Chris Marker, Always Moving - by Max Nelson - The New York Review of Books 🔗 📚 🖼 🎥

Chris Marker, les 7 vies d’un cinéaste — Catalog of the exhibition edited by Raymond Bellour, Jean-Michel Frodon, and Christine Van Assche — Paris: Cinémathèque française, 400 pp., €45.00

Marker kept returning, across the vast body of films, writings, photographs, and multimedia projects he produced between the 1940s and his death in 2012, to the matter of what it meant to live a happy life. In an early essay about the novelist and playwright Jean Giraudoux, he quoted Sartre’s insistence that at certain moments the streets of Paris turn ‘fixed and clear’ and offer up ‘an instant of happiness, an eternity of happiness.’ The challenge, Marker thought, was to put such instants in a pattern, ‘to make the feeling of those privileged moments into a permanent conviction.’