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| Chris Marker, from Wim Wenders' 'Tokyo-Ga' |
Although I am an English teacher, my undergrad degree is in
digital art, meaning videography, sound recording and composition, photography,
web stuff and so on.
I like to make composite photos, which I have been doing since
the early nineties, and during my schooldays I also made an installation piece
using Jitter (now reworked into
Gen) whereby I took a composite photograph and animated each frame to
re-create the image as a kind of ‘travelling shot’ through time. The idea was
to compare looking at the entire image as a composite, all at once – like a
painting, even though it is composed of fragmented shots, - and as a series of
images in time, like a film.
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| Single frame from 'New Cloo' |
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| Composite image of 'New Cloo' |
Interestingly, one of the controls in making the images in
the first place (for me) is that the photos must (naturally) be shot
sequentially, and quickly. Shooting them quickly forces framing, and (I hope)
accentuates the way our eyes move naturally when we are looking at something,
called saccadic eye movement.
So creating a travelling shot was a way of
re-visiting the process of shooting the composite image. My interest was in the two kinds
of time represented by these two kinds of representation. They were intended to
be projected, facing each other, as an installation, which I never got around
to doing. I made a small
video piece instead.
Another of my projects at Emily Carr was a short
documentary, an interview with
Oliver Kellhammer, called Four Gardens. When I
was working on it, I made a small poster called “Every Shot in Disappearing
into the Landscape”, a composite image containing the first frame of every shot
used in the film, read down from top left.
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| Every Shot in Disappearing into the Landscape |
I gave a copy to my friend Thomas Ziorjen, a painter and
digital image maker.
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| Thomas Ziorjen - 'Echoshark' |
Some time later he sent me an image called “Every Shot in La
Jetee”, where he had excised and collected the first frames of every shot in
Chris Marker’s landmark film, shot in 1962. We both love this film – one of its
extraordinary qualities is that only one image in the entire 28 minute film is
moving. The rest were shot as still photos. When I first saw
La Jetee, I didn’t
even realize this, so powerful was its effect on me. The film seemed to inhabit
an entirely new and different temporality.
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| A shot from 'La Jetee' - from the web |
Marker was one of the most extraordinary of twentieth
century film makers. He also made
Sans Soleil, and wrote Alain Resnais’ ‘
Night and Fog’, among many other projects.
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| Chris Marker, Self Portrait - from franceculture |
Thomas created this as a kind of vertical scroll. I tend to think of it as,
perhaps, a kind of modernist
kakejiku, a piece of art, in Japan often placed in
the
tokenoma, or shrine place, in a home. The images are read
across from top left.
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| Every Shot in 'La Jetee' |
In February, 2012, Thomas succumbed to his long struggle
with depression and killed himself. I recently decided to recreate the low-res
image he sent me in order to print it to remember him by.
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| Thomas Ziorjen - 'Wake' |
I just found out (today!) that Chris Marker had, also, died: on July
29
th, 2012. Somehow I had completely missed this.
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| From Flikr - flaneure |
