R.I.P. Chris Marker

July 30, 2012 by Emilie Friedlander

Word on the Internet is that the French film maker Chris Marker has died, just one day after his 91st birthday. He wasn't the kind of cultural figure who made headlines on the regular, but he made the kind of movies that college professors show first-year film students in order to get them thinking differently about storytelling. (At least, that's how I found out about him).

From his 1968 cult classic La Jetée, which inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys and was constructed almost entirely from still images, to 1983's Sans Soleil, a globe-trotting mediation on memory and geographical place, the notoriously reclusive philosopher/auteur seemed to point endlessly to the interrelation between photographic images and the human faculty of recollection-- the idea being that both attempt more or less successfully to preserve that which has already ceased to exist. To commemorate the life and work of one of film history's most tragically un-sung out-the-box thinkers, we thought we'd post all 30 minutes of La Jetée. (Though by all means, please check out the much higher quality Criterion Release).