Tribute Screening: “La Jetee” (1964 September 15, 2012

Saturday, September 15 – 7:30 PM
Tribute Screening: “La Jetee” (1964, New Yorker, 30 min). Marker’s most famous film (and his only work of pure fiction), “La Jetee” is an agonizing cry of love to a world gone by, the story of a man drawn through time by the image of a woman standing on the jetty at Orly Airport. A candidate for one of the greatest films ever made; certainly, it’s the most romantic. In French and German with English subtitles.
“Junkopia” (1981, 6 min). This short by Marker, Frank Simone and John Chapman is a wordless portrait of the Emeryville Mudflats near San Francisco, with the landscape’s mysterious refuse. In French with English subtitles.
REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME (LE SOUVENIR D’UN AVENIR), 2001, First Run/Icarus Films, 42 min. Dirs. Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker. Genius. This "cine-essay" by Chris Marker is dense and demanding, a splendid reminder that his nimble, capacious mind has lost none of its agility, poetry or power. Ostensibly a portrait of French photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades between 1935 and 1955, the film leaps and backtracks, Marker-style, from subject to subject, from a family portrait of Bellon and her two daughters, Loleh and Yannick (the latter co-authored the film), to a wide-ranging history of surrealism, of the city of Paris, of French cinemas and the birth of the cinémathèque, of Europe, the National Front, the Second World War and Spanish Civil War, and postwar politics and culture. In French with English subtitles. (Notes by James Quandt, Cinematheque Ontario.)
Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gd8C3SV4Wlg
“A Chris Marker Bestiary” (1994, Icarus Films, 18 min). Five Chris Marker short films devoted to animals, including:
“Cat Listening to Music,” (1990, 3 min). Marker fans are familiar with the cartoon representation of Guillaume-en-Egypte, Marker's beloved pet cat, which has become the reclusive filmmaker's alter ego. In this charming short, Marker reveals the real-life Guillaume, stretched out lazily in the filmmaker's apartment, as he listens to the lilting rhythms of a piano sonata by Federico Mompou.
“An Owl Is An Owl” (1990, 3 min). A visit to an aviary yields a rhythmically edited series of close-ups of the rapidly rotating or intently staring feathered heads of a colorful variety of owls, accompanied by an ambient electronic soundtrack.
“Zoo Piece” (1990, 3 min). A leisurely paced montage of animals, many of them confined in cages or enclosures - including seals, kangaroos, leopards, gorillas, wolves, monkeys, ostriches and a sleeping rhinoceros.
“Bullfight in Okinawa” (1992, 4 min). Two enormous black bulls engage in a contest of brute force, egged on by their screaming handlers, as they butt heads and lock horns in an attempt to rout their opponent.
“Slon Tango” (1993, 4 min). In this astonishing, sustained shot, an elephant in the Ljubljana Zoo ambles around its enclosure, performing syncopated dance steps to the accompaniment of Igor Stravinsky's "Tango."
CASE OF THE GRINNING CAT, 2004, Icarus Films, 58 min. In his last full-length film, French cinema-essayist Chris Marker reflects on French and international politics, art and culture at the start of the new millennium. In French with English subtitles.
Trailer https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aIE3O-3RKg

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