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TIFF Bell Lightbox looks back on the innovative career of French filmmaker Chris Marker

For those seeking a smart, thoughtful and experimental diversion from the bombastic, spectacle-filled and cliché-driven Hollywood fare that is being served up in movie theatres as summer approaches, TIFF Bell Lightbox has something special for you.

Perhaps most important, it’s something that is visually, emotionally and mentally challenging, unless you actually do wish to be entertained by robots clashing or hip-hop infused ’20s escapades.

Remembrance of Things to Come: Works by Chris Marker began last night and runs through May 19 as a retrospective on the filmmaker’s intriguing and innovative work. Marker was a French writer, photographer and filmmaker, known for creating essay-films, and he is often catalogued as part of the Rive Gauche group of the French New Wave movement. 

TIFF Cinematheque has presented retrospectives to Marker in the past, but this will be the first since his death in July, 2012. Since his passing, his work has undergone restoration, which has preserved his poetic, unique films for fans new and old to enjoy and experience. His films are fittingly “now,” and in a different way, timeless.

The event began with a screening of Sans Soleil, a travelogue that chronicles Marker’s time in Iceland, Paris, San Francisco and Tokyo. From the perspective of a wandering, unknown outsider, Marker muses on society with equal parts sadness and melancholy.

The series continues with Marker’s fascinating science fiction exploration of time and space, La Jetée. Set following the events of a World War III, the film — comprised almost entirely of still shots — is a meditation on memory and death. Remembrance of Things to Come, as well as The Sixth Side of the Pentagon will be shown in conjunction.

Saturday night’s A Grin Without a Cat is perhaps Marker’s most memorable endeavour, and is surely his grandest and most ambitious. Spanning four hours (yes, four), Marker’s epic essay-film is driven by global unrest and geopolitics, featuring interviews with politicians, activists and social leaders. The film has been realized as not a piece of propaganda or a film with a cause, but as a marvelous cinematic experience that documents how history is remembered and understood.

The words “trippy” or “sublime” are descriptive of much of Marker’s work, as well as the oft-overused phrase, “influential.” Marker widened the scope of what could be done on camera, creating films that capture the political, cultural and imaginative sensibilities of a time and place.

Check out the full schedule here.

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