"...SECRET RADIATION..." (of Denise Bellon)

"...amusing to imagine BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN aboard this vehicle..."
(the feet of Henri Langlois and Mary Meerson, the resistance vessle that saved innumerable films from Nazi confiscation/destruction. Photo: Denise Bellon)

Le Souvenir d'un avenir a.k.a. REMEMBERANCE OF THINGS TO COME by Yannick Bellon and Chris Marker is one the most extraordinary movies on (and of) photography ("....to sustain the gaze of others...") 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 Marker's other beloved subject, 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 of others, speaking through and with them, respecting and transforming them -- this is Marker's solidity (whereas for many other filmmakers it's their anemia). Simple devices, dissolves or cuts from photo to photo, are movements from strata to strata. When he's using images he himself has shot, it's the 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 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, 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 literally filming images, filming photographs, his methods of cropping, emphasis with masking, duration, and angle all contribute to his particular kind of memorial/material rhetoric. Here in REMEMBERANCE, and especially in LAST BOLSHEVIK, we have extremely refined work with photographs (it's shocking how sturdy the conventions are for filming documents and photographs for a movie; Marker doesn't use them, even when he uses them). A little 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, and epochs are brutal and unmistakable, "combat" and "testimony" to history. They don't crash into our time's back however. They come around and face us, gently lapping onto our epoch's doorstep.

A grand idea of the movie, perhaps suited to photography: Bellon's pictures somehow registered the moments when "post-war (WWI) became pre-war (WWII)."

Victorious steel turned to rubbish.

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

Adverts for alcohol and socialism.

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

She 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..."

REMEMBERANCE OF THINGS TO COME was once available on Youtube. Here are the carcasses of that fact :

part one

part two



part three





part four



part five