonial films. Anatole Dauman produced the first films of Chris Marker and later produced two more of his films Sunday in Peking and Letter from Siberia
He became internationally known for the short film La Jetée. It tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace with limited narration. This film was the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995).
In 1982 he finished Sans Soleil, stretching the limits of what could be called a documentary. It is an essay, a montage, mixing pieces of documentary with fiction and philosophical comments, creating an atmosphere of dream and science fiction. The main themes are Japan, (the erasing of) memory and travel. The title is taken from the song cycle Sunless by Modest Mussorgsky.
Beginning with Sans Soleil he developed a deep interest in digital technology, which led to his film Level 5 (1996) and IMMEMORY (1998), an interactive multimedia CD-ROM, produced for the Centre Pompidou.
Chris Marker lives in Paris and does not grant interviews. However, in 2005, artist David Horvitz was allowed to interview Marker in the coastal town of Brest. The story goes that by the end of the interview, Marker and Horvitz had drunk an entire bottle of Pernod, and had taken a small boat out into the bay and threw the recorded interview into the water. Horvitz was granted an interview by Marker after having mailed anonymous images of the sea to his Paris residence. The interview was to be published in Artforum magazine.
Filmography
Directed:
- Olympia 52 (1952)
- Les Statues meurent aussi (1953)
- Dimanche à Pekin (1956)
- Lettre de Sibérie (1957)
- Les Astronautes (1959)
- Description d'un combat (1960)
- ¡Cuba Sí! (1961)
- La Jetée (1962)
- Le joli mai (1963)
- Le Mystère Koumiko (1965)
- Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966)
- Loin du Vietnam (1967)
- Rhodiacéta (1967)
- La Sixième face du pentagone (1968)
- Cinétracts (1968)
- À bientôt, j'espère (1968)
- On vous parle du Brésil (1969)
- Jour de tournage (1969)
- Classe de lutte (1969)
- Les Mots ont un sens (1970)
- Carlos Marighela (1970)
- La Bataille des dix millions (1971)
- Le Train en marche (1971)
- On vous parle de Prague: le deuxième procès d'Artur London (1971)
- Vive la baleine (1972)
- L'Ambassade (1973)
- La Solitude du chanteur de fond (1974)
- Le Fond de l'air est rouge (1977)
- Junkiopa (1981)
- Sans soleil (1983)
- 2084 (1984)
- From Chris to Christo (1985)
- A.K. (1985)
- Mémoires pour Simone (1986)
- Le Tombeau d'Alexandre (1992)
- Level Five (1997)
- One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (2000)
- Chats Perchés (TV) (2004)