Chris Marker Quotes

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

Chris Marker

#2. We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.

Chris Marker

#3. 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.

Chris Marker

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

Chris Marker

#5. I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me,

Chris Marker

#6. ...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.

Chris Marker

#7. Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Chris Marker

#8. An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

Chris Marker

#9. 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.

Chris Marker

#10. 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?

Chris Marker

#11. I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.

Chris Marker

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

Chris Marker

#13. 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

Chris Marker

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

Chris Marker

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

Chris Marker

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

Chris Marker