Letter From Marker

A video essay by Luís Azevedo using the words filmmaker Chris Marker spoke about himself to tell his story. In 1958, after watching LETTRE DE SIBÉRIE (1957), André Bazin wrote that Marker’s first feature film resembles nothing hitherto seen in documentary films: “The important word is ‘essay,’ understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well. Generally, even in politically engaged documentaries or those with a specific point to make, the image (which is to say, the uniquely cinematic element) effectively constitutes the primary material of the film (…) with Marker it works quite differently. I would say that the primary material is intelligence, that its immediate means of expression is language, and that the image only intervenes in the third position, in reference to this verbal intelligence”. In 2017, the intelligence in his essay films still flows in the fringes of filmmaking.