06/11/2002

The first edition of Cinedays in the UK includes a two-week retrospective of the work of innovative British filmmaker Chris Marker. Cined@ys is an initiative of the European Commission (EC) that celebrates Europe’s film heritage and will take place in 24 European countries during November.
In celebration of the 20th anniversary reissue of his ground-breaking Sans Soleil, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in London has organised a two-week programme scheduled to run from 15-30 November and curated by Catherine Lupton in collaboration with Roehampton University of Surrey and supported by European Film Heritage.
The programme includes a 2-day conference (16 and 17 November) entitled The Art of Memory that explores the range and vitality of Chris Marker's activities as an essayist, thinker and artist in film, video and multimedia, and the importance of his activities for scholars, thinkers, filmmakers and artists. The conference includes rare screenings of A Bientot j'espère (co-directed with Mario Marret), Bestiaire, Slon Tango and Maspero: Les Mots ont un sens.
The ICA programme includes the screening of the following films: Le Joli Mai, Marker’s vérité portrait of French society in the spring of 1962, right after the end of the Algerian War. The Battle of the Ten Million is a riveting account of Castro's 1970 unsuccessful attempt to achieve a record sugar harvest. Level Five continues Marker's examination of the 20th century and the advent of computers and the Internet.
A highlight of this event will surely be the screening of Le Fond de l'Air Rouge, Marker's extraordinary 2-part documentary about the social, cultural and political revolutions of the 1960s. The film covers events like the Vietnam war, the death of Guevara, the May 1968 Revolution, the advent of Pinochet, the Prague Spring, the Common Programme and ends with 'What do we do now?'.
The programme also includes several of Chris Marker’s most significant short films: 2084, Embassy/i> (L'Ambassade), Matta and La Jetée, the film that inspired Terry Gilliam to make Twelve Monkeys.
The last two films in this review are The Last Bolshevik (Le Tombeau d'Alexandre), about the history and legacy of Soviet communism, as reflected in the life of Marker's friend, director Alexander Medvedkin and One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (Une Journée d'Andrei Arsenevich), Marker’s documentary about the final days of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky.