About Chris Marker

Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La Jetée, A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil. He was born on the 29th of July, Neuilly- sur- Seine, France and passed away on his birthday in 2012, Paris, France. He was always elusive about his past and known to refuse interviews and not allow photographs to be taken of him; his place of birth is highly disputed. Marker was a philosophy student in France before World War II. During the German occupation of France, he joined the Maquis (FTP), a part of the French Resistance. During his early journalism career, Marker became increasingly interested in filmmaking and in the early 1950s experimented with photography.

La Jetée (1962)

Meaning The Pier, La Jetée is Marker’s most well known movie.

It tells of a post-nuclear was experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects. In the film, a survivor of a futuristic third World War is obsessed with distant and disconnected memories of a pier at the Orly Airport, the image of a mysterious woman, and a man’s death. Scientists experimenting in time travel choose him for their studies, and the man travels back in time to contact the mysterious woman, and discovers that the man’s death at the Orly Airport was his own. Except for one shot of the woman mentioned above sleeping and suddenly waking up, the film is composed entirely of photographs by Jean Chiabaud and stars Davos Hanich as the man, Hélène Châtelain as the woman and filmmaker William Klein as a man from the future.

The editing of La Jetée adds to the intensity of the film. With the use of cut-ins and fade-outs, it produces the eerie and unsettling nature adding to the theme of the apocalyptic destruction of World War III.