Coastal lagoons fronted by barrier spits typically have entrances that migrate through time. Here, the entrance has been fixed by jetty construction. Carlsbad, CA. (April 1998)

A jetty is any of a variety of structures used in river, dock, and maritime works that are generally carried out in pairs from river banks, or in continuation of river channels at their outlets into deep water; or out into docks, and outside their entrances; or for forming basins along the sea-coast for ports in tideless seas. The forms and construction of these jetties are as varied as their uses (directing currents or accommodating vessels), for they are formed sometimes of high open timber-work, sometimes of low solid projections, and occasionally only differ from breakwaters in their object. The term derived from the French word jetée, "thrown", and signifies something thrown out. Jetties at the coast that have been raised and extended, help prevent long shore drift, so therefore slowing down beach erosion^{[citation needed]}.

For regulating rivers[link]

Another form of jetties, wing dams are extended out, opposite one another, from each bank of a river, at intervals, to contract a wide channel, and by concentration of the current to produce a deepening.

For berthing at docks[link]

Where docks are given sloping sides, openwork timber jetties are generally carried across the slope, at the ends of which vessels can lie in deep water or more solid structures are erected over the slope for supporting coal-tips. Pilework jetties are also constructed in the water outside the entrances to docks on each side, so as to form an enlarging trumpet-shaped channel between the entrance, lock or tidal basin and the approach channel, in order to guide vessels in entering or leaving the docks. Solid jetties, moreover, lined with quay walls, are sometimes carried out into a wide dock, at right angles to the line of quays at the side, to enlarge the accommodation; and they also serve, when extended on a large scale from the coast of a tideless sea under shelter of an outlying breakwater, to form the basins in which vessels lie when discharging and taking in cargoes in such a port as Marseille....

At entrances to jetty harbors[link]

Aerial view of jetties, constructed of dolos, at Humboldt Bay harbor entrance. These jetties mitigate unpredictable shifting sands and ensure 700 feet (210 m) of width.^[1]

The approach channel to some ports situated on sandy coasts is guided and protected across the beach by parallel jetties, made solid up to a little above low water of neap tides, on which open timber-work is erected, provided with a planked platform at the top raised above the highest tides. The channel between the jetties was originally maintained by tidal scour from low-lying areas close to the coast, and subsequently by the current from sluicing basins; but it is now often considerably deepened by sand-pump dredging. It is protected to some extent by the solid portion of the jetties from the inroad of sand from the adjacent beach, and from the levelling action of the waves; whilst the upper open portion serves to indicate the channel and to guide the vessels, if necessary (see harbor). The bottom part of the older jetties, in such long-established jetty ports as Calais, Dunkirk and Ostend, was composed of clay or rubble stone, covered on the top by fascine-work or pitching, but the deepening of the jetty channel by dredging and the need that arose for its enlargement led to the reconstruction of the jetties at these ports. The nes jetties at Dunkirk were founded in the sandy beach, by the aid of compressed air, at a depth of 22.75 feet (6.93 m). below low water of spring tides; and their solid masonry portion, on a concrete foundation was raised 50 feet (15 m). above low water of neap tides.

At lagoon outlets[link]

A small tidal rise spreading tidal water over a large expanse of lagoon or inland back-water causes the influx and efflux of the tide to maintain a deep channel through a narrows no longer confined by a bank on each side, becomes dispersed, and owing to the reduction of its scouring force, is no longer able at a moderate distance from the shore effectually to resist the action of tending to form a continuous beach in front of the outlet. Hence a bar is produced that diminishes the available depth in the approach channel. By carrying out a solid jetty over the bar, however on each side of the outlet, the tidal currents are concentrated in the channel across the bar, and lower it by scour. Thus the available depth of the approach channels to Venice through the Malaniocco and Lido outlets from the Venetian lagoon have been deepened several feet (metres) over their bars by jetties of rubble, carried out across the foreshore into deep water on both sides of the channel. Other examples are provided by the long jetties extended into the sea in front of the entrance to Charleston harbour, formerly constructed of fascines, weighted with stone and logs, but subsequently of rubble stone, and by the two converging rubble jetties carried out from each shore of Dublin bay for deepening the approach to Dublin harbour.

Rivers[link]

North Jetty on the left and South Jetty on the right at the mouth of Sebastian Inlet in Florida from the Indian River to the Atlantic Ocean.

At the outlet of tideless rivers[link]

Jetties have been constructed on each side of the outlet river of some of the rivers flowing into the Baltic, with the objects of prolonging the scour of the river and protecting the channel from being shoaled by the littoral drift along the shore. The most interesting application of parallel jetties is in lowering the bar in front of one of the mouths of a deltaic river flowing into a tide — a virtual prolongation of its less sea, by extending the scour of the river out to the bar by banks. Jetties prolonging the Sulina branch of the Danube into the Black Sea, and the south pass of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, formed of rubble stone and concrete blocks, and respectively, have enabled the discharge of these rivers to scour away the bars obstructing the access to them; and they have also carried the sediment-bearing waters sufficiently far out to come under the influence of littoral currents, which, by conveying away some of the sediment, postpone the eventual formation of a fresh bar farther out (see river engineering).

At the mouth of tidal rivers[link]

Where a river is narrow near its mouth, and its discharge is generally feeble, the sea is liable on an exposed coast, when the tidal range is small, to block up its outlet during severe storms. The river is thus forced to seek another exit at a weak spot of the beach, which along a low coast may be at some distance off; and this new outlet in its turn may be blocked up, so that the river from time to time shifts the position of its mouth. This inconvenient cycle of changes may be stopped by fixing the outlet of the river at a suitable site, by carrying a jetty on each side of this outlet across the beach, thereby concentrating its discharge in a definite channel and protecting the mouth from being blocked up by littoral drift. This system was long ago applied to the shifting outlet of the river Yare to the south of Yarmouth, and has also been successfully employed for fixing the wandering mouth of the Adur near Shoreham, and of the Adour flowing into the Bay of Biscay below Bayonne. When a new channel was cut across the Hoek van Holland to provide a straighter and deeper outlet channel for the river Maas, forming the approach channel to Rotterdam, low, broad, parallel jetties, composed of fascine mattresses weighted with stone, were carried across the foreshore into the sea on either side of the new mouth of the river, to protect the jetty channel from littoral drift, and cause the discharge of the river to maintain it out to deep water. The channel, also, beyond the outlet of the river Nervion into the Bay of Biscay has been regulated by jetties; and by extending the south-west jetty out for nearly 0.5 miles (0.80 km) with a curve concave towards the channel the outlet has not only been protected to some extent from the easterly drift, but the bar in front has been lowered by the scour produced by the discharge of the river following the concave bend of the south-west jetty. As the outer portion of this jetty was exposed to westerly storms from the Bay of Biscay before the outer harbour was constructed, it has been given the form and strength of a breakwater situated in shallow water.

See also[link]

• Breakwater
• Dock (maritime)
• Groyne
• Jettied floors in medieval houses
• Mole
• Pier
• Port
• Quay
• Spiral Jetty
• Wharf

References[link]

•  This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. 
• Humboldt Bay Recreation & Conservation District: Humboldt Bay Harbor Setting

Chris Marker (born 29 July 1921) is a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans Soleil (1983) and AK (1985), an essay film on the Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa. Marker is often associated with the Left Bank Cinema movement that occurred in the late 1950s and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi and Armand Gatti.

His friend and sometime collaborator Alain Resnais has called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man."^[1] Film theorist Roy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique...The French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."^[1]

Biography[link]

Early life[link]

Marker was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve on July 29, 1921. Always elusive about his past and known to refuse interviews and not allow photographs to be taken of him, his place of birth is highly disputed.^[1] Some sources and Marker himself claim that he was born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.^[2] Other sources say he was born in Belleville, Paris, and others, in Neuilly-sur-Seine.^[1] The 1949 edition of Le Cœur Net specifies his birthday as July 22. Film critic David Thomson has stated: "Marker told me himself that Mongolia is correct. I have since concluded that Belleville is correct- but that does not spoil the spiritual truth of Ulan Bator."^[3] When asked about his secretive nature, Marker has said "My films are enough for them (the audience)."^[1]

Marker was a philosophy student in France prior to World War II. During the German occupation of France he joined the Maquis (FTP), a part of the French Resistance. At some point during the war he left France and joined the United States Air Force as a paratrooper,^[1] although some sources claim that this is a myth.^[4] After the war he began a career as a journalist. He first wrote for the journal Esprit, a neo-Catholic, Marxist magazine where he met fellow journalist André Bazin. At Esprit, Marker wrote political commentaries, poems, short stories and (with Bazin) film reviews. He would later become an early contributor to Bazin's Cahiers du cinéma.^[1]

During this time period, Marker began to travel around the world as a journalist and photographer, a vocation that he would continue for the rest of his life. He was hired by the French publishing company Éditions du Seuil as editor of the series Petite Planète (Small World). This collection devoted one edition to each country and included information and photographs.^[1] In 1949 Marker published his first novel, Le Coeur net (The Forthright Spirit), which was about aviation. In 1952 Marker published an illustration essay on French writer Jean Giraudoux, Giraudoux Par Lui-Même.^[1]

Early career (1950-1961)[link]

During his early journalism career, Marker became increasingly interested in filmmaking and experimented with photography in the early 1950s. Around this time Marker met and befriended many members of what would be called the Left Bank Film Movement, including Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi, Armand Gatti and the novelists Marguerite Duras and Jean Cayrol. This group is often associated with the French New Wave directors who came to prominince during the same time period, and indeed both groups were often friends and journalistic co-workers. The term Left Bank was first coined by film critic Richard Roud,^[5] who has described them as having "fondness for a kind of Bohemian life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of involvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a consequent interest in experimental filmmaking", as well as an identification with the political left.^[5] Many of Marker's earliest films were produced by Anatole Dauman.

In 1952 Marker made his first film, Olympia 52, a 16mm feature documentary about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games. In 1953 Marker collaborated with Resnais on the documentary Statues Also Die. The film examines traditional African art such as sculptures and masks, and its decline with coming of Western colonialism. The film won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo, but was banned by French censors for its criticism of French colonialism.^[1]

After working as assistant director on Resnais's Night and Fog in 1955, Marker made Sunday in Peking, a short documentary "film essay" that would characterize Marker's unique film style for most of his career. The film was shot in two weeks by Marker while he was traveling through China with Armand Gatti in September 1955. In the film, Marker's commentary overlaps scenes from China, such as tombs which, contrary to Westernized understandings of Chinese legends, do not contain the remains of any Ming Dynasty emperors.^[1]

After working on the commentary for Resnais' film Le mystère de l'atelier quinze in 1957, Marker continued to form his own cinematic style with the feature documentary Letter from Siberia. An essay on the gradual destruction of Siberia's culture and individuality, the film combines footage that Marker shot in Siberia, old newsreel footage, cartoons, stills and, at one point, an illustration of Alfred E. Neuman from Mad Magazine, all accompanied by Marker's signature commentary, which takes the form of a letter from the director to his audience. In one sequence, Marker repeats the same collection of shots three times with different commentary: the first one praising the Soviet Union, the second denouncing it, and the third taking an objective stance.^[1]

In 1959 Marker made the animated film Les Astronautes with Walerian Borowczyk. The film was a combination of traditional drawings with still photography. In 1960 Marker made Description d'un combat, a documentary on the State of Israel which reminisces on the country's past and future.^[1] The film won the Golden Bear for Best Documentary at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival.^[6]

In January 1961, Marker traveled to Cuba and shot the film ¡Cuba Sí!. The film promotes and defends Fidel Castro and includes two interviews with the Comandante. The film ends with an anti-American epilogue in which the United States is embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco, and was subsequently banned. The banned essay was included in Marker's first volume of collected film commentaries, Commentaires I, published in 1961. The following year Marker published Coréennes, a collection of photographs and essays on the conditions of Korea.^[1]

[edit] La jetée and Le joli mai (1962-1966)

Marker became known internationally for the short film La jetée (The Pier) in 1962. It tells of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects. In the film, a survivor of a futuristic third World War is obsessed with a distant and disconnected memories of a pier at the Orly Airport, the image of a mysterious woman, and a man's death. Scientists experimenting in time travel select the man choose him for their studies, and the man travels back in time to contact the mysterious woman, and discovers that the man's death at the Orly Airport was his own. Except for one shot of the woman mentioned above sleeping and suddenly waking up, the film is composed entirely of photographs by Jean Chiabaud and stars Davos Hanich as the man, Hélène Chatelain as the woman and filmmaker William Klein as a man from the future.

La Jetée was the inspiration for Mamoru Oshii's 1987 debut live action feature The Red Spectacles (and, later for, parts of Oshii's 2001 film Avalon as well) and also inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys (1995). It also inspired many of director Mira Nair's shots for the 2003 film The Namesake.^{[citation needed]}

While making La Jetee, Marker was simultaneously making the 150-minute documentary essay-film Le joli mai, released in 1963. Beginning in the Spring of 1962, Marker and his camera operator Pierre Lhomme shot 55 hours of footage interviewing random people on the streets of Paris. The questions, asked by the unseen Marker, range from their personal lives, as well as social and political issues of relevance at that time. Like he had with montages of landscapes and indigenous art, Marker created a film essay that contrasts and juxtaposes a variety of lives with his signature commentary (spoken by Marker's friends, singer-actor Yves Montand in the French version and Simone Signoret in the English version). The film has been compared to the Cinéma vérité films of Jean Rouch, and criticized by its practitioners at the time.^[1] It was shown in competition at the 1963 Venice Film Festival, where it won the award for Best First Work. It also won the Golden Dove Award at the Leipzig DOK Festival.

After the documentary Le Mystère Koumiko in 1965, Marker made Si j'avais quatre dromadaires, an essay-film that, like La jetée, is a photomontage of over 800 photographs that Marker had taken over the past 10 years from 26 countries. The commentary takes on a slightly different dimension than his previous commentaries by using a fictitious photographer have a conversation with two friends to discuss the photos. The film's title is an allusion to a poem by Guillaume Apollinaire. It was the last film in which Marker includes "travel footage" for many years.^[1]

SLON and ISKRA (1967-1974)[link]

In 1967 Marker published his second volume of collected film essays, Commentaires II. That same year, Marker organized the omnibus film Loin du Vietnam, a protest to the Vietnam War with segments contributed by Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Claude Lelouch, William Klein, Michele Ray and Joris Ivens. The film includes footage of the war, from both sides, as well as anti-war protests in New York and Paris and other anti-war activities.

From this initial collection of filmmakers with left-wing political agendas, Marker created the group S.L.O.N. (Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles, but also the Russian word for elephant).^[7] SLON was a film collective whose objectives were to make films and to encourage industrial workers to create film collectives of their own. Its members included Valerie Mayoux, Jean-Claude Lerner, Alain Adair and John Tooker. Marker is usually credited as director or co-director of all of the films made by SLON.^[1]

After the events of May 1968, Marker felt a moral obligation to abandon his own personal film career and devote himself to SLON and its activities. SLON's first film was about a strike at a Rhodiacéta factory in France, À bientôt, j'espère (Rhodiacéta) in 1968.^[1] Later that year SLON made La Sixième face du pentagone, about an anti-war protest in Washington, D.C. and was a reaction to what SLON considered to be the unfair and censored reportage of such events on mainstream television. The film was shot by François Reichenbach, who received co-director credit. La Bataille des dix millions was made in 1970 with Mayoux as co-director and Santiago Álvarez as cameraman and is about the 1970 sugar crop in Cuba and its disastrous effects on the country. In 1971, SLON made Le Train en marche, a new prologue to Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin's 1935 film Schastye, which had recently been re-released in France.^[1]

In 1974, SLON became I.S.K.R.A. (Images, Sons, Kinescope, Réalisations, Audiovisuelles, but also the name of Vladimir Lenin's political newspaper Iskra).^[1]

Return to personal work (1974-1986)[link]

In 1974 returned to his personal work and made a film outside of ISKRA. La Solitude du chanteur de fond is a one-hour documentary about Marker's friend Yves Montand's benefit concert for Chilean refugees. The concert was Montand's first public performance in four years and the film includes film clips from his long career as a singer and actor.^[1]

Marker had been working on a film about Chile with ISKRA since 1973. Marker had collaborated with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart and ISKRA members Valérie Mayoux and Jacqueline Meppiel to shoot and collect the visual materials, which Marker then edited together and provided the commentary for. The resulting film was the two and a half hour documentary La Spirale, released in 1975. The film chronicles recent events in Chile, beginning with the 1970 election of socialist President Salvador Allende until his murder and the resulting coup in 1973.^[1]

Marker then began work on one of his most ambitious films, A Grin Without a Cat, released in 1977. The film's title refers to the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland. The metaphor compares the promise of the global socialist movement before May 1968 (the grin) with its actual presence in the world after May 1968 (the cat). The film's original French title is Le fond de l'air est rouge, which means "The base of the air is red", or "revolution is in the air", implying that the socialist movement existed only in the air.^[8]

The film was intended to be an all encompassing portrait of political movements since May 1968, a summation of the work which he had taken part in for ten years. The film is divided into two parts: the first half focuses on the hopes and idealism before May 1968, and the second half on the disillusion and disappointments since those events. Marker begins the film with the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin, which Marker points is a fictitious creation of Eisenstein which has still influenced the image of the historical event. Marker used very little commentary in this film, but the film's montage structure and preoccupation with memory make it a Marker film. Upon release, the film was criticized for not addressing many current issues of the New Left such as the woman's movement, sexual liberation and worker self-management.^[1] The film was re-released in the US in 2002.^[8]

In the late 1970s Marker traveled extensively throughout the world, included an extended period in Japan. From this trip, Marker first published the photo-essay Le Dépays in 1982, as well as using the experience for his next film Sans Soleil, released in 1982.^[1]

Sans Soleil stretches the limits of what could be called a documentary. It is an essay, a montage, mixing pieces of documentary with fiction and philosophical comments, creating an atmosphere of dream and science fiction. The main themes are Japan, Africa, memory and travel. A sequence in the middle of the film takes place in San Francisco, and heavily references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. Marker has said that Vertigo is the only film "capable of portraying impossible memory, insane memory."^[1] The film's commentary are credited to the fictitious cameraman Sandor Krasna, and read in the form of letters by an unnamed woman. Though centered around Japan, the film was also shot in such other countries as Guinea Bissau, Ireland and Iceland.^[1] Sans Soleil was shown at the 1983 Berlin Film Festival where it won the OCIC Award. It was also awarded the Sutherland Trophy at the 1983 British Film Institute Awards.

In 1984 Marker was invited by producer Serge Silberman to document the making of Akira Kurosawa's film Ran. From this Marker made A.K., released in 1985. The film focuses more on Kurosawa's remote but polite personality than on the making of the film.^[9] The film was screened in the Un Certain Regard section at the 1985 Cannes Film Festival,^[10] before Ran itself had been released.

In 1985 Marker's long time friend and neighbor Simone Signoret died of cancer. Marker the made the one-hour TV documentary Mémoires pour Simone as a tribute to her in 1986.^[1]

Multimedia and later career (1987-present)[link]

Beginning with Sans Soleil, he developed a deep interest in digital technology, which led to his film Level 5 (1996) and Immemory (1998, 2008)^[11] , an interactive multimedia CD-ROM, produced for the Centre Pompidou (French language version) and from Exact Change (English version). Marker created a 19 minute multimedia piece in 2005 for The Museum of Modern Art in New York titled Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men which was influenced by T. S. Eliot's poem.

Chris Marker lives in Paris and very rarely grants interviews. When asked for a picture of himself, he usually offers a photograph of a cat instead. (Marker was represented in Agnes Varda's 2008 documentary "The Beaches of Agnes" by a cartoon drawing of a cat, speaking in a technologically altered voice.) Marker's own cat is named Guillaume-en-egypte. In 2009 Marker commissioned an Avatar of Guillaume-en-Egypte to represent him in machinima works. The avatar was created by Exosius Woolley and first appeared in the short film / machinima, "Ouvroir the Movie by Chris Marker."

In the 2007 Criterion Collection release of La Jetée and Sans Soleil, Marker included a short essay, "Working on a shoestring budget". He confessed to shooting all of Sans Soleil with a silent film camera and recording all the audio on a primitive audio cassette recorder. Marker also reminds the reader that only one short scene in La Jetée is of a moving image, as Marker could only borrow a movie camera for one afternoon while working on the film.

Works[link]

Filmography[link]

• Olympia 52 (1952)
• Statues Also Die (1953 with Alain Resnais)
• Sundays in Peking (1956)
• Letters from Siberia (1957)
• Les Astronautes (1959 with Walerian Borowczyk)
• Description d'un combat (1960)
• ¡Cuba Sí! (1961)
• La jetée (1962)
• Le joli mai (1963, 2006 re-cut)
• Le Mystère Koumiko (1965)
• Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966)
• Loin du Vietnam (1967)
• Rhodiacéta (1967)
• La Sixième face du pentagone (1968 with Reichenbach)
• Cinétracts (1968)
• À bientôt, j'espère (1968 with Marret)
• On vous parle du Brésil: Tortures (1969)
• Jour de tournage (1969)
• Classe de lutte (1969)
• On vous parle de Paris: Maspero, les mots ont un sens (1970)
• On vous parle du Brésil: Carlos Marighela (1970)
• La Bataille des dix millions (1971)
• Le Train en marche (1971)
• On vous parle de Prague: le deuxième procès d'Artur London (1971)
• Vive la baleine (1972)
• L'Ambassade (1973)
• On vous parle du Chili: ce que disait Allende (1973 with Littin)
• Puisqu'on vous dit que c'est possible (1974)
• La Solitude du chanteur de fond (1974)
• La Spirale (1975)
• A Grin Without a Cat (1977)
• Quand le siècle a pris formes (1978)
• Junkopia (1981)
• Sans Soleil (1983)
• 2084 (1984)
• From Chris to Christo (1985)
• Matta (1985)
• A.K. (1985)
• Eclats (1986)
• Mémoires pour Simone (1986)
• Tokyo Days (1988)
• Spectre (1988)
• L'héritage de la chouette (1989)
• Bestiaire (three short video haiku) (1990)
  • Bestiaire 1. Chat écoutant la musique
  • Bestiaire 2. An owl is An owl is an owl
  • Bestiaire 3. Zoo Piece
• Getting away with it (1990)
• Berlin 1990 (1990)
• Détour Ceausescu (1991)
• Théorie des ensembles (1991)
• Coin fenètre (1992)
• Azulmoon (1992)
• Le Tombeau d'Alexandre aka The Last Bolshevik (1992)
• Le 20 heurs dans les camps (1993)
• Prime Time in the Camps (1993)
• SLON Tango (1993)
• Bullfight in Okinawa (1994)
• Eclipse (1994)
• Haiku (1994)
  • Haiku 1. Petite Ceinture
  • Haiku 2. Chaika
  • Haiku 3. Owl Gets in Your Eyes
• Casque bleu (1995)
• Silent Movie (1995)
• Level Five (1997)
• Un maire au Kosovo (2000)
• One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (2000)
• Le facteur sonne toujours cheval (2001)
• Avril inquiet (2001)
• Le souvenir d'un avenir (with Bellon 2003)
• Chats Perchés (2004) - a documentary about M. Chat street art
• Leila Attacks (2006)

Film Collaborations[link]

• Nuit et Brouillard (Resnais 1955)
  • Note: In a 1995 interview Resnais states that the final version of the commentary was a collaboration between Marker and Jean Cayrol (source: Film Comment).
• Les hommes de la baleine (Ruspoli 1956)
  • Note: under the pseudonym "Jacopo Berenizi" Marker wrote the commentary for this short about whale hunters in the Azores. The two would return to this topic in 1972's Vive la Baleine (Film Comment).
• Le mystere de l'atelier quinze (Resnais et Heinrich 1957)
  • Note: Marker wrote the commentary for this fictional short (Film Comment).
• Le Siècle a soif (Vogel 1958)
  • Note: Marker wrote and spoke all the commentary for this short film about fruit juice in Alexandrine verse (Film Comment).
• La Mer et les jours (Vogel et Kaminker 1958)
  • Note: Marker present commentary for this "somber work about the daily lives of fishermen on Brittany's Île de Sein" (Film Comment).
• L'Amérique insolite (Reichenbach 1958)
  • Note: Marker was eventually credited as a writer for this one, apparently, he wrote the dialogue (Film Comment).
• Django Reinhardt (Paviot 1959)
  • Note: Marker narrated this one (Film Comment).
• Jouer à Paris (Varlin 1962)
  • Note: This was edited by Marker - essentially, this film is a 27-minute postscript to Le Joli Mai assembled from leftover footage and organized around a new commentary (Film Comment).
• A Valparaiso (Ivens 1963)
  • Note: This gem was written by Marker. It feels like a Marker film.
• Les Chemins de la fortune (Kassovitz 1964)
  • Note: Marker apparently helped edit and organise this Venezuela travelogue (Film Comment).
• La Douceur du village (Reichenbach 1964)
  • Note: Edited by Marker.
• La Brûlure de mille soleils (Kast 1964)
  • Note: Marker edited this (mostly) animated science-fiction exstentialist short and (possibly) collaborated on the script (Film Comment).
• Le volcan interdit (Tazieff 1966)
  • Note: Marker narrates this volcano documentary.
• Europort-Rotterdam (Ivens 1966)
  • Note: Marker did the textual adaptation (Film Comment.
• On vous parle de Flins (Devart 1970)
  • Note: Marker helped film and edit this short (Film Comment).
• L'Afrique express (Tessier et Lang 1970)
  • Note: Marker wrote the introductory text for this film under the name "Boris Villeneuve" (Film Comment).
• Kashima Paradise (Le Masson et Deswarte 1974)
  • Note: Marker collaborated on the commentary on this documentary about the destruction of Kashima and Narita (Film Comment).
• La Batalla de Chile (Guzman, 1975–1976)
  • Note: Marker helped produce and contributed to the screenplay for this, perhaps the greatest of all documentary films (Film Comment).
• One Sister and Many Brothers (Makavejev 1994)
  • Note: Marker tapes Makavejev circulating among the guests of a party in his honor as much jovial backslapping abounds (Film comment).

Bibliography (self-contained works by Marker)[link]

• Le Cœur Net (1949, Editions du Seuil, Paris)
• Giraudoux Par Lui-Même (1952, Editions du Seuil, Paris)
• Commentaires I (1961, Editions du Seuil, Paris)
• Coréennes (1962, Editions du Seuil, Paris)
• Commentaires II (1967, Editions du Seuil, Paris)
• Le Dépays (1982, Editions Herscher, Paris)
• Silent Movie (1995, Ohio State University Press)
• La Jetée ciné-roman (1996 / 2nd printing 2008, MIT Press, Cambridge; designed by Bruce Mau)
• Staring Back (2007, MIT Press, Cambridge)
• Immemory (CDROM) (1997 / 2nd printing 2008, Exact Change, Cambridge)

References[link]

1. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z aa} Wakeman, John. World Film Directors, Volume 2. The H. W. Wilson Company. 1988. 649-654.
2. ^ Thomson, David, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film - Fourth Edition, Little, Brown (2003)
3. ^ Thomson, David, The New Biographical Dictionary of Film - Fifth Edition, Little, Brown (2010)
4. ^ http://www.chrismarker.org/2008/03/nyt-all-movie-guides-chris-marker-bio/
5. ^ ^{a b} "The Left Bank Revisited: Marker, Resnais, Varda", Harvard Film Archive, [1] Access date: August 16, 2008.
6. ^ http://archiv.berlinale.de/en/archiv/jahresarchive/1961/03_preistr_ger_1961/03_Preistraeger_1961.html
7. ^ http://www.chrismarker.org/wounded-time/
8. ^ ^{a b} Sterritt, David (2009). "A Grin Without a Cat". Cineaste (Cineaste Publishers) 34 (4). http://www.cineaste.com/articles/ema-grin-without-a-catem. Retrieved 31 July 2011. 
9. ^ Chicago Reader: Dave Kehr's Review of AK
10. ^ "Festival de Cannes: A.K.". festival-cannes.com. http://www.festival-cannes.com/en/archives/ficheFilm/id/1107/year/1985.html. Retrieved 28 June 2009. 
11. ^ "Chris Marker". Electronic Arts Intermix. http://www.eai.org/artistBio.htm?id=317. Retrieved 13 April 2012. 

External links[link]

• EAI: Chris Marker Biography and list of video works by the artist.
• Chris Marker at the Internet Movie Database
• Senses of Cinema: Great Directors Critical Database
• Bibliography of books and articles about Marker via UC Berkeley Media Resources Center
• Chris Marker: Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory Blog devoted to Chris Marker
• Chris Marker's "Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men"
• Description of the DVD release of La jetée and Sans Soleil by Criterion Collection
• Description of Marker's book of photographs and essays titled Staring Back
• Description of Marker's 'cine roman' titled La jetée, based on the film of the same name.
• The Wexner Center's "Chris Marker Store"
• Filmmaker As Socialist Anthologist by Williams Cole, The Brooklyn Rail, May 2009 Issue
• Literature on Chris Marker
• Chris Marker and the Audiovisual Archive, Oliver Mayer, Scope 20

Robert Smithson
Spiral Jetty from atop Rozel Point, in mid-April 2005. It was created in 1970 and still exists although it has often been submerged by the fluctuating lake level. It consists of some 6500 tons of basalt, earth and salt.
Born	(1938-01-02)January 2, 1938 Passaic, New Jersey
Died	July 20, 1973(1973-07-20) (aged 35) Texas
Nationality	American
Training	Art Students League of New York
Movement	Land art
Works	Spiral Jetty, 1970
Patrons	Virginia Dwan
Influenced by	Frederick Law Olmstead

Robert Smithson (January 2, 1938–July 20, 1973) was an American artist famous for his land art.

Background and education[link]

This section requires expansion.

Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League of New York.

Career[link]

Early work[link]

His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by "homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines",^[1] science fiction, and early Pop Art. He primarily identified himself as a painter during this time, but after a three year rest from the art world, Smithson emerged in 1964 as a proponent of the emerging minimalist movement. His new work abandoned the preoccupation with the body that had been common in his earlier work. Instead he began to use glass sheet and neon lighting tubes to explore visual refraction and mirroring, in particular the sculpture Enantiomorphic Chambers. Crystalline structures and the concept of entropy became of particular interest to him, and informed a number of sculptures completed during this period, including Alogon 2. Smithson became affiliated with artists who were identified with the minimalist or Primary Structures movement, such as Nancy Holt (whom he married), Robert Morris and Sol LeWitt. As a writer, Smithson was interested in applying mathematical impersonality to art that he outlined in essays and reviews for Arts Magazine and Artforum and for a period was better known as a critic than as an artist. Some of Smithson's later writings recovered 18th- and 19th-century conceptions of landscape architecture which influenced the pivotal earthwork explorations which characterized his later work. He eventually joined the Dwan Gallery, whose owner Virginia Dwan was an enthusiastic supporter of his work.

Mature work[link]

In 1967 Smithson began exploring industrial areas around New Jersey and was fascinated by the sight of dump trucks excavating tons of earth and rock that he described in an essay as the equivalents of the monuments of antiquity. This resulted in the series of 'non-sites' in which earth and rocks collected from a specific area are installed in the gallery as sculptures, often combined with mirrors or glass. In September 1968, Smithson published the essay "A Sedimentation of the Mind: Earth Projects" in Artforum that promoted the work of the first wave of land art artists, and in 1969 he began producing land art pieces to further explore concepts gained from his readings of William S. Burroughs, J.G. Ballard, and George Kubler.

As well as works of art, Smithson produced a good deal of theoretical and critical writing, including the 2D paper work A Heap of Language, which sought to show how writing might become an artwork. In his essay "Incidents of Mirror-Travel in the Yucatan" ^[2] Smithson documents a series of temporary sculptures made with mirrors at particular locations around the Yucatan peninsula. Part travelogue, part critical rumination, the article highlights Smithson's concern with the temporal as a cornerstone of his work.

Smithson's interest in the temporal is explored in his writings in part through the recovery of the ideas of the picturesque. His essay "Frederick Law Olmsted and the Dialectical Landscape" was written in 1973 after Smithson had seen an exhibition curated by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers at the Whitney Museum entitled “Frederick Law Olmsted’s New York” as the cultural and temporal context for the creation of his late-19th-century design for Central Park. In examining the photographs of the land set aside to become Central Park, Smithson saw the barren landscape that had been degraded by humans before Olmsted constructed the complex ‘naturalistic’ landscape that was viscerally apparent to New Yorkers in the 1970s. Smithson was interested in challenging the prevalent conception of Central Park as an outdated 19th-century Picturesque aesthetic in landscape architecture that had a static relationship within the continuously evolving urban fabric of New York City. In studying the writings of 18th- and 19th-century Picturesque treatise writers Gilpin, Price, Knight and Whately, Smithson recovers issues of site specificity and human intervention as dialectic landscape layers, experiential multiplicity, and the value of deformations manifest in the Picturesque landscape.

Smithson further implies in this essay that what distinguishes the Picturesque is that it is based on real land ^[3] For Smithson, a park exists as “a process of ongoing relationships existing in a physical region” ^[4] Smithson was interested in Central Park as a landscape which by the 1970s had weathered and grown as Olmsted’s creation, but was layered with new evidence of human intervention.

Now the Ramble has grown up into an urban jungle, and lurking in its thickets are “hoods, hobos, hustlers, and homosexuals,” and other estranged creatures of the city…. Walking east, I passed graffiti on boulders… On the base of the Obelisk along with the hieroglyphs there are also graffiti. …In the spillway that pours out of the Wollman Memorial Ice Rink, I noticed a metal grocery cart and a trash basket half-submerged in the water. Further down, the spillway becomes a brook choked with mud and tin cans. The mud then spews under the Gapstow Bridge to become a muddy slough that inundates a good part of The Pond, leaving the rest of The Pond aswirl with oil slicks, sludge, and Dixie cups”^[5]

While Smithson did not find “beauty” in the evidence of abuse and neglect, he did see the state of things as demonstrative of the continually transforming relationships between man and landscape. In his proposal to make process art out of the dredging of The Pond, Smithson sought to insert himself into the dynamic evolution of the park ^[6]

Smithson became particularly interested in the notion of deformities within the spectrum of anti-aesthetic dynamic relationships which he saw present in the Picturesque landscape. He claimed, “the best sites for ‘earth art’ are sites that have been disrupted by industry, reckless urbanization, or nature’s own devastation.” ^[7] While in earlier 18th-century formal characterizations of the pastoral and the sublime, something like a “gash in the ground” if encountered by a “leveling improver”, as described by Price, would have been smoothed over and the whole composition returned to a more aesthetically pleasing contour ^[8] For Smithson, however, it was not necessary that the deformation become a visual aspect of a landscape; by his anti-formalist logic, more important was the temporal scar worked over by natural or human intervention. He saw parallels to Olmsted's Central Park as a “sylvan” green overlay on the depleted landscape that preceded his Central Park ^[9] Defending himself against allegations that he and other earth artists “cut and gouge the land like Army engineers”, Smithson, in his own essay, charges that one of such opinions “failed to recognize the possibility of a direct organic manipulation of the land..” and would “turn his back on the contradictions that inhabit our landscapes” ^[10]

In revisiting the 18th- and early 19th-century treatises of the Picturesque, which Olmsted interpreted in his practice, Smithson exposes threads of an anti-aesthetic anti-formalist logic and a theoretical framework of the Picturesque that addressed the dialectic between the physical landscape and its temporal context. By re-interpreting and re-valuing these treatises, Smithson was able to broaden the temporal and intellectual context for his own work, and to offer renewed meaning for Central Park as an important work of modern art and landscape architecture.

Other theoretical writings explore the relationship of a piece of art to its environment, from which he developed his concept of sites and non-sites. A site was a work located in a specific outdoor location, while a non-site was a work which could be displayed in any suitable space, such as an art gallery. Spiral Jetty is an example of a sited work, while Smithson's non-site pieces frequently consist of photographs of a particular location, often exhibited alongside some material (such as stones or soil) removed from that location.

The journeys he undertook were central to his practice as an artist, and his non-site sculptures often included maps and aerial photos of a particular location, as well as the geological artifacts displaced from those sites. In 1970 at Kent State University, Smithson created Partially Buried Woodshed (1970) ^[11] to illustrate geological time consuming human history. His most famous work is Spiral Jetty (1970), a 1,500-foot (460 m) long spiral-shaped jetty extending into the Great Salt Lake in Utah constructed from rocks, earth, and salt. It was entirely submerged by rising lake waters for several years, but has since re-emerged. The lake waters may be pinkish due to high concentrations of β-carotene in the halophyte green alga Dunaliella salina.

In 1971 he created Broken circle/Spiral Hill for the exhibition for the Sonsbeek'71 art festival at Emmen, the Netherlands. The subject of the 1971 Sonsbeek exhibition was Beyond Lawn and Order (Dutch: Buiten de perken).

On July 20, 1973, Smithson died in a plane crash, while surveying sites for his work Amarillo Ramp in Texas.^[12] Despite his early death, and relatively few surviving major works, Smithson has a following amongst many contemporary artists. In recent years, Tacita Dean, Sam Durant, Lee Ranaldo, Vik Muniz, Mike Nelson, and the Bruce High Quality Foundation have all made homages to Smithson's works.

The Estate of Robert Smithson is managed by James Cohan Gallery.

• 

  Broken Circle, Emmen, The Netherlands

• 

  Broken Circle detail of materials, Emmen, The Netherlands

• 

  Spiral Hill, Emmen, The Netherlands

• 

  Spiral Jetty, Utah, USA

Notes[link]

References[link]

• Busch, Julia M. (1974), A Decade of Sculpture: the New Media in the 1960s, Philadelphia: The Art Alliance Press, ISBN 0-87982-007-1, OCLC 804815, OCLC 804815 .
• Kimmelman, Michael (2005-06-24), "Sculpture From the Earth, But Never Limited by It", The New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/24/arts/design/24kimm.html?ex=1180929600&en=97cea2a283bb6762&ei=5070 . Retrieved 2 June 2007.
• Smithson, Robert (1969), "Incidents of mirror-travel in the Yucatan", Artforum VIII (1), ISSN 0004-3532, OCLC 1514329, ISSN 0004-3532 OCLC 1514329 .
• Smithson, Robert (1996), Flam, Jack D., ed., Robert Smithson: The Collected Writings, Berkeley: University of California Press, OCLC 32853450, OCLC 32853450 .
• Roberts, Jennifer L. (Sept. 2000), "Landscapes of Indifference: Robert Smithson and John Lloyd Stephens in Yucatan", The Art Bulletin .

External links[link]

• www.robertsmithson.com
• Broken Circle/Spiral Hill (1971-2011) an historic Dutch program (video, exhibition and publication).
• Plans to Mix Oil Drilling and Art Clash in Utah, article by Kirk Johnson in the New York Times, 27 March 2008.
• 'An interminable avalanche of categories': conceptual issues in the work of Robert Smithson (or, once more, against 'sculpture') Lecture by Peter Osborne given at the Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, in 2008, which is available to download in audio form [2]
• Smithson Sightings Short essay on Smithson by Timothy Don of 3 Quarks Daily.
• Pictures of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
• 'Extra Terrestrial' - a 1993 monograph from frieze
• Robert Smithson exhibition at The Renaissance Society, 1976.
• Robert Smithson and Floating Island, by John Haber
• Nonsite from Smithson to New Media, by John Haber