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The Owl’s Legacy
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Chris Marker’s rendezvous with electronic video and
then digital media came much earlier in his career than for most low-budget,
independent filmmakers of his ilk: his feature-length essay Sunless already arrives, in 1983, at a
moment of liberating ecstasy when images we have previously glimpsed in the
montage are worked – revivified – through being fed into a video synthesizer, and
extravagantly colourised.
But Marker’s relation to broadcast television – this
time, more in sync with the filmmakers of his generation and political
orientation – was wary, at a distance. He regarded TV as “an anxiously moral
medium”, and was fond of quoting Jean-Luc Godard’s observation that, while the TV
set is something we literally look down upon, the cinema screen is something we
must look up at.
Above all, as with Godard or Harun Farocki, Marker
regarded conventional TV as the veritable voice of the State Apparatus, with
its dominant ideology writ large and enforced, day in and day out, in the homes
of citizens. This was not merely a matter of overt messages communicated by the
mass media, but also the type of creeping menace theorised, over many years, by
the radical filmmaker Peter Watkins: the form of TV, its relentless and
monotonous rhythm, the slick relationship of voices to images, the seamless
fusion of fiction with advertising … All this added up to a formidable
opponent, a veritable Goliath (Watkins called it the Monoform), for any
left-wing filmmaker to tackle.
Many uncompromising, imaginative directors – from
Godard and Farocki to Raúl Ruiz and Alexander Kluge – have toiled inside the
great machine of TV, but frequently at the cost of being shoved into specialist
slots for “minority viewing”, often around the stroke of midnight.
When approaching Marker’s delightful 13-part series, The Owl’s Legacy – and the DVD from
Icarus Films in USA will be, for most viewers, the first opportunity to see it
– it does well to remind ourselves of this conflictual relation between
progressive cinema and commercial TV. Such an attitude characterised film
culture, in many of its works and gestures, from the 1960s until at least the
turn of the century. Today, in the time of Netflix, HBO and all the rest, it is
easy (if deceptive) to imagine the opposite image of a free-for-all paradise:
if David Lynch, Jane
Campion or Terence Nance can express themselves there,
then what’s the problem, any longer? Although Marker (alongside his old pal,
Alain Resnais) became, late in his life, a big fan of the best American TV
series, I am sure he entertained no illusions about any lessening of the
ideological power that the medium held.
Certainly, he had to reckon with some political static
on completion of this ambitious, playful project in 1989. One assumes that the Onassis
Foundation, which financed the production, expected a more-or-less typical,
conventional, straight-down-the-line documentary series on the origins of ancient
Greek culture and its lasting legacy. What they got was something at once more
unusual and, at times, outrightly contestatory: modern-day Greece comes in for
some hard knocks in passing, and Marker, being Marker, is unafraid to broaden
his cosmopolitan gaze to Japan or Africa.
The Foundation, in response, not only complained to
Marker about the work in progress (he ignored this), but also appended a
disclaimer to each episode – now snipped out of the ensemble – and effectively
blocked access to the series for close to three decades. Jean-Michel Frodon’s
excellent DVD booklet essay gives invaluable documentation on all this
behind-the-scenes drama, direct from the Marker archives (no other extras are provided
on the DVD but, in this case, they aren’t really needed).
Marker likes to let his chosen participants have their
say – however contentious their sentiments may be in the minds of those officially
dishing out the cash. The Owl’s Legacy is conceived as a kind of agora, an
open discussion with many voices. This polyphonic form has recently made its surreptitious
way back into cinema, in films as different as José Luis Guerin’s The Academy of Muses (2015) and Joseph Kahn’s Bodied (2017).
Clearly Marker, for his part, seized the talking-head
format as one of the best, untapped possibilities of TV as a medium. Those
looking for the dazzling montage sequences or lyrical voice-over passages typical
of most Marker films will find only intermittent flourishes of such techniques
here. Marker hands the microphone over to the speakers, frames them elegantly
and statically (in slightly oneiric settings, with projected backdrops and
sometimes surreal-looking objects present), and lets them talk – often at
length.
The series (offered in both French and English
versions) is structured as a game – an essayistic meditation on 13 words,
chosen not quite randomly or arbitrarily, but certainly with the implication
that other words could have worked just as well. These words (structuring each
26 minute episode) include: democracy, nostalgia, mathematics, music, tragedy and
mythology. As in the chapter division of Godard’s Histoire(s) du
cinéma (1988-1998), the structure is deliberately left loose and
ragged: many speakers, at any given moment of their discourse, range across
several of these headings.
Marker’s art reveals itself here in the associative
chains he builds by joining one fragment of testimony to the next – often with
startling wit. The range of invited guests includes artists of various sorts
(Angelique Ionatos, Theo Angelopoulos, Iannis Xenakis), historians (Giulia
Sissa), politicians (Michel Jobert), philosophers (Michel Serres) and literary critics
(George Steiner).
Of course, there are some eccentric tweaks along the
way. When Elia Kazan starts rambling off-topic about Koreans in America, a
robot inserted into the editing serves to sternly re-direct him. And Marker
himself, while remaining definitively off-screen, is nonetheless present as a
constantly referenced interlocutor, encouraging the escalating passion of the
speakers. The infectious intensity of the political philosopher Cornelius
Castoriadis (1922-1997), for example, is conveyed not only in the headlong
fervour of his words and gestures, but above all in his constant appeals to “Chris”
on the other side of the camera. Evidently, the film-maker’s own store of
friendships, down many decades, formed the very basis of The Owl’s Legacy – and that, too, is interwoven as an indispensable
part of the fabric.
Many reviewers have, in the months since the Icarus
release, noted – usually with some embarrassment – the one decidedly dated
element of Marker’s sensibility as exhibited here: although there’s a fair
number of female talking-head experts included, there is also the conspicuous,
strained conceit of a gaggle of Muses (including the star of Level Five [1997], Catherine Belkhodja)
looking on silently (or, in one case, plucking a harp) while various groups of
guys, in various lovely locations, chatter away. Marker might have been taking
an ironic dig at waffly, patriarchal discourse here … but I doubt it.
Another turn of the historical wheel may only now be
catching up with The Owl’s Legacy. In
what would sadly turn out to be his final book published in his lifetime, European Cinema and Continental Philosophy:
Film as Thought Experiment (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), Thomas
Elsaesser (1943-2019) meditated on the long-held image of Greece as the home or
birthplace of thought, and especially political and philosophical thought. Elsaesser
detects signs that this image may be, at last, on the verge of eclipse:
This very priority given to Greek politics and philosophy, together with
Judaeo-Christian religion and ethics in any definition of Europe, has been
criticised as Eurocentric, suppressing the debts to other civilisations, setting
up a successive series of distorting mirrors, as well as acting as an elitist
and exclusionary narrative even with respect to Europe’s own indigenous
populations and their cultures.
I think we can assume that Marker was, to some extent,
already aware of such a critique of the impulse behind his series – hence his
enthusiastic embrace of Asia and Africa, as well as his general playfulness,
and the occasional sharp montage-jab to give us a glimpse of Greece’s various
20th century crises.
Ultimately,
however, we would be churlish not to allow Marker his magnificent, multi-levelled
dream of ancient Greece – one that he expresses with forceful eloquence, aided
at every turn by his beloved figure of the owl.
MORE Marker: Chris Marker, Posthumously, in 3 Books © Adrian Martin January 2019 |
