French director Chris Marker has made fiction films, written novels, exhibited photographs and even produced labyrinthine, interactive CD-ROMs. But, for good reason, he is known primarily as a pioneer of the film essay -- an idiosyncratic form with relatively few rules and practitioners and one that, in Marker's hands, can seem remarkably dense and supple.
Marker, now 87, always has been somewhat overshadowed by the major French new wave directors who emerged at the same time. This might have something to do with the daunting erudition and political commitment of his work, which has been infrequently screened and sparsely distributed in this country. That has started to change, though.
Last year, the Criterion Collection issued an essential single-disc edition of his two best-known films: the fictional all-stills short "La Jetee" (1962), a time-travel reverie that inspired Terry Gilliam's "Twelve Monkeys," and "Sans Soleil" (1983), a globe-trotting travelogue that muses, as do many of Marker's films, on the nature of memory and the recorded image.
This week, Icarus Films releases four additional Marker DVDs that, taken together, attest to the wide range of his obsessions and the incredible fluidity of his approach.
Two of the films here deal with artistic lives and careers, though to describe them as biographical documentaries does little to convey the ruminative and richly digressive Marker style. "The Last Bolshevik" (1993) takes shape as a series of "letters" to Soviet filmmaker Alexander Medvedkin, who began his career right after the 1920s heyday of Soviet cinema but was something of a forgotten figure by the time Marker befriended him in the '60s.
Marker draws on interviews with Medvedkin, conducted in Moscow in the '80s, and also weaves in film clips and testimonials, but "The Last Bolshevik" is not as narrowly focused on its subject as its title might imply. Born in 1900, Medvedkin was 17 when the Russian Revolution took place, and he died in 1989, as the Soviet Union was in its death throes. And so Marker, as is his wont, expands outward, telling the story not just of a person but also of a century, pondering the revolutionary ideals and tragic failures of Soviet communism.
The film comes paired with Medvedkin's rambunctious 1930s comedy about peasant life, "Happiness."
