French Cultural Center: Chris Marker Film Screening

October 23, 2013
Event Types
Screening
A cartoon cat is painted on a wall.

Still from Chris Marker, The Case of the Grinning Cat, 2004. Courtesy: Icarus Films

The French Cultural Center is thrilled to host a Ciné-Club special Chris Marker, in conjunction the List Center’s exhibition Chris Marker: Guillaume-en-Égypte. In partnership with the MIT List Visual Arts Center we will present A bientôt j’espère (Be Seeing You), from 1967 and directed by Chris Marker and Mario Marret. In the late 1960s, Chris Marker encouraged the formation of Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles (Society for the Launch of New Works), or SLON, a filmmaking collective which sought to make films collaboratively and to support workers in producing their own films.A bientôt j’espère (Be Seeing You, 1967), the first SLON production to document the revolutionary strikes and protests of the era, is a record of a 1967 strike at the Rhodiaceta textile plant in Besançon, France. Interviews with workers and their wives reveals a class for whom jobs lead not only to an experience of alienation, but aspirations toward the collective transformation of the very structures of industrial society.

Alise Upitis, Assistant Curator at the MIT List Visual Arts Center will present the movie and lead the Q&A session after the screening. Reception to follow.

16 mm transferred to DVD, 39 min film, Courtesy Icarus Films