{"id":1140,"date":"2009-10-22T11:18:37","date_gmt":"2009-10-22T16:18:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/10\/22\/walking-historys-ruins-w-chris-marker-arvo-part\/"},"modified":"2021-06-10T10:07:28","modified_gmt":"2021-06-10T15:07:28","slug":"walking-historys-ruins-w-chris-marker-arvo-part","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/10\/22\/walking-historys-ruins-w-chris-marker-arvo-part\/","title":{"rendered":"walking history’s ruins w\/ Chris Marker & Arvo P\u00e4rt"},"content":{"rendered":"

Michael Moore may be American cinema’s best known film essayist (or propagandist, if you like), but the leader of the genre is still alive and kicking, at age 88, living quietly in Paris (no doubt with one or several cats). Chris Marker’s Pictures at an Exhibition<\/a> is a walk through a gallery of his photoshopped d\u00e9tournements<\/a> commenting on art and world history.<\/p>\n

This is, of course, poles apart from agitprop. The combination of rich and affectively engaging imagery (with a kind of cross-historical hyperlinked quality), subtle humor and light-footed pacing, sutured together with P\u00e4rt’s delicately uplifting music, moves me into the kind of heartfelt meditative space the Buddha would approve of — as if we’re walking alongside Paul Klee\/Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, in a space capsule hovercraft scanning its monuments, but with humor and gentle compassion and curiosity, coming so close to the bodies lying on the battlefield we can touch them, feel their breath, and maybe give them some solace with our touch.<\/p>\n

It helps to know something about Marker’s lives<\/a>, loves, and politics — perhaps Wolfgang Ball<\/a> can be encouraged to create a footnoted hypertext analysis of the piece, as he did with Marker’s Sans Soleil<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Chris Marker – Notes from the Era of Imperfect Memory<\/a> has some other videos<\/a> by him. And see Brooklyn Rail’s piece on his Grin Without a Cat<\/a>. Oh, and make sure you click on the full-screen button when you watch it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Michael Moore may be American cinema’s best known film essayist (or propagandist, if you like), but the leader of the genre is still alive and kicking, at age 88, living quietly in Paris (no doubt with one or several cats). Chris Marker’s Pictures at an Exhibition is a walk through a gallery of his photoshopped […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":99,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[688745,689354],"tags":[5431,352,113],"class_list":["post-1140","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cinema_zone","category-image_nation","tag-art","tag-film","tag-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4IC4a-io","jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":8394,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2015\/09\/18\/eco-humanities-glossolalia\/","url_meta":{"origin":1140,"position":0},"title":"Eco-humanities glossolalia","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 18, 2015","format":false,"excerpt":"I've just come across the earliest outline I wrote for the course I'm currently teaching (in its third incarnation), \"Environmental Literature, Arts, and Media.\" The course has also turned into a book project I'm working on, which will be a thematic primer to the environmental arts and humanities.\u00a0Both course and\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Academe"","block_context":{"text":"Academe","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/academe\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1103,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/07\/16\/walking-on-the-moon\/","url_meta":{"origin":1140,"position":1},"title":"walking on the moon","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"July 16, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"This image of Buzz Aldrin on the moon, photographed forty years ago by his Apollo 11 spacemate Neil Armstrong, has haunted me for decades. Not so much because it's taken on the moon, as because of the image on his helmet, a mirror image that suggests there's nothing behind the\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Philosophy"","block_context":{"text":"Philosophy","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/geo_philosophy\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"buzz-aldrin-moon-msfc-6900952-ga.jpg","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/07\/buzz-aldrin-moon-msfc-6900952-ga.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":7952,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2014\/12\/29\/emis-cinematic-materialism-a-response-to-reviews\/","url_meta":{"origin":1140,"position":2},"title":"EMI’s cinematic materialism (a response to reviews)","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"December 29, 2014","format":false,"excerpt":"The latest issue\u00a0of the open-access\u00a0Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image, an issue devoted to \"Gilles Deleuze and Moving Images,\" includes a review by Niall Flynn of my book Ecologies of the Moving Image. Another recent review of EMI can be found in the The Journal of Ecocriticism. And\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1122,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2009\/09\/20\/fairy-villages-bowerbird-art-other-ambiguous-objects\/","url_meta":{"origin":1140,"position":3},"title":"fairy villages, bowerbird art, & other ambiguous objects","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"September 20, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"One of my (largely dormant) pet projects over the years has been to document and theorize anonymous, self-decomposing artworks made in collaboration with nature and time. These works are creative engagements with environments -- often simple rearrangements of physical materials (rocks, wood, found pieces of scrap metal or discarded trash,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Eco-culture"","block_context":{"text":"Eco-culture","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/ecoculture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Monhegan%20Island%20007.JPG","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/files\/2009\/09\/Monhegan-Island-007.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1192,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/02\/05\/bergson-the-universal-image-machine\/","url_meta":{"origin":1140,"position":4},"title":"Bergson & the universal image machine","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"February 5, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"There's something about our time that is very Bergsonian, in the sense that there's a kind of simultaneous opening up of the past and the future, the former feeding the possibilities of the latter. At the same time as new technological tools propel us ever forward on trajectories of embodied\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Media ecology"","block_context":{"text":"Media ecology","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/media_ecology\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/QP5dOKTB3ng\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":1378,"url":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/2010\/11\/28\/cinema-as-prosperos-organic-machine\/","url_meta":{"origin":1140,"position":5},"title":"cinema as Prospero’s organic machine","author":"Adrian J Ivakhiv","date":"November 28, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"Here's a fragment from Chapter 3 of Ecologies of the Moving Image. This chapter covers cinema's \"geomorphism,\" by which I mean the part of cinema's world-making capacity, its becoming-world-ness, that presents us with an objectscape, a territory within which things happen and action occurs. This is in contrast to cinema's\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Cinema"","block_context":{"text":"Cinema","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/category\/cinema_zone\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/img.youtube.com\/vi\/scUUJWWE34o\/0.jpg?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/99"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1140"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11903,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1140\/revisions\/11903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1140"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1140"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/aivakhiv\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1140"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}