Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve was born in 1921 in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Or Belleville, Paris. Or Neuilly-sur-Seine. He studied philosophy. During the Second World War, he joined the Maquis, a faction of the French Resistance. He may or may not have been a United States Air Force paratrooper. After the war, he wrote poems, stories, political commentaries, and film reviews for the Marxist, neo-Catholic magazine Esprit. He traveled the world as a photojournalist—a vocation he never gave up. He wrote and published a novel, Le Cœur net (1949), and an illustrated essay on Jean Giraudoux, Giraudoux par lui-même (1952), and, collaborating with the likes of Alain Resnais, inaugurated a filmmaking career that betrayed no hint of careerism. Many of his films had or have no obvious place in the commercial market. Rather than cultivate a persona-as-brand—a strategy that has served his fellow cinema essayist Werner Herzog well—Marker evaded cameras and microphones. He frequently used his films to provide platforms for those neglected by history—this is very much the case with at least two of the three titles in the Metrograph series—but with his own story he showed scant interest in setting things straight. Call it pathological reclusiveness or recursive arrogance; Marker felt the films were enough.

As we celebrate Marker’s birth/deathday, I can’t help but wonder how many filmmakers not only worked into their eighties but also remained so politically, aesthetically, technologically, and philosophically engaged. Only Marker’s Left Bank cohort Agnès Varda comes to mind. (I’m not certain late Godard hits all the above points.) Perhaps the dearth of dogma in Marker’s films, their fluid movement between genres, their endless open-mindedness as to what cinema can be, is intrinsic to their endurance and continuing relevance. There is no victory lap in late Marker. He never stopped running, or at least walking, with camera in hand, senses wide open, curiosity in full effect.

The first image in Berliner Ballade (1990) is of an elephant: memory’s avatar. The film, echoing Sans soleil’s peculiar, beguiling mediation technique—one that harkens back to 19th-century literature—is narrated by a woman receiving correspondence from Marker or a stand-in of some sort. “This time, you are writing to me from Berlin…” After the fall of the Berlin Wall, France 2’s Envoyé spécial sent Marker to chronicle the lead-up to East Berlin’s first free elections in decades. The resulting film is a typically playful, idiosyncratic whirlwind tour of a fleeting point in time, taking in the Schönbrunn Zoo and Kleist’s tomb, sausage sellers and enterprising youths chipping away pieces of the Wall—or simply a wall—to be sold as mementos in little plastic baggies with “ORIGINAL” stamped across the front. Diaristic travelogue constitutes only part of Berliner Ballade, however. There are images of Hitler and the massive crowds under his sway only two generations previous. There are interviews—whether archival or original is hard to discern—with intellectuals such as Jürgen Böttcher, Stephan Hermlin, and Ina Merkel, who debate the meaning and potency of a unified Left in a post-Soviet context, and with poet and singer Wolf Biermann, whose lyrics about choosing justice over revenge feel like a lost priority in the zero-sum binary politics of our current age. The film closes with a sequence filled with faces watching and waiting for election results, a variation on a theme found in many Marker films, including the next in this selection.