Discovering Chris Marker.

Chris Marker is a filmmaker I'd heard about for years, but I'd never seen any of his films until recently. As an American who grew up on the usual diet of Hollywood movies, I'd only heard about him in relation to films like 12 Monkeys and The Terminator, which supposedly drew their inspiration from Marker's arty, ultra-low budget science fiction film La Jetee. I still haven't seen La Jetee, but I have seen two of Markers other films, A Grin Without a Cat and The Last Bolshevik. I became interested in The Last Bolshevik after reading an essay by Jonathan Rosenbaum, who described it as an elegiac, somewhat bitter attempt to understand what happened to The Left's idealism over the course of the 20th century, specifically in relation to the failure of the Soviet experiment. Given my own fascination with this topic, it seemed like a film I couldn't miss. 

The Last Bolshevik I saw about a year ago, and I felt it was a pretty great film. It's about Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, a participant in the 1917 revolution who miraculously lived to see the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. It certainly does express a kind of complicated, critical, but also reverent portrait of the life of an artist trying to weather the storm of the 20th century, and the devastating effect it had on his ideals.

A Grin Without a Cat, which I watched this morning, is by comparison a much more detailed film about a much shorter window of time, concerning mostly the May 68 uprisings in France and the effect it had on the New Left thereafter. It was harder for me to follow than The Last Bolshevik, mostly because it's filled with a lot of dense information about French politics leading up to, during, and after May 68. Because the documentary is not just about France, but about how what went on in France relates to global socialist movements at the time, there is a lot of other information as well. For someone such as myself, who only has a passing knowledge of events like the Prague Spring and Che Guevara's Bolivian campaign, it's interesting if brutally educational. Just when I thought I was hopelessly lost in an ocean of history, Marker pulled everything together in a surprisingly concise and moving ending... just like The Last Bolshevik.

Watching Marker's films makes me realize how much I have to learn about just what the fuck happened in the 20th century, the century I was born in but now feels like ancient history. One thing the film convinced me of is that Fidel Castro was once quite charismatic, with quite a folksy persona. Not that the movie is pro-Cuba really. It doesn't seem to be pro-anything specifically. After seeing these two films I get the sense that Marker is basically a leftist who is constantly critiquing his own movement, by trying to identify and contextualize its perversions as well as its achievements. Both A Grin Without a Cat and The Last Bolshevik appear to be about this, about trying to examine an absurdly tangled ball of string that has taken a century to tangle itself... about stubbornly trying to untangle it rather than throw it away.

I don't see Marker as a propagandist. He's too ambivalent for that. He clearly believes in certain ideals, and a lot of his work seems to be a struggle to re-examine and maintain those ideals against the messy, frustrating, bloody 20th century history of socialist movements. In this way his films really seem to be based on a kind of self-criticism, which I think is healthy for a nakedly personal artist dealing with such difficult material. He seems more interested in posing questions than offering answers, which, as I get more jaded and bored with American political "discourse", makes him my kind of filmmaker.