This important study – published in conjunction with the Whitechapel’s acclaimed exhibition – is the first comprehensive survey of filmmaker Chris Marker’s influential oeuvre, surveying the entirety of his prolific career

Illustrated throughout, the book charts Marker’s unique commentaries on societies at times of upheaval, from his early writing and photography to his later use of CD-ROM and appropriation of web technology. Integrating his films within the display, it also brings together for the first time all of Marker’s multimedia installations.

Alongside a wealth of images that chart Marker’s substantial creative output, Chris Marker: A Grin Without a Cat also explores the filmmaker’s shift from word to image, the commissioning of his multimedia installations and the subsequent interplay of media. It includes key essays by the curators Christine van Assche, Chief Curator, Centre Pompidou, Paris, writer and film critic Chris Darke, and Whitechapel Gallery curators Magnus Af Petersens (Chief Curator) and Habda Rashid (Assistant Curator); texts by critics Raymond Bellour and Arnaud Lambert; plus the first English translations of two key early writings by Marker, an essay on Jean Cocteau’s film Orphee (1950) and his short story Till the End of Time (1947), which takes place the day after VJ day amidst a torrential rainstorm and features a demobilised soldier subject to apocalyptic visions, anticipating Marker’s most famous film, La Jetee (1962).

Chris Marker (1921-2012), born Christian Francois Bouche-Villeneuve in Paris, was a prescient multi-media filmmaker as well as a writer, editor, poet, cartoonist, and activist. Marker completed his first feature film Olympia 52 in 1952 and soon became affiliated with the Left Bank Cinema movement that included filmmakers such as Alain Resnais and Agnes Varda. In 1962 he made his best-known film, La Jetee, which won him an international audience. A great lover of cats, when asked for a photograph of himself he would send a picture of a cat.