February 25 - March 13

Curated by Jean-Pierre Gorin

“Galvanized by the intersection of personal, subjective rumination and social history, the essay has emerged as the leading nonfiction form for both intellectual and artistic innovation…[it] offers a range of politically charged visions uniquely able to blend abstract ideas with concrete realities, the general case with specific notations of human experience.” (Paul Arthur, Film Comment)

In the vivacious and engaged discussion following last season’s sold-out screening of Sans Soleil an audience member asked guest curator Jean-Pierre Gorin which figure from the history of cinema he thought Chris Marker was most in dialogue with in his film. Whose affinities did he share, despite his original, if ever-elusive voice? The answer came after a moment’s reflection: the Lumière brothers. Gorin argued that Marker’s probing ethnographic impulses, combined with a deep and sincere curiosity for the world, a European Orientalist tendency (the tradition is vast here, from painting, poetry to cinema), and an openness to the inherent fictions of non-narrative images—especially as seen through the lens of a camera—aligned him with the inventors of cinema. The great difference, however, is that Marker is actively engaged in the interplay between observing the world directly and observing the world through extant images of it.

There are countless ways to interpret and mark the history and trajectory of cinema, as we know, and Gorin highlighted a prescient paradigm shift—a new age of cinema, one that he ascribes to a musical structure. Whereas auteurs and documentarians, up to a certain point in time, revealed the world through investigation and creation, we’ve now entered the age of mass appropriation, recycling, mash-ups, hip hop, a sort of postmodernist pastiche run amok. There is no doubt that we live in a visual culture where moving