Chris Marker: The SLON Films

Abstract

The mere mention of political film-making in France after the turmoil of May 1968 is synonymous for most Americans with the name of JeanLuc Godard and the now-defunct Dziga-Vertov Group which he spearheaded with Jean-Pierre Gorin.1 Few people know that French collectivefilm-making derives from Chris Marker, who formed a film co-operative SLON (Societe pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles) to make Loin du Vietnam (Far From Vietnam, 1967). The film was a protest against continued American involvement in Vietnam and embodied segments by various film-makers whom Marker had gathered together for the project: Godard, Alain Resnais, Claude Lelouch, Agnes Varda, Joris Ivens and William Klein. It took someone of Marker's incredible persuasiveness to bring these artists together and fuse their work into one coherent statement. And Marker's presence literally sandwiched the various segments of the other film-makers: he was both producer and editor, and thus responsible for both preand post-production. After the events of May 1968, during which Marker and Godard both made numerous cinetracts,2 Marker revived the SLON group and committed himself totally to collective film-making. Mediating between film technicians and factory workers, he took film's technology and process out of the studios and movie theaters, allowing the workers to make films about themselves, study the films and form ongoing collectives around such films. In this way Chris Marker, while shrouding himself in an enigmatic obscurity, has given birth to most of the leading political film collectives still operating in France.3 At the same time that he was transforming political film activity in France itself, Marker and the SLON group (Valerie Mayoux, JeanClaude Lerner, Alain Adair, John Tooker and others) remained very active abroad, making three films of note after Far From Vietnam: La Sixieme Face du Pentagone (Marker and Francois Reichenbach, 1968), about the peace march on Washington; La Bataille des dix millions Battle of the 10,000,000-Marker and Mayoux, 1970), about a failure in the Cuban sugar crop; and Le Train en marche Train Rolls onMarker, 1971), a combination of archive footage about the Russian agit-prop trains of the twenties and an interview with the Soviet film-maker most responsible for many of the films made on those trains, Alexander Medvedkin. This latter film was the result of meetings in Paris between Medvedkin and Marker in 1971, and it served as a kind of prologue to the re-release of Medvedkin's first feature-length film Schastye (Happiness, 1934).4 Significantly, all three SLON films correspond in interesting ways to three earlier Marker films about the same locales: Lettre de Siberie (Letter From Siberia, 1957), a biting satire-travelogue about the Soviet Union; L'Amerique reve (The American Dream, 1959), a scenario never filmed about America; and Cuba Si (Cuba Yes, 1961), a compilation film with numerous still photographs of Cuba under the Castro regime in its early stages. There is a great deal to be learned about the political evolution of one of the most formative cinematic minds of our time in comparing Marker's America then and now, his Russia then and now, his Cuba then and now, both in terms of subject and film form. This comparison is the subject of my study. An inveterate traveler, Marker launched in the early fifties a reasonably priced, although lushly illustrated, series of books collectively entitled Petit Planete, with each book in the series giving a subjective, personal and sometimes poetic impression of a foreign country, but backed up by facts and figures to support such an impression. The idea for, and implementation