Chris Marker

Since 1995, the Viennale has invited renowned directors to create short, one-minute films as personal contributions to the festival. Ranging from home movies to political essays, musical sketches to abstract studies, these “little films” form a unique anthology of cinematic moments. 20 Little Films collects a selection of these works, premiering together for the Viennale’s 50th anniversary at the Locarno Film Festival.

Video on the mass media response to the bardo-traversing of Steve Jobs. Long live the archive and the archivist.

A short history of cinema

An historical "if"

Chris Marker’s Stopover in Dubai is a found-footage documentary reconstructed from CCTV material released by Dubai State Security, documenting the 2010 assassination of Hamas co-founder Mahmoud al-Mabhouh. The footage follows a team of 26 assassins moving through hotels and corridors on the day of the killing. Marker retained the original images but replaced the broadcast’s generic soundtrack with Henryk Górecki’s music performed by the Kronos Quartet.

What else ?

Rhytmics of a revolution.

Short film about violence in London.

A tour of Ouvroir, the virtual museum Chris Marker created in the online world Second Life with collaborator Max Moswitzer. Guided by Marker’s cat avatar, Guillaume-en-Égypte, visitors explore a 3D island of galleries, cinemas, and reading rooms inspired by Bioy Casares’s The Invention of Morel. The film documents this digital extension of Marker’s lifelong exploration of memory, art, and technology.

After a sleepless night, Obama's victory flashes on frontpages around the world.

Excerpts from Alain Resnais' film NIGHT AND FOG served as evidence during the trial against Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem. On the evening before the trial, the defendant Eichmann was shown the entire film. Leo Hurwitz, the director responsible for video recording the trial, filmed this unusual projection in a kind of shot-countershot procedure without sound and in black and white. Nearly fifty years later, French filmmaker Chris Marker, who had already worked as an assistant director on NIGHT AND FOG, assembled these shots with the original color images and sounds of the French film: Henchman Glance.

Pictures, collages, well, call'em XPLUGS

A brief visual journey through the subways of major world cities. Without narration, Marker captures anonymous gestures, repetitive rhythms, and the unique atmosphere of underground urban spaces. A sensory meditation on modern life, the homogenization of environments, and the quiet beauty of places in transit.

Cat film by Chris Marker

Like more and more internet users, if you didn't watch TV in 2007, you'll think twice about it in 2008. Because Guillaume-en-Egypte, Chris Marker's freelance cat, has watched it a lot; from Al Jazeera to CNN via Russian television and animal channels. And he came out unscathed, even offering us a special zapping.

Chris Marker's cat and rat.

The life and work of Russian film director Andrei Tarkovsky is celebrated and explored in three documentary films: Tempo Di Viaggio (1983) directed by Andrei Tarkovsky and Tonino Guerra, Moscow Elegy (1988) directed by Alexander Sokurov, and One Day In The Life Of Andrei Arsenevitch (2000) directed by Chris Marker.

Chris Marker, intrigued by the sight of yellow cats perched on walls on the streets of Paris, films the major national and international sociopolitical events of the early 2000s.

A personal history of France, told through photos by French photographer Denise Bellon.

This is where sizzling fire still smoldering in a war which everybody talked a lot and which we rarely had the opportunity to hear the actors. Once removed their image of poor refugees on the roads, the Kosovars have strangely disappeared from the media world and Kosovo is again an abstraction. Bajram Rexhepi is entirely concrete. Surgeon by profession, he's a surgeon that fought the war in the ranks of the KLA, the Kosovo Liberation Army. With the upcoming of peace, his unquestioned authority made him the elected mayor of Mitrovica. The use made of this authority may undermine some misconceptions.

Filmed during the solar eclipse of August 11, 1999, Eclipse observes adults and children across France watching the darkened sky through protective glasses. Marker captures their varied reactions—wonder, curiosity, and indifference—as day briefly turns to night.

Chris Marker’s portrait of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky documents the director at work on his final film, The Sacrifice, during the last year of his life. Interweaving behind-the-scenes footage with excerpts from Tarkovsky’s earlier works, Marker crafts a moving reflection on the artist’s vision, methods, and enduring legacy.

Laura, a French programmer, inherits the task of creating a game about the World War II Battle of Okinawa. Her research and interviews with Japanese experts and witnesses prompt her to reflect on life, humanity, and the lasting influence of history and memories.

A young man, who served as a peacekeeper in Bosnia and Herzegovina for a few months during the war, recounts his experiences. Throughout the film, we only see his face filmed in close-up, along with a few photos. The interview acts as a strong testimony to the failure of the international community in the Yugoslav crisis.

Originally displayed as part of an installation consisting of one metal stand, 5 monitors, 5 laser disc players, a computer face interbox, 5 video discs with 20 min. sequences: The Journey, The Face, Captions, The Gesture, The Waltz; 18 B&W video stills, 10 film posters, and a soundtrack: "The Perfect Tapeur", solo piano pieces lasting 59 min. 32 sec.

A documentary on Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin, examining his tumultuous career, the rediscovery of his masterpiece Happiness, and Russia's struggles over the course of the 20th Century.

Chris Marker’s Bullfight in Okinawa is a bizarre, 4 min documentary that introduces viewers to Japan’s subterranean past time of bullfighting. Part of Markers five-film “Bestiary” series, Bullfight employs observational documentary techniques and, in particular, Marker’s camerawork is impressive — tight framed shots, free-hand pans, and quick zooms all contribute to the film’s urgent sense of tension — and, if it weren’t for the suspense inducing music, this short-gem would be damn close to pure objective documentary cinema.

A collection of three short “video haikus” by Chris Marker. Yanka / Tchaika observes the Seine beneath a bridge; Owl Gets in Your Eyes features Catherine Belkhodja with an owl superimposed in flight; and Petite Ceinture pays homage to the Lumière brothers by filming empty train tracks along Paris’s disused railway.

Part of Chris Marker’s Three Video Haikus series, Owl Gets in Your Eyes observes owls and their young in quiet close-up, capturing their shifting expressions and watchful gaze.

Part of Chris Marker’s Three Video Haikus series, Tchaïka is a brief visual meditation showing an overexposed view of a bridge and the river flowing beneath it.

Part of Chris Marker’s Three Video Haikus series, Petite Ceinture is a brief visual meditation on Paris’s abandoned circular railway, filmed as an homage to the Lumière brothers.

Prime Time in the Camps is one of a series of Chris Marker’s short films on the war in Yugoslavia. Featuring behind-the-scenes footage of the camp’s TV crews in action, with interviews and excerpts from the TV programs, the film captures the importance of grassroots media and the need for people to share their stories.

An oddly rhythmic and balletic tape emerges from the juxtaposition of an elephant lumbering around his enclosure at the zoo and elegant music by Stravinsky.

Made entirely on Roger Wagner's HyperStudio software, Chris Marker explores set theory, using Noah's Ark as an example.

Some months after the fall of the Berlin wall, during the time of federal elections in Germany in 1990, Chris Marker shot this passionate documentary, reflecting the state of the place and its spirit with remarkable acuity.

Berlin 1990 travels the streets and the political landscape of the recently re-unified Berlin. In the tumultuous atmosphere of 1990, we watch Berliners walk through check points manned by soldiers, past street vendors selling sausages and "actual" pieces of the Berlin Wall, and watch as they watch the election results come in for another "new" Germany.

Part of Chris Marker’s Bestiaire (Petit Bestiaire) collection, An Owl Is an Owl Is an Owl is a short video meditation on the gaze and movement of owls—sometimes still, sometimes in flight—observed with the quiet, rhythmic attention typical of Marker’s later video work.

A quietly observed montage of animals in captivity—seals, leopards, gorillas, wolves, monkeys, ostriches, and others—Zoo Piece shifts perspective from spectacle to confinement, reflecting on the boundaries between observation and imprisonment.

A document of Perestroika, to be viewed as (nearly) unedited rushes of a voyage to Moscow, preserved by compatriot Costa-Gavras. Says Émilie Cauquy of the French Cinémathèque, "Astonishing unpublished travel diary, shot by Chris Marker in analog video on the occasion of a screening of L'Aveu in Moscow in 1990 [...] Armed with his camcorder, Marker films and records the comments, takes on the role of contemporary capital according to this unique ethnographic method that he has perfected".

After the Romanian Revolution reached its peak during the Christmas Holidays of 1989, Romania’s Communist patriarch and his wife Elena were sentenced to death by a military court and accordingly gunned down. Chris Marker’s short video-collage Détour Ceauşescu documents how the execution was depicted by France’s national TV-channel TF1.

Chris Marker’s work, "Zapping Zone (Proposals for an imaginary television)" was produced by the Mnam-Centre Pompidou in the framework of the exhibition "Passages de l’Image" in 1990. Composed of 13 television sets, 7 computer stations (Apple II GS), 4 luminous displays containing 80 slides and 10 photomontages, this large interactive installation marked the entry of digital script into the art field at the dawn of the World Wide Web. Up until 2007, and Chris Marker’s last presentation before his death, the artist produced endlessly, building up an archive of 183 disks of work.

Chris Marker’s Tokyo Days follows the filmmaker and actress Arielle Dombasle as they wander through Tokyo, beginning with an encounter with a live mannequin in a shop window. Mixing casual observation with playful edits, Marker captures everyday scenes—from subways to markets—in a personal video diary of the city.

Part of Chris Marker’s Bestiaire (Petit Bestiaire) collection, Cat Listening to Music simply observes a cat responding to the sound of a piano.

A wonderful tribute to the great Simone Signoret by Chris Marker. Rare documentary, made by movie clips and narration, with many lines Simone Signoret wrote for her autobiography 'La nostalgie n'est plus ce qu'elle était' (Nostalgia is not what it was anymore).

A portrait of the Chilean artist Roberto Matta leading Marker on a wise and funny private guided tour of his solo exhibition at the Pompidou Center.

An intimate chronicle of the shooting of Ran (1985), a film directed by the legendary Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

In the fall of 1985, Christo "packed" the Pont Neuf. In the space of a week, enthusiasts, critics and curious people drastically change the perception of this place whose presence has never been felt as much as since it was veiled. And that's what Christo wanted.

Made for the centenary of France’s trade union laws, Chris Marker’s 2084 imagines a future in which a computer looks back on the labor movement of the 20th century. Mixing documentary reflection with speculative fiction, the film envisions contrasting paths for the future of workers and unions.

A woman narrates the thoughts of a world traveler, meditations on time and memory expressed in words and images from places as far-flung as Japan, Guinea-Bissau, Iceland, and San Francisco.

Filmed along the Emeryville Mudflats near San Francisco, Junkopia captures a landscape of sculptural installations made from driftwood and discarded materials. Chris Marker, John Chapman, and Frank Simeone transform these ephemeral artworks—set against highways and the distant city—into a quiet meditation on art, decay, and the modern environment.

In 1978, just after Le fond de l'Air Est Rouge, which mercilessly analyzed the previous ten years of the revolutionary left's momentum until its collapse, Chris Marker made this complementary piece entitled Quand le Siècle a Pris Forme (Guerre et Révolution).

Chris Marker’s A Grin Without a Cat is an epic political essay tracing the rise and decline of the global left from the 1960s to the 1970s. Through archival footage and commentary, the film examines revolutionary movements in France, Latin America, and beyond, reflecting on the ideals, failures, and fading hopes of a generation.

This documentary chronicles an Yves Montand concert for Chilean refugees in France.

After a military coup d'état, political dissidents seek refuge in a foreign embassy. Over the next few days, they are joined by more and more people who are fleeing the military assault: teachers, students, intellectuals, artists, and politicians.

Salvador Allende interviewed by Régis Debray in 1971.

In 1973, after the failure of wage negotiations with the management of the Lip watch factories, the workers went on strike. Marker was responsible for assembling clips from various photographers into one cohesive film.

Co-directed by Chris Marker and Mario Ruspoli, Three Cheers for the Whale traces humanity’s complex relationship with whales—from reverence to exploitation—culminating in a stark depiction of industrial whaling. Combining archival imagery, commentary, and documentary footage, the film offers both a historical reflection and a call for ecological awareness.

This half-hour documentary by Chris Marker explores Aleksandr Medvedkin’s 1930s “Cine-Train,” a mobile film studio equipped with cameras, editing rooms, animation stations, and a laboratory. Traveling across the Soviet countryside, the train’s crew documented agricultural and industrial life—from Ukrainian harvests to southern steelworks—while living and working in cramped shared quarters.

An affectionate portrait of the left-wing publisher and bookshop owner François Maspero, who was a contributor to Far From Vietnam and would later publish the commentary to Le Fond de l’air est rouge. Maspero is one of the most satisfying and likeable of Marker’s films from this period, achieving an exemplary balance of quirky human warmth with a clear and inventive form of political argument.

Artur London was arrested in 1951 in a Stalinist purge, imprisoned and tortured for two years and forced to confess in the Slansky Trial, one of the last Stalinist "show trials" in Eastern Europe. The documentary explores some of the reasons for the controversy aroused by Costa-Gavras' The Confession, which had been accused of being anti-communist, and it highlights the political importance of filmmaking which, by its nature, is a fiction intended for the general public.

Documentary about economic development in Cuba, particularly the effort to boost output of sugar cane. This film is made from a compilation of newsreel footage from the Cuban film institute and from Santiago Alvarez's film Despegue a las 18.00 (Departure 18:00).

Made shortly after the death of Brazilian revolutionary Carlos Marighella, this documentary reconstructs his life and political struggle through interviews with friends and comrades. It examines his role in the resistance against Brazil’s military dictatorship and his death in a 1969 police ambush.

On September the 4th, 1969, a group of Brazilian revolutionaries kidnap the U.S. ambassador. In exchange for his release, they demand that the Brazilian authorities publish a manifesto they provide, and release 15 political prisoners.

Chris Marker and François Reichenbach document the massive anti–Vietnam War protest held in Washington, D.C., on October 21, 1967, where more than 100,000 demonstrators gathered at the Lincoln Memorial before marching on the Pentagon. Filmed amid the crowd, the short captures the tension, idealism, and growing radicalism of the American peace movement.

A series of 43 documentary shorts, directed (without credit) by several famous French filmmakers and each running between two and four minutes. Each "tract" espouses a leftist political viewpoint through the filmed depiction of real-life events, including workers' strikes and the events of Paris in May '68.

A documentary look at striking workers in a textile plant in Besançon, France, centering on interviews with workers about their motivations for becoming involved with the union and the struggles of their day to day life.

In seven different parts, Godard, Ivens, Klein, Lelouch, Marker, Resnais, and Varda show their sympathy for the North-Vietnamese army during the Vietnam War.

Composed entirely of still photographs taken by Chris Marker across 26 countries, If I Had Four Dromedaries presents a dialogue between three voices reflecting on the meaning of images and travel. Through this photo-essay form, Marker explores the relationship between still and moving images and the act of seeing itself.

Koumiko Muraoka, a young Japanese woman born in Manchuria and educated in France, wanders through Tokyo while she reflects on identity, memory, and what it means to be Japanese in a rapidly changing world.

Candid interviews of ordinary people on the meaning of happiness, an often amorphous and inarticulable notion that evokes more basic and fundamentally egalitarian ideals of self-betterment, prosperity, tolerance, economic opportunity, and freedom.

A man confronts his past during an experiment that attempts to find a solution to the problems of a post-apocalyptic world caused by a world war.

Chris Marker’s documentary traces the course of the Cuban Revolution, from its early optimism to the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion. Through on-the-ground footage and interviews—including two with Fidel Castro—the film captures the spirit and contradictions of a nation in transformation.

Chris Marker’s documentary portrays Israel twelve years after its founding, blending location and archival footage to explore its diverse communities—from kibbutzim and Arab villages to Orthodox quarters and tourist sites. The “struggle” of the title reflects the nation’s search for identity in a rapidly changing region.

An inventor builds a homemade spacecraft, and uses it to have various adventures, including peeping at women, visiting ‘human’ planets, and becoming involved in intergalactic warfare.

A faceless traveller takes a journey through the barren reaches of a Siberia caught between tradition and modernity, imparting his philosophical musings on its people and places, wildlife and culture.

Chris Marker’s travel essay Sunday in Peking transforms a long-held childhood dream into a cinematic journey through Beijing. Blending documentary observation with reflective narration, Marker captures the city’s rhythms, traditions, and everyday life in mid-1950s China with his signature curiosity and lyricism.

Commissioned by the journal Présence Africaine, this short documentary examines how African art is devalued and alienated through colonial and museum contexts. Beginning with the question of why African works are confined to ethnographic displays while Greek or Egyptian art is celebrated, the film became a landmark of anti-colonial cinema and was banned in France for eight years.

Olympia 52 is a 1952 French documentary film about the '52 Summer Olympics in Helsinki, Finland. Olympia 52 was produced by Peuple et Culture, a nonprofit organization, and it was the first feature-length work directed by the French filmmaker Chris Marker, who also co-wrote the narrative and served as one of the production’s four cinematographers.

This film is considered lost. Chris Marker described it as his first film, shot in Berlin on an 8mm movie camera purportedly borrowed from André Bazin. A decade and a half later, Marker would recycle some of Berlin photographs in a montage sequence in La Jetée evoking a post–­World War III Paris. In Abrahamic religions, Gabriel is an archangel with power to announce God’s will to men. He is mentioned in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Quran. It is Gabriel who announces to the Virgin Mary that she would have a child. Alain Resnais recalled: “It was a sequence of images that weren’t always identifiable, he used a lot of out of focus shots and techniques like that, but the commentary was fabulous and I was completely swept away by this film”.