Chris Marker Quotes

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan long ago.

Who said that time heals all wounds? It would be better to say that time heals everything - except wounds. With time, the hurt of separation loses its real limits. With time, the desired body will soon disappear, and if the desiring body has already ceased to exist for the other, then what remains is a wound, disembodied.

I'm writing you this letter from the edge of the world. According to a Siberian proverb, the forest was made by the devil. The devil did a good job; his forest is as big as the United States of America. But maybe the devil made the United States too.

Rarely has reality needed so much to be imagined.

Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.

We feel more emotion ... before an amateur photograph linked to our own life history than before the work of a Great Photographer, because his domain partakes of art, and the intent of the souvenir-object remains at the lower level of personal history.

...he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.

He liked the fragility of those moments
suspended in time. Those memories
whose only function is to leave just a trace in memory.

I've been round the world several times and now only banality still interests me,

I chose a pseudonym, Chris Marker, pronounceable in most languages, because I was very intent on traveling.

An object dies when the gaze that lights on it has disappeared.

In another time I guess I would have been content with filming girls and cats. But you don't choose your time.