UPDATE: This video was removed from YouTube at the request of First Run/Icarus, undoubtedly because they’re now offering the entire Bestiaire to own for the low, low price of $225! Way to ensure proper distribution for Chris Marker’s work, fellas. I’m so relieved there are dutiful distributors out there who will ensure that I’ll be able to see a major artist’s work for a fair price and that I can surely count on a theatrical screening of The Case of the Grinning Cat here in Minneapolis this fall. Oh, wait …
Chat écoutant la musique (Chris Marker, 1988, France, 2′59″)
Actually, everything about the above citation… the title, the author, the running time and (most evidently) the date is something of a compromise, a case of “close enough,” the sort that usually trips up anyone not invested in French filmmaker/filmosopher/videographer/multimediatrician Chris Marker’s eternally bemused examinations of otherwise heady propositions regarding, aside from the umbrella category “everything ever conceived,” memory, collective identity, the lifespan of political movements, and time. Marker’s sensibility is sort of synthesis between some school of philosophy I can’t even pretend to be familiar with (I admit to not knowing existentialism from egg souffle from technics from turntables) and the dispassionate, biologist’s eye of Robert Bresson. By dispassionate, I mean he’s neither discernibly optimistic or pessimistic, perhaps because he seems to reason that without any agreeable value on “history,” how can we reckon with the future? Like Bresson, he observes the world as an outsider. Unlike Bresson, who I think tends to pare down his field of vision until even one solitary soul (or even said soul’s back or hand) becomes intimidatingly ambiguous and unknowable, Marker casts his net as widely as any filmmaker I can think of. His 1977 “essay film” epic Le Fond de l’air est rouge (roughly translation: The Base of the Air is Red but known in English as A Grin Without a Cat) has roughly the same heft of scope as I think there is in all the other films I’ve ever seen combined (minus, perhaps, all the other films I’ve seen by Chris Marker). It’s one of the ten or so films I refer to as “my favorite movie,” but I’m afraid to watch it ever again for fear that I may never again accept the presuppositions of filmmaking extraneous to Marker.
All of which has little to do with the short video above, except to say that its existence is as hard to pin down as the concept of memory in Sans soleil or Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory. This is basically what I mean when I say “close enough.” The video is actually one of three parts to a ten-minute video anthology called Bestiaire. I haven’t seen the other two segments that follow this one. The middle piece deals with owls (cats with wings) and the final bit apparently shows animals in a zoo, gradually revealing their sad situation. Bestiaire itself was used by Marker as part of a larger video installation piece called Zapping Zone (Proposals for an Imaginary Television), in which Bestiaire and many other short video pieces (including excerpts from Marker’s longer films) played simultaneously on various TV screens stationed throughout the Pompidou Center. ZZ was mounted in 1990, and I believe Bestiaire was compiled in 1988. I’ve seen various resources cite the taping of this particular segment as taking place in 1985. Hence, the compromise. Talk about compromises, I took the video from the European DVD for Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (1992), which uses the three minutes as an intermission, of sorts, between the feature’s two halves. I saw Bolshevik at Oak Street Cinema a few years back, and don’t remember this intermission at all. Either it was added specifically for the DVD or my memory is a malnourished text.
While the exhibit was reportedly meant to show the confusion of mass media, I imagine Chat écoutant la musique (Cat Listening to Music) would’ve provided a completely centered respite from the dissonance. The short is essentially Chris Marker shooting a home video of his cat listening to, what Marker claims, is one of his favorite musicians:
He was fond of Ravel (any cat is) but he had a special crush on Mompou. That day (a beautiful sunny day, I remember) I placed Volume I of the complete “Mompou by Mompou” on the CD player to please him.
His cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, played an intregal part in some of his other work, as cats always do. It’s not difficult to see that cats and this cat in particular play as significant a role in Marker’s life as anything, and therefore this brief piece of video (accurately described in Film Comment’s filmography a few years back as “warm”) takes on greater resonance… as though here is Marker, briefly, laying aside all else to try and capture his own personal Madeline. Guillaume-en-Egypte’s langorous slip into contented unconsciousness perpetuates the unknowability of the filmed transaction. Marker’s history is the cat’s nap. And the video remains only a record of the beautiful sunny day Marker remembers, not the event itself.
Cute cat, though.