Chris Marker

Chris Marker was born in 1921 in Neuilly, France. He began studying philosophy, but his studies were soon interrupted by the world conflict. After the war, he worked for Peuple et Culture, began writing for the magazine Esprit and directed his first films, including Letter from Siberia, which made him more widely known. Writer, photographer, filmmaker and finally multimedia artist, Chris Marker is the author of a protean and innovative work. His taste for experimentation bursts out in La Jetée (1962), a short film of anticipation announcing his favorite themes: time, memory and the power of images. The same year, he shoots The Lovely Month of May, in the streets of Paris, in the spirit of direct cinema. The seventies were marked by committed films, the most famous of which, A Grin Without A Cat (1977), was a review of the social and political movements of the sixties all around the world. In this political furrow, he explores the links between individual memory and history in Sunless (1983) and then in posthumous tributes such as The Last Bolshevik (1993). In the 1990s, most often in collaboration with the Centre Pompidou in Paris, he designed several installations that explored the boundaries between the real and the imaginary. He passed away in Paris in the summer of 2012, and will remain a reference point for contemporary filmmakers.