"How do people manage to live in such a world?"

I have adopted this question, Chris Marker's elegantly posed justification for his 'mania', as a mantra of sorts. An impetus towards adopting this mania for myself - the mania of a curiosity that is not satiated by this or that fact, the satisfaction of an experience or memory, but is always its own fulfilment. We imagine Deleuze and Guattari's plateaus, not approaching a climax and then dissipating, but engaged in fields of resonance that perpetuate themselves.

'There is no way out of Time'

Marker functions for me as a phantasm. He in advance offers himself, not as a real person, born perhaps in Neuilly-sur-Seine and christened Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921, but as a cipher, or a set of intensities acquiring and discarding proper names: Sandor Kransa, Jacopo Berenzi, Fritz Markassin. When asked to provide a picture of himself, he sends pictures of a cat or an owl. There is no sense that this is a failure to satisfy the request, nor is it simply the modesty of the recluse that prompts him; it is rather the recognition that it is not the supposedly authentic identity of this ageing Parisian that is really sought, but some image or avatar that is no less real for its impermanence. When asked about his two most readily-available films, La Jetee and Sans Soleil, some forty years after making the former and twenty after the latter, he responded: 'if I were to speak in the name of the person who made these movies it would no longer be an interview but a séance.' Marker, always in motion and perpetually new, is not one to mourn the passing of himself.

An image become alien in Sans Soleil

The image of an alien finding itself stranded on earth, bewildered and unknowing, recurs in my experience of his work, and expresses perfectly the nature of this studied astonishment in the face of the world. In his documentary about Tarkovsky, One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, the narrator describes Tarkovsky's son, leaving Russia for the first time, as finding himself on another planet. The boy stares out of the window of a car, eyes scanning landscapes previously unimaginable. In a beautiful passage of Sans Soleil, one of Marker's aliases imagines a science-fiction film in which a being from our future, capable of total recall, travels into the past in an attempt to understand the sadnesses and sufferings of humanity afflicted by impermanence and forgetting.

These are not simply images to illustrate, on the one hand, the effectiveness of Soviet isolation during the cold war, or on the other the central significance of forgetting and anamnesis for humanity (though they are both those things); it strikes me the the notion of the earth as itself a strange and fully alien place is a vital image of the questioning mind in a world that cannot be circumscribed or totalised, and that is new at each moment. Dissatisfied with the closing off of perspectives and the fixed channels of thought as offered, Marker demands that we confront the openness of the world. This is curiosity as a mania, a new functioning of thought not content to apprehend things in terms of the familiar, nor to measure the Other against a fixed inheritance of class, race or gender.

So, for me, this mantra functions to unsettle and to challenge. Somehow, we are able to live in the world, each of us differently, uniquely. The question of how we live pushes into the past, asking, as Marker frequently does, how we negotiate with our pasts both personal and collective in order to decipher the future, which has as its arena the question which must accompany it: how might we live, and what world might we create?