He used to write me from Africa. He contrasted African
time with European and Asian time. He said that in the 19th century, mankind
had to come to terms with space, and the great question of the 20th century
would be different concepts of time.
—Sans Soleil
(1983)
Since Chris Marker's
death in July of last year (remarkably the 29th, the exact date of his birth 91
years earlier), there have been any number of attempts to address his life's
work. One particularly memorable piece is an obituary by Finn Brunton aptly
titled "Future Anterior,"1 the verb form of future
remembrance, a mark of what will have been. Brunton writes:
The heart of both Marker's art and his politics lay in
the future anterior, the knowledge that there is always an after, a next, which
we cannot predict and which will change irrecoverably the value of what we have
been and done. (69)
During his lifetime,
Marker himself often reflected back upon his earlier work, as when reediting
his 1977 film Grin Without a Cat (Le fond de l'air est rouge) in 1993 he
added a coda of sorts to the end, commenting among other things on the words
that did not then but have gone on to have great political resonance, "words like boat people, AIDS,
Thatcherism, ayatollah, occupied territories, perestroika, cohabitation
...." Marker, significantly not in his own voice but in that of a
commentator, not in the first person but in the third, continues: "Thus
our author marvels at the ingenuity of history, which always seems to have more
imagination than ourselves."
What is remarkable
here, in the comment and in Marker's work in general, is that deference to the
imagination of history itself. Not that he was not engaged, that he did not
have a stance—he absolutely did—but that he took his life in some great measure
to be more fully or accurately a "marker" of his time. A time that
was not his alone, that always was in some very real sense beyond him.
image:
from Grin Without a Cat (1977)
1 Radical Philosophy 176, November/December 2012, 68-71. [available here]