Chris Marker's IMMEMORY: GUTENBERG VERSION

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Chris Marker's IMMEMORY: GUTENBERG VERSION

A multimedia event presented with Exact Change

Schedule:

12pm to 5pm - IMMEMORY installation on view in the Archives

12:30pm - presentation by editor Isabel Ochoa Gold and designer/co-publisher Naomi Yang

1pm - SANS SOLEIL (1983, 100m) - screening in the 2220 Theater

3pm - LEVEL FIVE (1996, 106m) - screening in the 2220 Theater

FREE EVENT!

The enigmatic French multimedia artist and filmmaker Chris Marker (1921-2012) was known for his sprawling and constantly evolving body of film and video work, defined by an abiding interest in the nature of time and memory, and a physical and intellectual wanderlust. In 1997, Marker produced an interactive CD-ROM, IMMEMORY, that had resurfaced in Flash and bootleg copies but is otherwise impossible to view on a modern computer. Towards the end of his life, he began to plan a more durable and widely accessible version of this work.

The original publisher, Exact Change, has finally adapted IMMEMORY into a physical book, the Gutenberg Edition, which resembles a Cortazar-esque hopscotch text with footnotes and annotations. To celebrate this heroic act of preservation, we have endeavored to present IMMEMORY as a free limited-time installation, featuring computers where visitors can peruse the original piece at their leisure and view a projection of the video recording. We will also hold free screenings of SANS SOLEIL and LEVEL FIVE concurrently in the 2220 Theater, and have a presentation from the volume’s editor, Isabel Ochoa Gold.

Copies of the Gutenberg Version will be sold at the event.

Special thanks to Naomi Yang and Damon Krukowski (Exact Change), Isabel Ochoa Gold, Sandi Tan, Ed Halter and Thomas Beard (Light Industry), Joey Heinen and Mark Ayala (LACMA).

“IMMEMORY is something living, a sifting through decades’ worth of boxes filled with “postcards, newspaper clippings, catalogs, sometimes posters torn off the walls” and photographs: stuff [Marker] imbues with meaning and love. [He] lets you peek into the world through his own thoughtful and perceptive eyes, his own branching streams of consciousness. Wander through this world’s “zones,” as he calls the vast and networked terrain of his memories, and animate Marker’s spirit. Time is abolished; here, all of Marker’s memories are brought to the present, and the space of his absence filled.” -Isabel Ochoa Gold

“My working hunch…was that any memory, once it's fairly long, is more structured than it seems. That after a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us. By going through it systematically I was sure to discover that the apparent disorder of my imagery concealed a chart, as in the tales of pirates. And the object of this disc would be to present the ‘guided tour’ of a memory, while at the same time offering the visitor a chance for haphazard navigation. So, welcome to ‘Memory, Land of Contrasts’­ or rather, as I've chosen to call it, Immemory.” -Chris Marker

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SANS SOLEIL

directed by Chris Marker

1983, France, 100m, DCP

film start: 1:00pm

“Chris Marker’s 1983 masterpiece is one of the key nonfiction films of our time—a personal philosophical essay that concentrates mainly on contemporary Tokyo but also includes footage shot in Iceland, Guinea-Bissau, and San Francisco (where the filmmaker tracks down all the locations from Hitchcock’s VERTIGO). Difficult to describe and almost impossible to summarize, this poetic journal of a major French filmmaker radiates in all directions, exploring and reflecting upon many decades of experience. While Marker’s brilliance as a thinker and filmmaker has largely (and unfairly) been eclipsed by Godard’s, there is conceivably no film in the entire Godard canon that has as much to say about the state of the world, and the wit and beauty of Marker’s highly original form of discourse leave a profound aftertaste. A film about subjectivity, death, photography, social custom, and consciousness itself, SANS SOLEIL registers like a poem one might find in a time capsule.” -Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

LEVEL FIVE

directed by Chris Marker

1996, France, 108m, DCP

film start: 3:00pm

“Is LEVEL FIVE an essay film, a documentary, a techno-thriller or a mystery? The answer is yes, in an arrangement that is characteristically playful, ruminative and melancholy. Always thrifty and resourceful, Marker was adept at using modest cinematic means to pursue visionary ends. Much of LEVEL FIVE consists of the straight-to-camera testimony of Laura (Catherine Belkhodja) as she reflects on the legacy of a vanished lover and collaborator, who disappeared while researching an interactive video game…. Though it is in part a rigorous, informative and morally powerful historical documentary, is also a meditation on the relationship between the fixity of the past and the flux of memory. It wonders, in a way that feels joltingly contemporary, about how the images captured, invented and disseminated by various forms of technology — including cinema itself — affect what we know about the past and ourselves.” -The New York Times

"Marker's late masterpiece... keeps getting more contemporary every time I watch it... Visually rich (and beautifully written)." -Jonathan Rosenbaum, Cinema Scope

"A passionate and cerebral science-fiction adventure... there is nothing else in theaters now that feels quite as new." -The New York Times

"A fascinating glimpse of a historical event that's still little known in the West." —Variety

"This is a fin de siecle masterpiece crafted with life-worn hope for the new millennium just around the corner and a rueful awareness that the world remains as evanescent as ever." -Mubi Notebook