Cinétracts

The lynchpin of the French New Wave, Jean-Luc Godard was arguably the most influential filmmaker of the postwar era. Beginning with his groundbreaking 1959 feature debut A Bout de Souffle, Godard revolutionized the motion picture form, freeing the medium from the shackles of its long-accepted cinematic language by rewriting the rules of narrative, continuity, sound, and camera work. Later in his career, he also challenged the common means of feature production, distribution, and exhibition, all in an effort to subvert the conventions of the Hollywood formula to create a new kind of film.

Godard was born in Paris on December 3, 1930, the second of four children. After receiving his primary education in Nyon, Switzerland – during World War II, he became a naturalized Swiss citizen – he studied ethnology at the Sorbonne, but spent the vast majority of his days at the Cine-Club du Quartier Latin, where he first met fellow film fanatics Francois Truffaut and Jacques Rivette. In May 1950, the three men united to publish La Gazette du Cinema, a monthly film journal which ran through November of the same year; here Godard printed his first critical pieces, which appeared both under his own name and under the pseudonym Hans Lucas. With Rivette’s 1950 short feature Quadrille, Godard made his acting debut, also appearing in Eric Rohmer’s Presentation ou Charlotte et son Steack the following year.

In January 1952, Godard began writing for Cahiers du Cinema, the massively influential film magazine which also grew to include staffers Truffaut, Rivette, Rohmer, and Claude Chabrol, among others. However, Godard’s first tenure at Cahiers proved to be brief: In the autumn of 1952, he left France to return to Switzerland, where he worked on the construction of the Grande-Dixence Dam. With his earnings, Godard was able to finance his first film, the short subject Operation Beton. While in Geneva in 1955, he helmed his sophomore effort, the ten-minute Une Femme Coquette, subsequently appearing in Rivette’s Le Coup de Berger. Upon returning to France in the summer of 1956, Godard resumed his work at Cahiers after a four-year break from writing. There he rose to the top ranks of French film criticism while honing his increasingly fresh and freewheeling directorial style over the course of the short comedies Tous les Garcons s’appellent Patrick (1957), Charlotte et son Jules, and Une Histoire d’Eau (both 1958), the latter co-directed by Truffaut.

In 1959, Godard embarked on his feature debut, A Bout de Souffle (Breathless). Released at roughly the same time as Truffaut’s Les Quatre Cents Coups and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour, the picture helped establish the emergence of what was dubbed the French New Wave, a revolutionary movement in film heralded primarily by Cahiers alumni. A Bout de Souffle quickly earned global acclaim as the definitive document of its era. Based on a rough story outline contributed by Truffaut, it was shot without a script, its inspiration the American gangster movies which its director loved so passionately. Crafted with a rough-and-tumble, home-movie-like quality, it dodged all accepted notions of narrative and visual storytelling, adopting a freeform hipness unlike anything before it and sparking a revolution in low-budget, on-the-fly independent filmmaking. Seemingly overnight, Godard was revered as the most important cinematic talent of his generation.

Quickly, however, Godard’s refusal to be pigeonholed became apparent, and despite a few works of lesser quality, his work over the course of the upcoming decade was a remarkable period of innovation, experimentation, and sustained genius. In 1960, he resurfaced with his second feature, an oddball political thriller titled Le Petit Soldat. The first of many films to star his then-wife Anna Karina, it became the subject of controversy over its characters’ connection to the Algerian crisis and was banned in France for three years. Shooting for the first time in color and in CinemaScope, he next filmed 1961’s comic tale Une Femme Est une Femme, followed a year later by the episodic essay on prostitution Vivre Se Vie. Again, both starred Karina, prompting criticism – similar to the charges of indulgence leveled at Michelangelo Antonioni over his frequent use of actress Monica Vitti – that Godard was using her as a non-actress, a mere screen presence utilized and manipulated in ways that she herself did not fully comprehend.

The first of Godard’s films to receive a critical thrashing was 1963’s war drama Les Carabiniers, but Le Mepris, a study of the nature of cinema itself, starring Brigitte Bardot, returned him to reviewers’ good graces. An astonishingly prolific and brilliant period followed, led off by 1964’s Bande a Part and Une Femme Mariee. Pierrot le Fou and Alphaville, une Etrange Aventure de Lemmy Caution, a singular science fiction effort, appeared in 1965, and a year later no less than three new features – Masculin Feminin, Made in USA, and Deux ou Trois Choses Que Je Sais d’Elle – bowed. Godard repeated the trifecta in 1967 with La Chinoise, ou Plutot a la Chinoise, Loin du Viet-Nam, and finally the apocalyptic Weekend, his most formally radical film since A Bout de Souffle.

Beginning in 1968, Godard’s so-called “radical” period emerged and took form during an era when the political leanings below the surface of many of his earlier works began to position themselves as the director’s dominant focus. Through Anne Wiazemsky, his second wife, Godard was initiated into Paris’ Maoist underground. Ultimately, his entire worldview shifted from that of the obsessive cinephile to a radical outlook which even prompted him to reject his own film oeuvre as “bourgeois.” The global tumult that defined 1968 further informed his consciousness as he mounted Le Gai Savior, a series of political dialogues punctuated by telling images and symbols. Next was Un Film Comme les Autres, a collection of images juxtaposed with the various conversations between workers and students. One Plus One – a documentary portrait of the Rolling Stones also known as Sympathy for the Devil – followed. The final project of 1968, One American Movie (a planned cinéma vérité collaboration with D.A. Pennebaker and Richard Leacock), went unrealized.

In the summer of 1968, Godard also co-founded (with Jean-Pierre Gorin, Gerard Martin, Armand Marco, Nathalie Billard, and Jean-Henri Roger) Dziga Vertov Group, a collective designed to make “political films politically” and in the process revolutionize the motion picture language. The films created by the group were produced and written based upon concepts of class struggle and dialectical materialism, all in an attempt to revive a kind of proletarian culture. Once a die-hard auteurist, here Godard began working closely with other Dziga Vertov members, in particular Gorin, shooting in 16 mm on extremely low budgets and forgoing the usual channels of distribution and exhibition. As a result, the collective’s work – 1969’s British Sounds (See You at Mao), Vent d’Est, and Amore e Rabbia, and 1970’s Vladimir et Rosa and the uncompleted Jusqu’a la Victoire – went unseen by virtually anyone outside of student and activist circles, existing outside of common theatrical situations and never even appearing in the U.S.

In 1972, Tout Va Bien marked the ending of the Dziga Vertov Group; an attempt to deliver the collective’s messages to a more mainstream audience, it actively sought distribution on commercial circuits and was even bankrolled with American financing. After completing 1972’s Letter to Jane, Godard relocated from Paris to Grenoble, planning to remodel a video studio and establish alternative methods of production and distribution (primarily by passing out videotapes to networks of friends and associates). There he met Anne-Marie Mieville, forging a long-lasting partnership which began with 1974’s Ici et Ailleurs and continued with 1975’s Numero Deux and the following year’s Comment ça va? In 1976, Godard and Mieville moved to the small Swiss community of Rolle and immersed themselves in video and television work. After a decade, Godard began moving away from radical politics, returning to more personal material, exploring issues of subjectivity and individuality.

Among their first projects in Switzerland was Six Fois Deux (Sur et Sous la Communication), a series of a half-dozen two-part programs commissioned for Swiss television. Another TV series, France Tour/Detour Deux Enfants, followed over the course of 1977 and 1978 before Godard and Mieville returned to France to begin work on 1979’s Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie). In 1980, Godard traveled to California to work with Francis Ford Coppola on a biography of mobster Bugsy Siegel which failed to progress beyond the planning stages. Upon returning to Paris, he began work on his “trilogy of the sublime,” a collection of films – 1982’s Passion, 1983’s Prenom: Carmen, and 1983’s highly controversial Hail Mary (which Pope John Paul II denounced as “blasphemous”) – all fascinated with notions of beauty, feminine allure, and nature.

After 1985’s neo-noir feature Detective, Godard and Mieville produced 1986’s Soft and Hard (A Soft Conversation Between Two Friends on a Hard Subject) for England’s Channel Four. A series of projects, including 1986’s TV film Grandeur et Decadence d’un Petit Commerce de Cinema, and 1987’s Soigne ta Droite and King Lear, appeared in quick succession, but Godard did not again resurface until 1990’s Nouvelle Vague. Over the course of the decade he mounted Histoire(s) du Cinema, a ten-part video study of France’s film legacy; most of Godard’s 1990s work was auxiliary to the series, including 1991’s Allemagne Annee 90 Neuf Zero and 1994’s JLG/JLG – Autoportrait de December. Forever Mozart, an episodic film about the attempts of a French theater troop to put on a play in Sarajevo, followed in 1996. The following year, Godard completed the third and fourth installments of his Histoire(s) du Cinema series with 3A: La Monnaie De L’Absolu; 4A: Le controle De L’Univers; he also starred in Nous Sommes Tous Encore Ici, an episodic comedy-drama directed by Mieville.

(Source: http://www.allmovie.com/cg/avg.dll?p=avg&sql=2:91804~T1)

“I write to you from a far-off country…”

Information regarding the early life of Chris Marker, photographer, filmmaker, videographer, poet, journalist, multimedia/installation artist, designer, and world traveler, is scarce and conflicting. The year to which his movies, videos, and multimedia projects are dated depends on which source you use, and in which country you live. Personal data is in a state of complete disarray: Derek Malcolm, writing about ¡Cuba Sí! (1961) for The Guardian, reports that Marker was born in Mongolia, of aristocratic descent. Geoff Andrew of Time Out London isn’t sure (Andrew, 146), and most sources, along with the Internet Movie Database, use the location I’ve listed above as his place of birth. Some say his father was an American soldier, others that he (Marker) was a paratrooper in the Second World War. Still others, that he comes to us from an alien planet. Or the future. Throughout his career, he has rarely been interviewed, and even more rarely photographed. It is said that he responds to requests for his photograph with a picture of a cat – his favorite animal. (2) I have to wonder, given the dry, unexpected, and off-kilter wit in much of his work, as well as his fascination with the malleability of information in the digital age, whether, if he is not the author of any of the above pieces of information and disinformation, would he at least support the creativeness (or strangeness) of their design? When Mikkel Aaland, an artist and web designer who wrote about meeting with Marker during the early ‘90s (while the filmmaker was working on Immemory, an interactive CD-ROM that explores the interpenetrative concepts of memory and understanding), wanted to record on tape his talks with the multimedia artist, he was told, “No interviews. Instead, if you must write something, use your imagination. Place us on a boat on the Nile. We are drunk. It’s your story.” It isn’t that Marker supports lies and falsehoods – his chief fascination in his work has been, rather, the nature of truth, how it is perceived, understood, and most importantly, how it is created, for ourselves as individuals and as members of this or that community.

He is often credited with conceiving the cinematic essay form, with which such disparate filmmakers as Jean-Luc Godard, Orson Welles, Federico Fellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Jon Jost, Chantal Akerman, Wim Wenders, Harun Farocki, Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Jonathan Demme, Abbas Kiarostami, Nanni Moretti, Terry Zwigoff, and Agnès Varda have had varying degrees of success, and although the cinematic essay has its precedents in early work by Luis Buñuel (Las Hurdes, 1933), Alain Resnais, (3) and Georges Méliès, among others, Marker’s placement within the context of the development of the essay should begin with Lettre de Sibérie (1957), which is not his first film, (4) but certainly the earliest case of his unique narrative style. Not that confirming his planting of any flags has been easy: he is mentioned twice in Pauline Kael’s enormous review anthology, For Keeps, both times in conjunction with Jean Rouch, and subordinate to Godard, undoubtedly because Rouch, whose Chronique d’un eté (1961) is a key work that gave birth to the cinéma vérité movement, and Marker, whose Le Joli mai (1963) is predicated on some of the same man-on-the-street interviews introduced by Rouch, were simply seen as documentarian-ethnographers or documentarian-anthropologists (Edgar Morin, who collaborated with Rouch on Chronique d’un eté, is a leading French sociologist and philosopher), while Godard, who was and still is more of an international celebrity than Marker or Rouch or Morin put together, was beheld by Kael as a one-man band, a cinematic messiah, who knew no boundaries, and whose imitators would always know defeat when their imitations are uncovered or, as Kael suggested in her Weekend (Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) review “we murmur ‘Godard’ and they are sunk” (Kael, 187). The similarities between Le Joli mai (a film which seems, in contrast to his later work, imbued with an uncharacteristically objective tone) and Chronique d’un eté were undoubtedly great enough for a writer to set up Marker and Rouch as cinematographic coefficients, but the mere murmur of a film made in the year between the two primary specimens of cinema vérité, the science fiction masterpiece La Jetée (1962), is more than sufficient to grant Marker his own corner in cinema history. But we will return to that one in a moment.

Film school textbooks and books on film history have arrived at a general agreement to treat any French filmmaker working outside of (or alongside) the French New Wave as secondary: exclusions include Jacques Tati – who, like so many other giants in the medium, worked on a wave of his own design – and the filmmakers who belonged to the Left Bank group. While one normally pictures such Cahiers du Cinéma graduates as Godard, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Eric Rohmer when discussing the French cinema of the late ‘50s and early-to-mid ‘60s, there also existed the Left Bank directors, who, according to Richard Roud, included three people: Agnès Varda, Alain Resnais, and Marker. Any division between the New Wave and the Left Bank cinemas became increasingly problematic as the ‘60s progressed, and as the French intelligentsia became more and more politicized. All of the things that were critical in the early part of the New Wave/Left Bank periods: cinéma vérité, jump cuts, the fixation on American film noir, the neighborhood (Champs-Elysées, Cahiers, Paris, Europe)-centric attitudes, were discarded or modified accordingly to suit an increasingly global, and increasingly anxious, worldview. A multi-episodic collaboration between Marker, Godard, Varda, Resnais, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, and Joris Ivens, Loin du Vietnam (1967), created as a means to express sympathy with the North Vietnamese, was both an explicit embodiment of this “new” consciousness, as well as – perhaps not coincidentally, as Roud suggests (Roud, 668) – a movie made during a period when Marker decided to make films in collaboration with one or more other directors, rather than on his own: others included À bientôt, j’espère (co-directed by Mario Marret, 1968) and La Sixième face du pentagone (co-directed by François Reichenbach, 1968). This was also the period in which Marker founded the SLON (Societe pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles) production studio, an on-again, off-again (when overcome by events) filmmaking collective devoted to making socially and politically conscious works. Marker was also involved with Godard and Resnais in making and distributing “cinétracts,” 16mm promotional pieces intended as “news bulletins” for and about students and workers during and around the May 1968 revolt. (5) Marker would later make (and even later, modify) Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977-1993), also known as A Grin Without a Cat, as a way to reflect upon the rise and fall of the left during the ‘60s and ‘70s; the collective this time was a chorus of narrators, similar in scheme to The Thin Red Line (Terrence Malick, 1998), surrogates for Marker, whose name does not appear in the credits, but whose hand is unmistakably omnipresent.

• * *

Marker was in his late 30s when he made Lettre de Sibérie, but if it’s possible to reverse the old saw and say that there are no authors, only works, then the brief, skeletal outline of data above truly forms the foundation of his “early life”; these were the formative years for the Marker who would go on to design and stage an installation exhibit called “Silent Movie” for New York’s Museum of Modern Art, or before and after that, Le Tombeau d’Alexandre (1992) and Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (1999), or his second masterpiece, Sans soleil (1982). He is now the single author of his work, but now often credits himself, if at all, with “conceived and edited by…” instead of the usual “un film de…” or “written and directed by…” that we associate with contemporary French- and English-speaking filmmakers.

My association with Marker’s work began when, as a lark, I picked up the New Yorker Films videotape of Sans soleil, based on praise by Geoff Andrew, Jonathan Rosenbaum, and others. That was in early 2001; that’s how far Marker and I go back. I’ve since seen the essay – incontrovertibly the cornerstone of the form, far surpassing comparable works by Godard and Farocki – three more times, and each time it (cliché warning) remains utterly fresh. I’ve read a few reaction pieces by people who have been overwhelmed by the flow of information and introspection in Sans soleil, with its one-damn-thing-after-another structure shaped around Marker’s meditations on travel, consumerism, Tokyo, West Africa, guerrilla warfare, fatigue, television, history, memory, nostalgia, images, Tarkovsky, and Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), to name just a few things. But that’s precisely what I love about it – a recent capsule review in the New Yorker referred to it as “intellectually exciting,” and it may be the most intellectually exciting movie ever made; it opens up discursive spaces in your head in such a way that you feel you’re being electrocuted. One connection or reflection in the movie becomes four or five in your mind as you watch Sans soleil or think about it afterwards, as if the filmmaker has sent you on a mission to find out this or that idea or bit of information (the movie is inspirational in a very concrete sense), or to consider something from a different perspective, and still another, and so on; the cinematic equivalent of a stone being thrown into a pond, wherein you are the pond. All this, and Marker still finds room for a melancholy, weary, yet strangely optimistic, exhilarating emotional texture. It also happens to be very funny at times.

La Jetée is Marker’s best-known work, thanks to 12 Monkeys (Terry Gilliam, 1995), which adapted its premise to suit a 129-minute movie with high-profile stars (Brad Pitt, Bruce Willis, Madeleine Stowe) and a 29 million dollar budget. The original film is much more modest, obviously, but also much more graceful. The premise is familiar, probably: it’s present-day Paris, where a young boy sees a beautiful woman at an airport, and then sees a man die of a gunshot wound from an unknown assailant. Years later, following an apocalyptic disaster that has driven a decimated mankind into underground bunkers, the boy – now grown – is afflicted by his memory of the beautiful woman so strongly that government scientists wish to use it as a means for time travel, with the hope of finding a key to restoring the world to its former condition. Naturally, he meets the woman and falls in love with her. Clocking in at 28 minutes, La Jetée is one of the strangest movies ever conceived, and also one of the most beautiful and sad. It’s made up almost entirely of black and white still photographs, depicting the events of the narrative. (There is one single, haunting exception – the woman, in repose, fluttering her eyelids open.) These stills are governed by a third-party narration – the only voice we hear – as well as music, and sound effects.

Other key works by Marker include two excellent pieces of film criticism, Le Tombeau d’Alexandre, covering the life and times of the forgotten Soviet filmmaker Alexandre Medvedkin, and Une journee d’Andrei Arsenevitch, a 55-minute video profile of the exalted Russian movie director, Andrei Tarkovsky, made for the French television series “Cinema de Notre Temps,” and the aforementioned Le Joli mai and Le Fond de l’air est rouge. His documentary on Yves Montand, La Solitude du chanteur de fond (1974; aka The Loneliness of the Long Distance Singer) is entertaining and wonderful to listen to, although it’s probably fueled more by affection than thought. A subtitled print or video copy of ¡Cuba Sí! eludes me, as does much of his lesser-known work, including the cinétracts. His only disappointments, I think, are A.K. (1985), an unsatisfying homage to Akira Kurosawa that was made during the production of Ran (1985), and Level 5 (1997), a dreary shell of an essay that fails to capture Marker’s supposed fascination with online culture (along with his usual themes of memory, history, etc) and drifts too often into self-parody.

In a recent American movie, Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002), a character discusses a futuristic computer interface, a console for police officers to examine evidence in a way that makes them look like orchestra conductors, and refers to a specific investigative routine as “scrubbing the image.” (6) I don’t know how much Spielberg or his screenwriters know about the work of Marker, or Farocki, or even late-period Welles (F for Fake ¹⁹⁷⁴ and Filming ‘Othello’ ¹⁹⁷⁹), but my mind immediately made the connection between the high-tech investigative process – which is rooted in mental images and memories, coincidentally – and the work done by these essayists. Taking an image, a simple image, like the shaking hand-held cameras in some of the Le Fond de l’air est rouge footage, and “scrubbing” it – closely examining its nature, its context, its subject, or any other aspect, in order to develop a relevant discourse – is what Marker does best. Scrubbing the image is Marker’s bread and butter. One of his more recent subjects, Tarkovsky, remarked in his Sculpting in Time book that:

It is obvious that art cannot teach anyone anything, since in four thousand years humanity has learnt nothing at all. We should long ago have become angels had we been capable of paying attention to the experience of art, and allowing ourselves to be changed in accordance with the ideals it expresses. Art only has the capacity, through shock and catharsis, to make the human soul receptive to good. It’s ridiculous to imagine that people can be taught to be good…Art can only give food – a jolt – the occasion – for psychical experience. (Tarkovsky, 50)

I’m of the mind that, in this regard, art can make the world a better place, that it can create a fertile environment for the human mind to evolve in its sense of self, its environment, and its place in the global culture, and I don’t think it’s naïve to suggest that there are certain great works of art that should be viewed as tainted goods if they in any way promote destructive ways of thinking and acting, like racism, colonialism, sexism, and the preservation of ignorance. How unusual is it, then, that Marker has that rare quality that doesn’t make him more than a journalist as it makes him more of a journalist than his colleagues – the ability to find, extract, reflect upon, and use as the binding element of his theses, the elusive poetic quality, the vital force, of the persons, places, and things he sees. —Senses of Cinema