Junkopia (1981) dir. Chris Marker, Frank Simeone and John Chapman

Dabbling as I have in making video content – some of which I flatter myself to think rises to the level of “movie” – there is no more humbling figure than Chris Marker. One believes resources and budget are necessary to match big ideas, then one watches a masterpiece like “La Jetée” and sees not a single thing in it unavailable to any filmmaker other than the imagination to conceive of it in the first place. You don’t even have to have a motion picture camera.

Marker was one of the main voices associated with the Left Bank of the French New Wave, collaborating with luminaries of the movement like Agnès Varda and making key contributions to the groundbreaking documentary  “Night and Fog.” Here Marker and his collaborators, more or less messing around during production of his feature Sans Soliel, build a mini-story from shots of sculptures in what appears to be a remote and lonely area. The angles gradually reveal the sculptures living next to a San Francisco highway, the alien amidst the mundane with a mystical soundtrack suggesting a blurry border between the two.

The sculptures compliment the movie in that they are also found art – bits of detritus sculpted into new objects and creatures, an original creation reshaped from the available world.

Cat Listening to Music (Chat Ecoutant La Musique) (1988) dir. Chris Marker

As a kick off to the 1988 Year of the Month, this film is included as a bonus. Marker’s everyday props made into worthy cinematic subjects included his cat.