The Hollow Men

Chris Marker

Opening and presentation on the work of Chris Marker by Viva Paci,
on Thursday November 16 at 6pm.
The exhibition runs from November 16 to December 16, 2006
The gallery is open Tuesday through Saturday from noon to 5pm

On November 17 at 9:15pm, don’t miss the screening of the films Le Souvenir d’un avenir directed by Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker and L’Héroïque cinématographe directed by Laurent Veray and Agnès de Sacy. The films will be presented, in collaboration with the CRI, at the Cinémathèque québécoise as part of the 9th RIDM.

The Hollow Men (2005) is the latest work by iconic French media artist Chris Marker, a 19-minute looped video installation on eight monitors. The Hollow Men is the prelude to Marker’s inspired plan to collect a multi-segment history of the20^th century under the title Owls at Noon.

For more than 50 years, under various guises and pseudonyms, Chris Marker has considered topics as intricate as the paradoxes of time, the selectiveness of memory and the weight of history. Gathering up minutiae often scorned by public accounts, Marker is our generous escort in a garden of forking paths, providing critical insight and interpretation of disparate ephemera. In the case of The Hollow Men, the point of departure is T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem of the same name. Marker has selected Eliot’s solemn expression of the devastation wrought by the First World War to signify the opening of the 20^th century. Insinuating his own contemporary hold on Eliot’s vision, Marker cultivates a multivalent terrain of recollections co-mingled with projections of the future, recalling that the First World War was once recorded as the war to end all wars. Direct sampling of Eliot’s words combined with Marker’s expert sortation of visual data lend the work the character of an imaginary museum whose innovative chief curator prefers the inconstancy of human perception and the illumination of perpetually sifting memories over the conservation of discrete objects.

About the installation, Marker muses: “Owls at noon, night birds in the day, things, objects, images that don’t belong, and yet are there. Leaflets, postcards, stamps, graffiti, forgotten photographs, frames stolen from the continuous and senseless flow of TV stuff (what I’d call the Duchamp syndrome: once I’ve spotted 1/50th of a second that escaped everybody, including its author, this 1/50th of a second is mine). It’s from that raw material, the petty cash of history, that I try to extract a subjective journey through the 20th century. Everybody agrees that the founding moment of that era, its mint, was the First World War, and that it was also the background on which T.S. Eliot wrote his beautiful and desperate poem The Hollow Men. So the ‘Prelude’ to the journey will be a reflection upon that poem, mixed with some images gathered from the limbos of my memory.”

Sarah Robayo Sheridan

Chris Marker was born in 1921 in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. A pioneer in the use of every available media, he is an artist whose expression has crossed disciplines from journalism to cinema to photography to digital art. In 1953, he collaborated with Alain Resnais in the making of the documentary Statues Die Also, a critique of the consequences of French colonialism on African art. An innovator recognized for his development of the “cine-essay,” a short selection of his films includes La Jetée (1962), Le Joli mai (1963), Grin Without a Cat (1977), Sans soleil (1982), Détour. Ceausescu (1990) and, most recently, The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004).

Viva Paci’s introduction to The Hollow Men, entitled Life is very long. Parcours dans l’œuvre de Chris Marker, proposes to approach the work of Chris Marker with an intuitive, intertwining discourse. Chris Marker at the age of sixty, conceived and realized the multimedia presentation Zapping Zone (Proposal for an Imaginary Television) and at almost eighty, he invented the authored CD-ROM Immemory One. Throughout the year of 2004, he left his lively and reassuring mark, along with his cat’s, in the blog Guillaume-en-Egypte (http://www.unregardmoderne.com/). Although, ever since the 40s, his pen has faithfully returned to the journal Esprit, and since the 50s, his films have traversed continents and decades.

Viva Paci is currently in the final stages of her Doctorate thesis entitled From Attraction to Cinema at the University of Montreal. She is a member of both the CRI and GRAFICS. She is an assistant professor in Cinema and Literature at the University of Montreal as well as at the University of Bologna. Her articles have been published in international journals such as Cinéma & Cie, CiNéMAS, Intermédialités, Sociétés et représentations (CREDHESS), Comunicazioni sociali (Università Cattolica di Milano), Médiamorphoses (INA) as well as with John Libbey (London) and Amsterdam University Press. Her book Il Cinema di Chris Marker was published in 2005 with Hybris (Bologne). She is currently preparing, with André Habib, L’Imprimerie du regard. Chris Marker et la technique which will come out in 2007 with L’Harmattan (Paris).

Viva Paci’s presentation as well as the screening of the films during the RIDM are organized in collaboration with the CRI (Centre for Research on Intermediality). The exhibition is toured by Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, produced by Colin MacCabe and curated by Sarah Robayo Sheridan.

Dazibao thanks their collaboration and its members for their support. Dazibao receives financial support from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, and the Conseil des arts de Montréal. Dazibao is a member of the Regroupement des centres d’artistes autogérés du Québec.