Gavin Keeney - Chris Marker: The Last French Revolution

Friday, 5 April, 2013, at 6 p.m.
Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova, Maistrova 3

You are kindly invited to attend a lecture on Chris Marker by Gavin Keeney on Friday, 5 April 6 p.m. at the Museum of Contemporary Art Metelkova.

In concert with the release of the book Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), the lecture will survey the works of the late French filmmaker Chris Marker in terms of the origins of his critical project in 1940s' and 1950s' postwar France, with special attention paid to the seminal 29-minute film La jetée (1962), which Marker referred to as the beginning of his artistic identity, suppressing and repressing in the process everything that came before.

Marker's film-essays emerged out of 1950s? projects he co-authored with others, including Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, and various other progenitors of French New Wave cinema. His relationship to Jean-Luc Godard, before and after the emergence of the French New Wave is of particular interest. Marker's various interlocutors over the years, spanning 1947 (when he assumed the name or nom de plume "Chris Marker") to his death in July 2012, include members of the left-wing, postwar French intelligentsia and, after 1962 and La jetée, an ever-widening array of international artists, writers, and filmmakers who throughout the 1960s and 1970s were associated with the last battles against rampant capitalism in Europe and the Americas and the evisceration of socialist insurgencies most everywhere.

The lecture will be conducted by Gavin Keeney, an editor, writer, and critic. His most recent publications include: Art as "Night": An Art-Theological Treatise (2010), a survey of meta-painting from Velázquez to Gerhard Richter; "Else-where: Essays in Art, Architecture, and Cultural Production 2002-2011 (2011); and Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (2012). He has taught in architecture schools in the US and Australia and is the Creative Director of Agence 'X', an artists' and architects' re-representation bureau. His current research concerns theories of visual agency in Art and Architecture. In November of 2011, with an International Postgraduate Research Scholarship from the Australian Government, he began PhD studies at Deakin University in the School of Architecture & Built Environment (Faculty of Science & Technology), Geelong, Victoria, Australia, investigating the nature of the image (its discursive and non-discursive power) in the twin disciplines of Art and Architecture.