L'immémoire de Chris Marker est de l'étoffe des rêves. A la fois artistique, historique et énigmatique, elle élabore une cartographie abolissant le temps et l'espace puis recréeant une dimension universelle.
Le flâneur emprunte les allées de ses souvenirs et forge les siens sous le regard impertubable de la chouette et le sourire invisible du chat Guillaume.
"He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African time to European time, and also to Asian time. He said that in the 19th century mankind had come to terms with space, and that the great question of the 20th was the coexistence of different concepts of time. By the way, did you know that there are emus in the Île de France?"
"He didn't like to dwell on poverty, but in everything he wanted to show there were also the 4-Fs of the Japanese model. A world full of bums, of lumpens, of outcasts, of Koreans. Too broke to afford drugs, they'd get drunk on beer, on fermented milk. This morning in Namidabashi, twenty minutes from the glories of the center city, a character took his revenge on society by directing traffic at the crossroads. Luxury for them would be one of those large bottles of sake that are poured over tombs on the day of the dead."
"The commercial becomes a kind of haiku to the eye, used to Western atrocities in this field; not understanding obviously adds to the pleasure. For one slightly hallucinatory moment I had the impression that I spoke Japanese, but it was a cultural program onNHK about Gérard de Nerval."
"The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black. "
competiting with the city's mountains disappearing when the dust wind rises
The lost grand trees of Gwanhamun gil
The translucent subtle glow of the medusa-like fairylights along Chunggyechon canal
The beaming face of the wrinkled hotel's porter
The ice-flaked and red beans hills.
These memories shaped as the native tourist-but-not-born in the metropolis that I am looked at them, for me to see in the future.
The South African creator William Kentridge weaves together a theatrical set, political philosophy and silent movies' techniques in his new project O Sentimental Machine.
Trotsky's theories become the subject of a part-surrealist part comic short silent movie in which they are progressively drowned. A type writer, a loudspeaker and a mirror end up taking the lead on this melancholic stage. Kentridge imbues more humanity to these machines than to the portrayed humans swept up by forces surpassing them. A peculiar transdisciplinary experience: this time he does not invite the viewers to refuse time as in his last project but to assist to a re-creation of a lost world.
