Chris Marker Wrote

In the mid-twentieth century in Paris, a group of young rabble-rousers, disappointed with the staid nature of highbrow French cinema, started doing two things. They started to write about cinema in journals and magazines and they started to make their own films. In fact, if you know anything about the French New Wave and its major figures, it is likely this: that the young filmmakers who shook up French (and global) cinema culture in the 1960s were film critics before they were filmmakers. The most commercially successful group of filmmakers in this movement—Jean-Luc Godard, Éric Rohmer, François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jacques Rivette—published most of their writing the film journal Cahiers du cinéma, which Rohmer edited 1957–1963. These “right bank” filmmakers challenged France’s “tradition of quality,” championed a set of American and European directors working within the restrictive Hollywood studio system as “auteurs,” and developed a provocative film language aimed at French youth culture that borrowed from Hollywood and broke with mainstream French cinema conventions. Both critics and filmmakers, these right bank directors drew a deliberate line of inference between their provocative film criticism and their own films. Their central manifesto, François Truffaut’s 1954 essay Une certaine tendance du cinéma français, became a driving force for the decisions that animated their filmmaking practice. This connection, between critical writing and filmmaking, is easy for English-speaking film scholars to trace because much of the writing in those 1950s issues of Cahiers du cinéma has already been translated into English. Even faster than their critical writing, the films of the right bank directors were subtitled and imported into global cinema culture. Lauded as conquering heroes for defeating stuffiness and inspiring a generation of rebellious filmmakers around the world, the right bank was quickly accepted by Anglophone cinema culture. The infectious spirit of the movement was globally influential, inspiring dozens of upstart film movements that would call themselves New Waves in homage to the Nouvelle Vague.

But these right bank filmmakers were not the only cinematic provocateurs in Paris in the period, and their “left bank” counterparts represented a less homogeneous group than the core Cahiers du cinéma cohort. Older and more interested in literature, politics, reportage, visual arts, and experimentation, the left bank’s association with each other and with the more famous members of the right bank is more difficult to nail down. And unlike the 1950s issues of Cahiersdu cinéma, much of their own film writing has remained untranslated. While the pioneering spirit of the French New Wave is often directly associated with the critical anti-establishment perspective that filled the pages of Parisian film journals in the 1950s, the early critical writing of one of the movement’s most revered figures—the left bank iconoclast Chris Marker—has been largely unavailable in English translation until now. Steven Ungar (editor) and Sally Shafto (translator) seek to correct that in their volume of Marker translations, Chris Marker: Early Film Writings. Their collection is focused on Marker’s film writing 1948–1955, before he started making his own movies with the short Sunday in Peking (1956) and his first feature Letter from Siberia (1957), two films that established the playful essay-film style that would become his signature.

If a critical attitude toward mainstream film conventions, intertextual referentiality (with an embrace of particular elements and figures of Hollywood cinema), and a wry, writerly voice are key elements of this generation of critics-turned-filmmakers, then there is likely no figure more representative than Marker. This is true even though, as Ungar notes in his introduction, Marker is often seen as an outlier to the larger New Wave, “simultaneously present while also slightly marginal to his era, as much observer and archivist as participant and memorialist” (Ungar 2024, xvii). His pioneering cinematic style, embracing self-referential voiceover and meta-analytical editing of documentary footage, influenced filmmakers from the French New Wave to New German Cinema to the American avant garde. His work even inspired mainstream Hollywood movies, most prominently Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995), a direct adaptation of Marker’s La Jetée (1963), starring Brad Pitt. Marker was likely the most elusive member of this cadre of loosely associated filmmakers: he shunned photographs of himself, he erroneously and playfully claimed that he was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia rather than the well-to-do Paris suburb where he grew up, and he has always been (deliberately) mysterious, writing under a variety pen names, including but not limited to Chris Marker, and often preferring to be represented on screen by images of his favorite animals, including his cat Guillaume or an owl. Where did this figure come from? What was his role within the gang of upstart filmmakers that took movie theaters by storm in the early 1960s? He represents something of a contradiction: Marker is a filmmaker known both for his achingly personal style of documentary film, yet he remains playfully elusive about his own identity, almost never appearing visually in his own films even though his personal, authorly voiceover is more or less omnipresent. How does such an enigma come to be? Did he appear on the scene fully formed? Ungar and Shafto’s book makes the case that the best way to understand Marker’s genesis as a cinematic iconoclast is by reading his early film writing. As Ungar puts it, “even the most ardent of Marker’s fans have yet to contend with the full import of a simple truth: Chris Marker wrote” (Ungar, xii).

Beyond Ungar’s introduction, this collection includes twenty articles that Marker wrote on film 1948–1955, nine published in the French literary magazine Esprit, five in Cahiers du cinéma, and six in collected volumes published by the postwar activist movement Peuple et Culture.1 This collection is not exhaustive in terms of Marker’s output as a writer. Marker’s writing in this period included “a play, a novel, short stories, a literary monograph, poetry, radio scripts, film commentaries, translations, and roughly one hundred articles, essays, and book entries” (Ungar, xii). And even among his contributions to Esprit, the French literary magazine that originally published many of the essays in this volume, “Marker’s film writings make up less than 10 percent of his total contributions” (Ungar, xxxiii). Yet Ungar and Shafto argue that this period is essential for understanding Marker the writer, and through him Marker the filmmaker. As they evocatively quote the subject of one of Marker’s documentaries: “His Esprit writings make of him what he will be.”2 It is clear that for both Ungar and Shafto, these early Esprit essays are essential to understand Marker’s development—as Shafto puts it in her translator’s introduction, “This volume is a compilation of his [Marker’s] twenty postwar essays on film in French that begin and end with his articles for Esprit” (Shafto 2024, lxvii). Only two of these essays have never been translated into English before, and collected in this volume they draw a clear trajectory of Marker’s development from literary and film critic to a generational voice.

To focus on one particular example that illustrates the value of this collection, this volume includes a brief essay that Marker published in 1948, titled “The Imperfect of the Subjective” (L’imparfait du subjectif in French). The essay lambasts the film Lady in the Lake (1947), an adaptation of a Raymond Chandler novel directed by and starring American leading man Robert Montgomery. Even the most devoted cinephile has likely never heard of Lady in the Lake; while not particularly notable in film history, it bears the dubious honor of being the first “subjective” film shot primarily from the first-person perspective of its protagonist, a visual mode that would later be made ubiquitous in first person shooter video games. As the title of the essay suggests, Marker finds this formal approach insufficient to actually construct a subjective cinema, but the punny title also demonstrates the playful wit that is a signature of Marker’s film voiceovers. As Ungar explains it in his introduction: “the French word imparfait is both an adjective (‘imperfect’) and a noun referring to the past indicative tense. Marker plays on these two meanings by echoing the more familiar imparfait du subjunctif (imperfect subjunctive), an outdated verb form whose usage is increasingly rare” (Ungar, xliv).

Marker’s double-entendre title highlights what he sees as the mode’s insufficiencies, both by calling Montgomery’s attempt at “subjective” cinema “imperfect” and by thematically linking the film’s insufficiencies to an antiquated way of thinking and speaking. But what makes his critique so interesting and valuable for Marker devotees is the way it prefigures the concerns that animate Marker’s own films. Marker analyzes, in accessible and personal detail, the ways in which the schlocky first-person formal approach of Lady in the Lake fails to create any approximation of legitimate subjectivity. He critiques the woodenness of the camera movement which “moves around like a good movie camera” but which lacks the fluidity and chaotic unfocused movement of real human perception (Marker 1948, 12). “The hero in Lady in the Lake never once sees his feet” (Marker 1948, 13). He writes about how the potential for subjective cinema is limited by the source material, the structure, and the impersonal quality that is the result of its central formal constraint: “[A] novel’s characters can always describe their thoughts and feelings. In contrast, saying ‘I’ in the cinema, with the immediate reduction in expressive possibilities that this signifies . . . would amount instead to the hero’s depersonalization” (Marker 1948, 14).

And most interestingly of all, Marker seems to take the film’s claims personally; he seems to be legitimately interested in a truly subjective cinema and to be outraged at Lady in the Lake’s empty claims about constructing one. Marker sees glimmers of possibility in films that grasp for subjectivity in other ways, eschewing the pedestrian schtick of Montgomery’s first-person camera: a particular smoke-wreathed closeup of Dick Powell in Murder, My Sweet (1944), the “universe of spun glass” that Fritz Lang utilizes in The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) to illustrate the madman’s descent, or the dizzying mirror maze climax from Orson Welles’s The Lady from Shanghai (1947) (Marker 1948, 13–14). But Marker still yearns for a truly subjective cinema, which Lady in the Lake fails to actualize. “A true subjective film is yet to be made,” writes Marker in one of his most wistful moments of reflection (Marker 1948, 15).

Understanding this as an aspirational essay about cinema’s possibilities, rather than simply a takedown of a piece of overhyped middlebrow kitsch, it’s easy to see much of Marker’s own filmmaking as an attempt to enact what he sees as lacking in Montgomery’s film. Many of the elements that make Marker’s films unique—personal reflection, the editing mode that flits between people, times, and places like real human vision and memory, and the personal construction of subjectivity through a collision of often incongruous image and sound—can be seen as attempts to solve the problems that he identifies in Lady in the Lake. Nine years later, in his first feature film, Letter from Siberia, Marker would construct a sequence that made a literal attempt at subjective cinema. In Letter from Siberia Marker shows the same series of documentary shots of life in Yakutsk several times, paired in each iteration with different forms of propagandistic narration, demonstrating how our perception of cinematic reality is itself subjective. Far from the trite woodenness of the first-person perspective, this politically-charged and playfully wry actualization of the Kuleshov effect encourages viewers to challenge their own assumption about the indexical reality presented on screen. The Kuleshov effect, first demonstrated in the early twentieth century by filmmaker Lev Kuleshov, showed that editing two unrelated shots together could change the meaning of both images. Kuleshov proved this point by pairing the same relatively expressionless shot of Russian silent film actor Ivan Mosjoukine with various symbolically significant images, changing the audience’s understanding of Mosjoukine’s bland expression based on each pairing. Marker’s repeated use of the same documentary footage and playful agitprop political narration in Letter from Siberia dramatizes the same effect on an intellectual level, highlighting for the audience the ways in which seemingly objective journalistic practices have a necessarily subjective propagandistic function. Marker’s desire for a “true subjective film” seems to motivate his filmmaking throughout his development as an artist, enacted most fully in his 1983 masterpiece, Sans Soleil, a film that presents a complex and intricate construction of memory and subjectivity.

Other essays in this collection touch on more of the major themes present throughout Marker’s films and offer fascinating (and sometimes surprising) insight into Marker’s cinematic taste as a film-viewer. For example, another essay on cinephilia, film pedagogy, and cine-clubs includes this gem: “cinema’s destiny is not as an escape, but as an analysis of reality” (Marker 1949, 23). Marker writes in these essays about major films from the interwar avant garde, Entr’acte (1924) Un chien andalou (1929) Blood of a Poet (1930), and classics of art cinema and Hollywood from The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) to Orpheus (1950) to On the Waterfront (1954) but he also writes extensively about less devoutly canonized works, from the aforementioned Lady in the Lake (1947) to Czech stop-motion puppeteer Jiří Trnka’s 1950 feature Prince Bayaya or the 1950 United Productions of America cartoon Gerald McBoing-Boing, a film he calls “as pure and unchanging as our memories” (Marker 1951, 53). Marker’s eclectic and often exhilarating prose compares favorably to the singular narrative voiceover that is often the driving force of his own films. His evident cinephilia is on display in these essays, whether in a three-page paean to a little-known film or one of his broader assessments of national film industries and global film culture. And what is staggering is the sheer number of films that he references—nearly 200 within the twenty essays collected in this volume. More explicitly than in his own films, this collection of essays tells the story of why Marker became a filmmaker in the first place. He wasn’t merely a poet who wandered into a sound studio, but a devoted cultural critic, social activist, and above all, cinephile who caught the filmmaking bug in the film-obsessed 1950s Paris.

But beyond his own cinephilia, these essays chronicle the development of the unmistakable literary voice of Marker’s film voiceovers, wry, playful, and always revealing. What is most apparent in his critical voice is his unshakable ability to connect seemingly trivial personal observations to the major forces of history—an ability that is on full display in his assessment of a woman’s gaze toward the camera at a Cape Verde market in Sans Soleil just as it is in his clear-eyed assessments of German and Mexican cinema industries or his critiques of the gimmicky 3-D Hollywood movies of the early 1950s. If the most characteristic element of Marker’s films is his voice, then this collection demonstrates its clearly evident source in his critical film writing in the 1940s and 50s.

If anything falls short in this collection it is that the text does not include more explicit social context for Marker’s work. Ungar and Shafto have curated a collection of writings that showcase the development of Marker’s literary voice, but as a tool for understanding how Marker fit into film culture of the 1950s in Paris, this volume is lacking. There are occasional references to other filmmakers or forces within the French film scene, but for the most part Marker’s introspective lens is focused on his own perspective and on the films-as-texts. Fellow left bank collaborators and filmmakers Agnes Varda and Alain Resnais are barely mentioned, and even Godard and Truffaut are only referenced in the introduction. Ungar’s introduction is similarly myopically focused on Marker. That is a strength for those interested in the particularities of Marker’s work as a writer and filmmaker, but a weakness for readers interested in a broader synthetic understanding of Marker’s relationship to his contemporaries or to the hundreds of filmmakers influenced by his innovative essay films.

Yet that critique may not be totally fair—this is not a book that aims to offer a comprehensive history of Parisian film culture in the 1950s. As a collection of Marker’s early film writing and as a history of his own intellectual and creative development, this volume is excellent. It illustrates the point that Ungar and Shafto set out to make; it demonstrates the key concerns that motivate Marker’s filmmaking in the critical essays he wrote during the years before he became a filmmaker. This collection is a valuable resource, yet it only represents the tip of the iceberg of Marker’s writing and editing, which, as Ungar emphasizes, he continued throughout his long career as a filmmaker; hopefully its publication will lead to further translations of Marker’s writing. Chris Marker: Early Film Writings is a must-read for any student of Marker’s films, hoping to better understand his central concerns, valuable but limited for those interested in the French New Wave more broadly, and an important example for anyone interested in making their own films or for thinking about expanding the possibilities of cinema beyond the conventional constraints of the mainstream studio model.