30 Facts About Chris Marker

Chris Marker's best known films are La Jetee, A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil.

Chris Marker is usually associated with the Left Bank subset of the French New Wave that occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s, and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and Jacques Demy.

Chris Marker was 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.

Some sources and Chris Marker himself claim that he was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.

Chris Marker was a philosophy student in France before World War II.

For Esprit, Chris Marker wrote political commentaries, poems, short stories, and film reviews.

In 1949 Chris Marker published his first novel, Le Coeur net, which was about aviation.

In 1952 Chris Marker published an illustrated essay on French writer Jean Giraudoux, Giraudoux Par Lui-Meme.

Around this time Chris Marker met and befriended many members of the Left Bank Film Movement, including Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Henri Colpi, Armand Gatti, and the novelists Marguerite Duras and Jean Cayrol.

In 1952 Chris Marker made his first film, Olympia 52, a 16mm feature documentary about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games.

Chris Marker shot the film in two weeks while traveling through China with Armand Gatti in September 1955.

In 1959 Chris Marker made the animated film Les Astronautes with Walerian Borowczyk.

Chris Marker became known internationally for the short film La Jetee in 1962.

In 1967 Chris Marker published his second volume of collected film essays, Commentaires II.

That same year, Chris Marker organized the omnibus film Loin du Vietnam, a protest against the Vietnam War with segments contributed by Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, Claude Lelouch, William Klein, Michele Ray and Joris Ivens.

Chris Marker is usually credited as director or co-director of all of the films made by SLON.

In 1974 Chris Marker returned to his personal work and made a film outside of ISKRA.

Chris Marker had been working on a film about Chile with ISKRA since 1973.

Chris Marker then began work on one of his most ambitious films, A Grin Without a Cat, released in 1977.

Chris Marker begins the film with the Odessa Steps sequence from Sergei Eisenstein's film The Battleship Potemkin, which Chris Marker points out is a fictitious creation of Eisenstein which has still influenced the image of the historical event.

Chris Marker used very little commentary in this film, but the film's montage structure and preoccupation with memory make it a Chris Marker film.

In 1984, Chris Marker was invited by producer Serge Silberman to document the making of Akira Kurosawa's film Ran.

Chris Marker then made the one-hour TV documentary Memoires pour Simone as a tribute to her in 1986.

Chris Marker incorporated audiovisual elements in addition to the snippets of dialogue and poetry that "Computer" exchanged with the user.

In 2009, Chris Marker commissioned an Avatar of Guillaume-en-Egypte to represent him in machinima works.

Chris Marker confessed to shooting all of Sans Soleil with a silent film camera, and recording all the audio on a primitive audio cassette recorder.

Chris Marker reminds the reader that only one short scene in La Jetee is of a moving image, as Chris Marker could only borrow a movie camera for one afternoon while working on the film.

From 2007 through 2011 Chris Marker collaborated with the art dealer and publisher Peter Blum on a variety of projects that were exhibited at the Peter Blum galleries in New York City's Soho and Chelsea neighborhoods.

Chris Marker's works were exhibited at the Peter Blum Gallery on 57th Street in 2014.

Since 2014 the artworks of the Estate of Chris Marker are represented by Peter Blum Gallery, New York.