“Back to that balcony at the place de la RÈpublique where all huge demonstrations have always started or ended. I manage to frame again the top portion of my old photograph. In between I have been in Japan, Korea, Bolivia, Chile. I have filmed students in Guinea-Bissau, medics in Kosovo, Bosnian refugees, Brazilian activists, animals everywhere. I covered the first free elections in East Germany after the fall of the Wall, and I sniffed the first moments of perestroika in Moscow, when people weren’t afraid to talk to each other anymore. I traded film for video and video for computer. In the middle, on the balcony, the tree has grown, just a little.

Within these few inches, forty years of my life.”

Thus writes 86-year-old Chris Marker in Staring Back, his beautiful new collection of black-and-white photographs and video stills taken between 1952 and 2006. Virtually all of his subjects are the faces of people encountered in his travels–protesters, filmmakers, workers, immigrants, police–taken in isolation; some looking away, many gazing directly at the camera. “Frankly,” says Marker’s narrator in his essay film Sans Soleil, “have you ever heard of anything stupider than to say to people, as they teach in film schools, not to look at the camera?” And just as he illustrates this point by freezing the face of a young woman in Cape Verde, his photography here captures a multitude of people gazing wistfully, bemusedly, at the camera, calm faces with only the slightest glimmers of a bountiful range of emotions. Occasionally accompanying the images throughout the book is Marker’s prose, typically as brief as it is pithy, suggesting context, identifying details, musing philosophically on their interrelationships.

The book is divided up into various sections according to gazes (“I Stare” and “They Stare”), as well as animal photographs and documentation of the kinds of political demonstrations referenced above. The latter carries with it particular dramatic force, iconifying anonymous people caught in struggles that may span continents and decades, but share–as the narrator says in Sans Soleil–”the utopia of uniting in a common struggle those who revolt against poverty and those who revolt against wealth.” (The collection is ironically dedicated to France’s then-Prime Minister, de Villepin, “since he passed a law that triggered the demos that lured me to film them,” Marker wryly notes.)

The book also includes the script for Marker’s recent documentary, The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), and is published by MIT Press on the heels of a summer exhibition curated by Bill Horrigan at the Wexner Center for the Arts at Ohio State University, which in 1995 became the first American arts institution to commission a Marker installation. Horrigan contributes an informative and engaging account of his correspondences with Marker and the impetus behind what would become the first exhibition of Marker’s photographs in any country, threading insightful connections between pivotal Marker films interspersed with email excerpts from the filmmaker himself. “[My] editor’s syndrome functioned automatically,” Marker writes, “and [photographic] ‘pairs’ materialized, some graphic, some geographic, some thematic . . . I give [examples] for what it’s worth, but sometimes instinct has its merits.”

In short, Staring Back is an evocative and compelling account of past times and current times, and the artist who binds them together. It’s a rare token of the work of one of our most elusive but commanding of filmmakers, and a revealing portrait of the unspecified faces lingering in his–and now our–ongoing memories.

Before heading off to the Palm Springs film festival, I thought I’d post a collection of links I’ve amassed inspired by a book I recently received: Animation Unlimited: Innovative Short Films Since 1940. It’s a large, glossy paperback published in the UK in 2003 that features short write-ups on 50 animators, over 500 color stills, and–best of all–a two-hour, region 2 DVD sampler containing 29 of the works (in part or in whole) that the authors cite.

I’m still exploring it, and so far I’ve been favoring non-digital work over digital entries (co-writer Liz Farber is a managing partner of a digital production company, and the book contains a lot of contemporary CGI work). But here are a few favorites of which I’ve found corresponding web videos of decent quality:

Night on Bald Mountain (1933)

Alexander Alexeieff and his wife Claire Parker were pioneers of pinscreen animation (you might recall their iconic prologue for Orson Welles’ The Trial). The pinscreen is a large white board with thousands of tiny black pins that one can push in and out to varying degrees, causing the camera at a distance to record shades of grey. Alexeieff and Parker used rollers and objects to virtually “sculpt” imprints frame by frame, and you can see a wonderful NFB documentary on their process–as well as their films–on an excellent French DVD. My favorite of their films (also cited by the authors) is The Nose (1963), based on Gogol’s short story, but Night on Bald Mountain is a classic work as well. I hope to do a longer write-up on their work sometime soon.

The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981)

The authors pick Mothlight (1963) to represent the work of Stan Brakhage, but this film–included on the Criterion DVD–(in his own words) “is related to Mothlight” and “is a collage composed entirely of montane zone vegetation; as the title suggests, it is an homage to (but also argument with) Hieronymous Bosch.” And indeed, the beautiful flurry of greenery–gradually lightening and then fading–is virtually Edenic.

Sunstone (1979)

Abstract Expressionist painter Ed Emshwiller made this animation, one of the first computer-generated films, using a Guggenheim fellowship. The book quotes CalArt’s Michael Scroggins: “This was all accomplished at a time before there were any commercially viable 3D computer hardware and software systems. Jim Clark did not found Silicone Graphics until 1983 and the first digital video graphics system capable of 3D perspectives projection was not released until 1981.” Instead, the film makes copious use of early digital painting. Despite the crude technology, the results are amazingly subtle.

Synchromy (1971)

Aside from its windowboxing issue, the Norman McLaren DVD box set was a highlight of 2006; this film was generated not by a computer, but by filming striped cards and using that for the film’s optical soundtrack as well as its visuals, producing a chromatic scale of six octaves. The fewer and wider the stripes, the lower and louder the note, respectively. In an age before digital animation, this must’ve blown people’s mind–and it still does.

Yuri Norstein: Winter Days (2003)

I’ve written about Norstein before, and while the book appropriately cites his 1978 Tale of Tales as his masterpiece (which can be seen on the third volume of the Masters of Russian Animation DVD series or in three parts here, here, and here on YouTube), this short piece was his recent entry for the Japanese compilation film, Winter Days (2003). It showcases his beautifully textured style, comprised of delicate cutouts filmed on panes of glass.

The Man with the Beautiful Eyes (1999)

This unsettling story of a group of kids with a fascination for an enigmatic man might appeal more to fans of Charles Bukowski’s poetry, but Jonathan Hodgson’s animation is unquestionably remarkable. Playfully evoking children’s drawings through a fluid juxtaposition of texts and images, the film offers a personal memoir that is equally nostalgic and haunting. With its mixture of fanciful, “amateurish” drawing and sober themes, I wonder if it wasn’t an influence on John Canemaker’s recently acclaimed The Moon and the Son?

Father and Daughter (2000)

I was entranced by the lyrical minimalism of this film before suddenly remembering that we had posted an interview with its director, Michael Dudok de Wit, at Robert-Bresson.com a couple years ago. At the first Rencontre avec Robert Bresson in September 2004, the Dutch animator won the grand prize for this film, presented by Bresson’s widow. (Apparently, Bresson, who died in 1999, was a fan of Dudok de Wit’s 1994 film, The Monk and the Fish.) Like Bresson’s own work, the animation’s simplicity of setting and visual description belies its depth of feeling.

The book also highlights films by artists whose works have recently been released on DVD, including the famed Oskar Fischinger (more on him later) and Jiri Trnka, as well as contemporary animator Paul Bush, whose clip was taken from his 1998 scratch film The Albatross, and it looks positively stunning.

Any other books on the subject anyone would recommend? (I’ve been eyeing Chris Robinson’s Unsung Heroes of Animation as well.)

Preparatory drawing for The 39 Steps (1935) by Alfred Hitchcock

I’m always fascinated by the double artistic lives of established directors, people with a significant skill in an art form that requires the assistance of sometimes hundreds of technicians, artists, and actors. But what about their private, personal pursuits? A new book published in the UK, Art by Film Directors, is a glossy coffee table book that offers a taste of the non-film artwork by several notable filmmakers.

At 200 pages with large photos and plentiful use of white space, it’s not even remotely a comprehensive summary of the offscreen creative pursuits of even the filmmakers it addresses, much less the field in general. And reading through it, I was struck by the fairly superficial tone of the writing; a basic career summary of each director and a few paragraphs generalizing their artistic interests. Then I noticed the author, Karl French, is credited as “a writer and journalist specializing in cinema and popular culture” who has published in Esquire and written Cult Movies and This is Spinal Tap: The Official Companion. I’m sure these are fine publications and French is certainly not a bad writer, but the field is so open to serious scholarship and artistic analysis that I would have preferred a more rigorous, critical approach.

Nevertheless, this is far from fluff; the selected art works and notoriety of the directors are genuinely sound. From graphic artists like Sergei Eisenstein, Terry Gilliam and Satyajit Ray who graduated to filmmaking, to draftsmen like Alfred Hitchcock and Fritz Lang, to directors with legitimate art careers like Jean Cocteau, Mike Figgis, Peter Greenaway, and Dennis Hopper, the book includes works by 23 people in all. To his credit, French is quick to admit the book’s limitations: “[other material] could even warrant a second volume, with the inclusion perhaps of the sculptures of AndrÈ de Toth, the early paintings of John Ford, and the ceramics of Jean Renoir. . . . There are other images that one would like to have included but that have been destroyed or are otherwise unavailable–for example, the paintings that Jean-Luc Godard made when he was a teenager in Switzerland, and similarly Robert Bresson’s paintings.”

But the book includes many standout examples of mature art-making. I was particularly surprised with Hitchcock’s production sketches, not typical director storyboards (Martin Scorsese’s energetic scribbles are also included here), but fully-rendered and atmospheric drawings. Eisenstein’s sketches for Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible Part I (1945) are detailed realizations etched with a sure hand. John Huston’s lifelong love of painting produced some magnificent pieces, including the brilliantly-hued, cubist “The Spirit of St. Clerans,” which evokes his beloved hunting and fishing trips in the region. Perhaps the greatest contribution of the book is its three beautiful oil paintings (two cityscapes and a still life) by Josef von Sternberg, which it claims have never been publicly exhibited or published in any form.

Art by Film Directors is definitely an interesting and at times relevatory book that sheds light on an important and neglected subject, even if it’s easy to wish it had been more.

Browsing through a used bookstore on Hollywood Boulevard yesterday, I came across critic/filmmaker/curator Jonas Mekas‘ out-of-print Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, a partial compilation of his writing for the Village Voice during that period. Mekas was born in Lithuania in 1922, but after graduating from college, he was arrested by the Nazis during WWII and forced to work in a labor camp. After the war, he lived as a Displaced Person for four years before the United Nations dumped him in the US–he never officially immigrated.

In New York, Mekas began a love affair with the movies and eventually convinced the Voice to begin offering a regular movie column. He was asked to write it, and it was called “Movie Journal,” an apt title for its personal, off-the-cuff, diary-like musings on the New York film scene. Movie Journal is wonderfully entertaining and informative, Mekas’ writing on experimental films, polemics against mainstream criticism (“Now I know what Pauline Kael lost at the movies: the taste for cinema”), the programmers of the New York Film Festival (“an organized and well-sponsored undertaking to prevent New Yorkers from seeing what’s really going on in cinema”), and narrative films (“Dreyer’s Gertrud alone and by itself redeemed the festival”) are as relevant as ever and provide a charming glimpse of the culturally-engaged life of a ’60s cinephile. The book is one of my best finds in some time, a pre-Internet blog.

While the bulk of the book focuses on film reviews, one of his entries, A Rendezvous With the FBI (December 21, 1961), is particulartly engaging; a personal anecdote that is by turns startling, funny, and moving:

“I dreamed J. Edgar Hoover groped me in a silent hallway of the Capitol . . .”–Allen Ginsberg in Guns of the Trees.

Two days after the Cinema 16 screening of Guns of the Trees I received an early morning telephone call.

“My name is Schwartz, from the FBI,” said a voice at the other end of the phone. “I want to ask you a few questions.”

Schwartz. A good name, I thought. FBI. I was sort of thrilled. I remembered the novels of Mickey Spillane. Adventure. We agreed to meet on Avenue B. I had always wanted to meet an FBI agent. Or a detective. I wondered if I’d be able to spot him on the street.

Spot him I did; there was no mistake about that. Nobody could have missed him on the Lower East Side. A face right out of a Carol Reed movie, with black hat and raincoat.

“You don’t have to talk to me you know, ” said Mr. Schwartz, as he flashed his card.

“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “I’m thrilled. I’m glad.”

Still, I looked around. I felt I was entering a dark conspiracy. And although I knew I wasn’t guilty of any crime, I felt the huge power of the State Department behind this Carol Reed man.

Mr. Schwartz didn’t waste any time: “Have you seen any Soviet citizens lately?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. There was no point in denying my contacts with filmmakers or film critics of any country.

“Did you see them professionally? You know, as a photographer?”

I looked at him. There was a queer smile on his face. It was very clear what he was driving at: photographs, secret documents, cameras–all the spy stuff. I remembered Five Fingers.

“No,” I said. “I saw them on personal matters.”

I thought that was vague enough. Mr. Schwartz walked along silently for a moment. It was cold. He looked into a coffee shop, but I preferred the cold morning air.

“Did they ever offer you any kind of money?” he asked suddenly.

Money! I had better deny it, and fast, I thought. This was a dangerous question.

“No,” I said. “I haven’t received any money from any Soviet citizen, and you needn’t worry about it, if that’s what you’re afraid of.”

That should do it, I thought. It didn’t.

“I have information that you have received money from Soviet citizens in this country,” said Mr. Schwartz.

We walked on silently. If he doesn’t believe what I say, why does he bother asking me, I thought. It was insulting. What had first seemed like an innocent adventure, a game, suddenly became disgusting.

“I’d be glad to get some money from somebody,” I said. “I could use some.”

The joke didn’t come off. Mr. Schwartz was waiting for a direct answer or a sudden confession. I had made a mistake, I thought. You should never say that you need money–that may be proof that you accepted money. You are forgetting your movies, I thought.

“You are avoiding the answer,” said Mr. Schwartz. I found myself wondering: is he recording, taping down what I say? “But the question is ridiculous,” I said.

“It’s my duty to find out the facts,” said Mr. Schwartz.

“But how are you going to do that if you don’t believe what I say? It’s useless,” I said. “You are wasting taxpayers’ money on useless investigations.”

“Do you pay taxes?” the agent asked.

I shut up. Hell, I said to myself, he may dig into my taxes. He probably has a book on me, ten inches thick.

“Did you receive the money, yes or no?” insisted the man from the FBI.

I was in it, but good. I wanted to say “No,” but the sound disappeared in my mouth. My “No” was completely meaningless by now. I knew that if I said “No,” it would sound exactly like “Yes.”

I saw the East River in front of me. But I smelled the Un-American Activities Committee, the Gestapo, the NKVD, and all the secret agents, cops, and armies that I’ve already been through–the Flies of the 20th century.

“No,” I said. “I refuse to answer this question. I think I’ve had enough of this. And then to tell you the truth, I hate agents. All agents.”

I stopped. I looked at Mr. Schwartz and could clearly see that he no longer had any doubt: I was guilty. I had refused to answer; that meant I was evading the truth; that I was guilty. I had received money from Grigori Chukhrai, perhaps, or Sergei Bondarchuk, or Tatjana Samailova.

“Yes, I hate agents,” I said. I thought I would repeat it for the sake of the East River. “And then, do you think that by answering yes or no, it would change anything? Do you mean to tell me you will burn my file after this? My answer will change nothing. Once you satisfy your suspicions you’ll stick to them. So I may as well tell you right here and now that I refuse to cooperate with the FBI.”

Suddenly I felt like a crusader. “Who is going to tell me what to do and say? I’m free to exchange any artistic knowledge I have with whomever I please–whether he’s Russian, Greek, or Chinese. My knowledge is universal.”

“No,” interrupted Mr. Schwartz. “I’m the one who knows what you can and what you can’t tell to others. I’m paid for it, this is my profession, this is my field. I’m the authority on it.”

That shut me up. I was astounded.

“But I’m an artist,” I said, “and you’re only an FBI agent. I have knowledge that is not available to you. I have knowledge of the arts and human experience. I myself will decide how and where to use my experience and my knowledge, okay? You should think about it, I’m telling you this as one human being to another.”

“You are wrong,” said Mr. Schwartz.

The street was cold as Hell. The chimneys of the Con Edison plant were cold. The agent’s face was cold.

Suddenly everything seemed so stupid. Here I am, walking with an FBI agent on this cold December morning, on the Lower East Side, with Christmas wreaths hanging in the store windows, talking to him, trying to prove something–to prove what?

“Okay,” I said finally. “I admit it. I’m working in a huge munitions factory and I have files and files of secret materials and I am selling them for money to the Russian filmmakers–you know, one has to eat. . . . “

We walked on silently now. Communication was breaking down rapidly.

“This is stupid,” I said. “I’m going home.”

Mr. Schwartz didn’t look at me.

“Do you refuse to cooperate?” he asked. The voice was cold as metal. “You don’t want to help the government? You know, you are making a mistake by not cooperating.”

“Yes, I refuse to cooperate because the whole thing makes no sense. That’s what you should say in your report.”

The agent turned away and walked toward Avenue A. I bought a loaf of bread and walked home. What the hell did he want, I thought. What is behind all this? What kind of scheme? How the hell do they get such ideas? And how many people, how many are being harassed like this, every day, with stupid suspicions and senseless questions?

Or perhaps I’m guilty? Maybe I’ve sinned in my sleep? And who left the tip after that vodka with the Russian director (I don’t dare mention his name now)? Or perhaps I revealed the secret of the size of our Cinemascope screen? You never know. I was searching through my memory.

The telephone rang. Is it tapped? Has it been tapped for weeks now? I thought I heard a strange click in it. I sat by the table. The telephone rang again. I stared at it.

From the Guardian: Tarkovsky’s polaroids.