I went to see an exhibition of the work of the late (and great) Chris Marker. Marker was a visionary French film maker . He worked across many media including installation art, interactive media ( CD-roms and suchlike ) and cinema. He found fame with his science fiction film La Jetee which was eventually remade in Hollywood with Brad Pitt and a starry cast.
The exhibition was wonderful - I will return to the Whitechapel gallery before it finishes in June.It takes the viewer on a journey through Marker's obsessions - travel, film, revolution and war. His visual essays contemplate history, memory and political failure.
Marker was an enigma. He changed his name and declined to be photographed. He adopted the image of a cat as his avatar . He is also disproved a dictum of Orson Welles . Welles famously said that you needed a pen to be a scribe but an army to be a filmmaker. Marker created his films from the solitude of his studio in Paris and embraced the new media of the video camera and computer.
Although he was an outsider he was not a misanthrope. His vision was humane and quizzical . One of his pieces noted the young Fidel Castro was not a confident public speaker . He had a habit of aligning the microphones in front of him to claim his nerves as he spoke at public meetings . He tried the same trick when speaking in Moscow but was bemused to find the microphones were fixed and could not be moved. He still tried to move them anyway.
As I watched one of pieces I noticed a young student slumped in one of the bean bags provided for the exhibition audience. As he watched students from the 60s and 70s protest the Vietnam war on screen he absent mindedly played with his smart phone. A man from that 60's generation walked up to the young man twice and glared at him. The young man ignored him and continued to play angry birds or whatever on his phone. It struck me as something Mr Marker would have found fascinating. In this instance the cat would have allowed himself a grin.
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