Cats and Years – Weekend – Kommersant
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As part of the Garage Museum’s film program Shadows and Light: Films of the Companions of the French Resistance, Chris Marker’s film Sunless will be screened – either a history manual, or a philosophical treatise on memory, or a time traveler’s dream.
One of the most famous shots of this hypnotic, dreamlike film is the maneki-neko figurines in the cat cemetery, many porcelain cats with their front paws raised. One had a broken leg. Any viewer of “Without the Sun” will never be able to perceive maneki-neko as a symbol of good luck and prosperity: these figures will remind them of the cat Thor, for whom an elderly couple prays in the film. The cat escaped and her owners came to the cemetery to tell Death her real name. It doesn’t matter that the Torah is still alive, they pray for her, looking to the future, trying to mend the fabric of time.
Chris Marker, who never considered himself a director, but only an artisan (in the end credits of “Without the Sun” it says: “Concept and editing by Chris Marker”), with his films darns human memory, explores history in all its manifestations. History as a sequence of political acts. History as a collection of memories. History as a list of things, a list of persons and events. history as a process. And the gaps in this process, the very moments that only the memory of mankind catches.
“Without the Sun” can be retold as a film-essay in which a certain woman reads off-screen letters from cinematographer Shandor Krasna. He talks about his travels, his impressions of the old people of Tokyo and the children of Iceland, the women and cats of Okinawa, the politicians of Guinea-Bissau, the desert and the ocean, advertising and emus. He invents and tells her films, knowing that he will never make them. One of the films, he says, could be called “Without the Sun”: it will focus on an alien from 4001, a time when everything works flawlessly, humanity has learned to fully use all the possibilities of the brain and has forgotten how to forget. The stranger in this film will listen to Mussorgsky’s vocal cycle “Without the Sun”, not understanding its meaning, but feeling that this cycle “is somehow connected with misfortune and memory.”
“Without the sun” is impossible and does not need to be retold. These are letters from the world of ghosts, a film-cyclone, a film-desert, a hole that sucks in everything around, it is both a travelogue and a political-philosophical novel, a story about “perishable and immortal”, about everyone who writes their own list of “what makes the heart beat faster”, about everyone who looks directly into the camera. Images and words collide, blend, disappear, freeze. Chris Marker has always been interested in the workings of memory, memory of both the past and the future. He believed that this work is akin to the work of an editor: memories stick together with each other. But the opposite is also true: history remembers only cuts.
The Runway (1962), Marker’s most famous film, was also about this, a kind of photo album or photo novel about cinema and time travel. Many years later, Terry Gilliam based Runway into the dystopian 12 Monkeys with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt, the darkest movie about how we always make our own past, and over the present and future we have no power. Marker considered Gilliam’s film “great”.
Marker is a writer, photographer, video artist, member of the Resistance, a leftist, a philosopher, a cat (on the Internet, he also spoke on behalf of the cat Guillaume-en-Egypt). He worked with Alain Resnais, one of the first Europeans to make a film about Maoist China (Sunday in Beijing, 1956), he looked into the mirror of history (Beautiful May, 1963), knowing full well that “you never know what you you shoot until the years pass” (“The Color of the Air is Red”, 1977). He pondered over the way images are perceived, over their transformation, over the relationship between the image and the word, and towards the end of his life he set up a virtual gallery on the web (“Ouvroir”, 2010).
“Without the Sun” is something like a magnifying glass that focuses all the themes and images that have ever – in the past or in the future – been of interest to Marker. Cats, kamikaze, the Okinawa tragedy, advertising language, Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Icelandic ashes, burning broken Japanese dolls, the human eye. Marker is one of the few directors in this world who can forget the difference between philosophy and dreaming.
And it’s also a violently political movie about injustice, about rich and poor, about winners and undefeated, about amnesia for the future, and about how collective memories of torment “add up to the great wound of history.” And, looking at the sleeping passengers of the ferry, Sandor Krasna thinks about “small fragments of the war that fit into everyday life.”
Shandor Krasna is, of course, Marker himself. He is also the composer of the film Michel Krasna. He is also a Japanese friend of Sunless narrator, Hayao Yamaneko. This character passes images of the past and present through a video synthesizer, assuring that there are fewer lies in them than in what is shown on TV. The image turns into indignant colored spots in which one can guess the outlines of aircraft, protesters or emperors; memory processes the past in the same way, and people process history in the same way. “Memory is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather the reverse side of it,” says Marker. “Without the Sun” is a film about the wrong side, including the wrong side of history.
There is no time when this film is not relevant. Today, forty years ago, in the year 4001, it will contain everything you can see. All previous and future wars are collected here, all prayers, all montages that are somehow connected with misfortune and memory. And history is waving its broken paw in it.
Center for Contemporary Art “Garage”, December 9, 19.30
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