Studio: Remembering Chris Marker

by Adam Bartos and Colin MacCabe

(OR Books, £32)

A HUGE amount is crammed into this short book by film academic and producer Colin MacCabe and photographer Adam Bartos.

It gives an insightful and often moving personal account of MacCabe’s relationship with film-maker Chris Marker (1921-2012) during the last 10 years of his life.

Marker’s was a rich and varied existence. His name is associated with the French New Wave, headed by the likes of Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut, and he also knew Jean-Paul Sartre as a student and was friends with Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver.

Before he embarked on his film career he fought in the resistance during the second world war and MacCabe shares some of his candid remarks about that experience.

“A queue was formed round the block” to torture captured German soldiers, Marker recalled, though such comments are not incongruous from a man filled with enormous energy, adventure and a real love of life and people.

His commitment to left-wing politics is evident in his early involvement with Travail et Culture (Work and Culture), a French Communist Party (PCF) adult education organisation and his support of black civil rights, anti-Vietnam war campaigning and a belief in the power of protest, was a constant through to the end of his life.

Marker, who split from the PCF in the mid-1950s, was energised by the flowering of radical politics a decade later. When talking about his time working alongside icon of French cinema Andre Bazin, he exclaimed that “it was such a joy it was like May ’68 every day!” Marker’s first film Olympia 52, a documentary on the Helsinki Olympics, began a career that would last 60 years.

He made La Jettee (The Jetty), widely regarded as one of the best short science-fiction films ever made, and his Sans Soleil (Sunless) is perhaps the finest example of the “essay film,” a genre which he also invented.

Le Fond de l’Air Est Rouge (A Grin Without A Cat) is an incendiary account of the rise and fall of revolutionary fervour in the middle of the 20th century and he went on to produce groundbreaking works on CD and video.

The photographs by Barton of his studio are an absolute joy. On Marker’s crammed bookshelves autographed images of film stars jostle with toy cats in masks made out of VHS tapes.

It’s no surprise that cat images abound, as his affection for his feline friends is well known, as is the fact he was famously reclusive.

While these images were taken when he was still alive, he is of course absent from every frame.

Barton’s photographs close the book, along with a touching passage from MacCabe about his final years, reminding the reader of the marvellous eccentricity and creativity that drove a man who was utterly unique and is still sorely missed.

At last his energy started to wane, though he made it to 91. As MacCabe says: “There could be no sorrow for him — his race had been well and truly won.”

Tom Griffiths