HNAR-346: Films of Chris Marker

This academic course considers methodically the seminal work of Chris Marker, the French photographer, writer and documentary filmmaker who combines journalistic montages of historical events into cultural contexts that disclose socioeconomic political history. Marker's at times collaborator Alain Resnais, also of the French New Wave of the Left Bank Film Movement once called Marker "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man." The course will examine Chris Marker's works, focusing on his filmography to include A Grin Without a Cat 1977, Sans Soleil, 1982 and La Jetée, 1962- 66, the evocative science-fiction fable told in still photographs. The course will move onto to reveal Marker's later works to include the review of his multi-media works done for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City entitled Immemorial (1998, 2008) and an interactive multimedia CD-ROM produced for the Centre Pompidou. Considerations of how Marker's work is being examined today will also be topical for study. Marker's astonishingly diverse career that spans more than 50 years to include writing, photography, filmmaking, videography, gallery installation, television and digital multimedia will be examined to reveal how the exceptional works probe memory, cultural memory, history and the complications and paradoxes of new electronic media technologies.