“It should be said, making a traditional documentary that sketches an overview of this versatile artist – active in various media for more than 70 years – has never been my intention,” Flemish filmmaker Brecht Debackere tells BDE of his Chris Marker feature doc project. “The starting point was always: how can we make an audience get to know someone who has practically no biographical information available, no archive material?”
Brecht Debackere’s 90-minute feature documentary will tackle that most elusive of visual artists, Chris Marker (né Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve), who described himself as ‘the best-known author of unknown films.’ That said, he was responsible for ground-breaking and highly influential works such as La Jetée, Sans Soleil and Le fond de l’air est rouge.
The press notes for the film refer to an “essay about memory, history, nostalgia and how images of the past shape our future. Starting from Marker’s legacy, Nostalgia for the Future investigates what an archive can tell us about the person who created it, and asks the question whether we can really know someone through their body of work.”
The film is produced by Brussels-based Visualantics and will be ready for Spring 2023 delivery.
“When I first started out, I really followed a kind of associative route that he also applies in his own work, where one thing leads to something else; like a social issue can lead to a philosophical question, can lead to a more historic thing, to literature, through myth and through all sorts of different media,” director Debackere tells Business Doc Europe of an odyssey I suggest resembles Marlow’s search for Kurtz in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness.’
“You pull one thread and it loosens and gives you 10 different threads to continue. Through the course of my research, I talked to the people of the Cinematheque Française who have his entire archive. Everything that was in his studio, they have collected that. And apparently the way I approached this film is also a bit the way he approached his own work.”
“It’s like trying to make a jigsaw puzzle where pieces keep on being added, so you never really arrive at the end,” Debackere adds. “It’s like a jigsaw puzzle whose image is the jigsaw puzzle itself…and that’s a very interesting thing, because it really required me to work out how to approach this movie, because everything is connected to everything else.”
“What appeals to me is the density of subjects that are dealt with in his work,” he adds from the film notes. “It stubbornly connects an abundance of tangents, impressions, feelings and ideas that run counter to the smooth, shrink-wrapped perfection. Marker combines lyrical imagination with ethical depth. He is critical but not dogmatic. He looks with one eye at the future while the other searches in the past but does so with both feet firmly anchored in the present.”
Marker would also plunder his past work, Debackere stresses, “to see how the things that he already shot would translate to a new time. So that’s one of the things I also want to talk about in the movie, how the images of our past are creating our future. And in order to do that, you need to re-evaluate your archive. You need to look at what you filmed before and see what it means, what it meant, and then what it means now and what it can mean for the future, because images take on new meaning every time.”
Marker was also defiantly secretive, whose relationship with a cineaste public was strictly one-way. “If you want to know about me, watch my movies,” Debackere gives a typical Markerian response. “That’s why he says ‘my movies are enough for them,’ meaning the audience.”
“My fascination for his [Marker’s] work?” the filmmaker muses. “First of all the themes he tackles in his movies are very interesting, just the fact that the archive images [are like] memories, souvenirs of our past, but how also they represent our current predicaments, whatever they may be on a social or political level, and his associative way of making his movies, where it’s kind of free floating, and there’s nothing really that he deems unimportant. It can be something very difficult and philosophical in one minute, and it can be something very pedestrian the next. So that’s how he really combines all these things into a kind of web, where everything is connected and which I think for me creates a very valid worldview.”
