Chris Marker has long been known in film circles as one of the most delightfully enigmatic figures in French cinema. In the last years of his life, he didn’t like to be photographed and would often distribute photos or cartoonish animations of his cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, in his place. Despite this reclusive facade, Marker’s films are strikingly personal portraits of his world as he experienced it. Marker died last year and the Harvard Film Archive (HFA) is honoring his memory by screening more than 30 of his incredible films through Dec. 16.
Marker’s most famous film is certainly the sci-fi short “La Jet?e” (1962). The protagonist is a man in a future dystopia whose forced time traveling is overwhelmed by a hauntingly fleeting memory from his childhood that he hopes to understand. The film is almost entirely composed of ephemeral images: still photographs accompanied by sound effects and voiceover. Yet, despite being known for “La Jet?e,” Marker was mainly a director of documentaries and mutant documentaries known as personal essay films — a form that he pioneered.
Watching a Marker documentary gives a glimpse at what the documentary form — and cinema in general — has the potential to be. How many times have recent documentaries followed the same formula — interviews with expert talking heads interspersed with archival footage to make sure viewers understand exactly what’s going on? Marker recognized that documentaries had to do more than just relate facts in order to be compelling pieces of work. An interesting premise isn’t enough; at its core, a great documentary still has to be a good movie.
In Marker’s great pure documentary “Le Joli Mai” (1963), various Parisians are interviewed after the end of the Algerian War, between France and its former colony. It was the first month of peace in almost eight years, and Marker was eager to know what these people were thinking as the fighting concluded. Marker’s subjects spoke frequently about memory, and while this might have been enough for an anthropological piece, Marker pushed the work to another level. He took this raw material and expanded it, focusing on what happiness means even as political unrest continues. Yet Marker’s political engagement never meant disengaging from his poetic side, and “Le Joli Mai” is as visually beautiful as any film he ever made.
But Marker could drift to the other end of the spectrum too — toward lyrical impressionism — as he did in his great essay film “Sans Soleil” (1983). Like many of his essay films, “Sans Soleil” is almost a collage of thoughts and memories filmed either by Marker himself or appropriated from other sources. And, like thoughts, the subject matter of the film constantly shifts. “Sans Soleil” might seem like a travelogue since it’s filled with footage from Marker’s trips to Japan and West Africa. But there are far too many asides and digressions for it to be quite that simple. The best of these cinematic detours involves a layover in San Francisco to pay homage to Alfred Hitchcock’s “Vertigo” (1958). Marker’s densely edited images mix the memories of a world traveler with the visions of a future time traveler, which ultimately feel like “La Jet?e” in documentary form. To unify all his diverse images, Marker adds his trademark personal first-person voiceover, with a nameless woman reading from fictional letters written by a man named Sandor Krasna — an imaginary cameraman.
Marker’s colleague Jean-Luc Godard once said, “All great fiction films tend toward the documentary just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction.” Essentially, the ethics of truth-telling and the aesthetics of beautiful filmmaking are just two sides of the same coin. To the filmmakers behind purely content-based documentaries, here is the lesson to learn from Marker: you can either lecture at an audience or teach them by exploring themes through a personal lens. Watching a Marker film, you will be forced to think and learn, but the experience will also cause viewers to feel deep emotions and ponder unanswerable mysteries.
Alongside his numerous other great works, “Le Joli Mai” plays at the HFA on Dec. 1 and “Sans Soleil” plays on Dec. 7. This November and December, Marker dominates the Boston area, with MIT’s List Visual Arts Center hosting a comprehensive exhibition of Marker’s non-film work in almost every other artistic medium and the Max Wasserman Forum on Contemporary Art at MIT also honoring the filmmaker’s work. The HFA itself is hosting a free panel discussion on Nov. 14 on the importance of Marker’s work in addition to the retrospective. But no matter when you wander into one of the screenings at the Harvard Film Archive, the experience will surely confirm the power of the documentary form once and for all.
