This month’s installment of Still/Life features two deeply personal ruminations on the rapport between the image, both still and moving, and the flux of memory, from eminent artists Chris Marker and Danny Lyon.
Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (If I had four dromedaries)
Chris Marker
1966 / France, West Germany / 49 minutes
Chris Marker’s imagistic aesthetic finds perhaps its most concise and lyrical expression in this underseen photo-essay from 1966, shot over a decade in twenty-six countries and released four years after his landmark La Jeteé. Taking its title from an Apollinaire text (by way of a Francis Poulenc chanson) – of roaming the world and admiring it, given four camels for the journey – Marker’s film mounts a peripatetic montage of his own black-and-white photographs to the rhythm of a philosophical inquiry-cum-conversation. Cutting between cities as distant and disparate as Peking, Seoul, Havana, Oslo, Stockholm, Tokyo and Paris, Marker alights on a host of faces and places ripe for personal, political, and cultural exegesis, narrated with a measured delivery that’s at once witty and wistful, always poetic and ever political. The maker of images is likened to a hunter of angels, their wanderlust forever at the mercy of the inscrutable.
Born To Film
Danny Lyon
1982 / US / 33 minutes / 16mm
A multi-generational family portrait seen through the lens of…. the camera. Photojournalist and photographer Danny Lyon captures the quotidian life of his son Raphael as any doting parent might: growing up in New York City in the early 80’s, steering his bike through the city’s (since vanished) asphalt playgrounds, struggling with homework, riding the Bronx-line train. (Perhaps an exception is tending to a pet snake that has cozied up to the Steenbeck editing table). Woven into the film are images from the director’s own childhood, shot with a similarly impressionistic hand by his father, a newly arrived emigré from Germany in the 1930s. A home movie imbricated within a home movie, Lyon’s family album conjugates several tenses at once; from the wartime expatriation of his parents to his own family’s trips to the American west. Lyon limns a portrait in which personal and historical memory become inextricable; the effects of lineage disclosed through profound particularity accrue timeless and universal resonance.
TAM Cinema is a moving image series screened at Tacoma Art Museum.