CHRIS MARKER
From April 27-June 13, 2005 the Museum of Modern Art presents the world premiere of the latest work by iconic French filmmaker Chris Marker.
Marker’s OWLS AT NOON Prelude: The Hollow Men is a 19-minute looped media installation commissioned by the Museum to celebrate its reopening in Manhattan.
This is the first time the museum’s media gallery has been devoted to the work of a single artist. The text- and image-based media work, which is the first in Marker’s ambitious multipart history of the 20th century, takes as its starting point T. S. Eliot’s poem ‘The Hollow Men’ (1925), which evokes the repercussions of World War I.
“OWLS AT NOON Prelude: The Hollow Men is an ambitious work evoking the European world that was destroyed by World War I. Making innovative use of computer-generated technology, and incorporating images from several sources as well as text and music, Marker creates an installation that is an aural and visual tapestry in the manner of his other celebrated works. The installation is a two-channel feed on eight screens running continuously. The sound track is composer Toru Takemitsu’s ‘Corona’ (1962) with piano by Roger Woodward.”
Marker (b. 1921) himself describes the installation in the following words: “OWLS AT NOON, night birds in the day, things, objects, images that don’t belong, and yet are there. Leaflets, postcards, stamps, graffiti, forgotten photographs, frames stolen from the continuous and senseless flow of TV stuff (what I’d call the Duchamp syndrome: once I’ve spotted 1/50th of a second that escaped everybody, including its author, this 1/50th of a second is mine). Bringing into the light events and people who normally never access it. It’s from that raw material, the petty cash of history, that I try to extract a subjective journey through the 20th century. Everybody agrees that the founding moment of that era, its mint, was the First World War, and that it was also the background on which T. S. Eliot wrote his beautiful and desperate poem ‘The Hollow Men.’ So the Prelude to the journey will be a reflection upon that poem, mixed with some images gathered from the limboes of my memory.”
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