Silent Movie

Silent Movie is a installation Vidéo Multimédia and multi- screens carried out by the scenario writer French Chris Marker in 1995. Ordered by the Wexner Art Center for the Arts of University of the State of Ohio, it is composed, essentially, of five in core monitors arranged diffusing in loop, and at variable speeds, extracted from films and invented images. This installation constitutes a homage to the Silent film, returned by Chris Marker at the time of the centenary of the cinema.

Origin of the project

The initiative of the ordering of this project returns in Bill Horrigan of Wexner Art Center for the Arts. The installation will be then exposed in the museums of the whole world like the MoMA of New York or the Musée of modern art of Tōkyō, the Tate Gallery of London or the Palais of the Art schools of Brussels.

The installation

In the line of its research task on the images and the sounds, parallel to the turning of Level Five which took place with the same actress, Catherine Belkhodja, Chris Marker designed an installation being composed of a tower of 3 height meters monitors, of an exposure of posters of cinema fictitious and photographs extracted various turnings.

The tower directly refers to the model of the tower Pravda, project architectural of Russian avant-garde of the Vesnin brothers in 1924 (ever built).

It is made up of five monitors whose screens post completely random sequences of black and white cinema, grouped according to four topics: the voyage, the face, the gesture, the waltz. The fifth screen (in the medium) is reserved for the written titles very simply, as on the panels which intersected the images with silent films with formerly.

The selected images were drawn from the files of Chris Marker. It intersected them with more recent images, turned in black and white, with Catherine Belkhodja. The old and contemporary images alternate without one being able truly to date the time from one or others.

The assembly of Silent Movie is completely random: Chris Marker entrusted the management of the images to the interface of the computer. It is by him that the images take direction, with the liking of the completely random juxtapositions, between a gesture, a face, a voyage or a dance. Even if this film is not asserted like an anthology of the silent film, all the history of the cinema ravels under the eyes of the spectator, mirror of a vast collective memory.

Around, on the walls, from the photographs of Catherine Belkhodja come to punctuate the images presented on the lathe. The posters of cinema refer to films which were not made, but which, according to Chris Marker, “should have been turned”. Finally the musical band of film, carefully assembled by Krasna, adapts perfectly to the images.

A book recalling the installation was published by Wexner Art Center for the Arts.

Other interventions of Chris Marker in the contemporary art

Scenario writer, writer, photographer and vidéaste, Chris Marker carried out with Silent Movie his first steps in the contemporary art. More and more, it turns to a new language, which cannot be satisfied any more with the dark rooms. Since, it took part in several exposures of contemporary art, of which Immemory one and Airs of Paris in 2007 with the Center Pompidou of Paris in 1998, which gave place to the creation of a CD-ROM.

Bonds

an article on Silent Movie with the Wexner Center for the Arts of Colombus
an article on Silent Movie with the Palate of the Art schools of Brussels

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