Program of session 4.1

Here is the updated schedule for session 4.1 in week 38...

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18TH, 10:00

Students presentations: Souvenirs from Kassel and Muenster

TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 18TH, 19:30

Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, 1983 http://kit.kein.org/node/326

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH, 10:00

Students presentations: Souvenirs from Kassel and Muenster
http://kit.kein.org/node/344

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH, 14:00

Crossing borders: Lecture by Florian Schneider

WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 19TH, 19:30

Last year in Marienbad, Alain Resnais, 1961 http://kit.kein.org/node/231

Eidar Sessions: Alain Robbe-Grillet in conversation with Hans-Ulrich
Obrist, Matthew Barney, Carsten Hoeller, Myriam Backstroem...

Sans soleil

Documentary. Chris Marker, 1983, 100 min.

Stretching the genre of documentary, this experimental film is a rich composition of thoughts, images and scenes, mainly from Japan and Guinea-Bissau, "two extreme poles of survival". Some other scenes were filmed in Iceland, Paris, and San Francisco. A female narrator reads from letters supposedly sent to her by the (fictitious) cameraman Sandor Krasna. Sans Soleil is often labeled as a documentary or travelogue, however it contains fictional elements and moves from one location to another without regard to a location-based narrative.

Full text of Sans Soleil (Sunless)

A free replay (notes on Vertigo)

Chris Marker talks about Hitchcocks Vertigo (1958).

Last year in Marienbad

Alain Resnais, Alain Robbe-Grillet (screenplay) 1961

In a huge, old-fashioned luxury hotel a stranger tries to persuade a married woman to run away with him, but it seems she hardly remembers the affair they may have had (or not?) last year at Marienbad.

L'année dernière à Marienbad (translated as Last Year in Marienbad in the UK and Last Year at Marienbad in North America) is a 1961 French movie directed by Alain Resnais, starring Delphine Seyrig, Giorgio Albertazzi, Sacha Pitoëff. It is famous for its enigmatic narrative structure, in which truth and fiction are difficult to distinguish, and the exact temporal and spatial relationship of the events is open to question.

Read more at: http://kit.kein.org/node/231

Sunless links

"I write to you from a far-off country…" Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve writes about Chris Marker in "Senses of cinema": "Information regarding the early life of Chris Marker, photographer, filmmaker, videographer, poet, journalist, multimedia/installation artist, designer, and world traveler, is scarce and conflicting. The year to which his movies, videos, and multimedia projects are dated depends on which source you use, and in which country you live. Personal data is in a state of complete disarray: Derek Malcolm, writing about ¡Cuba Sí! (1961) for The Guardian, reports that Marker was born in Mongolia, of aristocratic descent. Geoff Andrew of Time Out London isn’t sure (Andrew, 146), and most sources, along with the Internet Movie Database, use the location I’ve listed above as his place of birth. Some say his father was an American soldier, others that he (Marker) was a paratrooper in the Second World War. Still others, that he comes to us from an alien planet. Or the future."
http://www.sensesofcinema.com/contents/directors/02/marker.html

"The Deleuzian Memory of Sans Soleil": B.C. Holmes Film studies:
"In the first few minutes of Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, the narrator recounts how "in the nineteenth century, mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the twentieth was the coexistence of different notions of time." This moment in the film echoes the writings of Gilles Deleuze, whose books on cinema are titled Cinema 1: The Movement Image and Cinema 2: The Time Image. Deleuze advocated a departure from cinema where space and movement dominated the content, toward a cinema centred on notions of time."
http://www.bcholmes.org/film/sansoliel.html

A critical reading of "Sans Soleil"
http://www.geocities.com/wolfgang_ball/

http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002187.php

A rare interview with one of cinema's most secretive filmmakers.
By Samuel Douhaire and Annick Rivoire

"What interests me is history, and politics only interests me to the degree that it is the mark history makes on the present." The French release of Sans soleil and La Jetée on DVD is an event, as is every furtive apparition in the news by Chris Marker, one of the great cineastes of our time as well as one of the most private.

Marker, 81, has always preferred to allow his filmed images, rather than his image as a filmmaker, to speak for him. Less than a dozen photographs of Marker exist, and his interviews are even more rare. The director agreed to an interview with Libération via an email do-it-yourself kit: four topics, with ten questions each. He did not respond to every question, but these 12 pages, at times "frankly Dostoevskian," more than satisfied us.

http://www.filmlinc.com/fcm/5-6-2003/markerint.htm
Originally published in Libération, March 5, 2003.
With thanks to Antoine de Baecque.