This thesis explores the poetics of editing in the films and multimedia works of Chris Marker. From his first essay films of the 1950s to his 1998 CD-ROM Immemory, the directors work has attracted critical attention for its beauty and originality of expression. Much existing analysis engages with this work in terms of its subject matter and themes and their relationship with its associational, rather than linear, narrative form, with relatively little focus on the stylistics of Markers editing. While questions of the directors thematic concerns also arise in my study, I argue that Markers contribution to cinema and the visual arts cannot be fully appreciated without a systematic understanding of his stylisticshis expressive use of cinematic forms and patterns. In developing such an understanding, this thesis utilises the work of a number of film writers explicitly concerned with the expressive use of cinematic space and time. From Andr?? Bazin, I take the idea of rapprochement to mean the way the comparison between two juxtaposed events or images suggests or expresses the meaning of their juxtaposition. From Jean-Andr?? Fieschi, I draw on the idea that the dialectical interaction of the plastic, formal and narrative elements of a film gives meaning to its cinematic space and time. My approach synthesises and builds upon both ideas for its account of the stylistics of Markers work. Starting with a preliminary analysis of one cinematic comparison in The Case of the Grinning Cat (2004), I then consider Markers exploration of the imaginative potential of a single image sequence in The Last Bolshevik (1993). After this, I explore examples of the stylistic figure of rapprochement in Letter from Siberia (1958), and the stylistic figure of transformation in Sunless (1982). The thesis then studies articulations of rapprochement and transformation in the museum installations Zapping Zone: Proposals for an Imaginary Television (1991), Silent Movie (1995) and the CD-ROM Immemory.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/222375 |
| Date | January 2009 |
| Creators | Broad, Lynne, English, Media, & Performing Arts, Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences, UNSW |
| Publisher | Publisher:University of New South Wales. English, Media, & Performing Arts |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright, http://unsworks.unsw.edu.au/copyright |
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