Tagged: Alexander Medvedkin

September 16, 2016

(1971) The Train Rolls On Chris Marker Le Train En Marche (1971)

First the eye, then the cinema, which prints the look….

“If Chris asked you to do something you did it: There was no question”, recalls Marc Karlin in one of his last interviews before his death in 1999. ‘Chris’, needless to say, was Chris Marker, Karlin’s friend who he called ‘le maitre’. The task was to provide an English version of Marker’s recent film Le train en marche (1971) – a celebration of the Soviet era filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin and his mythical ‘kino-poezd’ – a ‘cine train’ re-fitted with cameras, editing tables and processing labs, that travelled the breadth of Russia to make films for and with the workers. Films made on the spot, in collaboration with the local people, (workers in factories, peasants in kolhozs), shot in one, day, processed during the night, edited the following day and screened in front of the very people who had participated to its making… Contrarily to the agit-prop trains which carried official propaganda from the studios to the people, here the people was his own studio. And at the very moment bureaucracy was spreading all over, a film unit could go and produce uncensored material around the country. And it lasted one year (1932)!

This train that pulled out of Moscow January 25th 1932…

Medvedkin saw his kino-poezd (294 days on the rails, 24,565m of film projected, 1000km covered) as a means of revolutionising the consciousness of the Soviet Union’s rural dwellers. Marker hoped his recent unearthing would incite similar democratic film-making. In tribute, Karlin and other kindred spirits in London joined Cinema Action.” There was a relationship to the Russians. Vertoz, the man and the movie camera, Medvedkin, and his agitprop Russian train; the idea of celebrating life and revolution on film, and communicating that. Medvedkin had done that by train. SLON and Cinema Action both did it by car. Getting a projector, putting films in the boot, and off you went and showed films – which we did”.

The people were brought the filmmaker’s cinema, in the same way they were brought the artist’s art and the expert’s science. But in the case of this train the cinema was to become something created with contact through the people and was to stimulate them to make their own intervention.

…the train of revolution, the train of history has not lacked reverse signals and switched points but the biggest mistake one could make was to believe that it had come to a halt.

A big thanks you to Espaço Sétima Arte for posting this great find.

https://grunes.wordpress.com/2007/12/23/the-train-rolls-on-chris-marker-1971/

The Last Bolshevik by Chris Marker

http://www.film-philosophy.com/index.php/f-p/article/viewFile/206/204

Click to access mayer.pdf

October 27, 2014

Icarus Films Presents: On Strike!: Chris Marker and The Medvedkin Group

In 1967, Chris Marker and Mario Marret filmed BE SEEING YOU (À BIENTÔT J’ESPÈRE), about a strike and factory occupation-the first in France since 1936-by textile workers in the city of Besancon, the goals of which were unusual because the workers refused to disassociate their salary and job security demands from a social and cultural agenda.

Nevertheless when the film was completed, and the filmmakers returned to screen it for the workers in Besancon, many of them were not happy with it. LA CHARNIERE, the audio recording of their intense debate after the screening, is included on this disc as an extra, accompanied by photographs of the film workshops, shot by Ethel Blum.

In response Marker and his colleagues reorganized their efforts, and began training workers to collaboratively make their own films, under the name “The Medvedkin Group”, after Alexander Medvedkin, who invented the cine-train, a mobile production unit that toured the USSR in 1932 filming workers and farmers. CLASS OF STRUGGLE, their first film, picks up a year later and focuses on the organizing efforts of workers at a nearby watch factory, particularly the story of one recently radicalized woman, Suzanne Zedet. She articulates the radical scope of the workers’ demands, which include access to the tools of cultural production.

76 minutes / b&w
French
Release: 2014
Copyright: 1969

Praise for A BIENTOT, J’ESPERE:

“Terrific!” —Professor Ellen Furlough, History Dept., University of Kentucky

“Effectively places us in the middle of the strike and offers intriguing insights into the motives of the workers and organizers…” —New York Magazine

Praise for CLASS OF STRUGGLE:

“One of the finest examples of the politically engaged French documentary cinema of the late Sixties. “—Sam DiIorio, Film Comment

“Fluent, energetic, and wide-ranging!” —Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future

“One of the great films of May of 1968.” —Paul Douglas Grant, Directory of World Cinema: France

“[The Medvedkin Group] would go on to make nearly a dozen films, some of them stunningly beautiful, most notably CLASS OF STRUGGLE.” —Min Lee, Film Comment

Thanks and bravo Icarus Films!

November 19, 2013

Chris Marker: Marc 2

In a post last year, I traced the lost history of Marc Karlin’s collaborations with Chris Marker. It is over a year since Marker’s death and in tribute, stirred by the BFI’s Film Essay season in August, here is a collection of Marker related videos. Firstly, a visual essay from Criterion exploring the soundscape of Chris Marker’s 1962 landmark La Jetée, written by Michael Koresky of Reverse Shot.

Codirected by Frank Simeone and John Chapman, Junkopia was filmed at the Emeryville Mudflats outside of San Francisco while Chris Marker was also shooting the Vertigo sections of Sans Soleil.

Toute la mémoire du monde (1956) is a 20 minute bout of archive fever administered by Alain Resnais. Resnais takes us behind the scenes of the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, conceiving a key theme of the film essayist; the fragility of memory and the need to remember. In the opening credits Marker, a man of many aliases, is introduced as Chris the Magic Marker – that most democratic of public writing tools as Finn Burton puts it in Future Anterior,

That Resnais documentary follows one book into the Bibliothèque Nationale and thence into the hands of a reader, and the book happens to be one of the Petite Planète series of travel books, a series founded and edited (1954–58) by Marker. ‘Not a guidebook,’ Marker promised, ‘not a history book, not a propaganda brochure, not a traveller’s impressions, but instead equivalent to the conversation we would like to have with someone intelligent and well-versed in the country that interests us.’ Perhaps, then, something like the letters Sandor Krasna sends from his travels to his unnamed correspondent (voiced with limpid calm by Alexandra Stewart) in Sans-soleil (1983). Marker did much of the graphic design and layout work for the series as well, and every cover was a different picture of a woman, some looking away and lost in their own thoughts, others gazing into the camera, reserved and enigmatic. In Remembrance of Things to Come (2001), Alexandra Stewart, speaking again on behalf of Marker, says of the work of Denise Bellon, ‘Being a photographer means not only to look but to sustain the gaze of others.’ ‘Have you heard of anything stupider’, she says, quoting a letter of Krasna’s from Fogo in the Cape Verde islands, ‘than to say to people, as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?’ There is a woman, gazing slightly off-camera, on the cover of the Petite Planète edition (#25) that has arrived for cataloging in the Resnais film. Her hair is in an elegant black bob, she wears a simple black garment; the book, its title announces, is a traveller’s guide to Mars. She is perhaps the first of Marker’s many characters who address us, unexpectedly, from the future. They look back on our present moment and, in doing so, transform it, as we now transform the past, our memories, our recordings. (‘I wonder how people remember things who don’t film, don’t photograph, don’t tape.’)

In April Icarus Films announced its acquisition of all North American distribution rights to Chris Marker and Pierre Lhomme’s landmark 1963 film Le joli mai. This film had been unavailable for many years and it is now newly restored. It will be screened at several major film festivals and premiered in New York at Film Forum on September 13, 2013, presented in DCP, made from a new 2K scan. The restoration work on Le joli mai was done according to the wishes of Chris Marker and supervised by Pierre Lhomme, the film’s cinematographer and co-director. First off is Lhomme commenting on the restoration process, followed by the new trailer.

LE JOLI MAI is a portrait of Paris and Parisians shot during May 1962. It is a film with several thousand actors including a poet, a student, an owl, a housewife, a stockbroker, a competitive dancer, two lovers, General de Gaulle and several cats. Filmed just after the March ceasefire between France and Algeria, LE JOLI MAI documents Paris during a turning point in French history: the first time since 1939 that France was not involved in any war. Icarus Films

In Sight & Sound’s glorious celebration of the life and work of Chris Marker last year (Vol. 22 Issue 10 Oct 2012), a number of filmmakers, including Jem Cohen, Thom Anderson, Patrick Keiller, Chris Petit, Sarah Turner and Kodwo Eshun, paid tribute to the man. The US filmmaker John Gianvito proclaimed that any filmmaker who has ventured into the film essay territory in the past 55 years owes a great debt to Marker, and befittingly includes Marc Karlin. Introduced to Karlin’s work by Marker, Gianvito states Karlin is in need of the same recovery Marker bestowed the Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin.

John Gianvito’s most recent ouput is the collective film Far From Afganistan (2012), made with filmmakers Travis Wilkerson, Jon Jost, Minda Martin and Soon-Mi Yoo. The film is clearly inspired by Loin Du Vietnam (Far from Vietnam) (1967), a collaboration between Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Jean-Luc Godard, William Klein, Joris Ivens, and Agnès Varda, conceived as an outcry against the Vietnam War. Marker edited together William Klein’s films of pro- and anti-war protests in New York, Joris Ivens’ own North Vietnam footage; additional material by Agnès Varda and Claude Lelouch and Resnais and Godard’s self-contained sequences. From this prototype, Far From Afghanistan mixes fictional narrative, found footage and reportage in response to a protracted war that remains far from the collective consciousness. Here are both trailers, side by side. (Look out for Marker’s owl in Far From Afghanistan).

Next is a video postcard Agnes Varda made for her friend Chris Marker presented at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles in 2011 and her glimpse inside Marker’s studio. Marc Karlin too describes Marker’s studio upon a visit around the editing period of Le Fond de l’air est rouge (1977).

“Chris had a garage, a huge studio with drainpipes all across it. It was vast, and he put these little rolls of films all along the drainpipes, and then divided it onto countries, so you had Columbia, Peru, Cuba, Africa and so on. I entered this garage to find all these films from all these countries: the whole world was there. Right at the end there was Chris Marker on a platform with his editing table, and he looked like God. You had to walk past these films to reach him and sit down”.

Last year in an article written for Sight & Sound, Patrico Guzman recalled his first meeting with Marker and recounts his debt of gratitude that he owes to his mentor while filming Because The First Year. Nine years before their first meeting, Guzman and Marker collaborated, from a distance (Guzman with camera and Marker on script) on Joris Iven’s film …A Valparaíso (1962).

In 1962 Joris Ivens was invited to Chile for teaching and filmmaking. Together with students he made … A Valparaiso, one of his most poetic films. Contrasting the prestigious history of the seaport with the present the film sketches a portret of the city, built on 42 hills, with its wealth and poverty, its daily life on the streets, the stairs, the rack railways and in the bars. Although the port has lost its importance, the rich past is still present in the impoverished city. The film echoes this ambiguous situation in its dialectical poetic style, interweaving the daily life reality (of 1963) with the history of the city and changing from black and white to colour, finally leaving us with hopeful perspective for the children who are playing on the stairs and hills of this beautiful town. ivens.nl

And finally… a glimpse of Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, alias Sandor Krasna, alias Hayao Yamaneko, alias Kosinski, alias Guillaume-en-Egypte, alias Sergei Murasaki, alias Chris Marker…

I Am Writing To You From A Distant Country… Marc and Marker (The Monk/L’maître).

Just before Marc Karlin’s death, film-maker Isaac Julien remarked, ‘The reason why his (Karlin’s) work is still screened, is because he is seen as like the Chris Marker or Jean Luc Godard of the British independent scene. He was more or less the only person representing that sort of voice, that sort of perspective’.

Indeed Marker’s reflection on images, the media and their relationship with memory and with human subjectivity are themes shared by Karlin. And in terms of form, both film-makers are key to deploy alternating commentaries on history and society, with private musings and recollections. It is a voice that constantly shifts in linguistic registers, adopting poetic and prosaic tones in order to shake an amnesia strikened history.

Marc called Marker ‘The Monk’, on account of his reclusive nature and mythical standing with his contemporaries. Up until his death last month, Marker rarely granted interviews, opting to leave calling cards such as pictures of cats or owls. It is clear that Marker was a key influence on Marc, but what has been forgotten is Marc Karlin and Chris Marker were actually long-standing-collaborators. He met Marker during May ’68 while Marker was working on Cine-Tracts (1968) with Jean-Luc Godard. Marker had just formed his film group SLON and had since released Far from Vietnam (1967),a collective cinematic protest with offerings from Jean-Luc Godard, Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda, inspired by the film-making practices of the Soviet film-maker, Alexander Medvedkin.

Born in 1900, Medvedkin was little known outside of his homeland unlike his contemporaries, Sergei Eisentstein and Dziga Vertov. Marker was drawn to Medvedkin after viewing his film Happiness (1934) in 1961, a satirical fantasy that promoted the benefits of collectivisation. The American writer Jay Leyda, who wrote Kino: A History Of The Russian And Soviet Film, introduced Marker to Medvedkin at the Leizig Film Festival in November 1967. This meeting resulted in Marker’s next film, Le Train en marche (1971) an attempt to explain the myth of Medvedkin’s kino-poezd/cine train, the impact it had on cinema and the practices it could inspire in democratic film-making.

Medvedkin saw his kino-poezd (294 days on the rails, 24,565m of film projected, 1000km covered) as a means of revolutionising the consciousness of the Soviet Union’s rural dwellers. Marker hoped his recent unearthing would incite similar political film-making. In London, Karlin and other kindred spirits joined Cinema Action.” There was a relationship to the Russians. Vertoz, the man and the movie camera, Medvedkin, and his agitprop Russian train; the idea of celebrating life and revolution on film, and communicating that. Medvedkin had done that by train. SLON and Cinema Action both did it by car. Getting a projector, putting films in the boot, and off you went and showed films – which we did”.

Marc recalls being asked to shoot the English version of Marker’s The Train Rolls On in the mid-1970s. “If Chris asked you to do something you did it: There was no question”. Marker instructed Marc to film at Peugeot car factory, where Marker wanted to make a film on car workers. He couldn’t go in person as he was known to the officials as an agitator. Working under the pretense he was making a film for the Common Market, Peugeot responsed by putting Marc and his crew in a luxury hotel in Paris.

Choosing not to approach filming the monotonous labour of the workers in a Godardian way, Marc found inspiration in how the workers for a few seconds would cease work,

“all they did was boom, boom, boom. Then I noticed that the workers on the assembly line would come up like fish for air. They would not touch, and they would open their mouths. The Peugeot people were so canny, because they would put together a Moroccan, Portuguese, French and an Italian, so no one could actually speak to each other because on one knew each other’s lanuguage. That was why an excessive amount of touching was going on. I said to the cameraman, ‘Look, that’s how we film. We don’t film the work, because we can show that in twenty or thirty seconds. But we can film these people gasping for air. Or touching, whatever’. That is what we filmed. And then the audience had to imagine. What does it take for somebody to come up for air like that? Or touch? Those are the questions; when you talk about images of labour, how do you film labour?”

In the mid 1970s, Marker contacted left-wing filmmakers and groups to send him their offcuts. As Marker was ‘le maitre’, Marc agreed. Here Marc describes Marker’s studio upon a visit, “Chris had a garage, a huge studio with drainpipes all across it. It was vast, and he put these little rolls of films all along the drainpipes, and then divided it onto countries, so you had Columbia, Peru, Cuba, Africa and so on. I entered this garage to find all these films from all these countries: the whole world was there. Right at the end there was Chris Marker on a platform with his editing table, and he looked like God. You had to walk past these films to reach him and sit down”.

The film became Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977). It focused on the doomed optimism of left-wing activism from the second half of the 20th century. The ‘red in the air’ implying the socialist project only existed in the air, communicated only by a dream language. Again, Marc did the English version, A Grin without a Cat (1988) for Channel 4. Running shorter than Marker’s film and adding a new voice cast including Jim Broadbent and Cyril Cusack.

Around this time, Marc, in need of political inspiration, wanted to make a film about Chris Marker that would use Marker’s images, entitled, I Am Writing To You From A Distant Country… In keeping with Marker’s style, it begins with a letter followed by a montage of stills and sequences from Letters From Siberia (1957), Le joli mai (1963), La jetée (1962) and Le fond de l’air est rouge (1977) . From the treatment, we see the intention – to locate a time-travelling Marker. Marc asks, who is this letter writer and traveller? How do we recognise him?.. What does he declare at customs? There are no photographs of him, no evidence other than his letters. He is a Martian, an astronaut, an 18th century time-traveller, a descendant of Vikings, a Marxist, a subversive, an old man of letters… There are traces but no apparition, we have the grin but no cat. But we know where he lives: in a house in Neuilly, painted outside with owls whose eyes glint in the dark…

Here is a rather faded, time travelling letter from Marc to the Monk, informing him of the project. It comes at a time where Marc is creatively and politically jaded – in ‘Thatcher’s trough’.

The film never materialised, undoubtedly sucked into a black hole. Undettered, Marc ploughed into his next project, Between Times (1993). Possessing dialectic discsussive voice-overs, Between Times is a clear nod to Marker. The film’s main focus is on the Thurcroft miners failed attempt to buy their colliery from British Coal and the search for fresh alternatives after the devisive general election defeat for the left in 1992. This new perspective draws optimism from the educational ethos at Northern College, a residential college dedicated to the education and training of men and women who are without formal qualifications. The film observes a key moment in the shifting attitudes and aspirations among the working class in Britain at the time and recalls a May ’68 slogan,

le pain pour tous mais aussi / bread for all but

La paix/peace

le rire/laughter

le théâtre/theatre

la vie/life

The slogan is actually taken from a strike in March 1967 at the Rhodiaceta textile factory in Bresancon, France. The workers were not merely demanding higher wages but challenging the core oppression within capitalist society; wages yes, but what about education and cultural life? Chris Marker entered the strike on March 8 1967, resulting in the documentary À bientôt, j’espère (1967) (see below, sorry no Eng Subs) filmed by Marker between March 1967 and January 1968 with the Communist filmmaker Mario Marret and the SLON team.

As Trevor Stark points out in his excellent essay, “Cinema in the Hands of the people”; Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant film, the film À bientôt, j’espère emphasises the liberating experience of laying claim to sectors of life inaccessible to the worker: to creativity, to culture, to communication. Forty-two minutes into the documentary we see Pol Cébé, a factory worker from the working class district of Palente-les-Orchamps who had established a cultural programme for the local community and had regenerated the factory’s library with classic Marxist and Communist texts, in close-up state,

For us culture is a struggle, a claim. Just as with the right to have bread and lodgings, we claim the right to culture – it’s the same fight for culture as for union or in the political field.

À bientôt, j’espère is left purposley open-ended with little resolution, marked tellingly by Pol Cébé reciting the documentary’s title À bientôt, j’espère – ‘Hope To See You Soon’. The strike at Rhodiaceta achieved nothing but the broadening of class concsiousness that consequently lit the test paper for the events in Paris the following May. These concerns are resuscitated in Between Times. The miners are halted in their plan to buy their colliery and are pointed to the development of technology for optimism. Sadly, Marc Karlin observes the irony that before, a dream language could still be spoken, now the dreams are possible we no longer know how to speak it. Like À bientôt, j’espère, Between Times ends without a dialectical antithesis, leaving all but tension.

So he decided to keep his voices, make them argue, merge, split again. Be on high and on the ground. Anything to keep that sleepy logic at bay. But then there were those who were doing this all along…

These words are spoken over a slow tracking shot of a wildlife garden revealing in the foreground, a golden egg – Marker’s owl.

Sources

Looking at Class. Film, Television and the Working Class in Britain, S, Rowbotham & H, Beynon, (Rivers Oram Press:2001)

The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, L, Rascaroli, (Columbia University Press:2009)

Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, C, Lupton, (Reaktion Books:2004)

Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film, J, Leyda (Princeton University Press:1983)

“Cinema in the Hands of the people”; Chris Marker, the Medvedkin Group, and the Potential of Militant film, T, Stark, (mitpressjournals:2012)

http://www.chrismarker.org