Chris Marker

Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, also known as Chris Marker (France: 29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) was a French writer, poet, activist, internaut, critic, photographer, traveler, journalist, film enssayist, multimedia artist and documentary maker.

He began his work as part of the French Rive gauche group, parallel but different from the nouvelle vague, with which he would later share themes and works. He is credited with creating the subjective documentary and is considered a pioneer of collective cinema in France. His cinematographic work is known for its poetic, sometimes ethereal, and video-art-like expression. He dedicated himself, during sixty years of work, to observing, with meticulous curiosity, with caustic and often amusing irony, even with anger, the vicissitudes of world history and also of the individual (memory, art, wars, politics, culture, nature, etc), all this while experimenting with various methods of image manipulation and montage.

He is also known for the ignorance of his person. For years, hardly anyone knew what Chris Marker looked like, he didn’t like being photographed, so there were no photos of him. It amused him to offer contradictory accounts of his life in the few written interviews he gave. The closest you can get to Marker’s intimate life is in his film career. Philippe Dubois once said: “Chris Marker is, in a way, the most celebrated of the unknown filmmakers”. “Rather than a Man Without Qualities, he is a Man Without Biography,” says his official website: chrismarker.org.

He used many pseudonyms too, some are Hayao Yamaneko, Jacopo Berenzini, Kosinki, Michel Krasna, Sandor Krasna, Guillaume-en-Égypte (his avatar) & the best known Chris Marker.

Some of his most important works are La Jetée (1962), Sans Soleil (1983), Far From Vietnam (1967), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Level Five (1997), A.K. (1985) & One Day In the Life of Andrei Arsenevitch (1999). He also dabbled in CD-ROMs with Immemory (1997), has a website called Gorgomancy, a Youtube channel called Kosinki & created a whole world dedicated to his interests, life and works in the virtual world game: Second Life.