Obstinate Memory: Chris Marker’s and Patricio Guzmán’s Pictures for a Revolution

Abstract

“There is no asphalt of oblivion.” This was the comment of political journalist and author Daniel Singer on the French government’s policy of paving over the cobblestones of the Parisian Latin Quarter after the social upheavals of May 1968. When Chris Marker made Le fond de l’air est rouge (known in English as A grin without a cat) in 1977, the memory of May 1968 was still fresh. In the film we revisit scenes of worldwide popular struggle, from the Vietnam war of independence through the overthrow in 1973 of the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. Marker’s film seeks to preserve the memory of those struggles; indeed much of his cinematic oeuvre unfolds as a memory project, from his early short classic La Jetée (1962) and the feature film Sans Soleil (Sunless, 1983) to his personal museum of images in the CD-ROM Immemory, as well as the computer game dramatization, Level Five (1997) and his 1984 video of the future of trade unions in 2084. How things—even future events—will be remembered has been a constant and central preoccupation of Marker’s.