Celebrity Biographies
Chris Marker
Chris Marker passed away in the French capital on July 29, 2012, the same day he turned 91. Author of titles such as “Sin sol” and “La jetée”, he was considered one of the greats of the documentary and the inventor of the film essay.
Christian François Bouche-Vileneuve (real name of Chris Marker ) was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine on July 29, 1921. In the mid-50s he began working on documentary. His first surviving work is Olympia 52, a documentary about the Oslo winter games. Next he co-directed the film about African works of art Les status meurent auss , with Alain Resnais , with whom he forms the nucleus of the movement known as Rive Gauche, also with Agnès Varda . The Rive Gauche developed almost at the same time as the Nouvelle Vague, and shared some of its elements.
Chris Marker also co-directed with Resnais Night and Fog , another documentary about Nazi machinations to make extermination in their concentration camps invisible. Alone, he was the author of Dimanche à Pekin , Lettre de Siberie and ¡Cuba sí! , on the communist regimes in China, the Soviet Union and Cuba, where he includes diverse political points of view.
His film with the greatest international impact was La Jetée , the only fictional one, about time travel experiments in a post-apocalyptic world, which inspired Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys . One of his best works is Sin sol , about Japan and other topics, which mixes documentary images with reflections of a philosophical nature. It comes to be representative of what is considered a film essay, a way of using cinema for reflection.
His works on great figures of the cinema also stand out. Mémoires pour Simone pays tribute to Simone Signoret , AK revolves around the great Akira Kurosawa , and Une Journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch inquires into the work of Andrei Tarkovsky . His latest work has been the short Leila Attacks, from 2007.