Chris Marker (1921-2012), a radical French writer and director who would go on to found a film-making cooperative was an accomplished political essayist in print as well as on celluloid. And earlier in his career he would collaborate on a few of Resnais' documentaries while producing his own in many parts of the world. Perhaps, his best known film - an unusual science-fiction short, La Jetee (The Pier,1962) which consists with the exception of one shot, entirely of freeze-frames, stills taken from movie film and tells a riveting story of time travel and impossible love in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust.
Simultaneously, Marker was making what would be an uncharacteristic contribution to the cinema-verite study of Parisian life in Le Joli Mai (The Lovely Month of May,1963). Later, he both initiated and supervised Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam, 1967), a statement of protest that was directed by six other thoroughbreds in the names of Godard, Resnais, Lelouch, Agnes Varda, William Klein (an American director), and Joris Ivens. Marker's seventies films, On vous parle de Paris: Maspero Les mots ont un sens (Words Have A Meaning,1971) and Le Fond de l'air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat ,The Bottom of the Air is Red (1977) were seldom seen abroad. However he regained international prominence with his masterwork Sans Soleil (Sunless,1983).
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| Ivens got a clue |
Veteran Dutch communist filmmaker Joris Ivens (born George Henri Anton Ivens in 1898) had been making documentaries as early as 1927, though his first experimental films, De Brug (The Bridge) and 1929's Rain had then been thought of as contributions to the realist wing of the avant-garde studies in form. These inspired an invitation from Vsevolod Pudovkin to the Soviet Union and on a second visit he made the propagandist Song of Heroes (1932) with the workers of Magnitogorsk in the Urals and with a little help from the communist workers youth program, formally referred to as the Komsomal. On his return he would merge with Henri Storck and together they would turn out the thirty-six minute short, Misere au Borinage in 1933.
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| The magnificent seven ( Marker ,Godard, Resnais, Lelouch,Varda Klein and Ivens) directed the omnipotent Loin du Cinema |
For much of the Fifties he taught and made films in the Eastern Europe region. In the early Sixties he exiled briefly to Cuba and ultimately would move on to the major trouble spot - Southeast Asia, where he made The Threatening Sky in 1963, which concerned American intervention in the Gulf of Tonkin. He was one of the collaborators on Loin du Vietnam where his footage was used to connect the episodes of other directors. Soon after this he embarked on his collaboration with Marceline Loridan, whose particular expertise was in sound. Their first films were made in Vietnam and Laos, but their major enterprise was a twelve part film series with a spotlight on the daily life of contemporaneous, revolutionary China, Comment Yukong deplaca les montagnes ( How Yukong Moved the Mountains) made between the years 1973 and 1975, mostly utilizing direct sound so that people of China could at last speak for themselves, albeit with voice-over translation.