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Adam Bartos, Colin MacCabe, Studio: Remembering Chris Marker<\/em><\/a>, OR Books, 2017<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
\u201cIt felt good just to look out the window. If only it were possible to film like that, I thought to myself, like when you open your eyes sometimes just to look without wanting to prove anything.”<\/em><\/p>\n
Tokyo-Ga<\/em> (Wim Wenders, 1985)<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen a country is split in two by an artificial border and irreconcilable propaganda is exercised on each side, it’s na\u00c3\u00afve to ask where the war comes from: the border is the war.”<\/em><\/p>\n
Chris Marker, Cor\u00e9ennes<\/em> (1962)<\/p>\n
Studio<\/em>, as its title suggests, is not so much an exercise in the remembrance of Chris Marker, as a remembrance, when viewed as its sole essay contributed by cineaste-critic Colin MacCabe to the volume.\u00a0 As much as Marker shunned publicity of any kind during his lifetime (1921-2012, remarking pointedly \u201cMy films are enough”), for Studio<\/em> an array of selected photographs of his Paris workspace by Adam Bartos does the rest. \u00a0 Much continues to be made of Marker’s Pynchonesque reclusivity and refusal to discuss or engage with his past, which perhaps serves to underscore the premise behind Studio<\/em>, Marker being that \u201cobsessive agent of memory” according to writer and academic Stephen Barber.<\/p>\n
In Wim Wenders’ blank impressionistic portrait of 1983 Tokyo, the German director digresses from his street-level survey of the city and impassioned homage to the works of Ozu, attempting to capture Marker on film, who \u201crisk[ed] an eye” by revealing a portion of his face to the camera from behind a sheet of dot matrix cat.\u00a0 This scene, filmed the same year as Marker’s fragmentary Sans Soleil<\/em>, is shot in the Golden Gai quarter of Shinjuku, a battered collection of tiny themed drinking dens built up in the pre-fab style during the aftermath of World War II, one of which continues to bear the name of Marker’s 1962 calling card, La Jet\u00e9e <\/em>(held up by MacCabe here as \u201cone of the greatest science fiction films”).\u00a0 Studio<\/em> in hand, I sought out La Jet\u00e9e in Tokyo’s Kabukicho on a rain-lashed afternoon in May, only to find it closed up, though Stephen Barber was also in town that evening to activate a remembrance of Marker and his friend Donald Richie at a joint project of ours<\/a>.\u00a0 Down on the street afterwards, he took a disparaging view of studies of Marker which focused on the reclusiveness, travel writing and cats.<\/p>\n
It was only in Marker’s later life that he began to address his earlier pre-filmmaking years, speaking with collaborator Agn\u00e9s Varda about his activities in the French Resistance and later in the service of the US Army.\u00a0 This is briefly acknowledged by MacCabe, while others contend that Marker was also involved in a Vichy literary journal prior to this, though the sources are rather opaque.\u00a0 To begin, MacCabe details the scope of his engagement with Marker in Paris as belonging only to that later life period, beginning in 2002 (long after the Japan years). He does so by \u201ccold-calling” Marker at his Mara\u00eechers studio in the 20th<\/sup> \u00a0arrondissement and announcing his possession of a VHS copy of The Magic Face <\/em>(long sought by Marker, according to a mutual friend), after which a decade of closely followed conversations and friendship follows. \u00a0 Marker, who was only too happy to tell of his involvement in the torture of German conscripts (though MacCabe concedes this and his beliefs could be self-edited), ends his days producing \u2018Cats for Obama’ t-shirts.\u00a0 The connection to photographer Adam Bartos is told as a similar chance meeting through a shared interest in the Soviet space programme, and a collection of images of his work in the rue Courat studio form the latter half of the book.\u00a0 As ever, Marker insisted on not being present when these were taken, although this implies a certain impossibility in itself.<\/p>\n