Quotes from Chris Marker

What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.

And always the animals from each trip you bring back a gaze a pose a gesture that points to the truest of humanity better than images of humanity itself

In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don't choose your time.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling.

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.

He liked the fragility of those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only function is to leave just a trace in memory.

She accepts the ways of this visitor as a natural phenomenon; How he comes and goes, exists, talks, laughs with her, falls silent, listens to her, and then he vanishes.

he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.

Humour is the courtesy of despair

I'm writing you this letter from the edge of the world. According to a Siberian proverb, the forest was made by the devil. The devil did a good job; his forest is as big as the United States of America. But maybe the devil made the United States too.

Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments, only later do they make themselves known, from their scars.

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.

Rien ne distingue les souvenirs des autres moments: ce n'est que plus tard qu'ils se font reconnaître, à leurs cicatrices.

...after a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us.