Chris Marker’s cat, stretched out across the keys of a DX7 keyboard, listens to music by Federico Mompou.
EN
“Chat écoutant la musique or “A cat listening to music” is part of a short trilogy of films that Marker described as ‘haikus.’ They were made for his Bestiaire, consisting of two other films, An owl is an owl is an owl and Zoo Piece; highlighting the trilogy of Marker’s interests in cats, owls and people. This was part of a video installation called Zapping Zone displayed at the Pompidou Centre in 1990. The pieces were shot and edited two years before the installation and are incredibly homemade, almost like short home movies but about quintessential Marker subjects. In Chat écoutant, Marker’s cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, is shown in a short video clip listening to a piece of piano music. Marker shows the visual effect of music upon his sound level equipment whilst cutting between his cat sleepily listening. On paper, the film sounds incredibly normal, the sort of thing that could shot on a phone by a child. But this is where the film’s beauty lies. Its simplicity belies how rare and complex such moments are and, more surprisingly, how few there appear to be in cinema as a whole.”
Adam Scovell1
- 1Adam Scovell, “Contentment and Chris Marker’s Chat écoutant la musique (1988),” Celluloid Wicker Man, 27 February 2017.
