In the booklet that accompanies the CD-Rom designed for a 1997 installation in the Centre Georges Pompidou, Immemory One, Chris. Marker imagines a new paradigm for memory. Rather than conceiving of memory as a way of organizing time, he suggests that it is instead more like a geography. His justification for such a shift is that it would in effect disable the “rêveries mégalomaniaques” that induce us to consider our memories as if they were “History”, rather than as they truly are: radically limited by our particularities of time, space, race, gender, class, or nationality. What he offers as an example of this “geographical memory” is, of course, the interactive CD-Rom that he playfully titled “Immemory”, and which offers the spectator/user the chance to take a self-directed tour through Chris Marker’s “memory”, or at least through the 300 or so film clips that Marker has selected as his particular memory-landscape.

This paper takes as its point of departure the intimacy of the gesture constituted by the exposition of Immemory as an installation open to the public and its subsequent distribution (it will be re-issued in September 2002). Looking back over Marker’s career from the point of view of Immemory, the myriad strategies of distanciation that Marker has traditionally used in order to disassociate himself from his work (i.e. he uses a pseudonym; legend has it that he refuses to be photographed; and he never narrates his own films) become all the more apparent. Through an investigation of “parafilmic” elements of Marker’s films I argue that in his universe the filmic medium comes to stand in for memory, for the space in which the individual and the collective intersect.