Writer, filmmaker, traveller and photographer, Marker’s visionary work started out with his first filmed letter and pioneering essays such as Lettre de Sibérie, which could not be shown publicly for many years and which has now been recovered in restored copies. As Bazin observed at the time, Marker was devising a new kind of editing, in which the “primordial element is the sonorous beauty, and it is from there that the mind must leap to the image. The editing is done from ear to eye”. In Si j’avais quatre dromadaires, a photographer talks with two friends over an album of photos taken around the world—China, Israel, Cuba, Japan, Soviet Unión, Scandinavia, France—over ten years, in a dialogue about photography, ways of looking, progress and revolution. “Photography is like hunting, it’s the hunting instinct without the desire to kill. It is hunting angels … You stalk, you aim, you fire and—click! Rather than killing, you create something eternal.” (Chris Marker)
Lettre de Sibérie, Chris Marker, 1957, 35 mm, 60 min; Si j’avais quatre dromadaires, C. Marker, 1966, blu-ray, 48 min.
