Cut and spark: Chris Marker, André Bazin and the metaphors of horizontal montage

Abstract

ABSTRACTThis article traces the positions taken by prominent critic and film theorist André Bazin on the film-making of Chris Marker. In a series of reviews written between 1954 and 1958, Bazin identified a sweeping transformation at work in Marker's documentaries: film's paradigmatic transformation from a sovereign visual experience into a medium amongst other mass media, subservient to the strictures of text and cultural context. Over this four-year span, Bazin developed some key rhetorical metaphors in an effort to capture the promise and the menace of Marker's innovative montage technique. A close examination of the metaphors Bazin used reveals his appreciation of this dialectical process on celluloid, but also his dismay at the diminution of cinema's imagistic power that he felt such a process necessarily entailed. In alerting his readership to the damages film incurred when its image and its text (on the soundtrack or in subtitles) were set in radical equilibrium, he exposed Marker to a compelling kind of ‘friendly fire’, and exposed the extent of his own engagement with filmic realism at the same time.