'Enter the Memory': Interactivity, Authorship, and the Empowered Spectator in the Digital Audio-Visual Essays of Chris Marker

Abstract

This article theorizes the cinematic essay as a fluid, self-reflexive form which addresses the spectator directly in order to engage them in an intellectual process of dialogical exchange. Because it encourages the active involvement of the viewer in the determination of essayistic meaning, the cinematic essay challenges traditional models of authorship. Asopposed to relaying information to a passive viewer from a position of authority and omniscience, the cinematic essayist offers tentative thoughts and ruminations which the spectator is called upon to critically think through and use as the foundation for their own essayistic reflections. The evolution of digital filmmaking technologies over the past few decades has opened new creative avenues through which cinematic essayists may construct interactive viewing situations andtreat the spectator as an empowered co-creator of artistic meaning. Thisarticle focuses on two of Chris Marker’s late-period worksto examine the relationship between dialogical exchange, interactive spectatorship,and the capabilities of the digital database: Immemory (1997)and Ouvroir (2012). In these works, Marker carries overhis career-long impulse towards dialogism to the realm of the digitized database, composingintricate, intermedial constellations of archival materials which theviewer may peruse in whatever order they please. Rejecting the fixed sequential ordering of causal film editing, as well as the strict classificatory systems of chronological archiving, Marker embraces new media to enable the spectator to traverse historical time through a dynamic, rhizomatic structure which fosters the forging of dynamic and individualized intertextual linkages.