The New Galerie de France presents a selection of 37 photographs by Chris Marker. This group was part of an exhibition that comprised 200 photographs. This exhibition was produced in 2007 by the Wexner Art Center in Columbus, Ohio. In autumn of 2007, the exhibition was shown at the Peter Blum Gallery, New York.
The photographs, a series of faces that Chris Marker encountered during his travels, have
become, in their own right, the justification of his discerning eye. Political events are accorded a particular importance: the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the barricades of May 68 in Paris, protests in Japan and Tibet, the technoparade, the anti-CPE marches of 2006 in France…. Several portraits feature public figures: Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa, Andrei Tarkovsky, Delphine Seyrig…, others are of unknown strangers. The photographs of animals show a humanity more human than humans themselves.
OWLS AT NOON Prelude: The Hollow Men is a 19-minute multimedia installation on eight monitors. This work, drawing its inspiration from T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem, The Hollow Men, reflects on the European wasteland left in the wake of the First World War. Chris Marker’s reflections on the poem are here interspersed with images of wounded soldiers and achingly beautiful women. As The Great War returns to haunt us in the echo of our present futility in the Balkans and the Near East, this work offers the memory of, or the chance to witness, the self-massacre of a civilization.
Chris Marker was born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, and started his career as a writer and publisher (Petite Planète). His films have been unanimously celebrated by critics (La Jetée, Sans Soleil, Chats Perchés…). Maintaining an independence of spirit, Chris Marker continues to explore the possibilities offered by new media, thus producing installations like Silent Movie, Immemory….
Invitation card