Chris Marker: Early Film Writings

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Chris Marker:
Early Film Writings

by
Chris Marker

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Title:	Early Film Writings
Author:	Chris Marker
Genre:	Essays
Written:	(Eng. 2024)
Length:	198 pages
Original in:	French
Availability:	Chris Marker: Early Film Writings - US
	Chris Marker: Early Film Writings - UK
	Chris Marker: Early Film Writings - Canada

	from: Bookshop.org (US)

Twenty pieces, originally published between 1948 and 1954
Translated by Sally Shafto
Edited and with an Introduction by Steven Ungar
With numerous photographs

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Our Assessment:

B+ : very solid pieces, in a very well-edited and presented volume

See our review for fuller assessment.

The complete review's Review:

Though best-known as a filmmaker, as Steven Ungar points out in his Introduction:

Chris Marker wrote. In fact, he wrote a lot, especially between 1945 and 1955, when his publications included a play, a novel, short stories, a literary monograph, poetry, radio scripts, film commentaries, translations, and roughly one hundred articles, essays, and book entries.

       Early Film Writings collects twenty of his pieces dealing with film, published in various outlets -- notably Esprit and Cahiers du cinéma -- between 1948 and 1954. (Ungar also notes that the texts collected here do not: "compromise a definitive listing of Marker's film-based writings during the period in question" -- pointing already to two additional texts discovered after the collection had been put together.)
       The time in which Marker wrote is of particular significance here, with the steep fall in cinema attendance in the US that began in the late-1940s particularly relevant; the opening of the French market to (more) American films as a result of the Blum–Byrnes Agreements, as well as the different paths cinema took in divided post-war Germany also figure significantly.
       Many of the pieces deal, in one way or another, with the concerns about declining cinema attendance. (American movie theater attendance peaked in 1946, with over 4 billion tickets sold (the exact number is surprisingly hard to find ...), swooning quickly with the rise of television and reaching a pre-Covid-pandemic nadir in 1970, with less than a billion tickets sold; while sales rebounded somewhat -- briefly topping 1.5 billion in 2003 and 2004 (when the US had twice the population it had in 1946 ...) -- they collapsed again with the pandemic (with fewer than 220,000,000 tickets sold in 2020, and nowhere close to a billon since).)
       When Marker writes a 'Letter from Hollywood' in 1953, he already reports that:

Los Angeles has become a ghost town. [...] Industry-wide unemployment is estimated at 80 percent, partially compensated by television (which thus bears the brunt of all its evils by also being the remedy). Nevertheless, as far as one can tell, it seems that the desertion of cinema had touched ... bottom, and that it was possible to hope, after the public's honeymoon with television, for a profitable saturation followed by a rebound. But Hollywood didn't want to wait or couldn't when faced with the figures: out of 23,344 cinemas in the United States, 5,038 have closed since the end of the war. And things are only getting worse: by the end of this year that number may double.

In several pieces Marker looks at the changes in film-making that are attempted, in an effort to bring audiences back (to the theater-going experience). He writes about 3D-movies, or 'Cinerama' and 'Cinemascope' -- finding that: "the 'wide screen' technique seems to open a more promising path". This interest in such technical aspects of film is found throughout (and of course something Marker always considered in his own work), ranging also from observations such as that: "adding a soundtrack is the only way to make a truly silent film" (in a piece on Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc, which he hails as: "the most beautiful film in the world") to describing Robert Montgomery's Lady in the Lake as: "the first 'commercial' film, entirely in the first person" (allowing him also to consider the difficulties of "truly subjective representation", and noting, among other things, that: "the hero in Lady in the Lake never once sees his feet").
Marker shows a great interest in different ways of seeing and presenting material cinematically -- taking into account also that:

Impoverished on a psychological level in relation to the novel, which is equipped with language to render moods, film compensates with the image.

       A charming piece is 'Cornielle at the Movies', in which he reports and comments on papers by ten "thirteen-year-old demoiselles", writing on the topic of adapting Corneille's Horace for the screen, Marker impressed by their creative suggestions.
       Marker also address animation in several pieces -- repeatedly also bashing Walt Disney along the way (suggesting also that his 'principal merit' will have been not his films but: "the training of young talents endowed with a taste superior to his own").
       Of particular interest also is his discussion and contrasting of film-making in the East and West Germany of the day -- including examples such as:

Paul Verhoeven has the praiseworthy ambition of initiating the viewer to "film techniques" by presenting the same scene shot in different ways. Excellent premise, but à propos: while in its first example -- perfectly sober and bare -- the scene occurs without difficulty, incrementally as the "film techniques" appear, it becomes heavier, more embarrassing, and less convincing. Shadows exaggerate the stairwell, strange and unmotivated shot angles dwarf and deform the characters, and an intrusive music inflates everything. (Oh, and there's also a faulty reverse-shot: it's hard to think of everything !) In short, we are more and more in the cinema, but one that is completely passé.

       [The Paul Verhoeven referred to here is, of course, not the Dutch director (born 1938, and not yet making films when Marker wrote the piece), but the German one (1901-1975; Senta Berger's father-in-law).]
       Throughout, there's a sense of Marker's fascination with the potential of the medium and the form -- of what can be done with film, and on the screen -- as would later manifest itself in his own cinematic work. As such, it is of considerable interest -- but the pieces also stand up well on their own: they are engagingly presented and argued, and Marker has a keen eye, offering interesting observations.
       Steven Ungar's thorough and lengthy Introduction also provides useful biographical information and general background and context, and the whole volume should be of great interest to anyone interested in Marker and his work. Early Film Writings also demonstrates that Marker is a writer well worth reading, and one hopes that more of his essays and pieces on other subjects become more readily available. (As Ungar notes: "Marker's film writings make up less than 10 percent of his total contributions to Esprit. Approximately 40 percent address literary topics, with the remaining 50 percent devoted to social and political issues" -- and that only covers the 94 pieces published in that one outlet. And there's his (prize-winning !) novel, too -- Le cœur net, translated in 1951 as The Forthright Spirit .....)

[I can't help but point out one amusing blackout by the indexer of this volume: in a 1954 piece Marker devotes a paragraph to a "grotesque individual", scuzzy gossip columnist and red-baiter Jimmie Tarantino, referring to him by name twice (once as 'Jimmie Tarantino', once simply as 'Tarantino'); the index, however, lists the reference as: "Tarantino, Quentin, 127". (Director Quentin Tarantino had, of course, not even been born yet when Marker wrote this particular piece.)]

- M.A.Orthofer, 22 September 2024

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Links:

Chris Marker: Early Film Writings:

University of Minnesota Press publicity page

Other books of interest under review:

See the Index of books on Film under review

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About the Author:

French film director Chris Marker lived 1921 to 2012.

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