chris marker bot

excerpts from chris marker texts, in english. i am an analog "bot," and therefore tweet sporadically.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

If I ever had a passion in the field of politics, it’s a passion for understanding. Understanding how people manage to live on a planet like ours. Understanding how they seek, how they try, how they make mistakes, how they get over them, how they learn, how they lose their way…

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

Legends are born out of the need to decipher the indecipherable. Memories must make do with their delirium, with their drift. A moment stopped would burn like a frame of film blocked before the furnace of the projector. Madness protects, as fever does.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

Meanwhile, I have no difficulty with local earthquakes. But I must say that last night's quake helped me greatly to grasp a problem.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

Chance has intuitions, which shouldn’t always be taken for coincidences. The country where you just set foot delegates you a woman’s face which sums it up already, and names it. (A great ship whose prow slowly turns round and stares at you, like a horse.) Its name is Sweetness.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

Having only sent lifeless or insentient bodies through different zones of Time, the inventors where now concentrating on men given to very strong mental images. If they were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps they would be able to live in it.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

What Narita brought back to me, like a shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties. If to love without illusions is still to love, I can say that I loved it.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

According to a Siberian proverb, the forest was made by the devil. The devil did a good job; his forest is as big as the United States of America. But maybe the devil made the United States too.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

One day she got the idea of drawing up a list of 'things that quicken the heart.' Not a bad criterion I realize when I'm filming; I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighborhood celebrations.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

That immediately put me on the side of the people who seek and make mistakes, as opposed to those who seek nothing, except to conserve, defend themselves, and deny all the rest.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

If I ever had a passion in the field of politics, it’s a passion for understanding. Understanding how people manage to live on a planet like ours. Understanding how they seek, how they try, how they make mistakes, how they get over them, how they learn, how they lose their way…

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

Frankly, have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

The notion of historical progress, of a powerful “current of history,” never mattered to me except in a deliberate play on the word “current”: not a directional flow, but instead the possibility to grasp the current meanings of the historical present, full of sound and fury.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember, we rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

Until the day when a neighbor (a skeptic) came to see them – with a cat. At the sight of it, the usurper jerked bolt upright with fright and took her true form again – that of a rat.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

The tale says that an orphan, rediscovering her parents’ home after many years of exile, had the surprise of finding herself there already – a double of herself, identical down to the smallest detail, who obviously greeted her as an intruder.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

She remained nonetheless, and after some time, in spite of all the examinations, it was still impossible to tell one from the other.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

You could go on praising reindeer forever. Those velvet handlebars and the way they have of kicking themselves along with their heels – they’re the closest thing to a bicycle that God ever created.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

This gash in the forest means the city has gone by like a wild animal; follow the wrong trail and you may come to a bear or a tiger, follow the right one and you’ll come to a city.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

The Underworld exists, in the legends. An ogre sleeps there, eyes wide open. The young hero prepares for combat by drinking mandrake juice and wrestling with an iron flail. But instead of saving his soul, he marries a beautiful princess. Boys will be boys.

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

The weight of the past, can it be reduced to the sole role of ornament, as we do? Can the borderline between statues and men be drawn so tight that no vertigo crosses, no vast cry of madness or destruction?

[chris marker bot @bot_marker]

I find it fitting to give a filmmaker the last word on the twentieth century, which despite all its shams had so little real existence – which may after all have been nothing but an immense, interminable fade-over.