July 31st, 2012 / 12:30 pm
Film

Chris Marker died

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.

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4 Comments

  1. Scott Riley Irvine

      Sans Soleil deeply affected me when I saw it as a 19 year old. It’s still one of my favorite movies.

      I’ll always remember his “cameo” in Beaches of Agnes.

      rip

  2. reynard

      how the hell do you like an obituary, erik

      hopefully this will have everyone watching sunless and being wowed and whatnot, last i heard of marker’s work he was on second life (perhaps it took his first)

  3. A D Jameson

      Thanks, Reynard, for reminding me about Marker’s Second Life work; I’d forgotten about that …

  4. kb82

      People cry all the time. I can recall at least 20 instances of somebody crying after cooking something well/poorly on a reality game show about cookery.