KEY POINTS:
Few poems of the 20th century have as much emotional resonance and visceral power as T.S. Eliot's The Hollow Men. Published in 1925 when the trench horrors of World War I had been fully revealed, the poem conjured up a philosophical ennui as Old Europe was trying to rebuild out of ashes and despair.
Book-ended by much-quoted lines - it opens with, "We are the hollow men, we are the stuffed men", and closes with, "this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper" - the poem alludes to futility, the soul in limbo, the eyes of the dead watching the living, and is replete with striking images: "cactus land"; "crossed staves in a field"; "the supplication of a dead man's hand"; "this valley of dying stars" ...
The poem - much analysed but always moving - is the inspiration behind a compelling video installation at the Gus Fisher Gallery by the French film-maker Chris Marker, who uses some of Eliot's lines projected on eight, integrated horizontal screens and inter-cuts them with striking photographic images and words drawn from relevant sources.
The exhibit, commissioned for the re-opening of New York's Museum of Modern Art in 2004, is accompanied by a muscular solo piano soundtrack written by the late Toru Takemitsu and played by Australian Roger Woodward which is oceanic in its thunderous washes of atonality.
Entitled Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men, the installation is gripping in its imagery: faded photographs of the war which inspired Eliot; pictures of the fallen lying in muddy tranches who look nothing like "the Glorious Dead" which has passed into the language as a way of avoiding the horrific reality; frozen eyes wide in fear or betraying a dead soul within.
The 20-minute piece is absorbing if uneasy to watch, but has a subtly crafted narrative of its own. It is also as much about the medium of photography and digital video as it is about dark thematic undercurrents.
Marker - perhaps born in Mongolia in 1921, no one is quite sure - has long been recognised as an innovative film-maker who established his reputation in the 1950s alongside French New Wave directors such as Alain Resnais (with whom he directed Les statues meurent aussi in 1953), Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Goddard.
Yet as with Resnais, Marker was never firmly in the New Wave camp and he had begun his career as a writer. A hallmark of his films has been a quasi-documentary imperative, the use of strong and sometimes still images, and a sense of post-war disillusionment evident in his most well-known works, La Jetee (1962) and Sans Soleil (1982), both of which involve a character in search of memory through blasted emotional landscapes.
"When I first saw Sans Soleil," wrote the New York artist and critic Jason Simon in Art Forum last year, "I felt I was watching a newsreel of consciousness."
For a man who remains scrupulously out of the spotlight - he doesn't give interviews, details of his early life are sketchy, he has made more than 50 films which he seems to be in no hurry to have archived or curated - Chris Marker has been highly influential.
He pioneered a signature style of documentary essay and his sci-fi/time travel film La Jetee - composed almost entirely of stills and also at the Gus Fisher Gallery - inspired Terry Gilliam's 1995 feature Twelve Monkeys which starred Bruce Willis.
An eerie monochrome narrative, at only 30 minutes La Jetee was usually shown as a short in cinemas during the 60s and became a cult item among film aficionados. Cultural drift-netter David Bowie referenced it in the video for his 93 single Jump They Say about his schizophrenic brother who had committed suicide.
But if Marker is on the margins of popular culture and cinema, there is no denying the emotional authority of La Jetee and Owls at Noon Prelude. Both speak to dark recesses of the soul and intellect yet put on screen memorable images which are allusive rather than overt.
Photographs in Owls at Noon Prelude sometimes dissolve into fragmented pixels or come so close as to break down into abstract images where they have a textural quality. Words deconstruct into letters which move across the screens between related images of eyeless faces or hands taut with fear.
And in La Jetee the cutting between unflattering close-ups and discomforting half-lit underground chambers creates such a sense of narrative you can forget the film is composed of stills. The brief sequence using moving footage comes as a surprisingly romantic moment in a narrative largely devoid of such a sentiment. Chris Marker is a dark film-maker but these two important works can be mesmerising.
Both raise questions about collective memory, war, consciousness and the intensity of images.
They are by a rare - and rarely seen - film-maker whose work is located somewhere between the gallery and cinema, an installation and a movie, and photography and film.
Chris Marker
Born in 1921, French film-maker Chris Marker has been making films since the 1950s and is a pioneer of the film-essay.
This exhibition, organised by the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, presents his major recent video installation Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2005) and his classic sci-fi time travel film La Jetee (1962). Owls at Noon Prelude was commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York for its reopening in 2004.
The eight-screen video installation was inspired by T. S. Eliot's poem reflecting on Europe as a wasteland following World War I. La Jetee is a story of time-travel, memory and impossible love, which has inspired many other films including Terry Gilliam's 1995 feature Twelve Monkeys.
Saturday public events
Today, 1pm: The Many Faces of Chris Marker: Jan Bryant, head of research at AUT School of Art and Design, introduces Marker's work.
September 13, 1pm: Using Marker's Sunless (1983) as an example, Laurence Simmons, associate professor in the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland, discusses connections between Marker and film theorist Gilles Deleuze.
September 20, 1pm: Annie Goldson, film-maker and associate professor in the university's Faculty of Arts, discusses Marker's career in the context of the New Wave film movement of the late 1950s and 1960s.
September 27, 1pm: Professor Wystan Curnow, of the university's English department, discusses Marker's use of T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland in Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men.
October 4, 1pm: Mercedes Vicente, of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, discusses the relationship of photography to Marker's work.
GALLERY
What: Owls At Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men
Where and when: Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland St, to Oct 4
