Chris Marker

 

 

Marker’s legacy - which many times is taken also as a formal clichê of what an essay film should look like - as the one of the genre’s masters is highly influential to the way essayists and documentarists act nowadays. A contemporary and friend of Alain Resnais, Marker’s movies are presented in a between self knowledge and self expression, dealing with a high degree of subjectivity in a reading of our world that constantly relies on factors that are not visual - mainly the nature of personal and collective memories. The voice-over, generally personified, characteristic in most of his films presents not only a narrative to the images but an interpretation. The constant questioning of Marker’s the essays is essential to the philosophical and critic use of cinema. The understanding of time and space is also strongly aided by his production.