LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Chris Marker
built 635 days ago
Chris Marker (born July 29, 1921) is a French writer, photographer, film director, multimedia artist and documentary maker. He is best known for directing La Jetée (1962), Sans Soleil (1983) and AK (1985), a documentary about Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Biography He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, in Paris, France. 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.
Source:
Born in 1921, Chris Marker is a writer, essayist, photographer and film-maker, author of more than 35 films. He appears in the credits of Nuit et Brouillard (Alain Resnais) as second assistant and co-signs Les statues meurent aussi (Alain Resnais) in 1952. With La Jetée (1963) he continued on his own his exploration into the vestiges and the vertigo of time, but in a purely fictionnal way, doing so from photos alone. Some films and twenty years later, it was Sans Soleil which brought together the images re-worked on his Apple II GS, of a coming and going between the continents, and which has the form of a personnal diary. Level 5, his last film*, presents a woman (Catherine Belkhodja) whose task it is to reconstruct the battle of Okinawa in the form of a video game, at different levels. This tragedy interferes with her history (the loss of a man whom she loved).
Source:
Chris Marker's principal distinction may be to have developed a form of personal essay within the documentary mode. Aside from his work little is known about him; he is elusive bordering on mysterious. Born in a suburb of Paris, he has allowed a legend to grow up about his birth in a "far-off country." Marker is not his name; it is one of a half-dozen aliases he has used. He chose "Marker," it is thought, in reference to the Magic Marker pen.
Source:
Chris Marker's extraordinary filmography includes Letter from Siberia (1958), La Jetee (1962), Sans Soleil (1982) and Level Five (1996). The works of this French, "techno-shaman" exceed the boundaries of conventional cinema, often by using only still photographs and music in a film. Marker's body of work is international in scope and includes the mediums of writing, photography, filmmaking, video, television and digital multimedia. The biographer, Catherine Lupton, is a Senior Lecturer in Film & Television Studies at Roehampton University in London. She describes Marker's odyssey from the late 1940s, when he began to work as a critic and writer for the French journal Esprit with Alain Resnais and other intelligentsia, to his most recent work, a multimedia CD-ROM called Immemory (2002).
Source:
Chris Marker composed and edited Sans Soleil in 1982. The film begins with a quotation from Racine: "The distance of countries makes up in some way for the excessive nearness of time." As it opens, the film shows a shot of three children walking together through a meadow in Iceland and a shot of an American military plane aboard an aircraft carrier. Both shots serve as visual interstices for a black screen. The voice of Florence Delay reads the following text (sec. 10): "The first image he spoke to me about was the one of the three children on a road in Iceland in 1965.
Source:
Chris Marker (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) was born in 1921 at Neuilly sur Seine, France. He fought for the French resistance during World War II and enlisted as a Paratrooper in the United States Air Force. In the 1950s Marker wrote for l'Esprit and Cahiers du cinéma and was an assistant to Alain Resnais. His work was been presented internationally. Marker was the subject of a film retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was a featured artist of the exhibition Passage de l'image at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Documenta X, Kassel, Germany. He lives in Paris.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Chris Marker