The late French filmmaker Chris Marker (left), pictured with his friend, director Alain Resnais.
Photo: Getty/Keystone-France
Chris Marker, a visionary French filmmaker who inspired modern science fiction, died Sunday at the age of 91. News of his death was confirmed this morning.
Marker’s most famous film, the 1962 dystopian masterpiece La Jetée (The Jetty), was an inspiration to many leading science fiction authors, including William Gibson and the late J.G. Ballard. The quietly powerful, minimalist movie, comprised almost exclusively of numerous black-and-white stills and clocking in at about 28 minutes, was a direct inspiration for Terry Gilliam’s 1995 thriller 12 Monkeys.
Marker’s film takes place in a post-apocalyptic Paris, shortly after the nuclear holocaust of World War III. Paris is ravaged: Streets are covered in radioactive rubble, buildings are blown out and the Arc de Triomphe has been split in half. Almost everyone is dead or missing. Only a few people survive, hidden in the labyrinthine tunnels underneath the decimated city. One hardy survivor is chosen to save the present — by traveling in time to his memories of the pre-war past, and to the future.
“First viewing of La Jetee was astonishingly visceral, poetic, profound,” Gibson wrote Monday on Twitter after hearing of Marker’s death. “Immeasurable impact on everything I’ve written.” Gibson added that he first saw La Jetée in a film-history course at the University of British Columbia in the early 1970s.
Ballard previously praised La Jetée in an essay he wrote on the film. “This strange and poetic film, a fusion of science fiction, psychological fable and photo-montage, creates in its unique way a series of bizarre images of the inner landscapes of time,” he enthused.
Marker, whose real name was Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, seemed pleased with the attention his work attracted later in his life. “Certainly, for me 12 Monkeys is a magnificent film,” said Marker in a rare interview with French newspaper Libération in 2003.
Marker was modest, calling La Jetée a piece of “automatic writing.”
“It was in the editing that the pieces of the puzzle came together, and it wasn’t me who designed the puzzle,” he said. “I’d have a hard time taking credit for it. It just happened, that’s all.”
Marker was also prolific, making several impressive films over the course of his long lifetime, including Le Mystère Koumiko (1965), A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and Sans Soleil (1983). He created several films in homage to his favorite directors, including A.K. (a 1985 tribute to Akira Kurosawa) and One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999), for Andrei Tarkovsky. He also experimented with CD-ROMs and digital multimedia installations later in his life, in works like Immemory (1998).
See La Jetée below.
