To Chris Marker: An Unsent Letter

Emiko Omori's documentary essay is a collective love letter to iconoclastic French filmmaker, writer, and intermedia artist Chris Marker, who died in 2012. Known for his stylistic inventiveness and left-wing political views, Marker was a powerful influence, evidenced by the interview excerpts included here from a wide variety of friends, colleagues, and admirers (including film critic David Thomson), most of whom especially emphasize the impact of Marker's La Jetée (1962), an innovative short that combined a montage of stills, voiceover, and sound to tell an impressionistic sci-fi tale about post-war experiments in time travel (it would serve as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys). Attention is also paid to Marker's idiosyncratic documentaries, including the three-hour 1977 film A Grin Without a Cat (VL-5/09), the title of which reflects a feline theme that was common in his work, and the controversial 1983 documentary Sans Soleil (VL-7/93). Since Marker not only avoided interviews but also refused to appear on film himself, Omori—who served as a cinematographer on Marker's 1989 miniseries L'Héritage de la Chouett—is compelled to treat her subject in a roundabout fashion. Omori's approach mimics Marker's imaginatively allusive visual style, overlaying the interviews with montages of newly-shot footage that is tangentially related to the words (and often situating clips from Marker's films on laptops and theatre screens rather than simply inserting them in the full frame, which creates a distancing effect). To Chris Marker: An Unsent Letter may seem more than a little precious to the uninitiated, but those who appreciate Marker's work—admittedly an acquired taste—will find this to be a fitting tribute to an elusive artist. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (F. Swietek)