"Sent to Intermedio the 16th of December of 2006." "The Marker Variations" "The Blind Photographer" "It is said that the natives of Dijon are scared of photography." "Because they think that by photographing them, the photographers will steal their soul." "But it's a lie." "In every anthropologist lies a frustrated poet." "Our story begins in Dijon." "In the second half of the 19th century." "The king Sabu then governed in Dijon like a new god." "As a child Sabu studied in Europe." "And was the first chief of the African state who understood the usefulness of the politics of photography." "Sabu began to pose like a Roman emperor." "Soon, the ancient gods were expelled from the temples." "And replaced in the altars by Sabu's photos." "In all the houses." "In the bedrooms." "In the plazas and avenues." "Even in the most filthy alleys." "The image of Sabu was omnipresent." "Nothing could be done without exposing themselves to his penetrating look." "Soon, a hierarchy was established for the methods of taking pictures that thanks to their size, permitted to recognize instantly if the photo was of Sabu or one of his lieutenants." "A viceroy." "A general." "A colonel." "Only one photographer had the privilege to photograph Sabu." "That photographer also shot the only colored photos of Sabu." "Just like the only ones to be taken in the first shot." "A type of image... the head cut-out without its body." "In the beginning, nobody could distinguish whether it belonged to a god or a monster." "Sabu." "Not even that many photos could protect him from the imminent revolution." "None of the infinite photos could see the young Maub arming and training his soldiers by night." "And no photo raised the alarm when Maub crossed over the great large wall." "And his troops unloaded the anger like so many years against the power of Sabu." "As soon as he had the power at his disposal, Maub began to rule like a new god." "Sabu and his lieutenants, the viceroys, generals, colonels were jailed until further notice." "Revolutions always do the opposite of the preceding government." "Just like that, Maub immediately banned the photographs." "Marked like heresy." "A symbol of the evil and corruption." "All the photos were lies." "And for that, they should be burned." "Sabu's official photographer had his eyes ripped out and they were fed to the goats." "Maub dedicated the days on the throne pondering how to take revenge on his predecessor." "To find a way to get rid of Sabu that was for the inhabitants of Dijon so memorable like their reign had done." "But how to overcome the memory of so many photographs?" "In the dead of night, Maub suddenly sat upright." "He had an idea." "He ordered Sabu and everyone else to court dressed in their finest suits all the way to the throne hall." "The same one they had posed so many times." "In front of them, on the other side of the hall there was the official photographer hidden in back of his old camera." "And it was all an event to listen to Sabu and his deputies scream when they looked at the blind photographer who had carved the image of their glory." "Because they knew the orders that Maub had given." "For once, the photography would be real." "And all of them were outcrying to attempt that the blind photographer who was forced to photograph them one by one, so that he would orient himself correctly and capture them whole." "Since Maub ordered:" "Everything that didn't appear in the photographs a foot, a hand, a torso, a head... had to dissapear." "A mutilation could return a photograph its truth." "After all, a first shot always a decapitation." "And a blur, a dissapearance." "The inhabitants of Dijon were never afraid that a photo could rob their soul." "They are still afraid of Sabu and Maub." "The music of stone." "I write to you this mail from Girona." "My birth city." "The province of Girona is famous for the Brave Coast beaches." "For Salvador Dali." "For its cathedral." "Dali took Federico García Lorca to the cathedral and the poet would describe it in one word:" "Atrocious." "But Lorca didn't know the secrets of the cathedral." "The whole city of Girona is made of stone." "The seals are of stone." "The witches are of stone." "Even the music is made of stone." "A few years ago the archaeologists studied the capitals of the" "Roman cloister from the cathedral." "And they discovered that each capital corresponds to a musical note." "According to them, of the cloister is nothing more than a staff carved in the stone during the 12th century." "A musical phrase that the friars would sing around the patio." "The investigators needed various years to discover how the hidden music sounded." "They studied the columns capital by capital." "Note for note." "When at last, they got it transcribed on paper and make the melody sound, the investigators were perplexed." "The music of the cloister sounded like the music of Johann Sebastian Bach." "How is this possible they told themselves." "How could the monks from the 12th century compose a piece exactly like the ones" "Bach would make much later?" "The mystery was served." "If Bach had come up to the monks 900 years ago like a prophet.." "We're to believe that it's an authentic premonition." "But if the music had been induced the same investigators," "Bach was only a phantasm." "A mirage." "The rocks would need nine centuries to learn to sound like Bach." "In either case, the story would have delighted Dali." "As we can see today carved in the facade of the cathedral around 1700." "The forbidden cameras." "I write this mail from Buenos Aires." "The divided city." "Here, everything is divided in two opposite halves:" "Politics and sports, of course, but also the literature." "Ricardo Piglia and César Aira are two important Argentine writers." "They are not alike at all." "Piglia has to be from the Boca Juniors.." "and Aira from River Plate." "Piglia needs years to write a book." "Aira writes 4 books each month." "Book after book, they dedicated their efforts.." "to hate each other and all of his literary talent to insult each other." "After Piglia saw how the insults took a lot of time and he had hardly written anything.." "he decided to stop with the game." "He concluded that César Aira did not exist." "Because it was impossible that anybody should be able to write that many.." "works in such short time." "Aira can't be more than a pseudonym." "The mask that every good Argentine writer used to send off their worst books." "At times I ask myself if Chris Marker really exists." "In the birth records of the French registers, there is no one with that name." "I read in a dictionary.." "Marker." "Some conspicuous object used to distinguish or mark something" "Some conspicuous object used to distinguish or mark something." "A recurrent rumor asserts that Chris Marker and his cat Guillaume-en-egypte.." "drowned with the Titanic." "Then who hides behind that pseudonym?" "This is a Chris Marker." "By Agnes Varda." "Here we have a shot from Chris Marker." "Filmed by Johan van der Keuken." "He told me that it was, for him, the image of happiness and that he had tried.." "several times to connect it to other images, but had never succeeded." "This is a Chris Marker." "By Alan Berliner" "And now an Eisenstein by Chris Marker." "Vertigo." "In the credit spiral, he was looking at a time covering a larger and larger range.." "as he's moving away, a cyclone whose present instant contains, motionless, the eye." "A Chris Marker of Alfred Hitchcock." "In this case, a premake." "So tidily encoded inside the curl that it's impossible to go wrong and not disclose.." "right off this space's vertigo truly stands for time's vertigo." "And so Sophia Coppola also attempted to make her Chris Marker." "But she would ended like its title indicates:" "Lost in translation." "It's not enough knowing how to film." "To film with Chris Marker's pseudonym, it's necessary to complete many requirements." "Some very strange ones." "The Markers are a secret sect that can be found once a year in a.." "small town of an unnamed country." "A clandestine party with music, dance, and masks and cats." "And in that encounter, the cameras are severely forbidden." "At times, I ask myself how to make a new Marker film." "In the '90s, the literature group, Central Cafe from Barcelona.." "invented a program to write new poems of J.V. Foix.." "who had died some time earlier." "The group developed the program Infoixmatic.." "..that ordered the 70 sonnets and the 980 verses of "Sol, I de Dol" from his word-rhymes." "The user could choose a rhyme and the computer would.." "elaborate an unplublished sonnet with the words of Foix." "That's how they made new poems by Foix." "Ironic ones, nostalgic ones, comical ones, absurd ones, intelligent ones." "Many regrettable ones." "Another few, brilliant." "Foix's poems multiplied themselves to infinity." "In Barcelona I also knew the musician Victor Nubla." "In 1984, he found a piece of a puzzle on the floor of the Raspall plaza." "And he picked it up." "Today, he has an enormous collection of collected pieces and his music.." "resembles that collection everyday." "It was he who showed me that according to the dictionary,.." "compose literally means to form a.." "unity from diverse fragments." "Repair the broken." "Fit the pieces of a puzzle." "Nubla is a composer of sounds that are found." "Sounds that he lifts from radio by closing his eyes as if they were tarot cards." "The music that we are listening to is composed by Nubla from the sounds captured randomly from... a shortwave radio in the jungle." "The site is important." "One isn't going to find the same pieces of the puzzle in Buenos Aires or Dijon." "Today, I think maybe that the best form to make a new film of Chris Marker.." "would be to let the computer honor his name." "In fact, in the 90s Marker invented a program that ordered randomly his own shots.." "And therefore, created new infinite films of Marker." "It's been a while that I've pressed the "Random Play" key to let my computer.." "be the one that decides." "To mix, whatever it wants, the pieces of this puzzle." "I didn't mount these images." "They are pure Chris Marker made by Chris Marker." "The Makiko mystery" "The coincidences of life." "It's been a year that we have released my film La Leyenda del Tiempo.." "in Las Palmas film festival." "There, they dedicated a retrospective for Chris Marker cinema." "Like, my protagonist was a Japanese girl Makiko." "We took the opportunity to see together 'The Koumiko Mystery' from 1965." "She had never saw any of Chris Marker's films." "And she came out of the theater very surprised." "She told us that Japan from the film and Kumiko turned out so exotic like us.." "belonging to a time that she had missed living." "Another Japanese girl, Takako, explained that the Japanese and the Spaniards.." "are exactly the same." "That's why she lived in Spain." "And talked with a perfect Jerezano accent." "She reminds me that we're in the same parallel and.." "..in the two countries we eat rice and fish." "And we are what we eat, she concluded." "She did not convince me." "In Okinawa, the Japanese soldiers received two grenades." "The first one to throw at the enemy." "The second one to explode it against themselves." "In the Spanish Civil War, like George Orwell tells us,.." "..it was usual that the Republic soldiers would die.." "while they were taking a nap." "..because the grenade rings were loose." "Or during the attacks because the grenade rings would get jammed." "It could be that we eat the same." "But certainly, we don't kill each other the same way." "In Level Five, the image of a Japanese soldier tidying his furniture.." "...before committing suicide, reminds me of a sentence from Goethe." ""I prefer injustice than disorder."" "This dichotomy is impossible in Spain.." "..because the disorder is guaranteed in either case." "That's why we can bet only for justice." "In Homage to Catalonia, Orwell also wrote that the anarchist's grand error.." "..was not demolishing a building as horrible as the cathedral.." "of Barcelona when they had the chance." "But like a good atheist" "..in reality.." "..Orwell had confused the ecclesiastic hierarchy." "What he would have liked to set on fire wasn't a cathedral.." "but the Holy Family of Gaudi." "If the anarchists had paid attention to him,.." "what photos would the Japanese shoot today in Barcelona?" "I've taken these questions from Koumiko Mystery and I've.." "repeated them to Makiko." "She replied the following.." " I'm completely very Japanese." "Spirit?" "I don't know." "Japanese spirit." "Normally, we don't express that much in our heart.." "Thoughts,.." "Feelings." "I don't know..when we're small, we learn that it's more important to listen.." ".. to try to understand other people." "But, now that I'm here, I think that also I need to talk." "The fact is that, if you don't speak, you don't understand me." "In Japan, there is also lots of good things." "But, I feel more comfortable here." "When I arrived here, I looked everywhere." "The strangers would talk to me a lot." "But, here the whole world sometimes surprises me!" "Oh!" "Even that!" "They say, why?" "But, when I was in Japan, for me ..a little bit, I've always felt imprisoned." "Before, I would fix myself like that as well." "To try to change myself." "And I had brown hair, right?" "Brown color." "All of the girls try to be like that." "Like the ones in the magazines." "Modern, right?" "But, now, I like black hair." "Small nose." "Small eyes too, I like them a lot." "The fact is we were born like that." "Not that much." "Normally, I don't have time to read the newspaper." "For the Internet, yes!" "I don't know who is right or wrong." "I don't trust politicians." "Well I know that I don't understand them very well." "Normally, the men.." "don't say anything." "But, there's one thing I can believe from them." "It's that.." "I've told you that we need to talk more.." "But if... if the words increase, the false words increase too." "That's why sometimes, I don't know which word to believe." "Few words are truthful." "Here, normally, they say lots of times "I want you!" "I love you!"" "The Japanese men, I'm certain that very few of them say that." "Normally, they say nothing." "Japanese beauty.." "It's like..calm, tranquility." "I really like the kimono." "When I wear a kimono.." "I can't walk in big steps." "Only small ones." "Many small steps." "But, I really like that movement." "Today, I want to live today." "Before, I would always think about the future." "To live in the future, I would work.." ".. and it's not for today." "It's for the future." "But, nobody knows when life will end." "That's why I would really like living today." "In the blinking moment" "During World War II,.." "the train stations of England were full of poster signs.." ""Is your journey really necessary?"" "To Wittgenstein, those posters would remind him of his own aphorisms." "Is your journey really necessary?" "The cinema of Chris Marker began its first trip from that same station." "His close-ups move without the need of a dolly." "In Spanish, one doesn't get on the train,.." "but instead you mount on it." "Mount the train." "The trips are montage operations." "Walter Murch, the Apocalypse Now film editor," "..looked for the changing shots falling just at a blinking moment." "So that action would transit without the viewer seeing the cuts." "In Marker's films, the blink yields just at the half of the plane." "And the viewer should appreciate and see the crucial moment of the cut." "In each cut there is a time trip." "The blink in any case.." "is its station of departure or destination." "Marker's blinks do not want hide anything from us." "They want to open our eyes." "The strokes" "Eisenstein compared the art of montage with the oriental ideograms." "The ideogram of a mouth plus the one of a boy signifies crying." "A mouth plus a dog is the same as barking." "The mouth and a crow is cawing." "Today, I'm not going to write anymore." "I'm going to read now for Chris Marker." "The book is called Ideograms in China." "And its author is his old friend, Henri Michaux" "I like to think that the Michaux's sentences about the ideograms.." "...speak to us at the same time about the images of Marker." "Strokes in all directions." "In any sense" "Commas." "Curls." "Brackets." "Accents." "To Say." "At any height." "Any level." "Disconcerted tangles of accents." "Scratches." "Fragments." "Beginnings that look like they were suddenly stopped." "Without bodies." "Without forms." "Without figure." "Without contour." "Without symmetry." "Without a center.." "Without remembering anything familiar." "Without apparent rules of simplification." "Of unification." "Of generalization." "Not even sober ones, refined ones, nor the deprived." "Like dispersed ones." "Such is the first impression." "Ideograms without evocation." "Characters infinitely variated." "The page that contains them..." "a torn void." "Torn apart through multiple infinite ways." "However, there was a time where the signs were eloquent." "Or almost." "Just allusive." "More than things, they designated bodies or matter." "They designated groups." "Groups." "And they would display situations." "There was a time." "And then there were others." "Without pretending to simplify or to shorten.." ", each one delivered the task of disturbing one's own account." "Erasing the traces." "It started to manipulate the characters to distance them a little bit more.." "from the primitive eligibility." "Passage." "The pleasure for the secret has prevailed." "The reserve." "Prudence has prevailed." "The instinctive Chinese tendency of erasing its footprints." "To avoid finding itself exposed." "The pleasure of keeping the occult has prevailed." "The same with writing." "In front of the cover..secret." "An intricate secret." "A difficult secret." "Long." "Arduous to share." "A secret to form part of a society within the society." "A circle that during centuries and centuries.." "carries on the power." "Oligarchy of the subtle men." "The pleasure of the abstract has prevailed." "The paintbrush leaves the way clear." "The paper provides the passage." "Since today, it was possible to withdraw easily from the original reality." "Of the concrete and the signs close to both of them." "To be abstracted." "Go in haste through sudden strokes that would slip.." "without resistance over the paper." "Making it possible to be Chinese a different way" "The abstraction had prevailed." "Being Mandarin, had prevailed." "The archaic characters that touched the hearts dissapeared." "The bridges were cut with the origin." "Encouraged by the vehement bravery of the investigation.." "..the inventors, the ones from the second period, learned to liberate the sign of their model." "By touch." "Deforming it." "Without daring to shorten definitely, which binds the form to the being." "The umbilical cord of the similitude." "And that's how they liberated themselves." "Rejecting the sacredness from the first relation writing-object." "The religion was losing territory in the writing." "The written nonreligion began." "The character's senses were disappearing.." "stranded in reality." "Vanished from the use of the language." "Present in the stone of the antique tombs.." "..and in the bronze vessels of remote dynasties." "Present in the divinatory bones." "Much later, they were wanted eagerly by the Empire of the Center... the ancient characters... ..carefully gathered and copied.." "..were interpreted by the erudites." "An inventory." "A dictionary of original signs had finished seeing the light." "Recovered." "And recovered at the same time the emotion of the calm and quiet.." "and tender first writings." "The resurrected characters returned to live with their primitive intention." "Under this light..." "Every page written." "Every surface covered with characters, turns into.." "noisy and brimming." "Its filled with things." "With lives." "With everything in the world." "In the world of China." "It gets filled with moons." "With hearts." "It gets filled with doors." "And with men that take a bow.." "..that withdraw." "Resentful men that make the peace." "Its filled with obstacles." "Its filled with right hands..." "with left hands.." "..with hands that shake.." "..with hands that respond.." "..that are connected forever." "Its filled with hands front to front." "With alert hands.." "..with busy hands." "It's filled with tomorrows." "With doors." "With the water that drips from the clouds." "With barges that cross from one side to another." "With embankments.." "With crucibles.." "..and with arches.." "..and with fugitives.." "..and it's filled with calamities." "And it's filled with thieves that carry the stolen objects under the arm." "..and with greed.." "..and with stains.." "...and it's also filled with sincere words...and with reunions.." "..and with children that are born lucky.." "..and with holes in the ground.." "..and with navels in the bodies.." "..and with skulls.." "..and with graves.." "..and with migrating birds" "..and with new borns." "All of them new borns." "And it's filled with metals in the depths of the subsoil." "..and with virgin land.." "..and with vapors that rise from the pastures and swamps.." "..and with dragons.." "..with demons wandering through the field.." "..and it's filled with everything that exists in the universe reunited in.." "the same order or in another.." "chosen deliberately by the inventor of signs.." "to be next to scenes that move to meditation." "Scenes of all types." "Scenes to offer a sense.." ".. to offer various." "..to propose them to the mind.." "..to let them emanate." "Groups to result in ideas or deconstruct in poetry." "Being a calligrapher is like being landscapist, but better." "In China, the calligrapher is the salt of the earth." "In this calligraphy, art of the time, expression of journey.." ".. of the route, that which arouses the admiration.." "at the margin of harmony... .. of the vivacity.." "and dominating them." "It's the spontaneity that could almost lead to the fragmentation." "Not continuing to imitate the nature." "Signify it." "Through strokes, through impulses." "The thesis about the immediate..." "about the lightning." "How does nature do it?" "The language in China proposes to the sight and doesn't decide." "Its short syntax which invites to guess, to recreate." "..that leaves space for the poetry." "From the multiple, the idea comes out." "Characters open at various directions." "Balance.." "All language is a universal parallel." "None more beautiful than that of China." "The calligraphy exalts it." "It improves the poetry." "It's the expression that enhances the poem and supports the poet." "And the page most perfect is the one drawn from a single stroke." "Calligraphy in which... one simply stays still like a tree, a rock, a fountain." "To Chris Marker." "So that he can dedicated to whom ever."