mixed media
Akira Kurosawa and Simone Signoret, what really exercises
him in Staring Back is political protest, or rather the motif of
a single protestor’s face set at a specific instant against the
surge of the crowd. Demonstrations against the Algerian and
‘the apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a Vietnam wars are recast in light of protests in Paris against
wet, black bough’. Ezra Pound’s laconic city poem ‘In a Station the electoral success of the National Front in 2002 and the
of the Metro’ (1913) – that’s the whole poem, by the way ‘liberalisation’ of the French labour market in 2006. The more
– takes a snapshot of a key modernist moment: the fleeting recent images are all excised from Marker’s video footage.
appearance of a (most often female) face among the urban There he discovers faces that at first float free of
throng, a privileged instant of recognition and estrangement. the complex historical moments in which they’re immured.
James Joyce spots it, too; in Ulysses (1922), he has the furtive Protestors smile, wave at the camera or assume easily iconic
Bloom eye up a woman as she gets into a carriage: ‘sees me or even saintly poses, as in the case of several hooded, monk-
looking… the laceflare of her hat in the sun: flicker, flick’. Then like young men, or a woman who closes her eyes ecstatically
there is the aged editor Bernstein in Citizen Kane (1941), and raises a fist in timeless revolutionary style. Marker freeze-
turning over like an old photograph the memory of a girl frames attractive young women who look adrift from the
debarking a ferry half a century before: ‘a month hasn’t gone ardent protest around them: in one instance, the woman
by since that I haven’t thought of that girl’. in question resembles, with her averted gaze and air of
Conventionally, the trope sharpens desire, loneliness distraction, the young woman from the past who haunts the
and regret to a single sliver of lost time. But in the films and still frames of La Jetée.
photographs of Chris Marker, it’s nothing less than a glimpse What Marker only seems to see here is a certain
of the future, the very promise of an emancipatory politics. solipsism in the callow, just recently politicised demonstrators.
Marker’s work is full of such moments: most famously, It’s a favourite cliché of ageing militants: the notion that the
the protagonist of La Jetée (1962) is gulled by the childhood young take to the streets today only out of self-interest or
memory of a woman’s face on the jetty at Orly airport. In in support of a single issue, swiftly forgotten. Marker spies
Sans Soleil (1982), at a marketplace in Guinea-Bissau, Marker something else in their solitude: what is politics, after all, if not
Courtesy the artist and MIT Press
tries to capture the glances of women who look away as soon precisely this capacity for diverse togetherness, a willingness
as his camera lights on them, till a single face turns briefly, to march alongside those with whom we have yet to share
generously, in his direction: ‘she drops me her gaze… I see her; anything so romantic as ideological solidarity? That risk,
she sees me’. There’s nothing stupider, notes the filmmaker’s Marker discerns, is the seed of any radicalism worth its name.
fictional stand-in, Sandor Krasna, than the rule they teach in The formal correlative for ‘the everlasting face of
film schools: not to look at the camera. These looks are exactly solitude’ is what Marker calls the superluminal: ‘one frame
what he tracks, like a hunter; they promise not just seduction lost in the stream of almost identical frames’, now rescued
(if ever that, in fact) but a sort of provisional community: and recalled by its removal from the footage. It’s possible, I
Chris Marker: Staring Back. a sorority of sightlines. suppose, to be dismayed at Marker’s rudimentary methods
In another life, Marker has said, he’d perhaps have been in this regard: by the way he flattens these moments to the
happy just photographing women, or his beloved cats – but same pixelated monochrome obscurity, and even subjects
Image from
one doesn’t choose one’s time. Viewers of the photographic his most resonant photographs from the 1950s and 60s to
archive in his labyrinthine CD-Rom Immemory (1997) will get an unsophisticated Photoshop bruising. But this friend of
the sense of his having been present at an impressive number Cartier-Bresson, Klein and Riboud still considers himself,
of historical junctures in the latter half of the twentieth century: amazingly, an amateur photographer: the fogging of the
at the feet of Fidel Castro, in the streets of Paris in 1968, on images in Staring Back is something like the crude ‘image
the shores of North Africa on the cusp of postcolonial strife. synthesiser’ in Sans Soleil: transforming history into something
Now, following the first exhibition of his photographs, at the between a spectre and a comic strip.
Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, we have the publication In one of the brief texts that punctuate the book,
of Staring Back, a collection of 200 of Marker’s still images. Marker writes that poring over these faces from the past
He is even present among them himself, though somewhat brings on a kind of ‘megalomaniac melancholy’, as though the
blurred: a shaven-headed figure being led into custody by individuals framed there were merely part of his own spectral
the military police at a demonstration outside the Pentagon image bank, an archive of lost hopes. In truth, Staring Back
in 1967, his Rolleiflex case by his side. is not that at all: it pictures instead a historical continuum,
While the book also contains numerous images from a frieze of faces that extends into the future, beyond nostalgia,
Marker’s travels since the 1950s, and portraits of friends and regret or decay. As the philosopher Giorgio Agamben puts
collaborators such as Andrei Tarkovsky, Alexander Medvedkin, it: ‘Only where I find a face do I encounter an exteriority and
does an outside happen to me.’
Staring Back by Chris Marker and Bill Horrigan is published
by MIT Press at £19.95/$29.95
95 Artreview
Mixed Media_Photography.indd 3 3/8/07 12:06:35
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