Bolshevik Party Meeting. Sitting (from left): Abel Yenukidze, Mikhail Kalinin, Nikolai Bukharin, Mikhail Tomsky, Mikhail Lashevich, Lev Kamenev, Evgeny Preobrazhensky, Leonid Serebryakov, Vladimir Lenin and Alexei Rykov

Boris Kustodiev's 1920 painting "Bolshevik"

The Bolsheviks, originally also^[1] Bolshevists^[2] (Russian: большевики, большевик (singular); IPA: [bəlʲʂɨˈvʲik]; derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) which split apart from the Menshevik faction^[3] at the Second Party Congress in 1903.^[4]

The Bolsheviks were the majority faction in a crucial vote, hence their name. They ultimately became the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.^[5] The Bolsheviks came to power in Russia during the October Revolution phase of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and founded the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic which would later in 1922 become the chief constituent of the Soviet Union.

The Bolsheviks, founded by Vladimir Lenin and Alexander Bogdanov, were by 1905 a mass organization consisting primarily of workers under a democratic internal hierarchy governed by the principle of democratic centralism, who considered themselves the leaders of the revolutionary working class of Russia. Their beliefs and practices were often referred to as Bolshevism. Bolshevik revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky commonly used the terms "Bolshevism" and "Bolshevist" after his exile from the Soviet Union to differentiate between what he saw as true Leninism and the state and party as they existed under Stalin's leadership.

History of the split[link]

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In the 2nd Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, held in Brussels and London during August 1903, Lenin and Martov disagreed over the membership rules. Lenin wanted members "who recognise the Party Programme and support it by material means^[6] and by personal participation in one of the party's organisations." Julius Martov suggested "by regular personal assistance under the direction of one of the party's organisations." Lenin advocated limiting party membership to a smaller core of active members, as opposed to "card carriers" who might only be active in party branches from time to time or not at all. This active base would develop the cadre, a core of "professional revolutionaries", consisting of loyal communists who would spend most of their time organising the party toward a mass revolutionary party capable of leading a workers' revolution against the Tsarist autocracy.

The base of active and experienced members would be the recruiting ground for this professional core. Sympathizers would be left outside and the party would be organised based on the concept of democratic centralism. Martov, until then a close friend of Lenin, agreed with him that the core of the party should consist of professional revolutionaries, but argued that party membership should be open to sympathizers, revolutionary workers and other fellow travelers.

The two had disagreed on the issue as early as March–May 1903, but it was not until the Congress that their differences became irreconcilable and split the party.^[7] Although at first the disagreement appeared to be minor and inspired by personal conflicts, for example, Lenin's insistence on dropping less active editorial board members from Iskra or Martov's support for the Organizing Committee of the Congress which Lenin opposed, the differences quickly grew and the split became irreparable.

Origins of the name[link]

The two factions were originally known as "hard" (Lenin's supporters) and "soft" (Martov's supporters). Soon, however, the terminology changed to "Bolsheviks" and "Mensheviks", from the Russian "bolshinstvo" (majority) and "menshinstvo" (minority), based on the fact that Lenin believed that most of the party stood behind him. On the other hand, Martov's supporters won the vote concerning the question of party membership. Neither Lenin nor Martov had a firm majority throughout the Congress as delegates left or switched sides. At the end, the Congress was evenly split between the two factions.

From 1907 on, English language articles sometimes used the term "Maximalist" for "Bolshevik" and "Minimalist" for "Menshevik", which proved confusing since there was also a "Maximalist" faction within the Russian Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1904–1906 (which after 1906 formed a separate Union of Socialists-Revolutionaries Maximalists) and then again after 1917.^[8]

Composition of the party[link]

The average party member was very young. In 1907, 22% of Bolsheviks were under 20, 37% were 20-24 and 16% were 25-29. By 1905, 62% of the members were industrial workers (3% of the population in 1897^[9]).^[10] 22% of Bolsheviks were gentry (1.7% of the total population), 38% were uprooted peasants, compared with 19% and 26% for the Mensheviks. In 1907 78.3% of the Bolsheviks were Russian and 10% were Jewish (34 and 20% for the Mensheviks). Total membership was 8,400 in 1905, 13,000 in 1906 and 46,100 by 1907 (8,400, 18,000, 38,200 respectively for the Mensheviks). By 1910 both factions together had fewer than 100,000 members.^[11]

Beginning of the 1905 Revolution (1903–1905)[link]

The two factions were in a state of flux in 1903–1904 with many members changing sides. The founder of Russian Marxism, Georgy Plekhanov, who was at first allied with Lenin and the Bolsheviks, parted ways with them by 1904. Leon Trotsky at first supported the Mensheviks, but left them in September 1904 over their insistence on an alliance with Russian liberals and their opposition to a reconciliation with Lenin and the Bolsheviks. He remained a self-described "non-factional social democrat" until August 1917 when he joined Lenin and the Bolsheviks as their positions assembled and he came to believe that Lenin was right on the issue of the party.

All but one members of the Central Committee were arrested in Moscow in early 1905. The remaining member, with the power of appointing a new one, was won over by the Bolsheviks.^[12]

The lines between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks hardened in April 1905 when the Bolsheviks held a Bolsheviks-only meeting in London, which they called the Third Party Congress. The Mensheviks organised a rival conference and the split was thus formalised.

The Bolsheviks played a relatively minor role in the 1905 Revolution, and were a minority in the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies led by Trotsky. The less significant Moscow Soviet, however, was dominated by the Bolsheviks. These soviets became the model for those formed in 1917.

The Mensheviks ("The minority") (1906–1907)[link]

This section needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (February 2012)

As the Russian Revolution of 1905 progressed, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and smaller non-Russian social democratic parties operating within the Russian Empire attempted to reunify at the Fourth (Unification) Congress of the RSDLP held at Folkets hus, Norra Bantorget in Stockholm, April 1906. When the Mensheviks struck an alliance with the Jewish Bund, the Bolsheviks found themselves in a minority.

However, all factions retained their respective factional structure and the Bolsheviks formed the Bolshevik Center, the de-facto governing body of the Bolshevik faction within the RSDLP. At the Fifth Congress held in London in May 1907, the Bolsheviks were in the majority, but the two factions continued functioning mostly independently of each other.

Split between Lenin and Bogdanov (1908–1910)[link]

With the defeat of the revolution in mid-1907 and the adoption of a new, highly restrictive election law, the Bolsheviks began debating whether to boycott the new parliament known as the Third Duma. Lenin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev and others argued for participating in the Duma while Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Mikhail Pokrovsky and others argued that the social democratic faction in the Duma should be recalled.^{[citation needed]} The latter became known as recallists ("otzovists" in Russian). A smaller group within the Bolshevik faction demanded that the RSDLP central committee should give its sometimes unruly Duma faction an ultimatum, demanding complete subordination to all party decisions. This group became known as "ultimatists" and was generally allied with the recallists.

With most Bolshevik leaders either supporting Bogdanov or undecided by mid-1908 when the differences became irreconcilable, Lenin concentrated on undermining Bogdanov's reputation as a philosopher. In 1909 he published a scathing book of criticism entitled Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909),^[13] assaulting Bogdanov's position and accusing him of philosophical idealism.^[14] In June 1909, Bogdanov proposed the formation of Party Schools as "Proletarian Universities" at a Bolshevik mini-conference in Paris organised by the editorial board of the Bolshevik magazine Proletary in June 1909. However this was not accepted and Lenin tried to expel him from the Bolshevik faction.^[15] Bogdanov was then involved with setting up Vpered, which ran the Capri Party School from August to December 1909.^[16]

Final attempt at party unity (1910)[link]

With both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks weakened by splits within their ranks and by Tsarist repression, they were tempted to try to re-unite the party. In January 1910, Leninists, recallists and various Menshevik factions held a meeting of the party's Central Committee in Paris. Kamenev and Zinoviev were dubious about the idea, but were willing to give it a try under pressure from "conciliator" Bolsheviks like Victor Nogin.

Lenin was firmly opposed to any re-unification, but was outvoted within the Bolshevik leadership. The meeting reached a tentative agreement and one of its provisions made Trotsky's Vienna-based Pravda a party-financed 'central organ'. Kamenev, Trotsky's brother-in-law, was added to the editorial board from the Bolsheviks, but the unification attempts failed in August 1910 when Kamenev resigned from the board amid mutual recriminations.

Forming a separate party (1912)[link]

The factions permanently broke off relations in January 1912 after the Bolsheviks organised a Bolsheviks-only Prague Party Conference and formally expelled Mensheviks and recallists from the party. As a result, they ceased to be a faction in the RSDLP and instead declared themselves an independent party, called Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (bolsheviks) - or RSDLP(b). Unofficially the Party has been referred to as the "Bolshevik Party". Throughout the century, the Party adopted a number of different names. In 1918, RSDLP(b) became (All-)Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) and remained so until 1925. From 1925-52 the name was All-Union Communist Party (bolsheviks), and from 1952-91 Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

Although the Bolshevik leadership decided to form a separate party, convincing pro-Bolshevik workers within Russia to follow suit proved difficult. When the first meeting of the Fourth Duma was convened in late 1912, only one out of six Bolshevik deputies, Matvei Muranov, (another one, Roman Malinovsky, was later exposed as an Okhrana [Tsarist secret police] agent) voted to break away from the Menshevik faction within the Duma on 15 December 1912.^[17] The Bolshevik leadership eventually prevailed and the Bolsheviks formed their own Duma faction in September 1913.

Political philosophy[link]

The Bolsheviks believed in organising a party in a centralised and disciplined fashion that sought to overthrow the Tsar through a mass workers' revolution. They believed and succeeded in creating a vanguard party, a mass revolutionary party composed of what they called "the most militant and class-conscious" workers capable of leading the masses of Russian workers.

Although the Bolsheviks were not monolithic, they were characterised by a rigid adherence to the leadership of the central committee, based on the principles of democratic centralism. The Mensheviks favored open party membership and espoused cooperation with the other socialist and some non-socialist groups in Russia. Bolsheviks generally refused to co-operate with liberal or radical parties, viewing them as "bourgeois" parties, or even eventually other socialist organisations, although Lenin sometimes made tactical alliances.

Left to right: Trotsky, Lenin, and Kamenev

"Bolshevik" as an obsolete term[link]

In 1952, at the 20th Party Congress, Stalin declared: "There are no more Mensheviks. Why should we call ourselves Bolsheviks? We are not the majority, but the whole party."^{[citation needed]} According to his suggestion, the Bolshevik party was renamed the Communist Party of Soviet Union. Since that time, the term Bolshevik has been regarded as obsolete, and relevant only to the pre-Revolutionary times, during the Russian Revolution itself and the Russian Civil War which followed.

Derogatory usage of "Bolshevik"[link]

During the days of the Cold War in the United Kingdom, labour union leaders and other leftists were sometimes derisively described as "Bolshie". The usage is roughly equivalent to the term "Commie", "Red" or "pinko" in the United States during the same period. Adolf Hitler, Joseph Goebbels and other Nazi leaders used it in reference to the worldwide revolutionary movement coordinated by the Soviet Union.^[18]

See also[link]

• Democratic centralism
• Leninism
• October Revolution
• Old Bolshevik
• Vladimir Lenin

Related terms[link]

• Marxism-Leninism
• Trotskyism

Non-Russian/Soviet groups having used the name "Bolshevik"[link]

• Bangladesh: Maoist Bolshevik Reorganisation Movement of the Purba Banglar Sarbahara Party
• India: Bolshevik Party of India
• India/Sri Lanka: Bolshevik-Leninist Party of India, Ceylon and Burma
• India: Revolutionary Socialist Party (Bolshevik)
• Mexico: Bolshevik Communist Party
• Senegal: Bolshevik Nuclei
• Sri Lanka: Bolshevik Samasamaja Party

References[link]

External links[link]

• Bolshevism, the Road to Revolution, by Alan Woods
• Chronology of the Bolshevik Party World History Database
• The Bolsheviks and Workers Control, by Maurice Brinton
• The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism at Project Gutenberg by Bertrand Russell, November 1920
• Twenty Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-and-File Bolshevik, by Cecilia Bobrovskaya

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