Remembrance of Things to Come

Within the redesign of the magazine in 1972, L’Estampille art et artisanat introduced with Reportage de Prestige, a new column that featured different contributors on a changing topic for each issue.

Chris Marker was the first guest in this new column, introducing with FAUT VOIR his Musée Imaginaire to the readers, which consists of a short text and eleven stunning photographs.

The idea of a Musée Imaginaire is actually linked to André Malraux’s book triology Musée Imaginaire, which in turn has its direct role model in André Vigneau’s Encyclopédie photographique de l’art.

In Immemory and his short film Pictures at an Exhibition from 2008, Marker revisits the theme of the Musée Imaginaire that can be traced back to FAUT VOIR.

L’An 2000 : une anti-histoire de la fin du monde by André Clément Decouflé was published twenty-five years before the year 2000. With the new millennial approaching the world was forced to think about it’s future. At the time L’An 2000 was published in 1975, André Clément Decouflé was the director of the Laboratoire de Prospective Appliquée in Paris, whose research focused on social foresight, which aims to prepare the future through a rational and holistic approach. L’An 2000 brings together a really astonishing collection of literature dealing with the prediction of the future.

Most of the books in the collection were written in the middle of the 20th Century and offer at the same time a great insight of this era itself. The list of references is long and includes books, like the influential environmentalist text A Blueprint for Survival; Frank Herbert’s Dune; The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years by the military strategist Herman Kahn, who was the inspiration to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. All images in this book were assembled by Chris Marker and taken from his personal archive, Marker was also responsible for the cover design.

Feeling the need to present Chris Marker’s work in the UK, the Beaconsfield Gallery, in co-production with Pier Trust, brought the Silent Movie exhibition from Ohio to London in 1999.

The catalog Chris Marker: Silent Movie and Selected Screenings features texts by Catherine and Andrew Brighton, Craigie Horsfield and Dom Rotheroe, who deal with Chris Marker‘s work on a very personal level.