By Xulun Luo and Yushu Wang

In Chris Marker’s Immemory, time doesn’t unfold in a straight line; it’s a fluid tapestry that mirrors the way our memories ebb and flow. As you navigate through zones like Cinema, War, Memory, Photography, Poetry, Travel, Museum, and X-Plugs, you’re not following a predetermined path but crafting your own journey. This mosaic of images, film clips, music, and text invites you to wander freely, much like how our minds leap from one memory to another without concern for chronology.

Imagine exploring images and narratives from different countries and eras, seamlessly moving between them without any chronological framework. One moment you’re immersed in the streets of Paris; the next, you’re gazing at the landscapes of Africa or the temples of Japan. This mirrors how memories of different times and places coexist and intermingle within us. The Criterion Collection aptly describes Immemory as a work that “will thrust you out of time and into ‘the endless edifice of recollection.’”

This non-linear approach to storytelling isn’t new for Marker. His earlier film, La Jetée (1962), also delved into themes of time and memory without adhering to a linear narrative. But with Immemory, he expands this concept into an interactive format, allowing you to experience firsthand how time can be fluid and memories interconnected.

Subjectivity and the Nature of Reality

Delving deeper, Immemory highlights how our personal experiences shape our perception of reality. The interactive nature of the piece means that your journey is uniquely yours. As you engage with various images and narratives, your choices reflect your own interests and associations, emphasizing the individualized nature of memory.

You might come across a photograph that evokes a specific emotion or a film clip that reminds you of a personal experience. Your interpretation of these pieces is colored by your own memories, demonstrating how reality is constructed through subjective perception. Marker himself captures this idea by stating, “In every life, we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae.” It’s a poetic acknowledgment of the diverse landscapes within each person’s inner world.

This exploration of subjectivity extends to reflections on cinema and its impact on memory and reality. By presenting film as both a reflection and a constructor of reality, Marker invites you to consider how media influences your perceptions, blurring the lines between what is remembered and what is imagined.

Interactivity as a Reflection of Consciousness

What makes Immemory particularly compelling is how its interactivity serves as a metaphor for consciousness. Navigating through its content isn’t just about making choices; it’s about experiencing how thoughts and memories connect in unique and personal ways.

As you explore curated collections of artifacts, artworks, and stories, each decision you make—what you choose to engage with and how you interpret it—reflects the active role of your consciousness in shaping understanding. This mirrors the way we process thoughts and memories, forging connections that are unique to our own minds.

This interactive experience also challenges traditional notions of authorship. By allowing you to determine your own path through the content, Marker acknowledges the collaborative nature of meaning-making and the vital role the audience plays in interpreting art. 

In essence, Immemory is more than an interactive piece; it’s a reflection on how we perceive time, reality, and our own consciousness. By moving away from linear storytelling and embracing the fluid nature of memory, Marker provides a space for us to explore the intricate ways we connect with the world and construct our own narratives.

By Xulun Luo

In Memory of The Immemorial

As I journey through Chris Marker’s Immemory, I find myself lost in a landscape where personal memory and history fold into each other, like an endless tide. One question surfaces repeatedly: What does immemory truly mean? The word doesn’t exist in any dictionary; Marker crafted it himself. Yet two words come close to unlocking its essence: “immemorial” and “in memoriam.”

“Immemorial” speaks to something beyond the reach of memory, an existence so old it’s untethered from recorded history. In contrast, “in memoriam” is a vow against oblivion—a conscious act to honor and hold onto the past. These words seem to pull in opposite directions, yet it’s this very tension that animates Marker’s archive: a space to remember what feels eternal yet is forever at risk of slipping away, swept into the relentless current of History.

Wandering through Immemory’s various chapters—cinema, travel, war, photography, memory—Marker’s boundless archive of images, texts, and fragments invites us to step beyond time. Here, there is no set order, no singular narrative, only fragments in a kind of spatial montage. The viewer—perhaps more aptly called a viewser—creates meaning anew each time, making connections between Marker’s texts, images, and quotes. This reimagining allows the immemorial to resurface, not as a “true” or “real” past but as something fluid, reanimated in each encounter. In the spirit of Walter Benjamin’s “historical materialist”, Marker’s archive resists the weight of fixed memory and instead calls for a continual revolution of meanings, a reimagining that keeps the past alive in the present.

In a snippet from the photography section, Marker writes, “The end of our century demands something else. What’s more, the notion of historical progress, of a powerful ‘current of history,’ never mattered to me except in a deliberate play on the word ‘current’: not a directional flow over some chart plotted out by infallible commanders, but instead the possibility to grasp the current meanings of the historical present, full of sound and fury, told, and so on.” The current here is fleeting and fluid, surging and ebbing, never a static image. It cannot be captured or fixed, driven as it is by the ungraspable forces of nature itself. But for Marker, it’s this very transience that charges the “historical present” with potential.

In the travel section, he quotes Nicolas Bouvier: “That day, I thought I had really got hold of something and that my life would be changed. But nothing of that nature is irrevocably gained. Like water, the world washes through you and lends you its colors for a time. Then it draws back, and leaves you once again before the emptiness you bear within yourself, that central insufficiency of the soul you have to learn to live with, and which, paradoxically, may be our surest motivation.” The treasured fragments in Immemory stir and reanimate us, but only temporarily. Like all history, they are subject to fading, but with each reimagining, each encounter, they pulse anew with the promise of transformation, fueled by the fragile hope they inspire.

By Yushu Wang

References: The Deaths and Rebirths of Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory, Isabel Ochoa Gold, https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/7188-the-deaths-and-rebirths-of-chris-marker-s-cd-rom-immemory