Chris Marker’s Imaginary Japan

Petite Planète: Japon (edited by Chris Marker, 1959).

In the hundreds of images in Staring Back, Chris Marker’s 2007 exhibition and corresponding book, the artist captures the gazes of strangers, protestors, recognizable figures, and even animals during his travels far and wide. The critic Brian Dillon wrote to Marker with a request to discuss the photographs but, when he found Marker “crushed under [his] present grind” in his Paris studio, he was left to stare back into these faces and see what he found. Responding to a series of photographs of metro riders, Dillon considered Ezra Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” a whole world of observations cohabitating between these fourteen words:

    The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

    Petals on a wet, black bough.

Not long after the piece was published, Dillon received an email. Marker wrote that he had Pound’s poem in mind when organizing the book and exhibition but ultimately scrapped the idea of using it as an epigraph, a decision he ascribed to overthinking. He wrote that he was “thunderstruck” upon seeing these words in Dillon’s piece, a sensation that offered him something like hope: “So it was true, after all, there existed such a thing as poetry, whose ways are by nature different from the ways of the world, that makes one see what was kept hidden, and hear what was kept silent.”

Coincidences and correspondences attract Chris Marker, who spent his 91 years traveling around the world with eyes wide—camera, tape recorder, and pen in hand—collecting uncanny connections and arranging them into a kind of poetry. Often, what resulted was hard to define. On top of his work as a literary columnist, publisher, novelist, graphic designer, activist, photographer, and filmmaker, Marker was a perpetual inventor, most notably of the essay film. Upon seeing Letter from Siberia (1958), his first feature in this mode, the film critic André Bazin attempted to define Marker’s subversion of the documentary form: “I would say that the primary material is intelligence, that its immediate means of expression is language, and that the image only intervenes in the third position, in reference to this verbal intelligence.” Marker’s cinema is one of convergence, where spoken narration at once complicates and illuminates the images it carries forward. This new form suited Marker for, as the poet Susan Howe wrote in Sorting Facts, or Nineteen Ways of Looking at Marker, “so many hyphens and parentheses surround him.” At these in-between junctions where words conspire to uncover new meaning, his multidimensional work takes form.

Letter from Siberia (Chris Marker, 1958).

“I’m writing you this letter from a distant land,” begins Letter from Siberia, in which an unnamed narrator writes to an unknown recipient from under a birch tree, remembering that the Russian word for “birch” is also the word for “love.” He writes, he remembers: he offers his memories in the form of a letter, written to you, his hopeful companion on his journey. Much of Marker’s work is conveyed as an offering, an encouragement to those touched by his entangled words and images to remember something of their own pasts. Marker preferred to reveal himself in this way, ever generous and sly, often denying interviews and refusing to be photographed, responding to inquiries with an image of the cartoon cat Guillaume-en-Égypte in his place. He preferred to leave it all to the work. 

Over twenty years later, in Sans soleil (1983)—a roving masterpiece—he distances himself further with a slight change to the mode of address: “He wrote me that in the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats,” the voice of Alexandra Stewart croons while alternating between summaries and recitation of the hypnotic letters of a fictional cameraman, Sandor Krasna. (Stewart narrates the English version of the film, which Marker also had translated into German and Japanese, in addition to the original French, preferring his viewers experience his work in the language with which they are most comfortable.) This shift in perspective heightens the associations that build in his letters, allowing us to wander through the connections and collect our own. She recalls his experience of seeing a couple at the Gotokuji Temple blessing their runaway cat, Tora, only to remember later that the code name for the attack on Pearl Harbor was “Tora, Tora, Tora.” He prays for the lost feline, through her lilting voice, “Cat, wherever you are, peace be with you.” For coincidence is a means of correspondence, after all.

Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1983).

While the footage comprising Sans soleil was filmed in many far-off places, from Guinea-Bissau to San Francisco, the majority of the 100-minute film is given to visions of Japan, a country whose presence can be felt in so much of Marker’s work. Geography is a useful lens when attempting to make sense of Marker; as he instructs in the liner notes to his CD-ROM memoir, Immemory (1997), “a more modest and perhaps more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography.” Marker illustrates his memories through stacks of texts, photographs, sound clips, QuickTime videos, and other digitally stained ephemera from his travels, built using the bygone HyperCard software by which he was so enthralled. The appearance of his mnemonic heirlooms is triggered by the user’s clicks through each organized “Zone,” summoning a choose-your-own-adventure progression that meanders through a map drawn from a life of associations, where logic gives way to memory’s curves. It’s in the labyrinth of Immemory where I first came upon a trio of essays about his time spent “in a zone of silence amid sound, in the taste of eternity that we’ll call Japan.” At once keenly observant and fantastical, the writing is pure Marker. An explorer would lose hours sorting through his collection of eternity where these words appear. You can find them in the “Photography Zone.”

As with much of the materials collected in Immemory, these reflections appeared elsewhere first. The original French texts were published as the photo-essay Le Dépays (1982) accompanied by a collection of black-and-white photographs of Japan, taken and arranged by Marker. The original copies are now hard to come by, but The Film Desk has now published a reproduction of Le Dépays, featuring Marker’s own English translations from his archives at Cinémathèque française. The book is a near facsimile of the original, preserving Marker’s words in a continuous column of pronounced sans-serif text. The three pieces, each followed by a series of photographs, sometimes anticipate and at other times contradict the bracing images of the sleeping commuters, advertisements, street dancers, shrines, and cats that fill his Japan. Marker would likely disapprove of my use of “anticipate” here: a “Reader Warning” at the beginning of the book instructs us not to place too much emphasis on the correlation between his words and images, concluding, “One should therefore accept them in their disorder, simplicity, and division in two, as with everything else in Japan.” But I see his reflections working toward the images the way a spell of déjà vu anticipates a memory—that dizzying sensation of perceiving the familiar in something new.

And Le Dépays is familiar, too. The photographs were taken between September 1979 and January 1981, during the filming of Sans soleil. Despite this simultaneity, photographs in the book appear in sharp contrast to the colorful and hypnotic images that comprise the film, especially those saturated through the synthesizer of Hayao Yamaneko (another Marker alias), rendering historical images as “affected by the moss of time.” Marker’s rich black-and-white snapshots are instead straightforward and often searching; they are the photographs of a traveler intent on illustrating that ineffable realization that a moment has become a part of you. Le Dépays begins to make clear just how much space Japan occupies in Marker’s world.

Le Dépays (Chris Marker, 1982). Image courtesy of The Film Desk.

In the first sentence, Marker sets the tone: “Insomnia of the Tokyo dawn.” And the words that follow record the sensations of days and nights absorbing Japan, overstimulated, occasionally seeing double. He observes the tangible fixtures of Tokyo (of the city’s web of trains, “Yamanote green, Tozai blue, Marunouchi lacquer-red, color and name forever joined”) and superimposes them onto his recent memories. He writes of the intermingling of past and present, of finding coincidences in unexpected places, such as the spontaneous memory of a cat in Paris named Whisky, who would manifest by cat-magic when called, that summoned Whisky’s Japanese double on a nearby roof: “At the moment when you take the photo, the one on the right, the black one, gives you a look so exactly like that of the cat Whisky, at the other end of the world, in another life, that you tremble for an instant and—for once—you approve of having once written that the past is like a foreign country: it’s not a question of distance, but of crossing a frontier.” Again we find Marker in these pages, ever keen in his mnemonic offerings, assigning a new mode of address. The texts in Le Dépays alternate between first and second person, with Marker suggesting his memories with a hypnotist’s finesse. His Japan is now my Japan, but what to make of this remembered place? And who is he, inventor of this land of coincidences? In the book’s third section, he addresses the disorientation and how he both carried it with him and left part of himself there. Of the separation, he considers how “one changes, one is never the same, one should have to use the novelistic ‘you’ for an entire lifetime. But I know that if I were to return to Japan tomorrow, I would find the other again, I would be that other.”

After each scroll of text, the images filter in, one per page. The first passage ends and, as I attempt to heed our author’s “Reader Warning,” I’m drawn to a photograph of identically dressed twins seated together on the subway. I recall the twins I read about just a minute ago—I can’t help it—who helped a lost foreigner find his way to the Gotokuji Temple in the pouring rain. The twins share a spread with a photograph of a lone apple among rows of maneki neko, undoubtedly from Gotokuji, provoking in me an obvious afterimage. Where disorder was promised, I instead read into the images a sly coincidence born of Marker’s arrangement. Perhaps these are different twins, encountered by Marker in a different lifetime. Among the sequence of etched symbols in the streets, of the many photographs of remote subway cars that lulled their riders into dreams, I am invited into a world of appearances and left to find my way. It’s only when I come to the photograph of the cat who resembles Whisky looking back at me that I think of other words from Marker, written from another time entirely, and feel sure in our shared belief, “Coincidences are the pen names of grace for those who wouldn’t recognize it otherwise.” Le Dépays unfolds in this rhythm for those who welcome it: anticipating, disorienting, embracing, image after word after image.

Le Dépays (Chris Marker, 1982). Image courtesy of The Film Desk.

Back in Immemory, Guillaume-en-Égypte leads me to a peculiar moment where Marker’s likeness balloons from the center of a photograph, as if viewed from a space shuttle. He captions this hypermedia creation, “Where the author, safe in a hyperspatial bubble, observes the city of Tokyo and its inhabitants with the amused benevolence of a Martian who has seen more of the same—until after a while he realizes he hasn’t seen quite so many like that.” To see our guide offer up his image like this, so foreign and curious, startled me in the same way I was startled to see him reflected in the wet, black bough of the Paris Metro in a photograph from his 2011 Passengers series, captured with a spy glass camera. There he is, if you’ll believe me, staring through a cloud of Yamanote green.

I felt the need to rewatch Sans soleil when first flipping through Le Dépays, to see just how directly one work might reflect the other—not so much in a specific setting, but in the sensations their images evoke. I’m always surprised by how new some of the moments feel when seeing them for the dozenth time, and I find new ways to be stunned by certain familiar instances when image and text collide. The artist Paul Chan once remarked on the tendency to lose consciousness while watching one of Marker’s essay films. It wasn’t that he’d fallen asleep, overtaken by boredom, but that the film simply knocked him out by eliciting so many things—politics, criticism, emotion, humor, rigor, all of it—all at once. I easily imagine this sensation, which made this particular rewatch so strange. For one, I was startled to remember (to experience for the first time?) all of those silences that punctuate the film in the form of the narration’s pauses, of the freeze frames on faces that follow, always staring back. As the film holds its breath I see clearly, if only for a moment, Le Dépays enacted in its very fabric. A silence I hope the book holds for me, for the next time.

The Koumiko Mystery (Chris Marker, 1965).

Marker directs his camera toward one of cinema’s most alluring faces in The Koumiko Mystery (1965), filmed during his first trip to Japan in 1964. He was sent to Japan to record the Summer Olympics, but found Koumiko Muraoka instead. A French speaker born in Manchuria, she is a perfect Marker companion as he follows her around the streets of Tokyo discussing identity, aesthetics, culture, faces, and even cats, as he attempts to take the city in through her eyes. Marker, in a rare occurrence, narrates the first half of the film through a series of questions and observations directed at his magnetic guide. “She hasn’t read Borges but knows it,” Marker recalls, his voice bold yet lazy besides her hesitant French. “She knows that she doesn’t make the story but rather, she is the story.” She laughs at his fascination with what she sees as ordinary customs, when all he sees is poetry. Panning from a building-length poster of Jacques Demy’s newly released The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) to crowds of umbrella-clad pedestrians making their way through the rainy streets of Tokyo, scored by Michel Legrand’s dreary melody, Marker transmutes pleasure through this déjà vu. Beyond this rainy interlude, the film features original music by the great Tōru Takemitsu in their first collaboration, as he would go on to score Marker’s peculiar and frenzied short Tokyo Days (1986) and his documentary A.K. (1985), which follows filmmaker Akira Kurosawa on the set of his epic feature Ran (1985), also scored by Takemitsu. Marker’s devotion to his collaborators speaks to his Left Bank sensibilities, but a detour in Immemory makes clear his reverence for the musician. In the year of his death, Marker memorializes his loss: “There are so few great musicians that beyond the hole in a friend’s heart, their death leaves a greater gap than that of a filmmaker or writer. A great zone of silence.”

Silence, in Chris Marker’s work, always arrives just in time. In the latter half of The Koumiko Mystery, the camera zooms in on Koumiko’s eyes, all-consuming. Change is near. Marker’s voice is replaced by intertitles that ask a series of questions to which she responds. The questionnaire, written by Marker back in Paris, allows Koumiko to be less candid—more introspective—as she muses on all that she has yet to know. In an interview Koumiko reflects on writing the answers in Japanese before translating them into French and recording herself in a quiet room. This shift imbues the film with a great sense of longing, a blending of fact and fiction. In her comprehensive Marker study, Memories of the Future, Catherine Lupton observes that this shift renders Koumiko as “a projection from the past, a collection of memories on film that the narrator has carried back with him to Paris. The Koumiko we see and hear in the film is pitched exactly between her own reality and her status as Marker’s ghost-guide to his own imaginary Japan, and it is ultimately impossible to extricate one from the other.” The Koumiko we meet is already a remnant of the past, available to us only through this offering. Her last words recorded for Marker: “It reaches me.”

The Koumiko Mystery (Chris Marker, 1965).

It reaches me. Like the waves of history Koumiko speaks of, Marker’s works are often imparted rhythmically, where the same images and ideas return in different forms. In the early 1960s, Marker began reimagining (and sometimes, purely inventing) the films of his past by publishing the narrated texts, film stills, and his own reflective commentary in a book simply titled Commentaires (1961), followed up with Commentaires 2 in 1967. In these pages, films from Statues Also Die (1953) to ¡Cuba Si! (1961) to If I Had Four Dromedaries (1966) were illustrated anew, laid out in the unique style characteristic of Marker and fellow Éditions du Seuil designer Juliette Caputo, who collaborated on the popular Petite Planète travel guide series under the same publisher’s umbrella. The pair’s distinct style offered unlikely image groupings, from film stills and photographs to etchings and advertisements, with bold and varied typefaces that manage to hold so much stimuli along with the space to take it in. (Designer Richard Hollis is said to have based his design for John Berger's Ways of Seeing on these volumes.) Koumiko appears in here, too, her face changing shape throughout the pages, the Japan she sees scattered all around her, once again telling us « jusqu'à moi ».

A poster of the complete Petite Planète editions hangs above my desk, each country represented by a woman’s face, their individual gazes bouncing across the room. I’ve just returned from the library, where I flipped through a copy of Japon from 1959. Marker had stopped contributing to the series by this point—he was likely in Siberia during its assembly—and had yet to visit Japan, but I was intent on searching its pages, as I’m sure he must have done. (“A maniac always finds food for his mania,” he taunts in Le Dépays.) The woman on the cover is beaming, her eyes searching onward—the face of happiness. A beautiful portrait, only I look up and realize she isn’t there among the other faces on my wall. Instead, Koumiko’s smirk emerges through the backdrop of a darkened room, from the future.