“Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.”
Chris Marker, (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve), French filmmaker and multimedia artist born in 1921 and pioneered the essay film, an the avant-garde cinematic form that brings a personal approach to documentary and non narrative footage. Across many fields – in graphic design, multimedia, but most of all in film – he made the activity of thinking about images, whether photographic or moving, seem both profound and playful.
His best-known work, La Jetée (1962), is a short subject composed almost entirely of still photographs, with the exception of a brief film shot; the “plot” later served as the inspiration for the cryptic time-traveling drama Twelve Monkeys (1995).