The day Agnès Varda visited Chris Marker’s virtual world
If you have a keen interest in French cinema, you’ll be aware of the division between the Left Bank and the Right Bank filmmakers during the nouvelle vague. ‘Division’ might be the wrong word because these artists were not working in opposition – in fact, many of them were friends. Rather, they were two loose collectives divided by the Seine, their approaches to filmmaking slightly differing from one another, with the Right Bank filmmakers typically opting for stronger narratives, having all met and bonded over a love of classic cinema while working at the magazine Cahiers du cinema.
While all of the French New Wave filmmakers were very experimental, figures like Agnès Varda and Chris Marker, both part of the Left Bank, were much less interested in the history of cinema (Varda had only seen a handful of films when she made her debut feature, La Pointe Courte) and more so in its capabilities as a mixed-media artform. Both Varda and Marker were incredible photographers as well as filmmakers, something that is evident through their frequent use of still imagery within their work, such as Varda’s Ulysses and Marker’s La Jetée.
The pair hated to be limited to one medium, and over the course of Varda’s career, the filmmaker could be found making art installations, experimenting with self-referential nonfiction films, or creating narrative features that blended documentary and fiction. Meanwhile, Marker made films, photos, essays, and video installations and formed the left-wing group SLON, which made political films in protest of events such as the Vietnam War.
Later in his career, Marker also became fascinated by digital technology, an interest that Varda shared, although not as intensely. While Varda explored the opportunities that arose from picking up a handheld digital camera in the 2000s with films like The Gleaners and I, Marker was building his own world on Second Life, even creating a museum and surveying his kingdom with his avatar—an orange cat named Guillaume-en-Egypte.
In Varda’s short film In Chris Marker’s Studio, she visits her old pal in his home studio, which is loaded with the best kind of mess you can imagine: piles of books, newspaper clippings, film posters, cameras, computers, two television screens playing the news, and cutouts of Guillaume-en-Egypte. It’s a beautiful vision of chaos, the kind of space that only Marker, the genius, could navigate. Varda doesn’t show Marker’s face – he preferred to maintain a sense of anonymity in older age – but we get to know him through the fascinating artefacts he is surrounded by.
Most interestingly, however, is the section of the film in which Varda is granted access to Marker’s online world, with an avatar resembling the filmmaker with her signature bowl cut made for her to explore his island, L’Ouvroir. “Marker’s no fake, but he does lead a double life. Or rather, he exists elsewhere, virtually, on the website Second Life,” Varda tells us.
Varda and Guillaume-en-Egypte dance together on the island before she visits Marker’s museum, which contains stills from his films. She falls into a hole, where pictures float by, only to end up listening to Guillaume-en-Egypte playing piano before sitting on a large sofa shaped like a cat. It’s a bizarre journey into Marker’s mind, but it reflects his constant quest for innovation and his ability to utilise new mediums to convey his ideas.
Marker saw the potential in Second Life to create a world that could blend visual media with active participation from other users who could visit his museum or simply dance in this shared virtual space, existing somewhere between the realm of art and life. While other former French New Wave filmmakers continued to make narrative features or visual essays, Marker, always the radical, preferred to explore the opportunities found in a virtual world.
