He was 91. He passed away on his birthday, a Markerish thing to do. He made La Jetée and Sans soleil; he also made Le tombeau d’Alexandre (The Last Bolshevik), which has one of the greatest endings I’ve even seen:

And he made Le fond de l’air est rouge (Grin without a Cat) and Une journée d’Andrei Arsenevitch (about Andrei Tarkovsky), and A.K. (about Akira Kurosawa). And he produced Loin du Vietnam. And he made many other films.

A film professor showed me La Jetée in college. I liked it because at that time, Terry Gilliam was my favorite filmmaker, and 12 Monkeys had just come out. I became obsessed with LJ and wrote a terrible paper about the connections between the two films. That’s basically how I got started writing about the movies.

Then I learned that my college had a print of Le joli mai. Every week I thought, “I should go watch that”; I thought that for two years. Later, I got a VHS copy; every week after that I’d think, “I should finally watch that now.”

Those tapes are buried, I think, in a friend’s basement. I’m going to look for a copy now.

Chris Marker, je t’aime. Good luck.