Chris Marker: Early Film Writings by Chris Marker (Web Exclusive)
Edited by Steven Ungar, translated by Sally Shafto. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2024. 199 pp., illus. Paperback: $21.95.

Reviewed by Nadine Boljkovac

This volume contains the first English translation of twenty texts published between 1948 and 1955 by the ciné-poet best known as Chris Marker. In these texts compiled by Steven Ungar, and translated by Sally Shafto, Marker contemplates “film form, style, and history as well as adaptation, animation, new technologies, national film industries, and pedagogy,” as Ungar notes in a fifty-five-page introduction that assesses the “author behind the auteur.” Ungar urges a continuation of this work dedicated to Marker the writer, “the man whom Jean-Louis Comolli called ‘the writing Marker’ (‘Marker l’écrivant’).”

Ungar’s introduction—as vital a read for cinephiles and scholars as are the Marker texts—underscores Marker’s famed wit, incisive perception, and multimedia commitment to a metaphysics of time and affect. These writings also prove indispensable for tracing relations between Marker and André Bazin, the latter who praised Marker’s “horizontal montage,” a montage “forged from ear to eye,” for upholding the cinema’s ability to preserve time and space in their pure states. Marker’s assertion in one of this volume’s reviews—“Realism doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with improved representation”—supports Bazin’s thought as clearly as Bazin’s appraisal of Marker. [See Bazin, “Chris Marker, Lettre de Sibérie,” Le Cinéma français de la Libération à la Nouvelle Vague (1945–1958), Paris: Cahiers du cinéma; republished in the July-August 2003 issue of Film Comment, translated by Dave Kehr]

The essays confirm not only Marker’s status as sophisticated film theoretician (via page or whatever screen), and provide early evidence of his sociopolitical ethics but also document a “portrait of the writing Marker—more of a self-portrait, really—in the guise of what Jacques Rancière via Roland Barthes might have called a pensive spectator (Rancière) attuned to the emotional charge (Barthes) of still and moving images” (Ungar). Marker’s portraiture, conveyed through words and camera, embraces the “poignancy of things” (Sans Soleil) which, in Marker’s case, emerges frequently in relation to women. Markeresque claims will strike some (including, for instance, thoughts on Kenneth Anger’s work). In A Farewell to Movies/Abschied vom Kino, Marker parenthetically admits, “I’ve got an unfashionable tendency to prefer women in my lens” (2008, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich). Marker’s comment in an essay here—“[P]erhaps I am more lenient with female high school students with admirable legs and comely appearance,” among others—might meet with varying degrees of leniency by contemporary readers.

As in La Jetée, and throughout Marker’s practices, it is the woman’s direct gaze that arrests the reader/spectator. The essay, “The Imperfect of the Subjective,” (“L’imparfait du subjectif,” the title highlighting Marker’s wit and displeasure with Robert Montgomery’s attempts at expressing subjectivity in his 1947 film Lady in the Lake), provides further insight into Marker’s thoughts on perception and portraiture, and a woman’s allure. Invention, Marker’s own, with his insistence on ours, surfaces, and in Marker’s anecdote about a man discussing Jean Cocteau’s work: “he was perhaps closer, with all his mistakes, to the poem’s real purpose, which is not to be read, but to be rewritten silently by readers in their own name” (“Orpheus”). Toute la mémoire du monde’s final words (directed by Resnais with “Chris and Magic Marker,” 1956), flash, “these readers, each working on his slice of universal memory, will lay the fragments of a single secret end to end, a secret with a beautiful name, a secret called happiness.” Ungar’s work repeats Marker’s: “Will there be a last letter?” (Sans Soleil). 

Nadine Boljkovac, an assistant professor at the University of Colorado, is author of Untimely Affects: Gilles Deleuze and an Ethics of Cinema, in which she examines the films of Alain Resnais and Chris Marker. She has published recently in Camera Obscura, The Anthem Handbook of Screen Theory, among others, and is book series co-editor of Timecodes.

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