Nostalgia for the Future: a documentary to unravel the mystery surrounding Chris Marker

In Nostalgia for the Future, Charlotte Rampling’s voice personifies an archivist who guides us throughout the documentary. It’s a labyrinthine journey through Chris Marker’s records, including photographs, writing samples, and images that coalesce into a body of evidence about the documentary maker and lead us to reflect on memory and identity. 

When the Belgian artist Brecht Debackere became interested in Chris Marker, eight years ago, his study quickly deviated from the director’s great movies such as La Jetée, Le Joli mai (The Lovely Month of May) or Le Fond de l’air est rouge (A Grin Without a Cat). He delved into personal papers, explored the images stored at the Cinémathèque française, and reached out to people close to the filmmaker before his death in 2012. 

But how can you tell the story of an artist who loved being mysterious? Chris Marker gave very few interviews and when asked to provide a photograph, he would send a picture of a cat. Brecht Debackere shies away from telling Marker’s life story in favor of an almost abstract essay, an attempt to capture a state of mind, whose lyrical imagination was graced with an ethical depth. 

“In a world of heavily curated media, I am attracted to Marker’s stubborn insistence on the fragmentary, the tangents, and the image’s human complexity.” 

The name Chris Marker first appeared in the mid-1940s. His real name was Christian Bouche-Villeneuve and he was one of Sartre’s philosophy students, a former journalist, and author who published under several pseudonyms, before becoming, in the 1950s, the great film essay director that we still admire today.