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Introductory lecture by Angela Piccini, University of Bristol

Screening starts at 7.00pm

The late Chris Marker’s cine-essay is dense and demanding. Ostensibly a portrait of photographer Denise Bellon, focusing on the two decades between 1935 and 1955, the film leaps and backtracks, Marker-style, from subject to subject, from a family portrait of Bellon and her two daughters, Loleh and Yannick (the latter co-authored the film), to a wide-ranging history of surrealism, of the city of Paris, of French cinema and the birth of the cinémathèque, of Europe, the National Front, the Second World War and Spanish Civil War, and postwar politics and culture.

Full of Marker jokes, word play, filmic homages (Musidora makes a memorable appearance), peculiar art history, a consideration of the 1952 Olympics, and astounding segues from French colonialism in Africa to women in the Maghreb, to a Jewish wedding and gypsy culture in Europe, to Mein Kampf and the Nazi death camps (Birkenau, Auschwitz), the film opens with Dali and ends with Mompou, traversing in its short time a world of thought, feeling, and history.

In this lecture we consider the themes of time-travel, archives and memory that are explored in Arnolfini’s autumn season. We will look at how films broadly (and problematically) described as ‘documentary’ engage with place and memory, specifically focusing on the late Chris Marker’s film Remembrance of Things to Come (2003). Angela Piccini

Dir. Chris Marker France 2003 42mins Subtitled