Chris Marker (1921–2012), the creator of more than eighty films, has become a source of fascination for an entire generation of documentary filmmakers, as well as for the general public. In the 1950s, he succeeded in rejuvenating the documentary form and has since wielded considerable, though discreet, influence. The invention of mobile video cameras in the 1960s accorded greater liberty to documentary cinema. There was already talk of a New Wave in this field when Chris Marker reinvented the documentary essay, successively using various technologies from 16mm to Super 8, still photographs and digital images, while experimenting with the CD-ROM release format and finally with more recent online distribution platforms. The diversity of his artistic career and the different facets of his activity, successively or simultaneously as journalist, publisher, photographer and filmmaker, are too extensive to summarise here. His work cannot be reduced to documentary output, which was regarded as political or experimental cinema at the beginning of his career.

Chris Marker's polyphonic body of work (from Letter from Siberia, 1957 to La Jetée, 1962; Joli Mai, 1963; Be Seeing You, 1968; Class Struggle, 1969; Sans Soleil, 1982; Level Five, 1996; Immemory, 1997; The Last Bolshevik, 1998; and so forth) can be explored from various angles, but this oeuvre consistently addresses the question of image objectivity, reconstructing itself each time in new cinematic forms. At the crossroads of documentary and fiction, Chris Marker took an original approach as a cine-traveller and cine-writer, submitting each film to its own subjectivity in a meditative mode. Political but indifferent to fashionable trends, his cinema reflects on the contemporary world and the progress of history. Film history runs in parallel with the evolution of societies, and Marker embraced and appropriated successive technological innovations in his own practice over the years. This ongoing transformation of documentary film against the background of constant technological refinement was a major concern for Chris Marker, because it allowed him to reflect on memory and history well before the advent of digital technologies in the 1990s. Interestingly, he continued exploring each possibility provided by these new technologies, while maintaining a consistent approach and discourse toward both cinema and the world. Therefore, one may wonder what would be the best way to follow the major shifts in this body of work, in order to understand how its documentary core was constantly overtaken by ceaseless inventiveness.