The Otolith Group: On Chris Marker, 2012

Film Screening and Discussion

03 February 2012
Venue: Tranzit HU office, Király utca 102, Budapest 1068, Hungary
Introduction by Zsolt Sörés, leading local film critic (presented in Hungarian)

Launching The Otolith Group’s residency at Blood Mountain and Tranzit HU’s associated Free School Art Theory public programme, this was the first of two film evenings curated by The Otolith Group to set the framework for their research in Budapest.

Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962 (28 mins)

La Jetée  is a French science fiction featurette associated with the post World War Two Left Bank artistic movement. Constructed almost entirely from still photos, it tells the story of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel. It is 28 minutes long and shot in black and white. It was the inspiration for the 1995 science fiction movie, 12 Monkeys. In French with English subtitles.

Chris Marker, La Jetée, 1962, still © The Artist

Chris Marker, Sans Soleil, 1983

Sans Soleil is a  French documentary film made in 1983 and directed by Chris Marker. It is a meditation on the nature of human memory, showing the inability to recall the context and nuances of memory, and how, as a result, the perception of personal and global histories is affected. The title Sans Soleil is from the song cycle Sunless by the Russian composer, Modest Mussorgsky a brief fragment of which features in the film. Sans Soleil is composed of stock footage, clips from Japanese movies and shows, excerpts from other films as well as documentary footage shot by Marker. It is widely recognised as a documentary, travelogue, or essay-film. Despite the film’s modest use of fictional content, it is not a ‘mockumentary’, as the fictional content derived from the juxtaposition of narrative and image, adds meaning to the film along with occasional nondescript movement between locations and lack of character-based narrative. In French with English subtitles.