Birth name
     Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve
Date of birth
     29 July 1921, Ulan Bator, Mongolia
Date of death
     29 July 2012, Paris, France

Mini biography

Chris Marker (July 29th, 1921, Ulan Bator, Mongolia )

Chris Marker (born 29 July 1921) is a French writer, photographer, film director, multimedia artist and documentary maker.

His best known films are La jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983) and A.K. (1985), a documentary on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”

Biography

Marker was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, in Ulan Bator, Mongolia, 29 July 1921. (The 1949 edition of Le Ceur Net specifies his birthday as 22 July.) In World War II he joined the Maquis (FTP).

After the war he began to write and make films. He traveled to many socialist countries and documented what he saw in films and books. Les statues meurent aussi (1953) which he codirected with Alain Resnais was one of the first anticolonial films.

Anatole Dauman produced his earliest films of Chris Marker and two more later, Sunday in Peking and Letter from Siberia.

He became known internationally for the short film La jetée (1962). It tells of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects.

La Jetée was the inspiration for Mamoru Oshii's 1987 debut live action feature The Red Spectacles (and, later for, parts of Oshii's 2001 film Avalon as well) and also inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995). It also inspired many of director Mira Nair's shots for the 2003 film The Namesake.

In 1982 Marker completed Sans Soleil, stretching the limits of what could be called a documentary. It is an essay, a montage, mixing pieces of documentary with fiction and philosophical comments, creating an atmosphere of dream and science fiction.

The main themes are Japan, Africa, memory and travel. A sequence in the middle of the film takes place in San Francisco, and heavily references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

Beginning with Sans Soleil, he developed a deep interest in digital technology, which led to his film Level 5 (1996) and Immemory (1998, 2008), an interactive multimedia CD-ROM, produced for the Centre Pompidou (French language version) and from Exact Change (English version).

Marker created a 19 minute multimedia piece in 2005 for The Museum of Modern Art in New York titled Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men which was influenced by T. S. Eliot's poem.

Chris Marker lives in Paris and very rarely grants interviews. When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers a photograph of a cat instead. (Marker was represented in Agnes Varda's 2008 documentary "The Beaches of Agnes" by a cartoon drawing of a cat, speaking in a technologically altered voice.) Marker's own cat is named Guillaume-en-egypte.

In the 2007 Criterion Collection release of La Jetée and Sans Soleil, Marker included a short essay, "Working on a shoestring budget". He confessed to shooting all of Sans Soleil with a silent film camera and recording all the audio on a primitive audio cassette recorder.

Marker also reminds the reader that only one short scene in La Jetée is of a moving image, as Marker could only borrow a movie camera for one afternoon while working on the film.


Complete filmography

    * Olympia 52 (1952)
    * Les Statues meurent aussi (1953 with Alain Resnais)
    * Dimanche à Pekin (1956)
    * Lettre de Sibérie (1957)
    * Les Astronautes (1959 with Walerian Borowczyk)
    * Description d'un combat (1960)
    * ¡Cuba Sí! (1961)
    * La jetée (1962)
    * Le joli mai (1963, 2006 re-cut)
    * Le Mystère Koumiko (1965)
    * Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966)
    * Loin du Vietnam (1967)
    * Rhodiacéta (1967)
    * La Sixième face du pentagone (1968 with Reichenbach)
    * Cinétracts (1968)
    * À bientôt, j'espère (1968 with Marret)
    * On vous parle du Brésil: Tortures (1969)
    * Jour de tournage (1969)
    * Classe de lutte (1969)
    * On vous parle de Paris: Maspero, les mots ont un sens (1970)
    * On vous parle du Brésil: Carlos Marighela (1970)
    * La Bataille des dix millions (1971)
    * Le Train en marche (1971)
    * On vous parle de Prague: le deuxième procès d'Artur London (1971)
    * Vive la baleine (1972)
    * L'Ambassade (1973)
    * On vous parle du Chili: ce que disait Allende (1973 with Littin)
    * Puisqu'on vous dit que c'est possible (1974)
    * La Solitude du chanteur de fond (1974)
    * La Spirale (1975)
    * Le Fond de l'air est rouge (1977, 1993 re-cut, 2008 2nd re-cut)[2]
    * A Grin Without a Cat (1977)
    * Quand le siècle a pris formes (1978)
    * Junkiopa (1981)
    * Sans Soleil (1983)
    * 2084 (1984)
    * From Chris to Christo (1985)
    * Matta (1985)
    * A.K. (1985)
    * Eclats (1986)
    * Mémoires pour Simone (1986)
    * Tokyo Days (1988)
    * Spectre (1988)
    * L'héritage de la chouette (1989)
    * Bestiaire (three short video haiku) (1990)
          o Bestiaire 1. Chat écoutant la musique
          o Bestiaire 2. An owl is An owl is an owl
          o Bestiaire 3. Zoo Piece
    * Getting away with it (1990)
    * Berlin 1990 (1990)
    * Détour Ceausescu (1991)
    * Théorie des ensembles (1991)
    * Coin fenètre (1992)
    * Azulmoon (1992)
    * Le Tombeau d'Alexandre aka The Last Bolshevik (1992)
    * Le 20 heurs dans les camps (1993)
    * SLON Tango (1993)
    * Bullfight in Okinawa (1994)
    * Eclipse (1994)
    * Haiku (1994)
          o Haiku 1. Petite Ceinture
          o Haiku 2. Chaika
          o Haiku 3. Owl Gets in Your Eyes
    * Casque bleu (1995)
    * Silent Movie (1995)
    * Level Five (1997)
    * Un maire au Kosovo (2000)
    * One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (2000)
    * Le facteur sonne toujours cheval (2001)
    * Avril inquiet (2001)
    * Le souvenir d'un avenir (with Bellon 2003)
    * Chats Perchés (2004) - a documentary about M. Chat street art
    * Leila Attacks (2006)

-- Wikipedia

Director - Selected filmography

1. A.K. (1985)
   
2. Sans Soleil | Sunless (1983)
   
3. Grin Without a Cat | Le fond de l'air est rouge (1977)
   
4. La jetée | The Jetty (1962)