Chris Marker
French · 1921–2012
Enigmatic French essayist-filmmaker whose Sans Soleil, La Jetée, and multimedia project Immemory pioneered the essay film form and explored memory as montage, the impossibility of representing history, and time travel as an expression of grief.
Wikipedia ↗“Rien ne distingue les souvenirs des autres moments: ce n'est que plus tard qu'ils se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices.”
French
“Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments. Only afterwards do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars. That face which just appeared in the viewfinder — was it already a memory when I saw it, or did it become one only now that I recall it?”
“J'aurai passé ma vie à essayer de comprendre la fonction du souvenir, qui n'est pas le contraire de l'oubli, mais plutôt son envers.”
French
“I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember; we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?”
“Il disait qu'au XIXe siècle l'humanité avait réglé ses comptes avec l'espace, et que la grande affaire du XXe était la coexistence des différents temps.”
French
“He said that in the 19th century, mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th century was the coexistence of different times. By which he meant that the question of our age was whether we could live simultaneously in the present and in the memory of the present.”
“J'aurais aimé vivre à une époque où le voyage était encore possible.”
French
“I would have liked to have lived in a time when travel was still possible — I mean real travel, where you crossed borders and the world actually changed. Now the airports are all the same, the hotels are all the same, and we carry our sameness with us like luggage.”
“La photographie est l'invention d'un instant qui n'a jamais existé.”
French
“Photography is the invention of a moment that never existed, or rather, that existed only for the fraction of a second in which the shutter opened. Everything before and after that fraction belongs to the real world. The image itself belongs only to memory.”
“Le temps perdu ne revient pas habillé de nostalgie. Il revient comme montage.”
French
“Lost time does not come back dressed in nostalgia. It comes back as montage — fragments shuffled by an editor who is also the mourner. Every film I have made is a letter to someone who no longer exists, sent to an address that may never have been real.”