The best Chris Marker’s movies
We present our ranking of the best Chris Marker’s movies. Do you love cinema? Or are you looking for a movie of your favorite actor to watch tonight? Surely you have some to see or that you did not know yet about Chris Marker.
Tokyo-Ga
7.3/10
German director Wim Wenders made this documentary in which he tries to explore the Tokyo that was depicted in the films of Yasujiro Ozu. When Wenders visits Tokyo for the first time, he finds a very different city, one with a booming fascination with technology that often clashes with the traditional elements of Japanese culture. Wenders also interviews Ozu's cinematographer, Yuharu Atsuta, and Chishu Ryu, an actor who frequently collaborated with Ozu.
A. K.
7/10
In 1985, Chris Marker traveled to Japan to attend the filming of Ran, directed by Akira Kurosawa. Marker analyzes the progress of filming; the infinite patience of a team under the orders of a meticulous director down to the smallest detail; the antithetical mixture of the modern with the traditional; of the real with the fictitious; of life with cinema… and literature.
La traversée du désir
5.7/10
What was your first desire? What did you long for most? Arielle Dombasle put these questions to a wide circle of famous people.
Level Five
7/10
The French computer programmer Laura inherits the task of making a computer game of the Battle of Okinawa in Japan during World War 2. She searches the Internet for information on the battle, and interviews Japanese experts and witnesses. The extraordinary circumstances of the Battle of Okinawa lead Laura to reflect deeply on her own life and humanity in general, particularly the influence of history and memories.
Tokyo Days
6.3/10
This idiosyncratic view of Tokyo begins with a live mannequin in a store window and French actress Arielle Dombasle chatting with Marker as they wander around Tokyo. After Dombasle departs, the tape continues with footage from the Tokyo subway and an indoor market. Marker punctuates the tape throughout with playful visual and sound edits.
The Lovely Month of May
7.8/10
Candid interviews of ordinary people on the meaning of happiness, an often amorphous and inarticulable notion that evokes more basic and fundamentally egalitarian ideals of self-betterment, prosperity, tolerance, economic opportunity, and freedom.
One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich
7.8/10
A documentary about the Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky. The film was an episode of the French documentary film series Filmmakers of our time. The title of the film is a play on the title of Solzhenitsyn's novella One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
The Koumiko Mystery
7.6/10
A look inside the world of a young Japanese woman during the time of the Tokyo Olympiad (1964), from French New Wave Left Bank director Chris Marker.
The Invention of Chris Marker
5.8/10
A desktop documentary about online afterlife of the late French filmmaker, Chris Marker.
In Chris Marker's Studio
A rare and beautiful moment in cinema where two friends — who happen to be pioneering, legendary filmmakers from the French New Wave — meet in real life and in a virtual world. In the film, which was shot at two points between 2009-2011, Agnès Varda visits Chris Marker in his studio, a few years before his passing. She admires his magnificent mess, snooping around for details that reveal “the hidden side of Marker’s work”: a labyrinth of wires and computer equipment, a collection of images, magazines, and books, and — of course — cats. The film takes on a wonderful surrealist turn when Varda creates an avatar to meet Marker’s avatar in the online virtual world of Second Life.
