Chris Marker: A Grin Without A Cat

Sitting in Place Dauphine on Paris’s Isle de la Cité, the only sound the clink of aperitif glasses and the soft knock of boules, you’d be forgiven for looking like a cat that’s got the cream. The yellow cat, leaping above Bobo roof gardens high above, knows how you feel. Its caricatured feline features are all but consumed by a gigantic grin. You may know him as Guillaume-en-Égypte, avatar of the legendary Parisian filmmaker, photographer, time-traveller and cyberspace curator Chris Marker(1921 – 2012), whose first UK retrospective is currently at the Whitechapel Gallery.

As outlined in Marker’s 2004 film ‘Chats Perchés’, this street-art Guillaume is just one of the many incarnations of the yellow cat, who can also be found leering from postal stamps, galloping through the stock exchange, or infiltrating art history. In short, the cat is as flagrantly fame-hungry as his master was reclusive. However, as his self-styled name suggests, Marker was hardly self-effacing. When quizzed on the meaning of his films, he replied with characteristic reticence: ‘all I have to offer is myself’.

His style of mark-making took the form of a hybridisation of images captured in diverse contexts, a mixing of styles and origins that found its roots in collage, its apotheosis in cut-n-paste. An inveterate traveller, Marker’s works are all variations on the form of the travelogue, where each image offers the opportunity to travel through time and space, imprints on the memory that build towards a universal vision. Whether documenting political demonstrations in ‘Le fond de l’air est rouge’ (1977), sleeping commuters on a Tokyo train in ‘Sans Soleil’ (1983), or the world through the eyes of an African mask in ‘Les statues meurent aussi’ (1953), Marker’s take on the ‘essay film’ is an investigation into images as mnemonic devices – how we splice, freeze-frame, cut or fade, as editors of our own experience.

This idea is played out in the installation ‘Zapping Zone’ (1990 – 94), in which a hoard of competing images flip between different formats or ‘avatars’ – video, film-frame, collage, photoshop file, text. As the show’s curator Chris Darke points out: ‘At the time [Marker] was born, cinema was silent, radio was only just getting started as an important national medium, TV was nowhere to be seen.’ By 2005, the 84 year old artist was using Second Life to build a virtual museum of a lifetime’s work, represented here in the 2010 film ‘Ouvroir’ – ‘workspace’.

The exhibition is split into four sections: The Museum, Travelogues, Film and Memory, and War and Revolution, each section threaded through with selections from the ‘Staring Back’ series of images (1952 – 2006) – a beautiful woman, an eerily animate Chilean mummy, a cat lounging across a tomb. Marker’s most iconic work is undoubtably ‘La Jetée’ (1962), the short science fiction fable of a man obsessed by a single image from his past, beautifully shot as a series of still images – providing the source for Terry Gilliam’s 1995 film, ‘Twelve Monkeys’. You might expect ‘La Jetée’ to provide the exhibition’s opening hook. Instead, the film is reached at the top of a flight of stairs where Guillaume queries ‘Wanna know more?’, suggesting that a true appreciation of Marker’s work takes a little dedication. The exhibition persistently resists the temptation to fall back on Marker’s cult status, that ‘best-known author of unknown movies.’

Just across the hall from the shelving systems and catalogued chaos of Kader Attia’s installation ‘Jacob’s Ladder’ (2013), it’s telling that the retrospective opens with the motif of the ‘Museum’, in keeping with our current fixation on the act, or art, of curation. It’s a trend highlighted by the hype around Hans Ulrich Obrist’s recently published ‘Ways of Curation’ and by displays such as ‘Source’ at Tate Britain (until 14 September), drawing on the idea that we’ve become collage-makers of our identities, obliged to select and synthesise from a daily influx of information. Indeed, digital technology gave wings to Marker’s own ‘imaginary museum’, as demonstrated in ‘Ouvroir’ and the CD-ROM programme ‘Immemory’ (1997), which maps Marker’s influences into interactive zones to be browsed, re-routed and re-imagined. All too often, such self-reflexivity breeds gnomic statements and convenient paradoxes – the viewer is left floating in a vacuum of vagueness, sustained with a few sibylline quotes. Marker, on the other hand, was of the old school of mind-museum-making. ‘Ouvroir’ and ‘Immemory’ are constructed from the nearest the digital can offer in terms of bricks and mortar, meticulously mapped zones that refuse to indulge in the cheap trick of the infinite. He was, in his words, a ‘bricoleur’.

The word, with its connotations of haphazard DIY, provides an intriguing counterpart to the ‘megalomaniac’ quality Marker identified in his obsessive chronicling and browsing of past images – a desire to ‘conquer a world’, to orchestrate time and space. Perhaps Guillaume-en-Égypte is the expression of that megalomania, gleefully assured of his power as he vaults the rooftops of Paris. Marker was a wordsmith as much as he was an image-maker. His works, whether ‘Silent Movie’ (1995) or ‘Zapping Zone’, are the sort that spawn speech. But this is an exhibition to visit, not to talk about. Go twice, three times. Watch ‘La Jetée’ or ‘Le fond de l’air est rouge’ on loop. Then stumble out into the light, into a network of images.