Becoming a Film Auteur

Before Chris Marker became the elusive auteur behind La Jetée (1962) and Sans Soleil (1983), he was a sharp-witted, prolific film critic whose early writings mapped the intellectual terrain of postwar cinema. This essay, drawing on my translation of a newly available volume of his criticism (Chris Marker: Early Film Criticism, University of Minnesota Press, 2024), also sheds light on the little-known period of his activities during World War II. It traces how Marker, born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, subsequently sharpened his voice in the pages of Esprit and the newly launched Cahiers du Cinéma and Positif. In dialogue with contemporaries like André Bazin and Joseph Rovan, both active in the Peuple et Culture and Travail et Culture educational movements, Marker positioned himself within, and against, the orthodoxies of the emerging French film culture. Reflecting on his essays on various films and the national cinemas of Germany, Mexico, and Hollywood, I trace the emergence of a distinctly international critical voice-profoundly allergic to the type of popular film writing focused on stars and the glitz of the film world. Attentive to the hope of a burgeoning women's cinema, Marker crafted a sensibility that blurred politics and aesthetics, travel writing and philosophy, preparing the ground for his later cinematic experiments. Equally decisive was the still photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, William Klein, and Robert Frank, and the rise of the photo book, which profoundly shaped his style. Far from being a secondary apprenticeship, Marker's early film criticism (1948-1954) reveals a writer testing the ideas that would shape his films: time as montage, memory as collage, and the photo book as a template for cinematic form. In charting this passage "from pen to camera," I place Marker in dialogue with Alexandre Astruc's 1948 call for a caméra-stylo-a cinema written as personally as prose. His criticism, I argue, was not just commentary but the crucible in which he forged the sensibility that made him one of cinema's most enigmatic, intriguing, and influential auteurs

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