"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.