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| Les Statues meurent aussi, 1953 |
Chris Marker. Memories of the Future is on show at BOZAR, my favourite museum in Brussels. I love its architecture, its labyrinth hallways and rooms in art deco style. I remember seeing the Sophie Calle show here years ago and the Chris Marker exhibition is another one that will stay with me. What a remarkable intellectual curiosity and sensibility for people, cultures and society Chris Marker had. I took some notes here and there while watching.
In 1962, at the end of the Algerian War, Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme made the documentary Le Joli Mai with in-the-street interviews with residents of Paris and its suburbs.
“I don’t have an opinion.”
“Has that come with age and wisdom?”
In 1989 Marker directed a TV-series L'heritage de la chouette about the heritage of Ancient Greece in contemporary society.
"Were they more virtuous because they gave speeches?"
"Symposium means drinking together and discussing things together. [...] There is a ritual. The wine is passed round in roughly the same order as the sequence of conversation. [...] Food - well, one must eat. But wine is on a different level, a spiritual level, I would say, the civilised level."
“I wasn’t born to hate but to love.” (Antigone)
In 1953, together with Alain Resnais and Guislain Cloquet, Marker co-directed Les Statues meurent aussi, an ode to African art, critical towards colonialism and thus banned in France for eleven years.
"When men are dead, they enter History, when statues die, they return to Art. This botany of death is what we call culture."
“We put stones over our dead in order to prevent them from escaping.”
“Colonizers of the world, we want everything to speak to us: the beast, the dead, the statues.
And of course, La Jetée in 1962, on the pier of Orly.
"Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. Later on they do claim remembrance when they show their scars."