In Chris Marker’s work, the interpellation to remember constitutes an ontological and ethical imperative. Both for the individual and the collectivity, both as a theme and a formal organizing element of film, remembrance is both necessary and precarious. As Marker himself asks in Sans Soleil, “ how do people remember things if they don’t film, don’t tape?”

    This concern for the past informs Marker’s politics as well: much as politics is an implicit or explicit projection into the future, it is simultaneously an art of keeping grievances alive and hence casting a glance back. It is in this sense that Marker’s political project, as glimpsed in such films as Sans Soleil, Le Tombeau d’Alexandre and Le Fond de l’Air est Rouge, is always teetering on the brink of a certain leftist nostalgia, even melancholy. Certain idols of the international left, such as Fidel Castro, Che Guevera and Salvador Allende, make privileged appearances calculated to elicit immediate sympathy as defeated, yet honorable and necessary heroes. Does Marker fetishize the past? Is there a way of remembering that is not a narcissistic reification? Is nostalgia the only recourse left to the Left?

    In order to respond to this question, my paper investigates Marker’s mise en scène of memory, i.e. how image and word foreground the necessity of remembering while simultaneously questioning its possibility. Through a glance at two filmmakers who (surprisingly, if we regard Marker as a “leftist”) occupy privileged positions in Marker’s thought, Hitchcock and Tarkovsky, I delineate Marker’s ambivalence about a certain kind of remembrance and his awareness of the dangers of the reification of the past. Marker asks that we remember the past, but also that we remember it always anew. For Marker memory is not stable ground to protect, but a protean gesture of self-constitution, an oblique but still-viable political project.