Chris Marker: Guilleume-en-Égypte

The Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University, in collaboration with the MIT List Visual Arts Center and the Harvard Film Archive, presents Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte, a survey exhibition of the work of renowned filmmaker and artist Chris Marker (1921-2012). The exhibition is the first comprehensive presentation of Marker’s pioneering work in text, photography, film, video, and digital media, reflecting his role as a chronicler of the second half of the 20th century through its images.

Although perhaps best-known for his 1962 science fiction film La Jetée, Chris Marker worked as a photographer, writer, and editor, before turning to film in the early 1950s, and to video and new media technologies in later decades. On view at the Carpenter Center will be a selection of media, including two of Markerʼs most-important installation-based works: Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, a media installation created in 2005 for the Museum of Modern Art and inspired by T.S. Eliotʼs 1925 poem “The Hollow Men;” and Silent Movie (1994-95), Markerʼs response to the one–hundredth anniversary of the invention of cinema produced for the Wexner Arts Center, evoking the memory of pre-sound cinema in an installation that investigates the intersection of personal recollection with collective nostalgia.

Always an early adopter of new moving image technologies, Marker turned to the layering of images and the aesthetics of video, as well as computing and digital media, in the 1970s and 1980s. Both MIT and the Carpenter Center will present selections of Markerʼs work in video spanning several decades, including television productions and his pioneering use of digital technology. Marker’s landmark CD-ROM based work, Immemory (1998), which invites readers to navigate thematic “zones” through photographs, film clips, music, and text is part of the artist’s sustained engagement with the digital, making use of web interfaces as platforms for investigation and anticipating the ways in which forms of new media have become repositories of memory. The exhibitions will also include recent work Marker produced for a variety of digital platforms, including Second Life and Youtube.

Complimentary to the exhibition is an expansive retrospective of film and video work by Chris Marker at the Harvard Film Archive, curated by HFA Director Haden Guest. This program will be one of the most extensive Marker retrospectives ever presented in the United States featuring a number of rare films, some screened in the US for the first time. Please see the Harvard Film Archive’s website for schedule and ticketing information.

The exhibition at the MIT List Visual Art Center will include a comprehensive selection of Chris Marker’s media work along with three of his most important photographic series: Coréennes, his black-and-white-photos of a trip to North Korea in the mid-1950s; Staring Back, photographic portraits captured during travels in Asia, South America, Scandinavia, Africa, Russia, and elsewhere from 1952 to 2006, as well as images from political demonstrations and from Marker’s own films; and Passengers, images taken between 2008 and 2010 of passengers traveling on the Paris Métro. The MIT exhibition will also explore Marker’s critical interest in the relation between images and memory, and between documentary and fiction, through works such as Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), centered on over 800 photographs Marker had taken over a decade; Remembrances of Things to Come, (2003), a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon and her images of postwar culture; and The Last Bolshevik, Marker’s tribute to the work and legacy of Russian film director Alexander Medvedkin (1900-1989).

Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte is curated by João Ribas.

Support for this exhibition has been generously provided by the Institute Française and the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States, The Dedalus Foundation, Icarus Films, Cultural Service of the French Consulate in Boston, TOKY, the Council for the Arts at MIT, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, the Office of the Associate Provost at MIT, the MIT List Visual Arts Center Advisory Committee, and the Friends of the List. Special thanks to Peter Blum Gallery for their generous support and assistance.