Silences

Chris Marker is an unclassifiable artist, by turns film-maker, photographer, poet and artist. Author of the notorious film La Jetée (1963), science-fiction narrative presented in the form of a photomontage, he lastingly shook up narrative convention by cultivating a type of middle-ground between political documentary and dark fantasy. The work Owls At Noon Prelude :The Hollow Men follows the lines of video installation. The spectator finds himself in the middle of a system of eight screens in which hallucinatory images evoke the suffering of World War I soldiers, women’s faces and fragments of T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Hollow Men 1925.

Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, 2005
Multimedia installation, 19’
Commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art New York, and curated by Colin McCabe
Private collection

Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1921 – Lives and works in Paris