James Blue discussing Chris Marker:
"You know the triple pun that Godard did on the whole thing. He says the problem with Leacock is that he's failed to footnote his Rouches with his magic marker, which, I guess is a way of dealing with the whole problem of the ontology of cinema. Leacock and the American direct cinema/cinema verite group represent the thought that one can simply go out and shoot
and come back with the truth. Then there's the kind of material Rouch produces, which in the middle '60's, was reflexive. He tried to deal with the problem of the relationship of the filmmaker and the subject--Chronicle of a Summer (1961) was one such film. And then there's Marker, who is always flagrantly personal about everything he does, but arrives at a certain degree of honesty by making it so flagrant that it can only be considered an essay. The tension in Marker comes from the fact that you know you're dealing with images taken from the real world--quite often anyway--but they are being bombarded by ideas that transform them constantly in front of your eyes into something else. That kind of playfulness, almost preciousness, that Marker has is a trademark. His would represent the totally subjective attitude, Rouch being the midpoint between the subjective and the filmmaker/subject involvement in a relationship, and Leacock being the idea of simply recording it and putting it out...I like to see myself somewhere square in the middle of that triangle..." --James Blue's last interview, January, 1980 with Anthony Bannon, Afterimage 8 (October, 1980).
