Chris Marker...Remembrance of Things to Come...
Marker will not succeed at anything without the photo.  I suspect that even when he was a professional writer or a novelist, he was thinking through photos instead of words.  Let's put aside all those arguments against the quality of the photo these days, and jump right into the reality of it.  History, and more history.  When you watch this film, the avant-garde loosens itself and becomes an education.  Have you thought of Ken Burns?  A photo animated by the most dull movements of camera tracks.  Yes, but rather than experience what it is that is so plainly a history about a history, Chris Marker ventures out into the netherworld of the picaresque essay, an idea that bounds about, that squirms and returns to find its real chore when ready. I've mentioned this before,  but this is something that is very important when you are making a film...there is only one rule to the best kind of filmmaking: what you think you see and hear is not really the thing you see and hear.  It's most clearly that image from the magic trick--the magician says, hey, I will make this disappear, it disappears, and then I will make it return, and then it returns.  This trick never fails to wow someone who is watching a film. But it is ambitious of Marker to do this every time...he is a fantastic editor of ideas...like the shots of the dying Giraffe that pop up well before it arrives at that topic, a subliminal inkling of what Marker achieves....

As a side note, have I written about the Watchmen at all? How Alan Moore's design and writing is something very close to Griffith, and something very close to Marker.  He says that it emerges from the modernist experimentation of Burroughs, and this is most likely true, but towards the end of the novel there is the scene where Ozymandias is watching all those televisions in his room, and comes up with a hypothesis of the future.  That against the panoply of vision, this barrage of watching he will be able to extract something not there, something that is concealed with futurity.  And Moore thinks, isn't this much like when one cuts open the entrails of an animal to read one's future, that within all this violence, this smashing of images that do not occur end to end but side by side one will discover different images within so many at once.  Did you know that this is what Marker does as well? A loner, in his apartment with so many televisions running, of course he is allowed to come up with these different amazing juxtapositions...it is television, it is the remote control, it it the multiple screened spectacle of television that allows him to bound back and forth from here and there, and now and then, and everywhere.  Eisenstein again.  Not two molecules colliding though...millions upon millions, again and again.