Silent Movie questions the linearity of narration and history and presents a highly personal response to the 100th anniversary of the invention of cinema. It consists of 18 framed black and white film stills. Chris Marker developed the work by experimenting with black and white film clips and filming in black and white himself. The original installation included five monitors, on which Marker’s black and white films played, and he wrote an essay written by Marker entitled, “The Rest is Silent.” In the essay, Marker contests the notion of silent films, claiming there was always, at the bare minimum, a pianist or narrator to accompany the film while sifting through some of his earliest childhood memories with the medium. Marker explains how he conceptualized the work noting, “Perhaps this installation aims to be just that kind of altar: the sheer exposure to film magic…”

"In 1957, I had the opportunity to join a group of French journalists "invited" to visit North Korea. I realized later what a unique opportunity that was. The four years following the war (a conflict soberly described by General Bradley as the "wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy") had been dedicated mostly to rebuilding a bomb-stricken country, and the formidable propaganda machine that would soon be identified with the sheer mention of North Korea wasn't yet running at full throttle. We were subjected to a sizable dose of propaganda, but between two obligatory sessions of Socialist kowtowing, our hosts allowed us an amount of free walking unequalled since...Watching the image of hopelessness on the faces of the poor wretches made me appreciate even more the liberty I had enjoyed to hang around Pyongyang with my camera and to look everywhere, including marketplaces."

— Chris Marker

Divided into four sections, Staring Back is organized around the idea of the faces Marker has seen in his travels, and of the faces that have in turn witnessed his observant gaze –“I stare” and “They stare,” as Marker puts it. Central to the exhibition are his depictions of political demonstrations from Algerian independence protests in 1962, to the Pentagon march in 1967, to May 1968 in Paris, and continuing to 2006. Interspersed are photographic traces of his inimitable films, including La Jetée, Letter from Siberia, The Six Face of Pentagon, Cuba Si!, Le fond de l’air est rouge, Sans Soleil, and The Case of the Grinning Cat, among others. Although some of the portraits depict well-known individuals (such as Simone Signoret and Akira Kurosawa), most are of unidentified citizens or even animals to whom Marker and his camera were drawn in the course of his global progress through Asia, South America, Scandinavia, Africa, Russia, and elsewhere.

Marker's left-wing politics fueled his impulse to document demonstrations, which began in 1962 at the anti-war protests based in Paris. He had an unwavering interest in rebellions, revolutions, attempts at regime change, and the popular movements by which peoples give public voice to their opinions. He followed such movements in different countries on many continents, including the USA, Bolivia, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Brazil, Cuba, Chile, China, Russia, Czechoslovakia and Vietnam, and also much closer to home in Besançon, Saint-Nazaire, and of course, Paris.

"Petals are for sure these visages I capture like a benevolent paparazzo. Stolen, yes, but by another trick of the mirror, here stealing means giving. Tabloids love to catch people (preferably celebrities) unaware, if possible, with an awkward or ridiculous expression, things that happen mechanically, independently of the subject's real intention. When I was a kid, French President Poincaré once visited a WWI graveyard under a blazing sun, and the extreme light made appear on his face, for one-tenth of a second, a rictus that could be mistaken for a grin. A photograph caught that moment, and for the rest of his career he was berated by the Rightest opponents as “the man who laughs in cemeteries”. It may be that this childhood's memory did help me to generate a defiant curiosity toward images. So, my aim in collecting these “petals” is exactly—small wonder—the opposite of tabloids. I try to give them their best moment, often imperceptible in the stream of time, sometimes 1/50 of a second that makes them truer to their inner selves. I started the experience with a wristwatch camera, hence the title “QUELLE HEURE EST-ELLE?”. Then I used different contraptions, but I kept the title, for my personal pleasure and because the stolen moment of a woman's face tells something about Time itself … But that's another story and, oh yes, I had almost forgotten… Pound's poem: it was written in Paris, and the title is “In a Station of the Metro.”

— Chris Marker

Marker also experimented with printmaking, exploring notions of time, and commenting on his film projects. The modern finally meets the traditional arts in the series, After Dürer, where Marker uses the engravings of the German printmaker and revisits them through digital manipulations by creating his own photogravures. In the image Hollow Men, it also questions the linearity of narration and history. It was created in relation to a video installation of the same name that reflects on the European wasteland that resulted from the First World War. The title references a T.S. Eliot poem from 1925 commenting on the suffering soliders in the Great War endured.

T.S.ELIOT WROTE IT IN 1925
THE ASHES OF WORLD WAR I WERE BARELY COLD
AND WE 4 YEAR OLD TODDLERS   BARELY MADE OUT
A WORLD OF STRANGE FORMS
SHAPED BY THAT WAR
THE WAR TO END ALL WARS THEY SAID
WHICH WE WOULD DISCOVER QUITE UNTRUE
LESS THAN 80 SEASONS LATER
"HEADPIECES FILLED WITH STRAW"
OR "DRIED VOICES" OR "QUIET AND MEANINGLESS"
HOW OFTEN WOULD THESE WORDS APPLY
TO MY FELLOW PASSENGERS
ABOARD THE ERRATIC LINER
OF CENTURY XXth ?
"THE HOLLOW MEN"
"THE STUFFED MEN"

— Chris Marker