The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded (269 page)

Jean Queval once called Marker “our unknown cosmonaut.” It was a striking idea that, while Americans trod the ashy moon in cumbersome suits, so Marker with camera over his shoulder—like Dziga Vertov’s hero—had proved himself a more penetrating traveler.

But Chris Marker is not just a promise of a world to come. Perhaps his physical existence in the era of Hitler, Hiroshima, Castro, and the new Israel is simply a nexus of ideas that reach back and forward in time. Marker is here, with us, but perhaps he is a man of the twenty-second and of the eighteenth centuries. Of course, it is easier to look for men who resemble Marker in our past than estimate where he stands in the future. It is quite possible that he is an ordinary enough fellow in the twenty-second century, for he does not carry himself with the self-importance expected of filmmakers in our present age. His films see nothing exceptional in an inquisitive traveler sending back films about the lands he has seen and the thoughts he has had while there.

For anyone who has not seen a Marker film, their varied effects may be compared with that obtained in reading the journal of some eighteenth-century traveler: Johnson in the Hebrides, Rousseau’s promenade through his own sensibility, or Goethe’s visit to Rome. The work makes no attempt to be cinematic or literary; it is based, instead, on the assumption that a cultivated man should express himself in words or in film. Add to that the engaging fusion of seriousness and humor; a precise eye for strange places and a quizzical response to unfamiliar people; an easy ability to move from the very small to the large and to see no slick simile or impossible gulf between the activity of an individual and the nature of a country. Beneath all this, there is the unaffected independence of a man who sees that all people are travelers, lonely or self-sufficient—depending on the cast of mind—whether they lap the Earth or stay at home.

Of course, we do not yet send letters to our friends that are sixty-minute films as informative, entertaining, and personal as Marker’s. But we will, otherwise we must leave reports of foreign lands and strange ideas to the strident opinions of documentary TV, which invariably forsakes experience, research, and soul. Marker has visited several of the most newsworthy locales of modern times—Peking, provincial Russia, Tokyo, Israel, and Cuba—and returned with a report (or description) that bypasses the fixed problems that are supposed to beset our view of those places.

The variety of what he sees can only be hinted at here, just as the style of his films takes advantage of most of the unexpected freedoms of conversation. In
Lettre de Sibérie
, there is a delightful passage—about road-making in Iakoutsk—that incorporates the mutual incomprehension of Soviet and American propaganda films, without taking sides or forgetting that both stereotypes are parts of the total truth. For Marker knows how far men decide what is truth and untruth, how reality is colored by opinion. The babel of opinion delights him as much as the odd juxtaposition of modernity and antiquity. And perhaps it is because he is French that he has the sense to see life imitating art. Thus, this commentary on an Israeli girl in
Description d’un Combat
over our undirected view of the girl in a camera style that subverts the camera’s neutrality as little as possible:

On the other side of fear, children are born.

They come to you and say “Tsalemoti”—Photograph me.

They are good-looking. Legend has them as tall and blond. But sometimes Oriental grace has corrected this European model, and among the Rubens there are Chagalls.

They multiply. You photograph this boy drawing. When you come back to film there are already two of them.

How many will there be next year? Who will they be? Who will she be, this little Jewess who will never be Anne Frank?

One might detect in that Marker’s own leftist views. He was in the French Resistance during the war and he played an important organizing part in the final editing of
Loin du Vietnam
(67).
Les Statues Meurent Aussi
is hostile to imperialism, though less on doctrinaire grounds than out of a sense of betrayed ethnic nature. And if
Cuba Si!
is enthusiastic, its basis is not so much Marxist as the vitality of ordinary Cubans. Marker makes a habit of catching us unawares. In
Lettre de Sibérie
there is a moment when he notices a resemblance between a Siberian and André Gide—it is an ephemeral point, but it weighs more strongly on the side of human experience than would a manifesto. And in
Si C’Etait Quatres Dromadaires
(or is it
Mystère Koumiko
?—as in correspondence, the individual dispatches run together) there is a moment in which Marker discovers, some ten years later, a survivor from the massacre of the secret police in Budapest in 1956. Politically, that survivor is anathema to Marker, but the peculiarity of his story and the way Marker recalls it through the famous photographs taken by John Sadovy in 1956 dispels animosity.

The man, and Marker’s recognition of him, become events in the placid absorption of its experience by the world. Although he believes in the written word, Marker loves the photograph and its importance in the evolution of memory and conscience. He sees that all people live through the exchange of signs—outward facts that become transmuted into private fancies. His friendship with Resnais is signaled in this sense of the unreliability of memory, as if Diderot doubted the Encyclopedie. Here in
L’Amérique Rêve
—a ommentary to an imaginary film, or to a film somewhat spoiled by François Reichenbach—Marker sees an entire people in solitariness: “So, America dreams. The prisoner in his prison, the traveller in his photographs, the black in his carnival, the young girl in her plans, the man in his memories.”

L’Amérique Rêve
stresses Marker’s interest in his writings, an interest that makes his
Commentaries
—scripts illustrated by frames—works of art and not just the record of films. Marker began as a writer: he is the author of a novel and a study of Giraudoux, and was an editor with Editions du Seuil. His first film, on the Helsinki Olympiad, was strictly amateur, but Marker has not allowed himself to become rigidly professional. His originality has not made it easy for his films to be seen. It was only in the early 1960s that he became fashionable enough for showings outside France. Perhaps interested in his own success, he made two films of general appeal:
Le Joli Mai
was set in Paris, with a Rouch-like cinema verité study of a specific mood and moment. Even so, it manages to bear the flavor of a stranger’s view.
La Jetée
is a marvelous thirty-minute science-fiction film that reclaims the filmed still photograph from rarefied prettiness and specious historicity.

But at the time of
Loin du Vietnam
, Marker forsook his accustomed solitariness: not just in the collaborative direction of that film, but with the founding in 1966 of SLON (
Société de Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles
). By 1968, Marker reactivated SLON and set in motion a group enterprise in filmmaking, especially to record the new workers’ impulse to observe themselves on film.
A Bientôt
deals with a factory in Lyons and
La Bataille des Dix Millions
is a commentary on a speech by Fidel Castro. SLON also made contact with the Russian documentarist, Medvedkin, revived his film
Happiness
(35), and made a film of their own,
The Train That Never Stops
, about the ciné-trains on which Medvedkin and his unit traveled and recorded the new Bolshevik state.

Sans Soleil
is Marker’s greatest work of the last decade or so, a documentary format that leads into a revery on Japan, technology, and the conjunction of different times and peoples in the world. It shows how rich the potential is for filmmaking, like the writing of essays and the keeping of journals. It is a tragedy that the collected work of Marker (and there are films not listed in my filmography, not even released or finished) is so hard to find. But he is innately elusive, just as much as he is a master of discovery.

Marker’s great coup may be his farewell:
Immemory
is a CD-ROM, an interactive, intellectual mystery story in which the pilgrim is able to pass through a labyrinth, a museum of knowledge, music, images, and clips. The result is the most beautiful display of film’s new world. Maestro.

Mae Marsh
(Mary Wayne Marsh) (1895–1968), b. Madrid, New Mexico
The story is told in Robert Henderson’s study of Griffith at Biograph how the director once had a shotgun fired off behind Mae Marsh to get the necessary alarm on her face. The effect apparently lasted several years.

In
The Birth of a Nation
(15, D. W. Griffith), she is the sister perpetually fearful of a fate worse than death, on the point of taking flight with so much fluttering agitation and the breathy intake of apprehension. Sadly, though, when pursued to the top of a cliff and most in need of wings, she plunges to her death, virginal, but like a sandbag.

She joined Griffith’s company from school in 1912 and became one of his leading young ladies:
The Old Actor; A Siren of Impulse; The Lesser Evil; Lena and the Geese; The New York Hat;
accepting the grass skirt and bare feet declined by Mary Pickford for
Man’s Genesis; The Sands of Dee; Brutality; The Telephone Girl and the Lady; An Adventure in the Autumn Woods
(all 12);
Fate; Love in an Apartment Hotel; The Perfidy of Mary; The Little Tease; The Wanderer; His Mother’s Son; The Reformers; In Prehistoric Days; The Battle of Elderberry Gulch; Judith of Bethulia
(all 13);
The Escape; Home Sweet Home; The Avenging Conscience
(all 14).

Then, after her self-sacrifice in
The Birth of a Nation
, she was desperate again as the woman in the modern episode of
Intolerance
(16)—hers made the famous close-up of hands wrung together in anguish. She left Griffith for Goldwyn and starred in
Polly of the Circus
(17),
Spotlight Sadie
(18), and
The Little ’Fraid Lady
(20). But in the 1920s she made only a few films before retiring in 1926:
Nobody’s Kid
(21, Howard Hickman); to Britain for
Flames of Passion
(22, Graham Cutts); reunited with Griffith and starring with Ivor Novello in
The White Rose
(23);
Daddies
(24, William A. Seiter); and
Tides of Passion
(26, J. Stuart Blackton).

She made a comeback in the 1930s, but in much smaller parts:
Over the Hill
(31, Henry King);
Little
Man, What Now?
(34, Frank Borzage);
The Grapes of Wrath
(40, John Ford); still frantic as Rochester’s wife in
Jane Eyre
(44, Robert Stevenson);
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
(45, Elia Kazan);
The Snake Pit
(48, Anatole Litvak); as Mrs. Purley Sweet in
Three Godfathers
(48, Ford);
The Gunfighter
(50, King);
The Robe
(53, Henry Koster);
The Sun Shines Bright
(53, Ford);
Blueprint for Murder
(53, Andrew Stone);
The Prince of Players
(55, Philip Dunne);
While the City Sleeps
(56, Fritz Lang);
The Searchers
(56, Ford);
Julie
(56, Stone);
The Wings of Eagles
(57, Ford);
Sergeant Rutledge
(60, Ford); and
Donovan’s Reef
(63, Ford).

Garry Marshall
(Marscharelli), b. New York, 1934
1982:
Young Doctors in Love
. 1984:
The Flamingo Kid
. 1986:
Nothing in Common
. 1987:
Overboard
. 1989:
Beaches
. 1990:
Pretty Woman
. 1991:
Frankie and Johnny
. 1994:
Exit to Eden
. 1996:
Dear God
. 1999:
The Other Sister; Runaway Bride
. 2001:
The Princess Diaries
. 2004:
Raising Helen; The Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement
. 2007:
Georgia Rule
. 2010:
Dear Eleanor
.

Marshall is a very uneven director:
Exit to Eden
is a mess;
Nothing in Common
didn’t work as it might have done;
Frankie and Johnny
was crushed by its star casting. On the other hand,
The Flamingo Kid
is an enjoyable comedy, with skilled performances from Matt Dillon and the richly fraudulent Richard Crenna. Then there’s
Pretty Woman
. Few films took a worse critical battering, and surely it is wide open to charges of lunatic fantasizing. But without lunatic fantasy where would the movies be? I think
Pretty Woman
is so cunning and so well done that its white lies become creamy and intriguing. And its plain mean-spirited not to see that Julia Roberts is wonderful in it—nearly as good as Hector Elizondo.

So Marshall is a worthwhile figure, simply as a director. Of course, there’s far more to it. For he has been a giant figure in the production of TV comedy. Having worked as a writer on
The Lucy Show
and
The Dick Van Dyke Show
, he went on to be a producer on
Hey Landlord
(66–67),
The Odd Couple
(70–75),
Happy Days
(74–84),
Laverne and Shirley
(76–83, which costarred his sister, Penny), and
Mork & Mindy
(78–82). From that alone, we are likely talking about one of the highest earners in the business.

More than that, he is a capable comic actor, very funny in
Lost in America
(85, Albert Brooks) and also in
Psych-Out
(68, Richard Rush);
Soapdish
(91, Michael Hoffman);
A League of Their Own
(92, Penny Marshall); and
Hocus Pocus
(93, Kenny Ortega).