Parky at the Pictures (DVD 24/7/2014)

Noted for the versatility and integrity of his distinctive style, Chris Marker was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in Neuilly-sur-Seine in 1921. However, as one might expect of a man with many aliases and a secretive approach to creativity, he did nothing to scotch the rumour he had been born in the Mongolian capital, Ulan Bator. Having spent his schoolday afternoons listening to Jean-Paul Sartre in a local café, Marker studied philosophy at the Sorbonne before fighting with both the Maquis and the US Army during the Second World War.

Bored with playing piano in a bar, he landed a job with the Travail et Culture bureau of the French adult education system. He was befriended by André Malraux while working on stage projects, but threw in his lot with André Bazin, who had the office next door and showed Marker that there was much more to film than those in the French and Hollywood mainstreams were doing with it. Yet, while he wrote reviews for Cahiers du Cinéma, Marker rejected the opportunity to edit the journal and opted instead to write travel guides for Seuil Le Petit Planète. Travel was always Marker's primary passion and film-making gave him the excuse to visit places off the tourist trail.

In 1952, he made his directorial bow with Olympia 52 at the Helsinki Games and followed a collaboration with Alain Resnais on a treatise on colonialism and art, Statues Also Die (1953), with Sunday in Peking (1956), which, along with Letter From Siberia (1957) and ¡Cuba Sí! (1961), established Marker as one of the shrewdest screen commentators on the Communist world. According to Bazin, they also made him the inventor of the film essay. But his reputation would come to rest on his 1962 photomontage masterpiece, La Jetée (in which a time traveller from a post-nuclear future is troubled by a childhood memory of Orly Airport as he shuttles back and forth through history trying to summon assistance), and Le Joli Mai (1963), which he edited down from 55 hours to 150 minutes to present an epic snapshot of Parisian attitudes in a time of seismic change.

Jean-Luc Godard would magpie ideas from Marker for the rest of his career, as he joined the co-operative Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles and teamed with Resnais, Godard, Agnès Varda,Claude Lelouch, William Klein and Joris Ivens to make Far From Vietnam (1967), an unapologetic anti-war film that anticipated many of the concerns that would come to the surface during the May Days of 1968. Marker further reflected the possibility of the people seizing their own destiny in The Sixth Side of The Pentagon (1968), which accompanied 100,000 Americans to Washington on 21 October 1967 for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam protest. However, as he would report in The Embassy (1973) and The Grin Without a Cat (1977), the socialist radicalism of the 60s stalled and left France and the wider world without much to look forward to.

As if seeking less pessimistic subjects, Marker made two films about the Soviet director, Alexander Medvedkin (The Train Rolls On, 1971 and The Last Bolshevik, 1992). He would later follow these with personal profiles of Akira Kurosawa (AK, 1985), which he shot on the set of Ran, and Andrei Tarkovsky (One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich, 2000). The latter pair are showing here, as is Sans Soleil (1983), a music-inspired montage in which Marker assumed the persona of photographer Sandor Krasna to examine in a series of letters the sense of cultural dislocation he feels, as he shuttles between Japan, Guinea Bissau and Iceland. Teaming with effects artist Hayao Yamaneko, this was a landmark in the evolution of video art .

As his career entered its fifth decade, it seemed as though Marker was incapable of anything other than innovation. Indeed, he was always ahead of the game and was among the first to explore the potential of computers and digital technology in his 1998 CD-Rom, Immemory. Yet, while titles like Theory of Sets (1991), Three Video Haikus (1994), Blue Helmet (1996) and E-CLIP-SE (1999) all pushed boundaries and prompting audiences to see the moving image in a new way, he could still be irresistibly mischievous, as he demonstrated with The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004). Fittingly, Marker died while working at the bank of computers in his Paris office on his 91st birthday on 29 July 2012. Impossible to categorise, he should be hailed as one of the masters of the medium, as he stood alone as a visionary, polemicist and artist of boundless energy, insatiable curiosity and subversive ingenuity.

The earliest film in Soda's splendid selection is Sunday in Peking, which was made during a visit organised by the Franco-Chinese Friendship Association to mark the sixth anniversary of the People's Republic. It was filmed with a 16mm camera borrowed from director Paul Paviot and came about because Marker realised that he did not have the necessary lighting to shoot inside factories, offices or tourist sites. Consequently, he chose the day of rest to examine the new Communist Chinese psyche and, in the process created something akin to People on Sunday (1929), a sun-kissed city symphony fashioned by the Austro-Germanic cabal of Robert and Kurt Siodmak, Edgar G. Ulmer, Billy Wilder, Fred Zinnemann and Eugen Schüfftan.

Marker assembled his `day in the life' from footage recorded over several weeks. But such is his singularity of vision that the sense of spatial and temporal unity within this cine-postcard feels entirely authentic. He admits that he arrived with preconceived notions formed by the Western filtration of Chinese history and culture and it's amusing to note how the girls at the model school Marker visits view the picture-book he shows them with a mirror-like exoticism. However, Marker is also aware that much of what he is allowed to see has been stage-managed by the authorities and, consequently, there is an irony in narrator Gilles Quéant's assertion that the man practicing sword thrusts in front of an admiring crowd of onlookers typifies the modern city.

Indeed, the florid language used throughout this fleeting impression of the landmarks, acrobats, puppets and people that animate Beijing is designed to remind the viewer of the subjectivity of Marker's approach. Moreover, with its emphasis on colour, legend, music, dance and performance, this often comes closer to poetry than reportage. But there are glimpses of everyday life and their juxtaposition with the idealised leisure activities allows Marker (who readily acknowledges his debt to Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda) to debunk the traditional travelogue and public information formats and slyly expose the propagandist subtexts contained in similar works produced in supposedly democratic countries.

Marker hired ace cinematographer Sacha Vierny for Letter From Siberia, but he retained the stream-of-consciousness approach to the audio and visual content to use the Sakha region as a microcosm to explore how the Soviet Union was coming to terms with the troubled legacy of Joseph Stalin. Arriving just four years after the dictator's death, Marker frustratingly ignores some of the more shameful aspects of Siberian society, such as the gulags. But, unlike New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, he is anything but an apologist for the Kremlin. Indeed, this epistolary essay could be seen as one of the boldest satires of the Cold War, as Marker employs montage and animation to demystify myths about the past and the present in counties ruled by repressive and paternalistic regimes.

Accompanied by a Pierre Barbaud score punctuated with snippets of Shostakovich and Prokofiev, the tract opens with Marker revealing that Marco Polo dubbed this part of Russia, `the Land of Darkness'. He goes on to relate the story that the Devil covered it with birch forests and that it says much that the benighted area is similar in size to the United States. However, even though he marvels at the work being done at the institute for frost studies at Iakoutsk, Marker suggests that Siberia is coming back to life after a long, hard winter and shows the construction of a power plant to stress the image of a spark illuminating the wilderness.

He also makes playful use of animals, as he echoes the rustic idylls created by Alexander Dovzhenko to laud ducks for collectivising without allowing any of their number to become kulaks. Moreover, he employs cel animation to concoct a mock newsreel extolling the virtues of reindeer and recalls the legend of the woolly mammoth and its possible affinity with the mole. But, for all the playfulness, Marker is drawing parallels between the way the permafrost of the tundra perfectly preserves long-extinct creatures, while film gives the illusion of making a faithful record of life when the best it can offer is a pale imitation.

As if to prove the point, Marker famously parodies three styles of cinematic voiceover by creating an audio equivalent of the Kuleshov Effect. A scene of Yakut workers repairing a road in Yakutsk as Zim cars and a red bus go past is repeated in each instance. But, while the first commentary is a Socialist Realist paean to the opportunities that all can share for happiness and advancement, the second resembles a Voice of America diatribe against the iniquitous inequality that sees the elite ride in swish motors, while the proletariat pack on to rickety public transport and the Asiatic underclass toil like slaves. However, a third take on the scene states that the capital is a place in need of modernisation, but reassures the viewer that the task is being undertaken by the people in tandem and that those riding on buses today can aspire to owning a Zim in the brave new future.

Theorist André Bazin claimed that Marker invented a brand of `horizontal montage' that broke with the techniques devised by Dziga Vertov, Sergei Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin of colliding or linking frames to create a metaphorical meaning in order to achieve a lateral juxtaposition between sound and image that forced the viewer to question what they saw and heard in both isolation and in tandem. This form of audiovisual irony was loaded with political potential, but it also anticipated the kind of self-reflexivity that would characterise the nouvelle vague and, for this alone, Marker deserves a prominent place in the French cinematic pantheon.

The world has changed considerably since Marker made these two films and it is worth noting the extent to which his treatises on memory have become historical artefacts themselves. Indeed, Israeli film-maker Dan Geva has already pointed out in Description of a Memory (2006) how Marker's Golden Bear-winning Description of a Struggle fits into a wider and infinitely more complex context. It's apt that this assessment of Israel's first 12 years of existence should have won a prize at Germany's most prestigious film festival, as Marker clearly viewed the foundation of the state in the remnants of Mandatory Palestine through the eyes of someone who had served as an uncredited cameraman and co-author on Alain Resnais's deeply moving Holocaust memoir, Night and Fog (1955). But, even though Marker concentrates on the Zionist struggle to transform a desert wilderness into a Promised Land, he was also sufficiently shrewd to recognise the future problems that the pursuit of this manifest destiny would hold in store.

Taking its title from a Franz Kafka story and opening with a montage of seemingly disconnected images that suggests how `the land speaks to you in signs', the essay seeks to examine Israel's historical, cultural, social and ethical roots, while also contemplating its prospects for the future. The inclusion of so many children implies Marker's optimism. But, sadly, hindsight reveals this to be the generation that confined the Palestinians to the West Bank and Gaza Strip and imposed a similar kind of ghetto existence to the one their parents had fled in Europe. Marker may not quite predict such a doomed delineation, but he certainly notes the potential for trouble in asserting that the Jewish people had a right to an ordinary life after the shedding of so much blood. Indeed, it is possible to see Description of a Struggle and Description of a Memory as being the tragic factual equivalents of the dream and the reality that the young boy and the middle-aged man experience on seeing the woman at Orly Airport in Marker's photomontage masterpiece, La Jetée (1962).

Photographed by Ghislain Cloquet, Mayer Levin and Bertrand Hesse and with the commentary spoken by Jean Vilar, Howard Vernon and Alan Adair, this is a dispiriting study of what happens when humanity seeks to tinker with destiny. Switching between monochrome and colour, Marker visits kibbutzim, schools, community centres, marketplaces, Bedouin camel trains and ancient quarters like Mea Shearim in Jerusalem in a bid to see trauma turning to joy. He focuses on a girl drawing intently in an art class and states with relief that she `will never be Anne Frank'. But the horror of the past and the dread of the future hang heavily over young and old alike, as Marker wonders how long these people dancing on a volcano will retain their purity.

Marker was not exclusively a film-maker and published books of photo-essays like Coréennes (1958), as well as a collected edition of screenplays entitled Commentaires (1961). He was also that rare creature, a collaborative auteur and he teamed with François Reichenbach for The Sixth Side of the Pentagon, which takes its punning title from the Zen proverb about the tactics to employ when attacking an impregnable five-sided citadel. Essentially, this is a record of the march on Washington DC on 21 August 1967 by 100,000 protesters calling for the Mobilization to End the War in Vietnam. Coming just a fortnight after the death of Che Guevara, the demonstration was designed to convince Americans to take direct action to stop the deeply unpopular war and among those participating were radicals, liberals, black militants, combat veterans, service widows, celebrities, hippies and Yippies, with the latter being members of the Youth International Party that had been founded by.Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, among others, to spread a mischievous brand of socialism that they dubbed `Groucho Marxism'.

As the likes of novelist Norman Mailer, film-maker Shirley Clarke and folk singers Peter, Paul and Mary address the throng at the Lincoln Memorial, Marker and Reichenbach records young men burning their draft cards and American Nazis trying to barrack the speakers, while others call for peace and the removal of the `demons' from the White House and the military establishment. However, 35,000 souls decided to take their protest to the Pentagon, where they were met by soldiers whose fear of being overwhelmed led them to lash out with batons. The violence is captured with chilling viscerality by cameras caught in the middle of the mélee. Yet Marker also captures the moment in which a bunch of hippies attempt to use their psychic powers to levitate the Pentagon up to 300 yards off the ground (even though they only had official permission to go to 10 yards).

If Marker seemed impressed by the American public learning to resist instead of protest, he focused on the state fighting back in The Embassy, an early example of the now ubiquitous `found footage' that was clearly inspired by the overthrow of Chilean president Salvador Allende by General Auguso Pinochet on 11 September 1973. However, there is something Buñuelian about the short pseudo-documentary, as the narrator passes sardonic comment on the scenes captured by a lone camera operator in what is presumed to be the American embassy in Santiago. The sanctuary seekers are evidently shaken, as the ambassador offers them food and a chance to relate their experiences. News comes that enemies of the state are being rounded up and imprisoned in the main football stadium. But it turns out not to be the Estadio Nacional, but the Parc de Princes, as Marker springs a surprise in the final upward pan from the street to reveal the Eiffel Tower and the dome of Les Invalides on the dawning horizon.

If Marker perhaps succeeded in further depressing those Soixante-Huitards still licking their wounds, this Super 8 exercise in télécopie-vérité feels a little strained in its warning that the complacency of a divided Left can only leave the way open for the monolithic Right. However, by the time he came to make Theory of Sets in 1991, Marker seemed to be a little more buoyant, which is just as well as this experiment with computer graphics is set upon a cat-shaped ark whose Noah is the Georgian artist Niko Pirosmani. Marker thanks everyone from Hieronymus Bosch and Albrecht Dürer to Aloys Zötl, Marc Chagall and Snoopy in the closing credits of a teasing trip through the basics of classification and mathematics that relies heavily on intertitles, the music of Alfred Schnittke, the wisdom of two owls and the magpie eye for a telling image that earned Marker his reputation as a master bricoleur.

In addition to finding fresh uses for pre-existing visual material, Marker was also an inveterate innovator, as he demonstrates in Three Video Haikus, a triptych of miniatures that are over in the blink of an incredulous eye. He harks back to the birth of cinema for Hommage aux Frères Lumière, which trains a static camera on a stretch of the Petite Ceinture line running through Paris in May 1994. However, while there is lots of noise to suggest plentiful off-screen activity, nothing happens inside the frame and Marker makes a muted apology in the closing caption. By contrast, each time Katherine Belkhodja exhales from the cigarette she is smoking with a long holder in Owl Gets in Your Eyes, a transparent bird hovers beneath the billowing smoke before disappearing into thin air. This resort to superimposition also recalls the féeries that enchanted the first moviegoers. But Tchaika employs the phenomenon known as solarisation to reverse the image tone and make light areas seem dark and vice versa. The shot in question depicts traffic going over a bridge across the Seine and its ethereality is reinforced when Marker cuts to a close-up of the scene reflected in the slowly moving water. However, he freeze frames when a seagull flies into view, only for the river to keep flowing relentlessly, as if by magic.

Simplicity is also the watchword for Blue Helmet, in which Marker revisits his time working with SLON and Group Medvedkine to guides former UN peacekeeper François Cremieux through a series of captioned categories in order to sum up his experiences in Bosnia during the ferocious war for independence. Occasionally inter-cutting still images of ordinary citizens trapped in a combat zone, Marker keeps the monochrome camera fixed in close-up on Cremieux's face, as he lucidly describes his patrol and intelligence-gathering duties, the lack of trust informing his encounters with friendly and hostile locals, the casual racism he witnessed and the struggle to establish a rapport with comrades from other countries without a common language. He freely admits that he never had a particularly profound understanding of the mission and was not alone in volunteering because the pay was so good and not because he had a humanitarian vocation. Moreover, he concedes that few tangible benefits accrued during his six months on the frontline, especially as they fled when the Serbs besieged Bihac.

Much of what Cremieux has to say is fascinating and Marker's stylistic and tonal restraint stand in stark contrast to the more emotive approach Richard Jobson took in The Somnambulists (2012), in which a number of British service personnel reflect on their time in Basra following the invasion of Iraq. And the focus remains fixed on faces in E-CLIP-SE (1999), as Marker films a variety of people preparing to watch a solar eclipse from an unidentified zoological park (that appears to have its own Noah's Ark, as well as some hippo statues and a couple of snoozing owls). At one point, he switches to night vision. But, while the odd child clambers over the metal hippos, everyone else simply gazes into the sky through a bewildering ranges of safety specs.

Throughout his career, Marker's mantra was always `speak softly and carry a small camera'. He did sometimes allow his feelings to show, most notably in his lament for the decline of French socialism, A Grin Without a Cat (1977). But, at the ripe old age of 85, Marker sensed something of a sea change in the months following the attack on the Twin Towers, as young and old citizens of La Patrie forgot Le Monde's poignant claim, `Nous sommes tous americains' and began to rally against George W. Bush's illegal war on terror. The symbol of hope that people might care about their world in the way they had done in the two three decades following the Occupation came in the unlikely form of a yellow cartoon feline who started appearing on walls, chimneys, pavements and placards in the period after 9/11. But, as The Case of the Grinning Cat progresses, Marker comes to realise that M. Chat was simply another passing fad rather than a totemic symbol of a seismic shift in public opinion and activism.

First conceived anonymously in Orléans in 1997, M. Chat is the work of Thoma Vuille and Marker (who had always had a thing for cats and owls) was excited that a toothy Cheshire beam could pique interest across the generations. Consequently, he photoshops its image into cave paintings and works by Van Gogh and Picasso. Moreover, with his finger forever on the pulse, he also becomes intrigued by the concept of flash mobs and joins a hastily convened congregation outside the Pompidou Centre. But, as it dawns on Marker (speaking through narrator Gérard Rinaldi) that his companions are merely the Internet equivalent of Hamelin rats, he decides not to film their faces as they unfurl the umbrellas they have been instructed to bring on a non-rainy day, as they have come to participate in a gimmick rather than make a worthwhile statement.

Marker's faith in these headless thrill seekers is partially restored when they rally behind centre rightist Jacques Chirac to defeat Front National leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in the 2002 presidential election. But he cannot fathom how they or the parties of the left allowed this situation to develop. Similarly, he is bemused by the outpouring of patriotism (fanned by a plethora of tacky commercials) that surrounds the French football team as it prepares to defend the title won in 1998 in the World Cup in Japan and South Korea. However, the fervour is nothing compared to the fury that greets the squad on its return after picking up a single point in the group stage.

By the time the demonstrations start against Bush and his idiotic conviction that Saddam Hussein is a latterday Hitler, Marker has started to despair at the passivity of a protest that involves lying in the street and pretending to be corpses. M. Chat has also had enough and he starts to appear less frequently and the news agenda becomes dominated by the death of Marie Trintignant from a cerebral oedema brought on by the repeated blows struck by her activist singer boyfriend, Bertrand Cantat. Even the Spanish Civil War partisan La Pasionaria's famous quote, `They took the cities, but we had better songs' starts to ring hollow.

Striking something of a despondent note at the end of an epic excursion, this is a sympathetic city symphony that can only shrug hopelessly at the syllogisms that pass for ideology in the intellectually bankrupt political sphere of the early 21st century. But the real reason for dejection is the vacuum in the chasm of vacuity that Chris Marker leaves, as there is no one with the wit, wisdom, prescience or compassion to fill his cinematic shoes.