"Memories" Of Chris Marker’s Films

The French director Chris Marker may be an unfamiliar one in ’Left Bank Group’ of the New Wave movement. He is entitled for his strong and intense portrait style and have maintained his highly intrinsic unification throughout almost60years of his career. Andre Bazin once described his movie as ’essay film’, thinking his movies are constructed by ’intelligence’ rather than images. Even now this new movie form is regarded as an open topic. His work always focuses on probing deeply into society, culture and politics and also bears some of the most important culture memories of the past century. Though he seems a modest and mystic man, his entire creation history is tightly bind with France and the movement after the world war.This article intends to study Marker’s unique image creation form of’essay film’ and to find out how he can present his memory theme throughout the whole creation though the ways of scraps of images and essay like soundtrack and the cooperation of which forms a special ways of movie presentation called ’horizontal montage’ by Bazin. And the themes of memories he persists in, which include the memories of history, the memory function of image itself and a mechanism like human memories, try to construct a museum of memories using images in the direction of geography. This article will discuss how Marker present these memory themes using ’essay’ like images through perspectives of his creation history, background and thought and language of film.