Chris Marker’ Political Cinema

Chris Marker’s work is bound with rethinking questions of political history and the philosophy of time. He creates novel ways to look at global temporality and political activity through his art. He is mainly the documentarist who questions, how could we recognize authentic historical moments with individual, seemingly insignificant, yet time-preserving pieces of our culture? Events that he witnessed by artistic activity and through artistic representation, are building links between documents and their audience. The documentary cinema not only represents fragments from the political past, it also intervenes in our thinking, our understanding of political history, and the political meaning of time.As a consequence, it has the effect of producing knowledge in cultural, artistic and theoretical spheres. Cinema has the potentiality to reflect on controversial images of history and the political world. Chris Marker is especially interested in transitional societies, and his films also represent cultural and political differences. For instance, in 1967, Marker organised a collective project to protest America’s involvement with Vietnam, the film is called Loin du Vietnam, a specific approach to political film-making that continues in his four-hour montage film, Le fond de l’airest rouge (The Base of the Air is Red, 1977). Since 1973 Marker had been working with a variety of political issues such as Chilean refugees, the feminist movement, sexual liberation and ecological questions. Marker has made cinematic portraits of, Akira Kurasawa, Christo, Tarkowsky and Simone Signoret. His film Le Tombeuxd’Alexandre (1993) was prompted by Alexander Medvedkin’s death. In the late 1970s Marker worked on the photo-film Les depays and finally, Sans Soleil, 1982, which received the British Film Institute award in 1983. Both of the films play with the juxtaposition of image and commentary. Images do not only illustrate the text, nor does the text comment on the images; one has to take them in ‘disorder’ or just as individual narratives, happening in the dialogue within the cinematic time and space. The cinematic witness portrays the position of a witness as someone who is present, and thus shares the presence of the artist and his/her experiences. This art of witnessing may testify from personal observations, but has a larger effect in extending individual experiences to a global audience and global resistance of politics. In my presentation, I will mainly discusses the documentary films Les statues meurentaussi (The statues also die) and Sans Soleil(Sunless) .