Chris Marker in Japan

APPROPRIATELY, THE BEST ESSAY ON Chris Marker was not written. It exists, though, as a 17-minute interview from 2007, conducted with filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin and appended to the Criterion Channel version of Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). Gorin was close with Marker and speaks of the French polymath with affection, describing the apartment where “Krazy Katovich” lived. It was an “idiosyncratic and magical” home with multiple screens and cats, a “cabinet” where guests had to remove their shoes like “a good Japanese,” a status Marker aspired to, or at least kept tabs on. Gorin speaks of Marker’s work as a “constant endorsement of human activity,” which is a good way to understand his heterodox rainbow of commentary and collection. Gorin also talks about what it feels like to watch Sans Soleil. He says, “I forget exactly what he showed me, but I don’t forget the intensity of the attention itself.” 

This describes how I felt in 1984 after seeing Sans Soleil for the first time. Forty years later, my feelings are not precisely the same, because I have come to expect Marker’s attention and its resulting intensity but I still cannot retain every vertiginous thought that Marker chains together in the voiceover of Sans Soleil. Like almost every single one of his films, Sans Soleil is a pairing of image and text and sound, each creation running in parallel but independently. Call it, for a few more moments, anti-sync. In Sans Soleil, Alexandra Stewart recites the English narration, reading letters from “Sandor Krasna,” a Marker alias. When we hear Stewart reading aloud from the letters and saying “he,” that pronoun also seems to refer to Marker. (Teenage me must have spent a long time trying to figure out who the woman was and who he was, and if there was going to be a plot. But there is no plot, ever, and it is all Marker.) The footage in Sans Soleil was filmed in Guinea-Bissau, Japan, Paris, Iceland, San Francisco, and Cape Verde, all of it working with and against the voiceover. This made me dizzy in 1984.

_{Photo by Chris Marker}

I think of Marker now as someone who wandered the world taking photographs and gathering footage while writing. After sweeping together all of that into bundles, he would edit them into audiovisual pairings that range from terror with an impeccably quiet sheen (La Jetée, 1962) to provisional, burping collages (Immemory, 1997). I do not prefer the smooth “successful” Marker because what I want is his mind and I find it there in all of his work. Rather, I will propose a slightly exaggerated and pedantic theory of Marker that opens his work the way he wanted it to be opened, even when he hid in his cabinet and sent people photos of cats when approached for interviews. Marker was a “stereo thinker,” someone who created fully loaded sound, image, and text streams, working with the productive friction generated between all three. (The Greek word “stereo” means three-dimensional, not two.) Only one of his films (La Jetée) could be described as fictional, and even when he shoots sync sound, he rarely has subjects speak in their own voice, though that rule is also broken at times. He wants to think with you—no more, no less—and is not ultimately committed to any one format. When I first tried to study his films, in the ’90s, I got the impression he simply didn’t want people to see them at all. Argos Films would only send out VHS copies that were priced, if I recall correctly, unusually high—$75 dollars per tape, maybe $100? There were strict guidelines around where the films could be shown, and I remember the entire exchange being somewhat fraught.

And so we come back around to both Immemory (click on that, save the tab for later) and Sans Soleil, even though our topic is the newly published photoessay book, Le Dépays. Marker manages to hide even when he shows himself—just look at his “memoir,” Immemory, initially issued on CD-ROM. I am not joking—that is what he chose! Of his own free will! Within 10 years, there were very few computers that could play the CD, due to operating system upgrades. That link is to a YouTube video that explains how to watch Immemory, and it is an unexpectedly easy hack. And within Immemory is the English translation of Le Dépays, which translates roughly as “the anti-country,” though Marker titles the text as “The Disorient” for the CD-ROM version. Editor Sadie Starnes used a version of the text—a Word document found in Marker’s archives, attributed to Marker himself—for the first translated edition of Le Dépays, published by Film Desk Books. 

_{Photo by Chris Marker}

One of the most important filmmakers of the 20th century stranded his only memoir (if we can call it that) in a format that died almost immediately—it is worth sitting with that. But now that Starnes has reassembled the book, we see that it is something of a skeleton key for his entire career, and Sans Soleil. It was put together at exactly the same time as Marker was assembling the film. And here is his opening note to Le Dépays: “The text doesn’t comment on the images any more than the images illustrate the text. They are two sequences that clearly cross and signal to each other, but which it would be pointlessly exhausting to collate. One should therefore accept them in their disorder, simplicity, and division in two, as with everything else in Japan.” I would swap out “Japan” for “my body of work” and propose that instruction is what you need to process Marker.

I encourage you to accept Marker in his disorder, which is why my preface to this book is so long. The spoiler for an artist as serious as Marker and occasionally cloaked and grouchy is to take his deliveries less seriously and his thinking more. His early political engagements somehow gave way to a phase beyond politics, at least in his telling (though his attention to the material conditions of his subjects belies his Marxist roots, despite his disavowals). In a rare 2003 interview, Marker says, “Politics, the art of compromise, bores me deeply. What interests me is history, and politics only interests me to the degree that it is the mark history makes on the present.” This is what Gorin calls “carbon-dating,” the process that film makes possible, fixing historical moments. And what are we to make of how Marker fixes Japan?

Read his text while flipping through the pictures, maybe with a Marker film like Tokyo Days (1988) or The Koumiko Mystery, from 1965, playing in the background. Koumiko is a Japanese woman who lives in Tokyo and speaks French, who is not a mystery at all, except that she plays along with Marker’s need for mystery to reattach itself to all things, and so helps him ask, in French, “Why do some cats wave hello?” (In this film, you can hear Marker himself asking the questions, too.) In Le Dépays, Marker decides to keep speaking of cats, telling us, “The cat Whisky died under the wheels of a truck and you raise your glass to his memory, to the memory of your other Russian-blue cat friend—Tozai blue—and to the memory of the frightened owl who died one day in your hand, choked by the meatball she had swallowed with a hunter’s haste.”

_{Photo by Chris Marker}

In Tokyo Days, Marker films his friend Arielle Dombasle walking around Tokyo. She claims to be “more attentive” to cats than Marker, and the footage is, as in many Marker films, of indifferent quality. The point seems to be that something can be captured in its unfolding and then prepared for a later finish, with voiceover. Tokyo Days has little voiceover, though, but plenty of trains. Le Dépays shows that Marker was always a scrupulous photographer, and the Tokyo subway and its sleeping riders are rendered in luscious blacks and soft grays. (The only Marker movie more famous than Sans Soleil is La Jetée, which is almost entirely photographs, none of them lazy.) It is worth adding another Markerian fork here, and pointing out that for many years, the only Marker films available in the US were these two titles, evidence that he was perhaps either hostile or indifferent to his legacy; dozens of his other films have only now reached the world since his death in 2012.

Every time Marker speaks of “the Japanese man” in Le Dépays, it seems as if he is speaking of Marker again: “Leave him to his tranquil schizophrenia, his own way of seeing in everything its contrary, and the more vibrantly the thing is felt, the more imperatively he summons its opposite, which rushes to meet him like the shadow of King Kong on the asphalt of Manhattan.” Are these the men we see in Le Dépays captured in the rain, or the women in the bath, or the figures stretched across billboards? Marker admits that his Japan is an “imaginary country,” possibly one where the clamor of his associations made more sense, if only because he was less likely to end up talking to anyone. And this may be the essence of his anti-country, that he be the only citizen there, able to record and assemble and weave in some kind of peace. 

_{Photo by Chris Marker}