Ten Lives of a Cat

😿 😿 😿 

Chris Marker. Born 1921, died 2012. Is a French filmmaker, and multimedia pioneer.

The self described, “best known author of unknown movies”. He was a contemporary of the French New Wave, and collaborator with the likes of Alain Resnais, Akira Kurosawa and Andrei Tarkovsky.

He refused to be photographed or interviewed. Appearing only behind the mask of his beloved cat, Guillaume-en-Égypte. 

He loved masks, but it’s our job to unmask.

😿 😿 😿 

You wrote, “Poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emus in The Zone”. 

Who remembers all that? That ambiguous poetry of the last century. Mankind has come to terms with the coexistence of different concepts of time, the question is simply, why wait? Poetry is made by everyone, and nothing escapes The Zone. The real question is, how to reclaim The Zone?

You wrote from Africa. You wrote from USSR. You contrasted the suburbs of Tokyo, to the rooftops of Paris. You sought happiness in pictures, and if not, at least you found the cats. 

I’m writing you, not from a distant land, a land of darkness or childhood, but a place beyond time. Somewhere between cat cemetery of Gotokuji, and mausoleum on Red Square. Your tomb at Montparnasse. More of a dead end, than a road to follow. However, accepting that with each year, death takes a filmmaker as if they were a panda, here I am. To confront the partition, to stare through it, with curiosity and admiration. To give a life, where nine have expired. To login, where you logged off. Performing “the rite that would repair the web of time, where it had been broken”, ten years prior.

First Letter - The Madeleine

In 1957, you wrote, “Korea greeted us with morning calm”. 60 year’s and 100km South, it seems she has changed her custom. As morning breaks, the fate of President Park Geun-hye is sealed. Exposed in an extortion scandal, which claimed her impeachment and culminated in her arrest. The answer of the street, a torrent of emotion. 

From the North, you brought back your reportage, Coréennes. In the South, it becomes my guidebook and lens. I find dioramas from photographs and exhibits of your memory. I reconstruct what I can, but when you wrote, “the border is the war”. The split must have seemed, at least somewhat linear…

As I confront a new border in this sibling rivalry, there is a coup on the lawn of City Hall. Where hands that emerged from colonialism, to build a miracle on the Han river. Have come to reclaim their spot. A spot of fertile soil, where the torch of Korean Resistance was lit in 1919, and rekindled in 1987. Today however, as ageing militants, with youthful exuberance and American flags. Attempt to smother the radiant, candle light of the future. I get the distinct impression, the torch has already been passed. 

As daughter of South Korea’s most authoritarian leader. Park’s disgrace, prompts a difficult question. Beyond the belligerent tannoy, now swallowed in the spring ether. Where those present, are forced to reconsider their spot. I find fragility, and a gesture that will haunt me. They tell me, “Korea is at a crossroads”, “It is a travesty, Park has been wrongfully arrested!”, “Everyday I pray for Martial Law, it is the only option!”, “They are a manifestation of Satan!”.

Across the crowded Gwanghwamun however. Beneath the bronze Turtle Ship, and stone silhouette of Korean sovereignty. These satanists seem far more preoccupied with saving lives, than taking them. As tireless hands thread ribbon, to elevate 476 dead, from three years of neglect, into the most poignant ammunition against Park’s regime.

It’s not difficult to see who’s winning. There is even a joke going around. “Park lived with her father for 18 year’s, then in exile for 18 year’s, in government for 18 year’s, now, will she be in prison for 18 year’s?”

When you were eighteen, you published your first work - a student newspaper. Nineteen, your country was outraged, shattered and martyred. Twenty, you left for Switzerland. “The youngest member of the French resistance”, might be a bit of a stretch, but it’s not my place to rewrite history. You were assimilated into the American Army. One cat says as a Paratrooper, another as an interrogator. These formative year’s, set a precedent of secrecy and rediscovery that would define, and perhaps scar you. As your 67 post-war year’s, would in turn be consumed by the inexplicable relationship between image and memory. “Impossible memory, insane memory”.

Between the pages of Esprit. You were re-christened, Chris Marker. You claimed a spot amongst the Parisian literary left wing. Then, in Helsinki, you would mobilise once again. 

You wrote, “The idea of Greece, has been used to fuel the spirit of totalitarianism”. Your first encounter with this imaginary Greece, seems a fitting start to an elusive story. One that plays with totalities, like a cat with string, or toy fish… 16 years from Berlin, 28 ’til Moscow. The tyranny of Helsinki, would be bad weather and poor attendance. In your first assignment, Olympia 52. Equipped with the ideals of Peuple et Culture. Leni Riefenstahl’s man machines, are definitively decommissioned and disassembled. For a renewed humanism to ascend the rostrum.

You wrote, “There we were, like the apes at the beginning of Kubrick’s 2001.” “The doors of the future had begun to swing open.” The remnants of War were collapsing, and your generation, who could be defined by saying, “I knew Berlin before the Wall, or I knew Brando thin”. For a few year’s could pocket another legend, “I saw Stalin in the Mausoleum”. 

With one paw excavating the past, the other deciphering the future. What Tarkovsky described as “sculpting in time”, for you must be considered, sculpting beyond time, and assuming your identity, one learns to time travel. To emancipate image from memory, to fool about with it. In a way, to become unsentimental, by finding it’s utility. Is this what you meant when you said, Dziga Vertov was your teacher?

Between student, militant, vagabond and archivist. This antiquated idea of history, as eternal magnetic tape forever rereading itself, is ever present. As your memory would be constantly rescanned and archived, from paper, to film, to tape, to hard drive. Snagging on each Madeleine. What is a Madeleine? This is a Madeleine. And this is a Madeleine. And with each Madeleine, a rediscovery. 

“Thus one comes to call Madeleines all those objects, all those instants that can serve as triggers for the strange mechanism of memory”. In your multimedia memoir, Immemory. You lay out your Madeleines like ornaments on a mantle. From Jules Verne to Uncle Anton. Your madonna’s and favourite creatures. It’s all there, pinned down and decorated, in pixelated formaldehyde. But now that I think about it, why? What started all this? Your vigilante-like crusade against the injustice of forgetting…

You wrote, that the only coherent part of your work, was “To give the power of speech to people who don’t have it”. To those fading stars who appear in every film, from Helsinki to Dubai. And so, marked by images of childhood, with cat like reflexes and a taste for madeleines. You overcame the tyranny of memory, by pulling icons from the delirium, and placed in other images, the purity of those indelible moments granted as a child. 

With all this talk of Madeleines. On this journey through memory, what Proust was to Hitchcock, and Hitchcock was to you, now you are to me. You wrote, “In my imagination, I could still see an illustration from a book I had looked at in my childhood. Without knowing exactly what it referred to. It was in fact, a scene at the gates of Peking.” Wherever I go, I seem to spend all my time chasing those immobile stone faces. Asian peasants, African Marxist’s, even European bourgeois. I went to the monument on Namsan Mountain, commemorating the first demonstration against the Japanese. To which both sides of the crowded city centre, owe their entire existence.

I’m not sure why exactly, but staring at the ‘Taegukgi’ this afternoon, a strange feeling came over me. I thought of your illustration. Realising that I myself, had been dreaming of Korea, ever since the World Cup in 2002. When as a child, this strange flag seemed to belong more to that funny world of Picasso, than my own. The royal red and blue, distorted beyond recognition. Evoked something inexplicably exotic. ”It's not very often that one can step into a picture belonging to one's childhood”, yet there I was. And in that moment, with a purity that had been dormant for fifteen year’s, it seemed earth had doubled in size, once again.

What is a Madeleine? This is a Madeleine.

That evening, I found my own character taking revenge on society. As if from out of those stone faces, I had retrieved a ‘Dokkaebi’. A mischievous spirit in Hanbok. Which inadvertently, I have now seemed to unleash upon the city. Predictably, it’s up to him. To play us out, and proclaim of this first day in Seoul. “The words, the end.”

Since childhood a fascination for museum’s.

You gave each one their sovereignty. Exploring as if it were the city itself. Unburdened by time, like a game save. In Tbilisi, you could re-spawn each morning, to greet Mr Noah in a moment of solitude. I find myself however, wandering in Ouvroir.

Your remodelling of the eidetic island, from The Invention of Morel, into an archipelago of Second Life. A cyber sanctuary, part Hyrule Castle, part Palats Kultury. Where by, you can relax, you can dance, and even play cowboy. When you are done with that. There’s a screening room, a sitting room, and of course, a roller coaster. Just swap out ‘Valencia’ and ‘Tea for Two’, for equally passé polygons. Then you too become a kind of ephemeral fugitive, deciphering a presence, stuck between plains.

In Statues Also Die, your first 'real’ film. You wrote, “When we disappear. Our objects will be confined to the place where we send ‘black things’, to the museum.” And so, here we are. Beyond first and second life. As treasures which had never left your studio on Rue Courat, are shown on the top floor of the Cinémathèque Française. You too become a contemporary of those mute idols and black things, recovered from history. 

Under the sign of “Chu-Mou”, I am reminded of a passage in Letter From Siberia. You wrote, “In these graves, which rest on foundations of ice, life and death are separated by nothing more substantial, than a breath of air.” As if that same breath, had been included in the price of admission. Your trinkets seem on stand by. Just bring back the body, and your studio could boot again…

I suppose it’s true, what remains of dinosaurs like you, belong in museums. My real fascination however, is the fragility beyond a collection. The tentative narrative that turns objects into artefacts, whilst itself remaining uncertain. In Seoul’s state of the art Park Chung-Hee Presidential Library, these insecurities play out with a formidable irony. As ultimately, the attempt to recalibrate history, inadvertently underlines the conflict of the city centre. The spectre of autocracy, that has plagued Korean democracy for over a century.

Committed to those values, imposed on impressionable, Imperial Army officers. Park Chung-Hee held power, across eighteen year’s, and two constitutional republics. Solidifying the “miracle on the Han river”, with the most militarised and repressive regime since Japanese Occupation. But perhaps his defining moment, came whilst speaking at the National Theatre. When a botched assassination killed his wife. Somehow undeterred, with the composure, exemplary of those Samurai he had admired as a child. Park resumed the address, simply gathering her possessions upon exit. Five years later, he too would be dead… Assassinated by his own Intelligence Service, but afforded the first state funeral since Korea’s last Emperor. 

By 1959, you had compared this broken peninsula, to a tale of two orphans. By 1979, it seems one orphan, had made a commitment to another. At Seoul’s National Cemetery, I discover the Korean concept of ‘Han’. A state of grief, pertaining to a kind of vengeful resentment. Where forty years ago, Park Geun-hye, bid farewell to her parents. Releasing a fog of nostalgia, that would consume Seoul until today. More than just an exercise in democracy. Park’s impeachment symbolises an emphatic end to her fathers legacy. One that has defined two orphans, for nearly half a century. 

At the Odusan Unification Observatory, I glimpse that which you had sufficed to name, sweetness. As inquisitive siblings, marvel at the mystery of their Motherland. This simple gesture, made in the viewfinder of a telescope. Chips away at the last vestige, “of the famous crisis of ideologies”. Transforming a fortress into a pasture. To unearth the profound harmony, interned in these ancient waters, since the famous Tale of Shim Chong.

Your parting gift, would be the last in a unique series, which had began with Petite Planète. Neither history or guide book, propaganda or travelogue, but the equivalent of a conversation. Teasing text against image, from Ireland to Israel. In a new kind of adventure, for kids to share with their cats. 

All the while, you travelled like Plume. Disarming coincidences and discovering signs. In China, you stepped into a picture once belonging to your childhood. Played Malraux against Stalin, Van Gogh against Mao, and discovered a festival of colour, unique to Beijing.

You wrote, “My first film, not one of my best, but if there’s one thing I wouldn’t cut out of it today, it’s the memory of that bedazzlement”.  This portrait of yesterday’s China. Now closer to Humphrey Bogart, than the China of 2000 AD. In truth may not have been your first film, but was truly, your first great “home movie”. 

Your first masterpiece however, lay at the edge of the world. “Between the earth and moon, between humiliation and happiness”. It’s name, was Letter From Siberia.

Beneath the surface of that hostile land. You unearthed not only a new type of filmmaking, but a lens to fit a new kind of sensibility. That which André Bazin called “horizontal”, then became “Markeresque” to a thousand other’s. But to me, is better illustrated by a game of Cat’s Cradle. Forged between ear and eye. Where ‘soldier’s bed’ to ‘fish in a dish’, becomes “romanticism plus electrification”. “After that, it’s straight ahead”.

As I walk along my own grove of birch tree’s, native to my own devil’s island. I can’t help but play the game. I picture your mammoths and monsters. Those deserted culture parks and Ushatik the bear. Even your 10% of conformity. Because no worthwhile film about the Soviet Union, could be without bribery. Sputnik, Laika and the slow pan of Angarsk’s central square. As crisp arches and towering steeples. Thaw the Stone Age forest, into the radiant future. For a moment you forget where you are. Just take away the taiga, and your in Minsk…

More of a refrigerator than tundra. However, as Heroes of Labour join those of the Yakutsk Opera, in returning to folklore. This Neo-Classical larder, is an interesting footnote, to your world of picturesque denizen and cooperative Cervinae. 

Where as Siberia is perhaps best known for its exiles, Minsk is considerably less. Although there is one hall of famer. In 1959, failing an ill conceived defection. The unconscious body of Lee Harvey Oswald, was found bleeding out in a hotel bathtub. Incredibly, his recklessness paid off. The twenty year old marine from Louisiana, who would eventually kill John F Kennedy, was allowed to stay. Receiving a new flat, in the new hero city, of the Belarusian Soviet Socialist Republic. Upon hearing the news, he asked, “Minsk? Is that Siberia?”

You wrote, “The season of dying water, is winter. The ghost of the winter hare, is snow.” 

Letter From Siberia, is a testament to the unique freedom of filmmaking, but by framing reportage against animation, poetry against advertisement. Perhaps your first masterpiece, says more about post-war Paris than provincial Russia. 

In 1946, Léon Blum arrived in Washington, to sign the Blum-Byrnes Agreement. Giving Hollywood, un-precedented access to French theatres. Once limited, then banned under occupation. This renewed artistic freedom, amidst the dominant but sensitive cultural narrative, of de Gaulle's ‘Résistancialisme’. Pressed upon the first decade of Post-war cinema, certain parameters for rediscovery. But as your compatriot’s on the other side of the Seine, were seduced by Humphry Bogart and Orson Welles. You lugged around Henri Michaux and Gérard de Nerval. All looking to commit to celluloid, that French ideal, which would change cinema forever.

Second Letter - The Gaze

Tarkovsky had his dogs, Medvedkin his piebald horses. You had cat’s, and owl’s - good for you. “All you see are the girls”. You wrote, "the stolen moment of a woman’s face, tells something of time itself”. Beyond all else. At eye level, “at arms length, at zooms length”. The close up of a woman’s face, became your defining motif. Casting from each stolen moment, a statuesque gaze. As if it were the shorthand of those legends, written beyond time. You wrote, “It’s the instinct of hunting without the desire to kill. It's the hunt of angels”. And with each angel, a gaze. The French gaze. The Japanese gaze. The Slavic gaze, the Yugo-slavic gaze. Then there is the gaze of billboards, of screens. The gaze that looks back, the gaze that doesn’t. 

It’s noon in Cairo, in Tel-Aviv and Tallin. Midnight in Honolulu, morning in Harlem. Lunch is late in Leningrad, but early in Lisbon. It's beautiful in Beijing, but bedtime in Brisbane.

Your first trip around the world, and already you might’ve been, the Eisenstein of essay film. Then in the most beautiful city in the world, as the first spring of peace time, met the outbreak of World War III. You came home, to face your fellow countrymen. Trading in your textbooks for the talk of the town. Which stocks had risen, which had tanked? Then again, how much did Algérie Française, have left in the tank? And what about Fantômas? You wrote, “I was completely immersed in the reality of Paris 1962, and the euphoric discovery of ‘direct cinema’. Then on the crew’s day off, I photographed a story I didn’t completely understand.” 

I’m not sure why exactly, but at the top of Yerevan’s Cascades. I am reminded of that particular Sunday afternoon. I recall the image of a frozen sun, a woman’s face, and a man running. A roar, a gesture, a crumpling body, and the cries of a crowd blurred by fear. My mind wanders, beyond the moment of a mans death. I picture the violent scene, spill into a violent sequence: With pounding jack-boots, of panting G.I.G.N. - A ricochet through the terminal hall. Announcements, evacuations. The rush of pompiers, paramedics and the press. Until finally, the man from the camp is detained. But for how long?

Your best known and most influential film, La Jetée. Was a defining moment for the New Wave. As if it were a metaphor for the whole generation, who’s individual and collective memory, were not entirely in sync. Those, who could no longer reconcile the principles of the past, against the anchor of the present. And so, in 400 photographs and 8 seconds of film. You leapt fearlessly into the future. Like a jump cut.

It’s remarkable that your only foray into fiction, could leave such a legacy. “The Man” continues to manifest, in Film School’s all over the world. To the Golden Globes, even the Billboard Top 10. You might’ve been forgiven for spending a career, telling sci-fi stories with still images. However, I suppose the morale of La Jetée, is to look back, but never go back. And you never did. 

So what about that woman’s face? In Paris, a museum filled with ageless animals. Remains filled with fragments, of your timeless film. Like a museum, to those days of happiness. The face of happiness however, is another one.

But where does it come from, that face? Well, Simone Genevois, as Joan of Arc. You wrote, “This is the image that taught a child of seven, how a face filling the screen, was suddenly the most precious thing in the world. In a word, the image that taught you what is love.” From Paris to Pyongyang, The Pentagon to Praia. As “cinema and women, became two inseparable notions”. You made it your life’s work, to reframe and rediscover that moment, you had been granted as a child.

You wrote, “You track, aim, fire and click! Instead of a dead man, you make him eternal.” All this talk of hunting, leaves me foxed. It’s tough to rediscover the poignance in your pictures, but even tougher to pull the trigger. As my dead eye hinges on an insecure criteria. I want them to see me, but not too much. Not enough as to appear unnatural, just enough to consent. If they don’t see me however, snap what is needed and take nothing more. You wrote, “The number of times people said thanks, knowing they wouldn't get the picture.” I think between your century and mine. The perception of amateur photographer, has collected certain connotations. Be it through paparazzi or perversion. Did you know for example, it’s impossible to mute the camera on phones sold in the Asian market? I didn’t. Not until I took a photo with some Koreans. Upon which, the silencer coded in my selfie, caused quite a stir…

In Helsinki, you leapt onto the silver screen, but in the golden October of Tokyo 64. As the world rediscovered Japan. The new Japan of transistors and bowing emperors. You fell in love with a city full of tiny legends. You wrote, “Here time is a river that flows only at night. Inventing Japan, is just another way of getting to know it.”

I couldn’t make it to last year’s ‘Sakoku’ games. So naturally, I must fill in the blanks. I recall that summer in Tokyo. Where I developed a sudden obsession with baseball. Well, with the spectators on game day. Because as you know, the real action takes place in the stands. And the real athletes, are the beer girls. They run, jump, climb. Stoic as soldiers while dressed like cheerleaders. Lugging over-priced beer, from the best seat in the house, all the way to the nose-bleeds. But as Kon Ichikawa, in his “official” film. Cemented the games as “a symbol of human aspiration”. You forfeit personal Olympic glory, to place a new name, into the gallery of “Star Fairies”. 

“Test. Test. Name - Geronimo, and I’m from Las Vegas.” 

[Your first cat?]

“Loulou. Small and black. With a terrible voice and she was speaking all the time. She was found in a trash bin, and she had some issues with her nose and eye, and yeah, her voice was, I can not describe it, it was terrible.”

[Your favourite cat?]

“I think, I really loved Loulou, but I think we all were fond of Ludovich. He was very very, almost a person. He had one missing eye, he was very nice.”

In The Koumiko Mystery, you balanced the spirit of new Japan, against a face from old Japan. Part Anna Karina, part Kim Novak, but absolutely Japanese. The Japanese gaze, when cornered by a “funny face”. Is strikingly raw. From Kagoshima to Hiroshima, even now, one cannot entirely negate the weight of history. As if that burden wasn’t enough, then there’s the male gaze. A burden, which Yukio Mishima mounted against a temple, looking “like some beautiful ship, crossing the sea of time”. He wrote, “They are weary of an existence, that involves constantly being observed. They feel hemmed in. They return the gaze, by means of that very existence itself. The one who really looks, is the one who wins.” 

How does one really look? In Sunless, you contrasted a bar in Namida-bashi, to a market stall in Bissau. Places which supposedly allowed you to stare with equality. Safe from hot blooded barbers or timid ‘Tongmu’. You saw them, they saw you. Well, they saw your camera. When “the magical function of the eye”, meets that magical extension of the eye. A reciprocal gaze, breaches the partition between witness and participant. This method - your method, of sewing moments into an eternity, far beyond “the length of a film frame”. Places an unmistakable divinity, into an unassuming crowd. Evoking the candour of those pre-modern faces, found in museums and monasteries. It might suffice to say, the gaze that really looks, is that which keeps looking.

When all the girls have gone home, then there are your critters and favourite creatures. Seemingly inconsequential, but “animal innocence is not just a trick for getting around censorship”. It’s a bait and switch. As your clawed co-stars stretch into frame, they too stare with equality. “Bringing down man to the level of the beasts”, beyond exploitation. I think the key to unlocking your ‘Kino-Eye’, lies in that freedom of which you frame subjects. Men, women and children. Statues, landscapes, dogs and cats. Wholeheartedly and indiscriminately, side by side. The gaze of the living, and the dead. 

At Tokyo’s National Art Centre, I met another dog, another cat, and another gaze. Giacometti’s. To copy a few lines from the catalogue, “I suddenly came to the realisation that the gaze is the only thing that is always alive. The rest of the head became to me, little different from the skull it will be after death. What really makes the difference, between the dead and the living, is the gaze”. 

Make no bones about it, with no budget for illusions, your lens never modified. When a cat, was a cat, was a cat. A missing cat, was a lost cat. A cat hit by a car, was a dead cat. And a fat cat, was a plant killer. You were defenceless in your lack of affectation. Making the tragedy of a dead giraffe, as irreconcilable as that of a dead guerrilla. A death, is a death, is a death. As if it were the Jetty at Orly, and the moment of ones termination. When the gaze is extinguished, and death stares back. It becomes perversely impossible, to look away. 

In Sunless, you quoted those “few definitive and incommunicable sentences”, spoken by Brando, in Apocalypse Now. “Horror has a face and a name... you must make a friend of horror.” Maybe that’s why you - an animaniac, could make peace with bullfighting. You wrote, “Spanish bullfights challenge death. You stare at the sun, stare death in the face. Like in the fascist anthem, Cara al Sol.” 

In Death in the Afternoon, Hemingway confessed that for men like you, marked by war. “The only place where you could see life and death, violent death, now that the wars were over, was in the bullring”. I’m lucky. I only vaguely remember hearing stories about violent death. Bombs in far away places, like Beirut or Belgrade. Or when taking preservatives into school, puzzled as to where they were going. Maybe it was Ethiopia, but I can’t be sure. To me, violent death was basically just something in Hollywood and history books. Until the moment, I discovered the word “terrorism”. In the playground, from a teacher. On that overcast, late summer afternoon in 2001. 

Perhaps, you too can consider yourself lucky. You died in time, before having to relive those scenes from your youth. As once more, Paris was outraged, shattered, martyred. 

What do you remember of November 13th 2015?

“Its still unexplainable, it was a very big feeling, I still can’t really explain why we all reacted so, emotionally. I don’t know if very interesting but this feeling connected with murder. Like its brutal, its unfair, its blind, its violent, and also the idea of violence is not very connected with Paris, or Bastille day, or Nice, or cartoons, so its shocking, its shocking. Its very strange, because historically Paris was always a very rousing, violent city. I think all the post war people see Paris as something with people outside, no body seems to be very worried, or no body even seems to work. It is a very pleasant and relaxing place and very associated to peace and a, I don’t know, sweet life. For me the most unbearable thing was to imagine dead people on some terrance, and the second one was to still not know how many people would be killed because it was increasing, so it felt, completely unstable and dangerous on this very night. It was like living just a couple of hours of war, and also calling your friends and hearing in their voices that they are not safe, that they are scared, that they are hiding, and the little humiliation that comes with that. That they are hunted, and it was unbearable.”

And the next day?

“The day after like on the French social media, also on the news I discovered things, like I’m very naive but its been a long time that there were any war inside France. Because when we say wounded or injured people, its actually wounded or injured with machine guns. So, the work the doctors were describing was totally like a war. Also, what they discovered when they could enter inside Bataclan concert room was of course terrible. At the end it was a lot of killed, there had never been so many dead people in the streets of Paris since the second world war, so it was yeah… I went to Paris for three weeks after, it felt like there was some… like the tv was very stupid. Because of course there was a lot of racism, so it felt very depressing because like the country was cut in half. So yeah, it felt like a giant funeral atmosphere.”

My summer in Tokyo, 53 after yours, and four stops on the Chuo-Sobu line. From the Yokozuna of Ryogoku, to the baby-faces of Korakuen Hall. The talk of the town was, can ‘The Cleaner’, dethrone, ‘The Rainmaker’? Wrestling tames violence into an art. It’s athletic, dramatic, dangerous and ridiculous. And not unlike the bullfight, a dance. The difference however, is the climax. Where as the gaze of death, is inseparable from the bullring. It has no place on the mat. These warriors don’t kill, they don’t even really fight. They make a composition in violence. Like a sculptor, like Giacometti. To make a friend, of horror. 

But there’s more than one way to skin a cat, and so, the girl’s don’t stay home for long. You wrote, that because “love is truly, the only victor over time”. “Women maintain a particular relation with death”. In both that film you saw nineteen times, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, and it’s re-make - so called. A woman’s face, has the capacity to “resurrect a love that is dead”. Overcoming the violence, imposed by time. 

You wrote, “To cast out the horror that has a name and a face, you must give it another name, and another face.” In Sunless, the monsters were laid out for Natsume Masako. Playing the part of the monk, in Journey To the West. You wrote, “for the first time in history, the platonic dream of pure beauty, united with pure wisdom, was realised.“ Little did you know, that platonic dream would resurface, 18 years later, in your little corner of Paris.

“It all began on a summer night in 1987”. With a muse, at a banquet. Saying “things clever people already know, and morons will never know.” Somewhere between Natsume Masako and Tatiana Samoilova, but of all the gestures and gazes, caught in a lifetime of leader… Catherine Belkhodja, was the most glamourous. Illuminating a film, a tv show, three shorts and an installation.

Part star, part muse, part magicians assistant. Catherine Belkhodja, was for you, a kind of cinematic cat burglar. Slipping into the past, as if it were a window ajar. Relaying secrets and retrieving signs. Beginning with the installation Silent Movie. Together you could rewind and overwrite, those monochromatic icons of the pre-talkies. To cast a perennial beauty, across the first century of cinema.

Far from the Mission San Juan Bautista, or Orly Airport. Horror movies came to life on Okinawa. Projecting onto that lizard shaped tranquil paradise, the sobering reality of spring 1945. The blade runner, with whom you decipher such barbarism. Is the “Cyberpunk Lorelei” - Laura.

Hoping to simulate an alternative outcome, to the historical tragedy. Laura attempts to complete her late husband’s last work, a video game reconstruction of the Battle of Okinawa. Inevitably she fails, but as the somewhat recognisable suffering, of a grieving widow. Becomes a link, to contextualise the incomprehensible suffering of mass suicide. The totality of violent death, is made perceptible again, in the gesture of a woman’s face.

You wrote, “Must one die to get to Level Five?”

In 1986, Saint Joan the Maid, was restored and screened at the Palais de Chaillot. You wrote, “A loop of time was looped that evening, when I found myself sitting not far from a charming old lady, who didn't suspect for one minute, she had been literally, my first love.”

In Level Five, that loop of time, had looped once more. As a woman going loopy, addressed you; “the editing wunderkind”. From Petite Planète to Prime Time in the Camps. Tirelessly, you’d been looking to rediscover that image from your childhood. Then suddenly, there it was. Surrounded by glitching monitors and trophies unlocked. As if you had switched seats with Simone Genvois. The image of love and absolute beauty, had finally, stared back.

Interlude (The Elephant In The Room)

In Odessa, that unique monument which for a while, stood at the top of the steps. Has been moved away from the tourists, to a dead street. You wrote, “The image of heroes doesn’t come from life, however transfigured, but straight out of a movie”, and not only Eisenstein’s. In A Grin Without A Cat, you framed the encore of the new left, against the dress rehearsal of the Potemkin. Setting in motion the demonstrations of the 60s, with a word spread all over the screen, “Братья!” - brothers.

1967 - 1977. A decade of “direct action”. Vietnam. Cuba. Mao. Black power. Women’s liberation. France is bored = May ’68. Militant filmmaking cooperatives. Film as a tool. Inspired by Dziga Vertov + Russian avant-garde. Slon, Iskra + Groupe Medvedkine. A protest, is a protest, is a protest.

(We are talking once more about Seoul)

Before her impeachment, Park Geun-hye, agreed to the installation of US missile defence system, THAAD. Perceived by many Korean’s, as a provocation against the North. Further undermining the prospect of peace, on the peninsula. With Park behind bars, it was now time, for round two.

Amidst the thundering of Gwanghwamun Plaza. Complete with catchy theme songs and eye-catching choreography. Moon Jae-in, steps into frame. 

A son of Northern refugees, imprisoned as a student, for demonstrating against the dictatorship. Moon is the symbol of that new Korea, emancipated from the burden, of the military junta.

You wrote, “Why, sometimes, do images, begin, to tremble?” - Well, a large camera doesn’t help, neither does a crowd. 

From direct cinema to direct-to-DVD. A Grin Without A Cat, to The Case of the Grinning Cat, I picture your last demo’s. As you rediscovered, those ancestral slogans from Eisenstein movies, in the millennial warpaint of Paris 2002 - how lovely. It occurs to me however, that with the critter pointing you in the right direction. Even into your eighties, you made room for the odd ‘Kai Neko’. And so, as I find myself, out of luck and in search of signs. I remember your fascist-killing-machine of choice, from that year in Paris. And swap cameras, to tempt the cat, from under the sofa.

I expected at least a paw, but no, the cat is nowhere to be seen… 

I didn’t know it at the time, but Moon didn’t need luck. One month later, it was a landslide. 

(Now we are talking about Yerevan)

In Armenia, it’s almost the same story. After a turbulent decade, fraught with police brutality, electoral fraud and corruption allegations. Serzh Sargsyan, the conservative pro-Russian President. Was running once again as ruling party candidate, following a controversial constitutional reform, which by shifting Armenia, from presidential to parliamentary republic. Allowed the president to remain head of state, as prime minister. Not bad.

On the other side of the isle, is the camo-clad Nikol Pashinyan. A journalist and human rights activist. First imprisoned in 1998, for defamation against Interior Minister… Serzh Sargsyan. Then in 2010, for protests against President-elect… Serzh Sargsyan. This blatant, and shameless censorship. Ultimately solidified Nikol, as Armenia’s leading political opponent. Declaring upon release, “Our fight is unpreventable, our victory inevitable”. It seems now, he was unstoppable.

Declaring a general strike, Nikol calls for nation wide protest and civil disobedience. Blockading all roads, railways and airports. To take a step, and reject - Sargsyan, and the spectre of autocracy, which too has haunted modern Armenia, for over a century.

After almost a month, the two meet.

(The Morpheye)

“I am very glad you accepted my numerous calls for dialogue”, says the President. “I think there is a misunderstanding”, responds Nikol. “I came here to discuss the conditions of your resignation… that's why I ask you not to use the term, ‘dialogue’.” “This is black mail!”, declares the President. “You do not understand the situation” insists Nikol, “power has been transferred to the people”. The President, not wishing to pursue his “dialogue” any further, leaves. Implying that the party of Mr Pashinyan, “has no right to talk in the name of the nation”.

An hour later, as riot police attempt to put down the protest, Nikol is detained. The President’s triumph however, is short lived. The army sides with the protesters and Sargsyan, is forced to resign. The night before the final vote, the movement reconvenes.

In all the excitement and anticipation, for one slightly hallucinatory moment, I had the impression you appeared. “Look what the cat dragged in” I thought to myself. Not exactly a doppelgänger, but not a half bad stunt man either…

The next morning, the vote is cast. Nikol becomes prime minister, and the “Reject Serzh” movement, takes it’s victory lap. Or is it a dance?

(Conclusion)

In Besançon, in eastern France, just before Christmas 1967. You discovered in the workers strike at Rhodiacéta factory, your own Potemkin. The elephant in the room, when it comes to SLON however. Is the tendency of “proletarian” art, to smother poetry with realism. It’s admirable of course, but by trading personal ambition for collective aspiration. Ironically, your Marxist film’s, are perhaps your least revolutionary. 

To me, what is truly liberating. Is the multidisciplinary slap in the face of public taste, one hundred and fifty million will call ‘Markeresque’. As you recode and defrag, the filthy slime and hieroglyphics of academia, into the “slang of the suburbs”. You mapped a D.I.Y directory for rediscovery, and made the unreadable - compatible. All that remains, in the words of Henri Michaux, is to “Tear down the Sorbonne, and put Marker in its place”. And while we’re at it, why not pixelate the walls of the Surikovka, and Command-Z the Royal College of Art.

In A Grin Without a Cat, what began with the Potemkin sailors, ended with the Prague martyrs. As any hope of “Socialism with a human face”, was disfigured by the Soviet intervention. You wrote, “What happens when a party - the Communist Party, and a great power - the USSR. Cease to embody revolutionary hope”. One could argue, they never really did. As those spooks in suits, were themselves possessed by the spectre of autocracy. If the revolution, was really ever revolutionary, it’s thanks to Mayakovsky…

You wrote, “The occupation of Czechoslovakia, the crushing of the guerrillas, the Chilean tragedy and the Chinese myth. The post 1968 period is a long series of defeats... That’s why it matters… to find out who committed the innocence, rather than the crime.”

In modern Ukraine, there’s no room for rose-tinted revolutionary romanticism… Now Socialism is the food for worms, to be tossed overboard. Lucky for me, Bolsheviks come and go, but art remains, and more often than not in Ukraine, those heroes are accompanied by subtitles. However, instead of “Брат” - brother, they read, “Кат” - executioner.

Last Letter - The Zone

In 1978, Andrei Tarkovsky returned to Tallinn, to complete his legendary film, Stalker. Having made the trip once before, but with the negative mishandled and the cinematographer fired. Andrei, on the threshold of the room, left empty handed. It’s inconceivable to shoot such a film twice, but then again, in the words of The Stalker: “The Zone demands respect, otherwise it will punish you”. Having being accused of prematurely entering into production, perhaps Andrei had inadvertently disturbed The Zone. And only on condition, of the scripts revision and extension, could he return, to face “the meat mincer”. That same year, you returned to Japan, and in turn, our journey enters The Zone. 

As you had in San Francisco, in Tokyo, I make the pilgrimage of a film I have seen - at least twenty times. Your film - Sunless. Immediately running off to see if everything is where it should be. The Ginza owl, the Shimbashi locomotive. Gotokuji and the temple of the fox. I track down those cemeteries in the shadow of banks, pictures bigger than people and a city crisscrossed by trains. I make a prayer, Japanese style. Drink saké with the lost souls of Namida-bashi, and spend my Sunday’s in Yoyogi. I take measure, of the unbearable vanity of the West, and make the obligatory offering, to the faithful soul of Hachiko. 

Released in 1982, Sunless is perhaps your defining masterpiece. As this tapestry of introspection, considered one of the greatest documentaries ever made, continues to inspire every non-fiction fanatic who picks up a camera. You wrote, “I bow to the economic miracle, but what I want to show you are the neighbourhood celebrations.”

In the smouldering light of New Year. You dusted off your ‘Kino-Eye’, revealing the schematic, for yet another kind of filmmaking. You wrote, “When all the celebrations are over, it remains only to pick up all the accessories of the celebration, and by burning them, make a celebration.”

In the electronic world of the maniac, Hayao Yamaneko. You discovered your digital Dondo Yaki, known simply as The Zone - a homage to Tarkovsky. As his Zone, was a reserve for the immortality of faith. Your Zone, becomes a pause button for “the impermanence of things”. Where against the pixelated pyre of your pal’s machine, images ”shredded in a frame of fire”, are returned to a sort of subconscious debris. Transforming the inaccessible reality of the past, into a proxy of the present.

You wrote, “I think of a world where each memory could create its own legend”. I think by unplugging Hayao’s “electronic graffiti”, and hooking it up to the street. The glade of Stalker, took root in the insomnia of Sunless. With your Zone, becoming itself a re-wilding. Albeit, a cultural one. You wrote, “I’ve been round the world several times, and now only banality still interests me”. Only by surrendering to the rhythm of the street, could you recover your lens from the battleground of the 60s, and decipher a new principle, of “things that quicken the heart”.

I was in Nara with the sacred deer. In Cheshire, I rediscovered the image Bashō had written about in the 15th century. But it was in Georgia, coming back from Truso Valley, where I thought of Shonagon's list, and “all those signs one has only to name, to quicken the heart”. Unlocking the realisation, that in nature or electronic texture. The Zone itself, is a metaphor for inspiration. A construct in which to decipher the indecipherable. With the Stalker, being that individual, who adds colour to an otherwise meaningless landscape. In the words of The Stalker, “The Zone is a complicated system of traps... Traps disappear, others appear. The right trails are blocked, the route is clear then indecipherable again, thats The Zone. It may seem capricious, but at each moment, it’s what our conscience makes it.” 

The trial of The Zone, extends to the edit. As clips are lifted, scrubbed and tidied up. Some play, where others don’t take. With each cut attempting to dislodge, the secret to the sequence. It’s tedious work. A landscape here, a landscape there. A building in Tbilisi, one in Tokyo. A Japanese cat, a Georgian cat. A Japanese girl - in Georgia. You get the idea. Eventually, I find myself focusing more on what’s missing, than what’s there. The Monsieur Chat pillows at Incheon Airport. The rhinestone clad crooner, taking the metro. The photographer from Donetsk - her last night in Seoul. The fashion designer from Busan - my last night in Seoul. The little Russian and Gypsy girls, trading roses in Tbilisi. The whole sequence perfectly framed, perfectly lit, but I didn’t have the heart, to hit record.

Somehow in those moments that elude me, I feel you at work, pulling strings from beyond Level Five. Even the cats run from me. I should take it as a compliment perhaps, that you would sabotage my film, just to stay out of sight. I welcome your challenge - but the jig is up. The cat is out of the bag. Now it’s my turn, behind the camera. 

Attempting to recover a least a handful of images. I remember the crooner from the metro, had given me a photograph and even signed it. Then there’s my last night in Seoul. Looks more closed circuit than cinematic, but it’ll do. As for the photographer from Donetsk however, it’s tricky. I go back to her exhibition, Memory Decay, to see what I can find. Ironically, the project is itself an attempt to recover lost images. Those of a past life, destroyed by displacement from the war in Donbas. As for my portrait, trivial by comparison, I make do with a projection. That is until we meet again, my first night in Kyiv.

You wrote, “the Japanese secret, what Lévi-Strauss had called the poignancy of things. Implied the faculty of communion with things, of entering into them, of being them for a moment.”

Dog-tired of playing cat and mouse, I develop a game to trick The Zone. I call it, “Guillaume-Caching”. The rules are simple: You walk straight. Only changing direction on meeting a cat, owl, or green light. As “The Zone let’s through those who’ve lost all hope”. If you play for long enough, your sure to win. One night in Naha, I even hit the jackpot. It was the birthday of Silvio Moreno. An Argentinian folk singer, who had come to Okinawa in 1979, fleeing persecution under the Jorge Videla military junta.

You wrote, Okinawa is “a Japan that kept its memory”, and Naha, is a city “full of ghosts”. Arriving prepared, determined to avoid delay. I expected a least a little resistance, but it’s all here. Everything you had spoken about in Level Five, surrendering itself almost immediately. Commodore Perry, still laying among the decaying tombs of the foreign graveyard. The tags, the cats and karate… Exactly as you left it. Even the bulls moo ‘Haisai’…

Making my way through the anthill, once fortified by Ushijima’s High Command. I’m struck by the speed in which tranquility cascades into nightmare. The air thick in the memory of bayonet drills on live prisoners, and babies silenced by so-called samurai. I must admit, loosing my nerve for history. I think more about Laura than the 32nd Army. Noticing that between your trip and mine. Flowers have been added among the coins and furniture, arranged by Yahara, “to leave a good impression”. 

I follow the trail between Sunless and Level Five, to the Himeyuri Cave. You wrote, “This is the ditch where two hundred girls had used grenades to commit suicide in 1945, rather than fall alive into the hands of the Americans”. In reach of that horror, I cross a mirage of peering faces, straight out of the local museum. 

Thankfully, the special effects have been axed, along with the souvenir lighters… but cornering your fading memory, against the cave diorama. I manage to smoke out my own “open sesame”. Understanding that the accumulation of “things that quicken the heart”. Is more than just a filmmaking philosophy. It’s a personal prerequisite, that runs from your Beaulieu, into your bones. Imparting a flash of harmony, in which to conquer ones insignificance. At least for a moment.

In Stalker, The Zone leads to “The Room”. A place which grants the innermost wish of all who enter. The interminable neon of Tokyo however, leads to a small bar in Shinjuku. A themed tavern, more Planet Solaris than Planet Hollywood. Which is itself, an outpost outside of time. Re-running your unique sensibility, nearly every night, from 8 ’till late. 

I spend so much time, programming the prompt to unmount your memory. The only chance I get to be myself, is among those familiar faces at La Jetée. I met the whole gang, but don’t worry, I didn’t ask too many questions. Because curiosity killed the cat of course… but more importantly, because I didn’t need to. It was obvious. The sincerity you left behind, filled the room like incense. A sincerity which dictates, that with only eight chairs, there’s no room for pretences.

You wrote, “To know that for almost 40 year’s, a group of Japanese are getting slightly drunk beneath my images… that’s worth more to me than any number of Oscars”. Beneath those ageing images, I cross timelines to touch the threshold of The Room. Where you too became a Stalker, navigating the indeterminable landscape, of “the two extreme poles of survival”. 

In Sunless, you framed Japan against Bissau and Cape Verde, but in truth, the other side of survival, was Russia. Stringing eight films between those two poles, you’d been round the world several times, but it seems only Japan and Russia, kept inviting you back.

You wrote of Russian kindness, and Russian curiosity. Of Russian strength, and Russian cruelty. Where “friendship can charge like a cavalry”, but “applaud when a writer is imprisoned”. You raved about the Russian gaze and the Slavic soul. From the shores of Southern Siberia, to a ‘stolovaya’ in St Petersburg. Then there was Moscow…

When in Tokyo, you could get lost in the labyrinth of department stores. In Moscow, you could loose yourself in the liturgy of those churches, “where icons are to be seen, not only on the walls”. Then there was the circus, the Bolshoi, and the Cosmos. You wrote, “The only city where one can breathe, surrounded by gardens, parks… real pears, real apples… and the metro - it's a Hall of Mirrors!”. 

As Paris had the Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle, Tokyo had Godzilla. Moscow, had dinosaurs inside the Kremlin. Because your Russia, was not the Russia of Peter or Putin. It was that Russia, of mosaics bigger than buildings. Where truth was Pravda, and cathedrals were demolished to build swimming pools.

But while you were in Paris, amidst the commotion of Christo’s environmental installation, The Pont Neuf Wrapped. In which to the chagrin of Jacques Chirac, the oldest bridge in Paris, was wrapped in gold fabric. Things in turn, were starting to wrap up, for that Russia of your youth. 

In 1986, the disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, was the moment that sealed the fate, for your Russia. I wonder, what did the Strugatsky brothers think, watching Gorbachev on TV? It’s unlikely Roadside Picnic was their first thought, but thirty year’s later, their prophetic novel and Tarkovsky’s ominous adaptation, have become inseparable from the tragedy. With the police cordon, the punctured landscape and the ethereal threat. Fiction corrodes into reality. Trespassers even feed the folklore between the concrete and flora, by calling themselves, Stalkers. Traversing “the quietest place in the world”, where “any deviation is dangerous”, to find freedom, inside the barbed wire. 

The only alternative, is to take the official “Sunday stroll”. But between a hot lunch, and hot spot photo-op’s. I can’t help but wonder, would Andrei recognise his allegorical Zone, in this foreboding corner of Ukraine? Would his returning dogs inspire a sequel? Now that’s a film I’d like to see. Although free from the censorship of Goskino, perhaps the greed of Hollywood would dictate a blockbuster. I can already picture the marquee, ‘Stalker 2: Return to The Zone’, in IMAX…

After 20 year’s of sabotage, Tarkovsky ultimately defected from USSR. “He, who was so profoundly and naturally Russian”, would never again see the birch tree’s or taste the air of his childhood… As in December 1986, just months after the disaster. Tragically, Andrei died from lung cancer, supposedly contracted during the filming of Stalker. Becoming himself, a ’Monkey’ - a victim of The Zone. 

In your tribute, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich. You revealed yourself amongst the congregation, at a cathedral which bear’s the name of a film - St Alexander Nevsky. Widows hide their grief behind a veil, but for the first time in fifty year’s, you revealed your face in a film. Maybe no one noticed, but for me, this symbolic gesture of a man most think is a cat, who always refused to be photographed. Speaks to the unparalleled respect and admiration you had not only for Tarkovsky, but for the artist, and the Russian.

In The Owl’s Legacy, your 13-part excavation of Ancient Greece. You sized up all the Athenian heirlooms you could get your hands on. Philosophy and logomachy. Mythology and misogyny. Tragedy and democracy. You wrote, “It was in Tbilisi, in March 1988. One of the few places on earth, where words…had a price”. Little did you know, that last greek word - democracy, was catching fire, on the other side of the wall. But before Berlin, before Prague or Timișoara. You stopped off in Moscow, to bid farewell to that Russia of the last century. Casting a “portrait of an era, through the portrait of a man”. Aleksandr Ivanovich Medvedkin. The Last Bolshevik, “who’s Rosebud, was a red flag”.

You wrote, “So the picture book was closing, the one that had opened with the Potemkin’s first dead… and who’s last idols, would fall that same night”.

We live worlds apart, even further than Medvedkin from Prince Yusupov. So much so, it’s easier to imagine Flash Gordon storming the Winter Palace, before these moustached men. They are relics of Planet Mongo. Frayed ribbon of that picture book, long since closed. But now that I think about it, long before I saw your road in Iceland, or Jetty at Orly. I too was in Moscow with “Iron Felix”. I was taking his picture without knowing, you were there the night of his hanging. Who says statues die after all? When the present is perforated by memory. Not unlike the pockmarked marble of a reborn metro station… Images once deemed inconsequential, suddenly rush to the surface. It’s these moments of harmony, which put into true perspective, the fragility of filmmaking. 

You wrote, “That would be the end of utopia…the very idea of utopia. The promise of the 1990s, may have succeeded in flushing out Leninism, but what stood in it’s place, was more cronyism, than Cobain-ism. The collapse of USSR, left behind an immense topography of exhausted industry, ecological distress and territorial dispute. With siblings of the Chernobyl Zone, reaching far beyond the Ukrainian border. Lenin’s legacy, is littered from the Baltic to the Bering Sea, the Carpathian Mountain’s to the Pamir, and back to the Caucasus. 

After exhausting the real world, naturally you mapped the virtual one. In Paris, the Pompidou Centre has exhumed your executables, starting with Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television. ‘Gamarjoba’ Mr. Noah… Then the scoop of the last century. A peak behind the cat-flap. A tell-all interview, with your prehistoric programme - Dialector.

TYPE A NUMBER  <  1  < — >  1111  >  —  ?

666

ENTER YOUR NAME  ?

MJOT

PRESS RETURN I FYOU CONSIDER IT’S NONE OF MY BUSINESS

ENTER THE NAME OF SOMEONE YOU LIKE  ?

GENTILS FLOQUETS

disc is running . . . 

disc is running . . 

disc is running . .

disc is running . .

disc is running . .

disc is running . 

disc is running . . . . . . . .

disc is running . . . . .

disc is running . . . . . . . .

disc is running . . . . . . . .

  disc is running . . . . . . 

  disc is running . . . . . 

disc is running . . 

disc is running . . . . . 

disc is running . . . . . 

disc is running . . . . . . . .

disc is running . . . . . 

disc is running . . . 

  disc is running . . . . . . 

disc is running . .

disc is running . 

disc is running . . . . . . . .

COMPUTER  —WHAT WERE YOU SAYING  ?

MJOT  —GOT A LINE FOR GENTILS FLOQUETS?

COMPUTER  —LET’S DRINK TO GENTILS FLOQUETS

MJOT  —NOW YOUR SPEAKING MY LANGUAGE

COMPUTER  —DO YOU REALLY BELIEVE WHAT YOU ARE SAYING  ?

I should have known that even in code, you’d be catty… 

Between Sunless and Level Five. The debris of The Zone, dreamt up on Hayao’s machine. In turn became ‘the Matrix’ of William Gibson’s Neuromancer. “On that image” - you wrote, “we neanderthals graft our own vision”.

In Level Five, Laura makes a confidant of her computer. It doesn’t dog, it doesn’t sardine nor cauliflower, but does confide in her, a shortcut to total recall. Optimal World Link - The Knowledge Standard. Your mecha-maquette, for an alternative Internet. Where by returning the World Wide Web, from plain C, to the world of ‘console cowboys’. You could reboot from the innovations of Silicon Valley, that Constructivist innuendo, to “the equalising force of modern technology”. As once more, all the culture of the past, met all the impatience for the future.

No longer in need of celluloid, a lab or guillotine. With two paws, Photoshop and a password, you stormed the frontier of consumer-grade computing, like a kamikaze. Making yourself at home, in all the mischief and anonymity, afforded by the vast unconquerable landscape of the Web. Is that what you meant when you wrote, “Poetry will be made by everyone, and there will be emu’s in The Zone”? 

Caught between the cyberspace of O.W.L, and the yellow tag of Monsieur Chat. You tailed the new millennium, out of Windows, onto the rooftops of Paris. Illustrating your favourite slogan, “The owl is to the cat, what the angel is to the man”. Under the banner of your final masterpiece, The Case of the Grinning Cat. But by lending a paw, and co-opting the critter into a symbol of the present. You did more than just salute the custodians of a new culture. You threw out an answer to the question, that would permeate the decade of your departure. How to find truth, in the “Information Age”?

You wrote, “We were the freedom cats. If you didn’t catch the message, just move on.”

But whilst scaling the hideout, of your 21st century cat. You lost your footing, when the “sound and fury” of post 9/11 Paris, culminated in the tragedy of Marie Trintignant, and Bertrand Cantat. You wrote, “A famous singer kills a famous actress, what a bounty for the scavengers”. 

The ‘crime of passion’ however, was an assault. Not by a man “madly in love”, but a man madly jealous. Mercilessly beating his girlfriend, into a coma, over a text message. You did your best to pull an honest slant from the headlines, but beauty was a bit of a blind spot, and perhaps your optimism for the future, got the best of you. When by bringing together, the faces of “two star-crossed lovers”, in a flimsy moment of editing. You did about as much for Marie Trintignant, as the tabloids.

As for Bertrand Cantat, he served just four years for the murder, but the curse of his ‘black desire’, would continue to howl far from the hilltops of Vilnius. With the suicide of his wife, Krisztina Rády, further exposing the violence inseparable from his name. The investigation may have been dismissed, but the subsequent testimony of his bandmates, reveal beyond any doubt, a culture of abuse which they too were complicit. And so, over this quagmire. All I can do is to keep a small silent place for Marie, and Krisztina. Two women sacrificed to the misogyny of a society, which allows a murderer to resume a career, in Rock n’ Roll. Bravo.

From Paris ’37, to May ’68. The Takenoko-Zoku, to Monsieur Chat. You approached each gateway to the future, by reprocessing the debris of the past. Until finally putting your affairs in order, with a requiem for the 20th century. The installation, Owls At Noon. A reflection on that Great War, as defined by T.S. Elliot, in The Hollow Men.

“The hollow men,

The stuffed men.”

“This is the dead land,

This is cactus land.”

Then on your 91st birthday, July 29th, 2012. You gifted yourself, one last cat nap at the computer, and logged into Level Five, forever.

“This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

This is the way the world ends,

Not with a bang but a whimper.”

Your loyal cat continues to keep watch, but things have changed since you were last active. Even your cyberpunk search engine, isn’t safe from the fat cats of ‘Big Tech’. Without thinking, I type in your name… But no, it doesn’t know that either. And so, in order to perform one last Dondo-Yaki, and drop you at the platform of the new century. I take the metro to your stop, Maraîchers. 

How much time was spent waiting here over the year’s? How many imaginary movies played out in the monitors above the platform? Perhaps as some images are meant to be kept, some are to remain memories, while others are best forgotten. Sometimes I wonder, does documentary film simply amount to a montage of moments, defenceless enough to be filmed? A suggestion of what was, or what could have been? I follow the signs to your studio, to honour the spirits of all those films, lost to corrupt hard drives. Expired reels, dead batteries and full cassettes. To salute the cats, too crafty to be caught. The girls who jammed the camera. The frames cut “in order to tidy up”, and the scenes cut all together.

You’ve stopped making dates, but hoping you’ll make an exception… I try my luck, but no… Cat got your tongue. And so, this film must end where it began, “how many seasons ago was that now?”

In Tokyo, I took my fortune and followed a labyrinth of shrines, to the gates of Hell. Which as it turns out, was located in the suburbs of Osaka. I played a machine to predict my fate. Naturally, I was damned. In Korea, I met Buddhists and Christians. I saw frescoes in Abkhazia, and heard the call to prayer in Azerbaijan. I got creeped out, by the Bone Church in Czech Republic, and the Catholic Church from my childhood. I saw remnants of the Golden Rose in Lviv, and the remains of Lenin in Moscow. But the only apparition I could trust, were the cats of Gotokuji.

From the suburbs of Tokyo, to the suburbs of Paris. These ceramic cats, with one paw raised. Have bear witness to a journey, caught between two timelines and 120 year’s. Like little guardians over all that which has slipped away, unable to cross times passage. The shipwrecks, the mutinies. The faces of happiness who fell overboard, the cat’s who walked the plank. The ‘Salut’s’, the ‘Aba yo’s’ and the ‘Paka Paka’s’. All those moment’s of inspiration and banality, in and out, of The Zone. 

All that remains, is to set free the spirits, of all those who are not missing, but dead. Tora, Lou Lou and Ludovich, Guillaume, and my little Mayakovsky. By evoking the prayer spoken by the woman in Sunless, to say simply, “Chris, wherever you are, peace be with you.”

😿 😿 😿 

If you’re going to work on memory you might as well use the one you’ve got,
but my fondest wish is that there might be enough familiar codes so that the visitor could imperceptibly replace my images with his, my memories with his.

And that my “Immemory” should serve as a springboard for his own pilgrimage in “Time Regained”.

Chris Marker, 1998.