Abstract

“Speak to it, Horatio. Thou art a scholar.” –Shakespeare, Hamlet With the recent passing of the world’s “best-known unknown filmmaker,” Chris Marker, it is axiomatic that left-wing melancholy now includes the ongoing loss of previously lost causes – a paradox that suggests the true address of all lost causes worth defending is a strange confluence of past and futural states, as one state. This double loss as gain is also the primary mark of the “landscape” of pessimistic optimism that also denotes the foremost position to occupy today in the battles associated with capitalist end times (Slavoj Žižek’s term). Cultural ecology is no longer what it once was – that is to say, a strange amalgam of vernacular essences perpetrated in the rather forlorn 1970s and/or the insistent and incessant production of difference. Instead, cultural ecology invokes spectral civil war – arguably the very state of things today – and the return of “the dead” in the persistence of forms of high-formalist and high-conceptualist works of art and architecture. This paper examines the late works of the late Chris Marker, including the very short videos he uploaded to YouTube under the pseudonym “Kosinki” from 2007 to 2011, an event contiguous with his return to exhibiting very-still photography from 2006 to 2011. Marker’s simultaneous returns to still photography and the short film-essay are both magnificent gestures toward the austerities required of present-day media to effect the necessary “return” to what is always present in one form or another anyway – the non-place between world and world-to-come.