Marker’s Madeleines: the Essay beyond Text and Film

• Main Author: Philip Bijoy
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Babes-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca 2019-12-01
• Series: Metacritic Journal for Comparative Studies and Theory
• Subjects: chris marker; commentaires; le dépays; sans soleil; immemory; ouvroir
• Online Access: https://www.metacriticjournal.com/article/135/markers-madeleines-the-essay-beyond-text-and-film

This paper focuses on Chris Marker‘s status as an essayist but, instead of taking his cinematic works, it explores his early print essays Commentaires (1967), Le Dépays (Chrismarker.org), and his later digital works – Immemory (Gorgomancy.net) and Ouvroir (SecondLife.com). This study is based on the argument that the essay is a malleable form and that it serves its primary function of expressing thought through a process of combining disparate elements in a non-linear format. Further, it argues that this digressive nature of the essay not only enables it to combine different media such as the use of photographs and text, but also it is capable of combining material between media and produce an entirely new medium such as multimedial works in the digital sphere.