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FILM COMMENT
May/June 2003
CHRIS MARKER: EYESIGHT
By Chris Darke
Above: La Jetée
"It's pretty rare to be able to take a walk in an image of childhood." These words from Chris Marker's 1958 film-essay Letter from Siberia are echoed, later, in La Jetée, a film about "a man marked by an image from his childhood." Both of these "images of childhood" are reprised and subtly modulated at the beginning of Sans soleil in the film's opening "image of happiness": three children on a road in Iceland. Between Letter and La Jetée lies Marker's "lost period" - what one might call the childhood of his oeuvre. Maybe "childhood" is too precious a designation for what is, after all, early work, but it's work that is more or less lost to us, orphaned from the back catalogue if not disowned by its creator. When the Cinémathèque Française presented a Marker retrospective in 1997, the director denied practicing any "retrospective self-censorship" in choosing 1962 (the year of both La Jetée and
Le Joli mai) as his Year Zero. Rather, it was the case that Marker deemed this work to be merely "rudimentary" compared with later efforts. "Rudimentary" is a carefully chosen word, one that suggests "primitive" and "fundamental," with this work representing the tyro efforts that contain all the tropes, tricks, and strategies, all the obsessions that will recur throughout the filmmaker's career.
© 2003 by Chris Darke
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