“We have to deliver strictly what the title implies—the Gutenberg version of a McLuhan object, no more, no less.” When other of his writings suggested more, he declined, he didn’t want “a Marker encyclopedia” either. Gutenberg means the printed page, instead of a 1998 hypertext multimedia Macintosh CD-ROM (remember those?), translated from the original French and published by Exact Change in the US. Mac System updates then stymied Marker (hey, I thought I was so smart creating interactive kiosk multimedia artworks in Macromind Director v. 2, that then proved unplayable on v. 5). An online Adobe Flash version Of Immemory online went dark on 1/1/21. Shortly before his 2012 death, Marker reworked it, also published by Exact Change of Cambridge MA. And years of subsequent editorial work turned it into this book.

I first encountered the eminently creative Chris Marker when “La Jetée”, a 1962 movie almost entirely made of black and white stills, was shown in 1971 in my high school French class (the teacher, bless her heart, also gave me comics by Druillet). I was then transfixed by “Sans Soleil” (1983), in San Francisco’s Roxie Cinema not long after it came out. Here was an epistolary cinema like no other, letters from travel as a voice over atop footage of ferry boat passengers, Tokyo Ginza and its erotic museum, antimilitary protestors run through colorful analog video filter, memories and philosophical epiphanies from the road. I loved this movie’s subjectivity, switching between subject matters and cinematic styles.

Walter Benjamin sought to reconstruct the Paris of about fifty years before his birth with massive collection of citations and epiphanies, which he outlined in “Paris, Capital of the Nineteenth Century”. When I was asked thirty years ago to pitch a virtual reality artwork to France Telecom’s California lab, I suggested one could be based on Benjamin’s “Paris…”, with its five discrete arenas of Arcades, Panoramas, World’s Fairs, Interiors, Baudelaire the flaneur, and the Barricades…but instead they chose someone else’s idea for fishing game, sigh. Marker breaks his hypermedia Immemory into 1. Cinema, 2. War, 3. Memory, 4. Photography, 5. Poetry, 6. Travel, 7. Museum, and 8. XPLUGS.

Was every literary hypertext ultimately a noble failure? A groping towards a future polyliterature yet unrealized, perhaps—despite continual technological innovation and personal power—unrealizable? As Scott McCloud proposed Reinventing Comics (title of his 2000 book) using branching digital media, Marker explores “zones” of memory with word and image; his narrative Bifurcations were inspired by Julio Cortozar’s novel Hopscotch. Gustave Flaubert used lists—of goddesses, monsters and heresies— effectively in his early Temptation of St. Anthony, and clumsily in his late Bouvard and Pechuet. Marker’s voice seems to say “This reminds me of this, which reminds me of this, which reminds me…”  Consequently, this review may prove maddening, or scattershot, as I map the global range of his subject matter, which Marker weaves into mini-narratives…or sometimes, not.

Immemory: Gutenberg Version’s imagery begins with a Photoshop’d astronaut in a hall of cat portraits. He draws his image of a grinning cat from Parisian graffiti, representing his own house pet Guillaume-en-Egypt, whose pop-up image serves in the onscreen Immemory as an icon to access further information. His text then scampers over St. Augustine, Marcel Proust, fragmentary Japanese memoirs “written with the brush”, Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”, scientist Robert Hooke in the 17th century, and geography both geophysical and a Second Life island.

Section 1 on Cinema begins with childhood memory of the aviators in “Wings” among heroic World War I movies. He recalls not Carl Dreyer’s version featuring Renée Falconetti, but Simone Genevois as Joan, petting a cat in Marc de Gastyne’s 1927 Joan of Arc biopic, a crisp restoration Marker saw in 1986. Count Dracula was another hero of his childhood, all the way up through Christopher Lee’s 1970s version. He then assembles a mammoth list of great ladies, both characters and actors, and film titles (the Russian “Aelita”, Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”) well-served by their directors.

Section 2 is War. From further cinema representations of WWI to a group photograph from 1942, including François Vernet—introduced by four short poems—who died in Dachau. Tarot cards depicting Slovenian concentration camp life are contrasted with the tomb of Anton Webern, composer shot by an American soldier in 1945. Marker shows photos of Okinawa, a bloodied US protestor, and Bosnian refugee woman. As many noted, the Gulf War of 1991 was essentially presented as video game to incinerate the bad guys.

Section 3 is Memory…which is, in effect, the entire project. Proust’s madeleine pastry evoked for him the past, whereas Marker ponders a playbill, remembered scenes, a bit of audio, then the character Madeleine in Hitchcock’s “Vertigo”. An important character in the entire project is Uncle Anton, a distinguished Mitteleuropäisch dandy, evoked by his magnifier and his photography album labeled Postcards, kinsman to aunts who fought a duel or had elaborate outfits for costume balls. Photographer Anton’s rich collection includes late 19th into mid-20th century artistic nudes, double exposures and travel photos from Venice, Spain, Portugal, and Cuba, including one shot of severed heads. Marker spins grand this-reminds-me-of- these reveries as the Immemory enters into the to artificially-bordered area number 4, Photography. Continuing Anton’s archival inclinations, these are Chris Marker’s own shots from travel in Korea, Japan, China, Cuba, Russia, Elsewhere. The historic event of the 19th c. execution of French missionaries in Korea, and France’s military response, is given its Korean justification. Marker’s travel to Pyongyang led to a somewhat patronizing meditation on the Korean people. He has a rich exchange with a woman whose parents were killed by American troops in the Korean war and recounts the propaganda he saw in US 1954 beside Korean books with romantic titles. He finds Japanese clothing and Mexican in Kaesong market where “Vexed, I buy a pink cat”. Children dance for his camera, while adults carry things to market upon their heads. Ginseng’s healing properties are treasured. 

The entire mise-en-scene, postwar socialist landscape changes during his visit, reveals further layers. “Every Korean meal is a costume party—but the food wears the disguises. The eggs are cross hatched, the duck is lacquered, the beef askew, the greens red-hot…the salad is mixed up, the tongue falls silent, the brains are amnesiac. As for the fish, you’d best be quick—it cuttles.” He appreciates two children hand in hand, taking a stone from “a roadway of meteors” in a land of folktales, fairytale animals, memory, almost feverish dreams.

Marker loves the literature, and Korean cinema, which evokes comparisons of Korea to Italy. Tales if the Three Sisters and the Celestial Lord center the list of the 32 Spirits & Stars that govern life. He feels he travels through an enchanted area. Expressive dances are described. He visits an underground theater that played on during the worst of the Korean war. Also tombs, stone statues, skilled bowmen, drum and accordion music for slow-dancing Sunday couples that might include a 19th c. work song with the lines “The water-lily blossoms, moistened by the rain, as beautiful as the three thousand servant girls bathing…We crossed a carpet of flowers on our horses; at each step our mounts crushed the flowers and freed their perfumes…

A 1997 coda informs us the text dates to its 1959 publication, excoriated as politically incorrect by both Left and Right. He muses on ideology in the post-Cold War 1990s, that which one US triumphalist called the “end of history”.

In Japan early in the morning, his descriptions are reminiscent of Roland Barthes’ fine little 1970 book The Empire of Signs. In a bar he remembers a cat named Whisky, and the omnipresent maneki neko cat with paw raised in greeting. Sleepers on the early morning commuter train. Bake-neko sorceress cat in the body of a woman. Some of this content I remember from his movie “Sans Soleil”. This is Marker’s tabino soshi, travel diary. He visits an institute studying 24 different owl species, advocating their protection. He travels to northerly Hokkaido and southerly Okinawa. In 1981 he saw homeless in Japan on the streets, stags and singing women at dawn in Nara, recognizing how at the time filmmaker Kurosawa was at work on the medieval epic Ran.

We jump to China in 1955, which Marker finds colorful, even a Hong Kong beggar with a stomach tumor. His black and white 1980 travel photos there ride the rails to a section with fairies and portraits of women from around the world, including a Russian woman in the 1920s photographed by his uncle Anton.

Marker’s memoirs of Cuba saw him in 1970 cutting cane in the sweltering Oriente, richly described here, including the ersatz coffee (in Cuba!), grim officials, workers’ fatigue, and campesinos’ poverty. Yet he also has recollection of his 1934 childhood residence in Cuba, visited by his family friend the gentlemanly, imperious French Ambassador. Havana boasted “Streets strolling out to the quays like women’s legs”. Reflecting on a game of Chinese origin with symbolic animals suggests to him the mixed heritage of painter Wilfredo Lam. A panoramic photo of Havana cuts—Marker is a filmmaker—to 1961 and Castro’s revolution, here in Marker’s own documentary photos.

Did the online version of Immemory include audio selections from the gay musician Bola de Nieve? He’s remembered appreciatively, along with the muralist René Portocaarrero, plus two female revolutionary filmmakers who died young.

From Cuba to Russia, beginning with an impression (as he provided of Tokyo) of Moscow at dawn, in the era of De-Stalinization and erasure of the dictator’s ubiquitous presences after his death. The 1957 Youth Festival might have heralded the Sixties thaw, and we see pretty actresses at Mosfilm studio who caught his eye.

Allusions to French directors Varda and Godard then present

Children, the Pushkin Museum, a graveyard in winter, and a circus.

Marker’s humanist photographs are like those by Jean Mohr, John Berger’s collaborator on three books.

The click of the mouse—or in book version, turn of the page—takes us to GuineaBissau, its carnival and Cape Verde Islands, contemplative women with dark eyes and the housemaid who killed the gecko that listened to his classical music. Then volcanic Iceland. Then Chile in the Allende days, his Unidad Popular movement already in decline and fearing electoral defeat, not military coup. The portent, not seen at the time, of ancient Chilean mummies.

Section 5 is subtitled Poetry: Rare, Giants, Elsewhere. Marker advises you can skip it if you don’t read French, but we are given a Shakespeare sonnet, Quevedo in Spanish then English translation, and Rilke’s Second Duino Elegy (translated by whom? Marker?). Chris Marker’s own short poems are about Siberian reindeer, a blackbird in Brittany. There’s a Basho haiku from Japan, followed by a poem of the otter and the wolf evoking Rumania. Animakus is a section of short haiku (originally animated?) by Yano, Wada, Sujiro. Closing thoughts by Marker are on other moments when poems by Valéry, Char and Mandelstam enchanted him.

The author calls section 6 Travel, and it’s brief and trivial. It’s odd that he created a separate chapter called this, for the majority of what was previously presented were travel photographs, Marker’s own (and some Uncle Anton’s), and travel memories. He takes a moment to appreciate the impact of Jules Verne and illustrated 19th c. travelogues upon him as a child, juxtaposed with memorable Uncle Anton’s photographs. Some miscellaneous shots from around the world here sometimes lose the thread of coherent narrative, as when Algerian exiles in France celebrate their home nation’s independence.

Hypertext can be a messy garage, basement or attic. Or it can rise as complicated but substantial as Postman Cheval’s Palais Idéal, architecture from a sculptural assemblage of pebbles. The elegant moment of stewardesses’ giving a seat belt demo using classical Cambodian dance gestures land us at the seventh section, called the Museum. Such institutions were little Chris’s childhood fascination, like this reviewer’s own. He shows some unexpected paintings like those of Niko Pirosmanashvili in Tbilisi, Georgia. A few contemporary Americans, then a nod to video art.

Hypermedia can become a museum, and paintings are swapped before a seated couple’s eyes. Pigeons distinguish between different paintings, some by unappreciated fourteenth century surrealists.

“Beast Wishes” from a cat drawn in the artist’s blood, Nefertiti beside a giraffe, a beachfront seal, a Titian Venus gazing like an owl, a cat like Crivelli virgin. The Imagined Museum displays faces, artworks, photos, more from travel to carnivals in Cuba and Guinea-Bissau.

The eighth chapter XPLUGS is both satisfying in a unique way, and frustrating.  Marker proudly gives us a gallery of digital collages, which makes sense in a 1990s hypermedia product, but many suffer from the era’s tendency towards “Photoshop Abuse”, the proudly intrusive prevalence of the tools and filters rather than balanced design of the content. Many have the claustrophobic overdetermined look and feel of some 1990s comic books, where digital color separations and manipulations on higher quality paper were used without restraint. Chris Maker laments the too-soon disappearance of an arty magazine he worked on called BINARY (perhaps enthusiastic as 1990s MONDO 2000, WIRED or ARTBYTE) which was published October, November and December 2001. “The disaster having obviously put an end to its publication”—the 9/11/01 catastrophe that brought down the twin towers in NYC? Photo-collages as one saw in many publications, layered unthinkingly, overly-complex, difficult to read (figure-ground problems with complex overlaid text); I railed at a generation of students for these sins.  Some arresting images like a stealth bomber as a scowling owl, and interesting collages, using images from art history (Courbet’s clinical “The Source of the World”) and WWII-Blitz’d London are among the roughly seventy images he gives us here, a museum without textual information, an isolated wing not integrated with the previous text(s).

Immemory is a project that probably should’ve been a book to begin with, photos juxtaposed with essays of any length, much like James Agee and Walker Evans’ 1941 Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or the previously mentioned books John Berger produced with photographer Jean Mohr.

One recalls diverse multimedia like Marker’s exhibited by members of YLEM Artists Using Science & Technology on the west coast, and SCAN Small Computers in the Arts Network on the east. In the 1990s we were all so enthusiastic about interactivity in the new branching digital media; a panel on hypertext literature at an ISEA International Symposium of Electronic Art ultimately helped me secure a tenured Professorship. Chris Marker lived from 1921-2012 so in 1998, when he undertook the Immemory hypertext, he was 77. Nevertheless, despite Immemory’s long, torturous production history, to finally (with a bit of irony) resolve in the time-tested medium of a book between covers, it’s good that this mature filmmaker undertook a significant project testing the boundaries and potentials of the promising new onscreen digital media.