A Celluloid Elegy For The Postwar Left

Chris Marker is a dinosaur. This designation has less to do with his age—85 this year—or his longevity as a filmmaker than the fact that he’s an unabashed, unreconstructed, old-guard leftist. In Marker’s brilliant 1992 documentary The Last Bolshevik—about Soviet director Aleksandr Medvedkin—he acknowledges that Medvedkin (and himself by extension) is a dinosaur, a relic of a century and a political ideology that have happily outlived their usefulness. And yet, as Marker notes in one of his typically wry asides, “Look what happened to dinosaurs—kids love them.”

Marker’s name indicates the nature of his artistic project. Born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, he adopted the name Chris Marker—a generic nom de cinema leeched of gender, ethnicity and nationality. As a global traveler, Marker wandered the world with his camera, stopping in then-exotic locales like Cuba, Israel, Japan and Siberia, and shooting idiosyncratic films about daily life, history, culture and everything in between. Taking his cues from Alexandre Astruc’s notion of le camera stylo (the camera-pen), Marker helped invent a new style of idiosyncratic, highly subjective essay-film.

But Marker’s favorite topic has always been politics. In many ways, Marker is the great poet of the Left’s dream, playing witness to its robust youth, its dissolution and death, now clutching yellowing photographs of the dimly remembered past. It’s curious, though, how Marker’s memory of the 20th century—and he’d be the first to warn us—distorts and jumbles the image.

MOVIES BEAT THE BOOK
Marker is the subject of the latest entry in the University of Illinois Press’ essential Contemporary Film Directors series. Unfortunately, author Nora M. Alter isn’t up to the task of wrestling with Marker’s prodigious output, or the complexity of his politics; her book is an impenetrable jumble of academic pretension and reflexive radicalism (offering such peculiar judgments as “The Cuban revolution advanced a model of political transformation with proven success” without further comment).

Far better to turn to Marker’s films themselves, which have lost none of their potency, wit or vigor. Best known for the futuristic short La Jetée (in which a time traveler is haunted by memories of his own death), Marker’s most deeply felt, impassioned work is his 1977 documentary A Grin Without a Cat. Looking over the fabled history of late-’60s activism from the gloomy perspective of the late ’70s, Grin sees beautiful dreams turn into ugly memories, and leftism grow purposeless and brutal—“a spearhead without a spear.”

Marker, great lover of cats, has pointed out that “the cat is never on the side of power.” But Marker’s embrace of Castro’s regime—and relative silence on the horrific crimes of the Soviet and Chinese Communists—indicates a certain willful blindness to the Left’s tyrannies. The intellectual parlor game played with so many Communist-sympathizing artists (what did they know, and when did they know it?) becomes, for Marker, less a repudiation of his work than a reflection of his own tangled allegiances, often torn between truth and the cause. Luckily, the truth, even if occasionally mangled, usually wins out. You call Chris Marker naïve or deluded at your peril—whatever intellectual mountain you may have climbed, it’s likely Marker has already been there, and rolled some footage of it.