The "...SECRET RADIATION..." of Denise Bellon

"...amusing to imagine BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN aboard this vehicle..."

(the feet of Henri Langlois and Mary Meerson, and the resistance vessle that saved innumerable films from Nazi confiscation/destruction. Photo: Denise Bellon)

Le Souvenir d'un avenir a.k.a. REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS TO COME by Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker is one the most extraordinary movies about, and made of, photography ("....to sustain the gaze of others...") that I know and one of Marker's finest videos. The photographs under consideration are those of Denise Bellon who lived almost every year of the 20th century (1902-1999) like one of Marker's other beloved subjects Alexandr Medvedkin, THE LAST BOLSHEVIK.

To have been 27 years old at the time of the Second Manifesto of Surrealism. To have been 18 years old during the Russian Revolution...

To have been middle aged during the fight against Fascism.

Filming the images that others have made, speaking through and with them, respecting and transforming them -- this is Marker's solidity (whereas for many other filmmakers, it's is their anemia). Simple devices -- dissolves and cuts from photo to photo -- are movements from strata to strata. When he's using images he himself has shot, it's an image within the image: commentary. Marker is known for his beautiful voice over commentaries -- exact and digressive, personal and worldly -- and REMEMBERANCE's is no exception.

For all the mastery and invention of essay form in Marker that has been talked about on a literary basis, what's as important or perhaps more important is how these commentaries relate to the images, i.e. the cinematic basis: Marker manages to leave the image open while transforming it. In spite of the density of Marker's commentaries, his images are not smothered as images. Still, we must consider Marker's images of images as his (and his collaborators) own, because though Marker is filming the images of others  -- filming photographs -- it's his methods of cropping, emphasis with masking, duration, and angle that contribute (I would say entirely) to his particular kind of memorial and material rhetoric. Here in REMEMBRANCE, and especially in THE LAST BOLSHEVIK, we have extremely refined work with photographs (it's shocking how entrenched the conventions for filming documents and photographs in standard documentary productions have become; Marker doesn't use them, even when he does). A little camera move over a photo, a crop understood as a crop; Marker's commentaries would be merely lovely without the cinematic. The ideas between the images, materials, authors (generations), and epochs are brutal and unmistakable; "combat" and "testimony" to history. Anachronisms here don't crash into our time's back from the past; they face us, and gently lap onto our epoch's shore.

A big idea in the movie: Bellon's pictures somehow registered the moments when "post-war (World War I) became pre-war (World War II)." How? It is only to see...

Victorious steel turned to rubbish.

The body liberated, then mutilated, then appropriated by fascism.

Adverts for alcohol and socialism.

Then, of Duchamp the film says: "he'll be used to vindicate the art of vanity." Bellon took pictures of him as if he knew.

Bellon took the only pictures of Langlois's cradle of all cinematheques, his bathtub filled with films. Over Bellon's photos of suicidal Europe, the film later says "...it seems that nations on the verge of war make a point of parading their wealth, like misers who in their final death throes want to recount their treasures."

Bellon reported to L'Afrique occidentale française: "....even on the Left nobody thinks of independence..." In this sense she was a spy...as is, and always was, Marker...


REMEMBERANCE OF THINGS TO COME was once available on Youtube, and I embedded all the parts below so that it could be seen -- but no longer. Here are the carcasses of that fact:

part one



part two



part three




part four



part five