Chris Marker Quotes

I will have spent my life trying to understand the function of remembering, which is not the opposite of forgetting, but rather its lining. We do not remember. We rewrite memory much as history is rewritten. How can one remember thirst?

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don’t choose your time.

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.

I’ve been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me.

...after a certain quantity, photos apparently taken by chance, postcards chosen according to a passing mood, begin to trace an itinerary, to map the imaginary country that stretches out before us.

I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

We feel more emotion... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.

I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling.

And always the animals from each trip you bring back a gaze a pose a gesture that points to the truest of humanity better than images of humanity itself

What I'm passionate about is History, and politics interest me only insofar as it is the cross-section of History in the present.