Chris Marker News
From May 3 to July 9, La Cinémathèque française is organizing the exhibition and retrospective, ‘Chris Marker – Les 7 vies d’un cinéaste’. This long-awaited exhibition (trailer) is the culmination of the inventorization of Marker’s prodigious personal archive by the Cinémathèque under the direction of a scientific committee (Raymond Bellour, Jean-Michel Frodon and others), an operation that already started in the spring of 2013 after the artist passed away the summer before. The exhibition will move to BOZAR in Brussels from September 19 to January 6.
The catalogue, Chris Marker: L'Homme Monde, is a co-publication by Éditions Actes Sud, La Cinémathèque française and BOZAR. This 400 page publication is richly illustrated by unpublished visual materials from the archives and contains more than thirty texts by Raymond Bellour, Jacques Rancière, Bernard Eisenschitz, Olivier Hadouchi and many others.
In the build-up to the opening of the exhibition and vast retrospective, a lot of DVD's and publications are being released or re-issued.
On April 12, Les Mutins de Pangée and ISKRA release Si j'avais quatre dromedaires (1966) in a beautifully designed DVD edition and with English subtitles. It’s one of Marker's films that has never been issued on DVD. On the same day, they also release the 15 films of Les Groupes Medvedkine (1967-1974) in a 3 DVD-box set (trailer), for the first time including Marker's Le train en marche (1973). This edition is accompanied by a 170 page book, including texts by Marker himself, Nicole Brenez, Pierre Bourdieu and many others. On May 2, Arte Éditions are the first ever to release the 13 episodes of Marker's mythical television mini-series, L'Héritage de la chouette (1989), in a DVD box set.
In terms of book publications, Éditions Actes Sud unites Marker’s long out of print Commentaires I (1961) and Commentaires II (1967) in a new edition, expanded with additonal texts of him on his work. Des mots pour des films - Commentaires (1953-2014) will be available on April 18. Marker’s only and also long out of print novel, Le Coeur Net (1949), is being re-issued by its original publisher Seuil on April 26. While on June 16, Marker’s 1959 photo book on North Korea, Coréennes, will be republished by the wonderful Éditions L'Arachnéen with the support of the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP).
