1968(may). Everything moves and swarms of photographers (already) shoot at everything that moves, police in uniform running youth in civilian clothes, in the spirit of fox hunting: the unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible (Oscar Wilde ). Barricades, lashings, postures, crowds, protests, flags, slogans, speakers, workers, Chris Marker, who did not do that, finds time to photograph all this, insisting, as always, on the eyes, including those of the police behind their biker glasses. But he does more. Accompanying a demonstration passing in front of the prison of the Health, it seizes, with the TV of 200 mm of his Pentax, which nobody had thought to photograph, even less to see: the gesture of solidarity of two prisoners through their bars. Two men locked up encouraging a free crowd, he had to see it. A few nights later, in front of a street blocked by a cordon of police, he seized again what nobody else thought to seize that night: a young woman with a very Russian smile and his companion, sitting on the edge the sidewalk in a skylight, conscious and indifferent at the same time, living their parenthesis against the backdrop of law enforcement, two images abundantly reproduced in a number of cine-tracts of the time.
1985 . While a man-orchestra he realizes K. , that is to say a comment (that too fast spirits would call a making-off) of the filming of the Ran Kurosawa, still armed with his Pentax now at the end of a click , he captures one last moment, the moment when the arrow leaves the bow and his archer to go fuzzy in time, the last image of his now untraceable book Le Dépays (Herscher, 1986).
2011 . Income from the use of professional instruments but always ready to divert and fold at will the most banal tools, armed this time with photographic glasses of a single megabyte of memory, purchased by correspondence on the site of L a modern man, he grasps the dream and the feminine solitude on the subway without their knowledge. The images lack definition? Never mind: the pixels too apparent will make these dreamers access to the rank of Byzantine mosaic faces. And all the others will join the painting. He was thinking of Ingres, Delacroix, Leonardo (da Vinci), Burne-Jones. Also sometimes reaching the ordinary nightmare of a Bacon, in Passengers, a wonderful and soon untraceable book (Peter Blum, 2011). Never underestimate the American dimension of Chris Marker.
Being a great photographer is not already given to everyone. Being a great photographer while being a great filmmaker, a virtuoso of music and writing and a formidable manipulator of computer science, is magic. But perhaps it was "enough" for Chris Marker not to have wanted anything to be all of this in particular, to have rather wished to be first a moralist of his century, with the means of his century. A century of which he has neither snubbed nor swallowed the successive lyrical illusions, which, however, he accompanied, as one accompanies the wonders of a child, just before they are smashed on the walls of reality.