Chris Marker

Filmmaker, photographer and writer Chris Marker never adhered to the conventions of a particular art form. Each of his films, from La Jetée to Sans Soleil, pushes the boundaries of its medium, merging at times with the essay, political manifesto, personal letter, art installation and even, finally, a computer game.
For Immemory, first published in 1998 (French) and 2002 (English), Marker used a CD-ROM to create a multi-layered, mixed-media memoir. The reader investigates ""zones"" of travel, war, cinema and poetry, navigating through image and text as if physically exploring Marker's memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st-century Remembrance of Things Past, an exploration of the state of memory in our era. With it, Marker both invented a literary form and perfected it, just before the digital format he chose for the experiment was quickly rendered obsolete.
Immemory: Gutenberg Version reinvents this unique work for the printed page, a project the author dreamed up, titled, and began working on with Exact Change before his death. Now finally realized, it brings this seminal work into the present and future through a time-tested, durable format of the past: the book.
Chris Marker (1921–2012) served in the French Resistance, and then the US Air Force, during World War II and worked as a journalist while honing his film career. He received international acclaim with La Jetée in 1962, and became a critical voice in film theory and production as well as a widely admired "cult" artist, a filmmaker's filmmaker.

Illustrated throughout, the book charts Marker's unique commentaries on societies at times of upheaval, from his early writing and photography to his later use of CD-ROM and appropriation of web technology. Integrating his films within the display, it also brings together for the first time all of Marker's multimedia installations.

Alongside a wealth of images that chart Marker's substantial creative output, Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat also explores the filmmaker's shift from word to image, the commissioning of his multimedia installations and the subsequent interplay of media. It includes key essays by the curators Christine van Assche, Chief Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris, writer and film critic Chris Darke, and Whitechapel Gallery curators Magnus Af Petersens (Chief Curator) and Habda Rashid (Assistant Curator); texts by critics Raymond Bellour and Arnaud Lambert; plus the first English translations of two key early writings by Marker, an essay on Jean Cocteau’s film Orphée (1950) and his short story Till the End of Time (1947), which takes place the day after VJ day amidst a torrential rainstorm and features a demobilised soldier subject to apocalyptic visions, anticipating Marker’s most famous film, La Jetée (1962).

Chris Marker (1921-2012), born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in Paris, was a prescient multi-media filmmaker as well as a writer, editor, poet, cartoonist, and activist. Marker completed his first feature film Olympia 52 in 1952 and soon became affiliated with the Left Bank Cinema movement that included filmmakers such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. In 1962 he made his best-known film, La Jetée, which won him an international audience. A great lover of cats, when asked for a photograph of himself he would send a picture of a cat.

Filmmaker, photographer, writer and traveler Chris Marker (1921–2012) never respected the boundaries between genres. His landmark 1962 film La Jetée is made up almost entirely of stills, its one moving image as thrilling as the Lumières’ films must have been for their original audiences. Marker’s films (including the features Sans Soleiland Level Five) continued to stretch the definition of the art, merging at times with the essay, political manifesto, personal letter, art installation, even the computer game. In Immemory, Marker used the format of the CD-ROM to create a multi-layered, multimedia memoir. The reader investigates “zones” of travel, war, cinema and poetry, navigating through photographs, film clips, music and text, as if physically exploring Marker’s memory itself. The result is a veritable 21st-century Remembrance of Things Past, an exploration of the state of memory in our digital era. With it, Marker has both invented a literary form and perfected it.

System requirements: for Macintosh computers running System 7.5 through Mac OS 9 (including the “classic environment” of Mac OS X).