La jetee/Sans soleil
dir. Chris Marker
The Criterion Collection

Film critic David Thomson, while shaking off the sting of the recent passing of master filmmakers Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni, wrote in the Guardian, "There's every reason to wonder whether the climate and culture of film — I mean the extent to which we and filmmakers need it, desperately — is likely to go on producing masterpieces."

If you've spent any time bothering with the classics of world cinema, whether it be for a college paper or simply to alienate friends, this summer's stream of obituaries have likely served to remind how, once upon a time, many of the greatest film shared a sense of communal artistic purpose. This loose coalition of hearts and minds arguably started in Russia just as it was forming the USSR in 1922, but spread throughout Europe, Asia, the Americas and even the colonial developing world of Satyajit Ray's Apu, peaked a little after mid-century during Bergman and Antonioni's prime, and then gradually evaporated.

But there is at least one filmmaker — a contemporary of Bergman and Antonioni — whose work has prepared our imaginations for a future beyond Thompson's Great Books vision of cinema: Chris Marker, whose work to date has crossed over most visibly through such secondary sources as Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys and the idiosyncratic nonfiction films of Errol Morris. With its new DVD pairing Marker's most famous works, La jetee and Sans soleil, the Criterion Collection provides an opportunity to consider his work with respect to current film culture's diffused light.

As usual, Criterion packs the disc with extra features aiming to contextualize the films and filmmaker. Disappointingly, here these additions only continue the tradition of explaining away Marker's value by marveling at the elusiveness of his work and character. Using the filmmaker's associate, Jean-Pierre Gorin, as a talking head, these material overstate a single point: Marker's iconoclasm. Even if you're approaching these films for the first time, it hardly does any good to tell you Marker is a unique filmmaker — that's obvious. The question to ask, then, is why he is also an important one.

Part of the answer lies in Marker's sensitivity, not just to the properties specific to film but of media in general. But this also goes far to explain why, just maybe, film culture no longer requires the new masterpieces Thompson craves.

Film and the literally revolutionary passion it once stirred has been shuffled and re-filed into the greater culture of New Media, aping Marker's own trajectory from documentarian to multimedia artist. A look at Paris's journal of utter film seriousness, Cahiers du Cinema, cements this impression with its coverage of video gaming, a feature which has been gradually expanding since the late 1990s. Meanwhile, in China, a Green movement as significant as it is repressed challenges the local industrial economy with a solidarity kept intact by text messaging. When this is how technology is shaping culture, such boundaries as those set by a two-hour feature — which are largely matters of the film "user interface," to resort briefly to techno jargon — hardly seem relevant. More would-be cineastes are engaging with their entertainment either by personalizing it (audio and video mash-ups, time-shifted TV viewing, gaming's open-ended narratives … even DVDs themselves, with their chapter indexing and audio commentaries, are not exactly an example of a viewer honoring the director's terms) or through conspicuous consumption (blogs, ringtones, iPod playlists). In this climate, the committed film lover is a mere romantic when he used to be a symbol of modernism.

Given the state of things, there appears to be three options for contemporary auteurs. They can either carry on as a kind of classicist of the medium, like Pedro Almodovar or Wong Kar-Wei, delving deeper into the formal tradition of the great mid-century masters who set their time-bending, narrative-suspending pace. The more self-consciously "progressive" filmmaker might take his cue from the likes of Wes Anderson or Todd Haynes, Americans who tend to cannibalize their lineage with no apparent concern for the fact that, in literature at least, pastiche is considered a minor skill.

Marker represents a unique case of a third way, which is a decided step outside of cinephilia into the broader and more relevant digital world at large. Marker remains, perhaps unjustly though logically, a middling figure in the motion picture history.

This is because what Marker does is less like producing single masterworks and closer to keeping a blog, albeit an astonishingly prescient one started almost 50 years before Typepad. With his long scroll of documentaries, installation pieces, photography books, political cartoons, CD-ROMs and poetry, he's refined a remarkably consistent set of themes with the care of a philosopher or a coffee shop dilettante, depending on your opinion of him. Among the themes are the fragility of radical political movements (The Train Rolls On, A Grin without a Cat), the positive and negative sides of Orientalism (Statues also Die, The Koumiko Mystery), and his ever-present bugaboo: memory.

How does this look to a viewer who craves masterpieces and/or "motion picture events?" Well, in a word, frustrating. A habit of Marker's is to sidestep filmgoers' most basic expectations. A background chorus seems to sing the same scolding refrain each time he is reassessed: "Motion pictures should move, documentaries should be fact-based." A vivid example of the way he upsets the chorus is his 1962 La jetee. When working within the confines of a genre film, as he does with this sci-fi short, Marker makes us strikingly aware of the properties of the medium he respects, as well as those he wishes to tease out. For starters, he tells us the film's story with the conspicuously uncinematic tools of still photographs and voice-over narration.

The jetty of the title refers to the pier at which the central event of this circular tale takes place. In a bombed-out Paris, the nameless protagonist (Davos Hanich) is made an agent of time whose mission is to travel into the peacetime past to retrieve food and other scarcities.

Unlike most of Marker's work, La jetee isn't overtly political. Time's relationship to memory and vice versa — the little black dress of modernism — is Marker's clear concern here. But through the stills and relative silence, this theme is handled with a ruthlessness which contrasts with the kind of artists who commonly look at ennui and see their muse. The difference is refreshing and seems to challenge the slightly surrealistic approach to time and memory of Marker's one-time collaborator Alain Resnais in Last Year at Marienbad, made the same year as Marker's short.

After 10 minutes of slowly dissolving still pictures, the novelty is long forgotten. Through the byways of the protagonist's memory, we meet a woman (writer and filmmaker Hélène Chatelain). She first appears slightly plain but gradually exudes the comfortable prettiness we associate with a lifetime of viewing another person, a minor celebrity perhaps, at a distance. With every photograph Marker shares, a subtly new facet of the woman is opened to us. Then, as if Marker structured the entire film to make us sympathize with the protagonist by feeling her physical presence, the woman's eye blinks.

The effect is stunning. Even as the procession of stills continues from this moment, the sense of the woman's presence remains and her prettiness turns intimate, expanding into a beauty which is carried to the film's disorienting conclusion. Like the video installation pieces Marker began assembling in the late 1970s, the film attains a certain three-dimensionality.

The overall feeling is of a filmmaker whose pushing the abstract nature of this medium to its limit to achieve a concrete goal. If that isn't one definition of New Media, then it's hard to be sure of any others.

La jetee represents Marker's stylistic extreme; his themes are given similarly free reign in the essay film Sans soleil, narrated by Alexandra Stewart. She warns us early on:

I've been 'round the world several times and now only banality still interests me. On this trip I've tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter.

On its premiere in 1982, New York Times's critic Vincent Canby dismissed San soleil as little more than a fantastic voyage to the bottom of the director's own navel. This complaint is fair but thick. It's true, Marker often wills objectivity out of the handheld and stock footage he uses of, among other things, revolutionaries in Guinea-Bissau, West Africa; the bourgeoisie in Tokyo; Alfred Hitchcock in San Francisco; or, as ever with Marker, the ghosts of the Soviet and Cuban revolutions.

But the key to watching this film is our willingness to free-associate. It's been suggested by several critics that the way to watch Marker is by skimming, letting your attention wander in and out of his purview. That's only as fair as skimming a letter or half-listening to a friend speak, assuming their experience is just a variation of your own. But there is something to be said for not looking for a form where one isn't intended. Unlike the novelistic work of Bergman or Antonioni, Marker is an essayist.

The perils of trying to read Marker any way but plainly are apparent in Canby's shrill reaction to a scene about three-quarters through Sans soliel. Here, Marker takes us to San Francisco to re-visit the locations of Hitchcock's Vertigo, a film that Marker often references in his own work. Alexandra Stewart's narration:

He wrote me that only one film had been capable of portraying impossible memory — insane memory: Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles he saw time covering a field ever wider as it moved away, a cyclone whose present moment contains motionless the eye.

Here is a case where Marker approaches another film and finds the thematic arrows pointing outward, beyond cinema and the crush of other films, outside the story tucked neatly between its dozen or so reels and into the sphere of his own life. Canby isn't convinced and is utterly slack-jawed that Marker would even go there:

Even to someone who shares Mr. Marker's admiration for Vertigo, this kind of reverence is ridiculous. It also seems to expose the essential nature of the film. Sans soleil is less concerned with the quality of life on this planet than with its own desperate, much more private search.

How can you expose what you have already stated outright? The film begins precisely with Marker explaining the problem of subjectivity in his work. There is no symbol to decipher, no allegory to seize upon, just Alexandra Stewart, in her matter-of-fact tone:

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me, "One day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader. If they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black."

Canby and those who seek something more grand than this in Marker resign themselves to the black.

In Marker's defense, there is a growing number of media theorists who now think the state of the audio-visual arts has passed its critical phase. In the recent book Deep Time of the Media, Siegfried Zielinski writes of the diminishing allure of media to come in our time. "As a matter of course, they will be a part of everyday life, like the railways of the nineteenth century or the introduction of electricity into private households in the twentieth."

Marker would be the first to agree and has seen this coming all along. In 1995, on the occasion of film's first centennial as the predominant popular art, Marker stated flatly, "Cinema won't have a second century." Though David Thomson, in his plea for new masterpieces, should be taken rhetorically, Marker could hardly have offered a more appropriate response.

— Andrew Stout (andrewstout at gmail dot com)