Matan Tal’s The Invention of Chris Marker – Article from Takriv Magazine (Hebrew to English)

This is a translated version of the original article in Takriv Magazine, published in July 2025 in Hebrew. You can find the original article here

Somewhere back in 2020, in the age of COVID, I could no longer leave the house to document the outside world. I found myself spending hours watching YouTube. One day, I remembered Chris Marker’s YouTube channel, which I had first discovered sometime around 2006. Out of nostalgia, I returned to the channel and watched the short films he had uploaded there until his death in 2012. As I was watching, I also read the comments people had left on the videos.

Since it was such an archaic and hidden channel, and with no reason for the algorithm to promote it, each video usually had no more than two, three, maybe ten comments at most. Then I noticed something strange: some of the comments were bizarre and repetitive—but they weren’t bots. They came from real people, writing in an obsessive, cryptic pattern. The same comments appeared again and again under Marker’s videos, and even under other videos connected to him. Most striking of all was the recurring cat emoji—😿—so closely tied to Marker himself.

What did it all mean? Suddenly a light bulb switched on in my head, and I began documenting an almost detective-like investigation across the internet—It become like a detective film, only more philosophical, taking place entirely on a computer screen. At the time, I didn’t even know about the “desktop documentary” genre. I was acting purely on instinct. I recorded my virtual investigation into Marker’s spirit and his obsessive admirers.

This is how the film The Invention of Chris Marker was born—and how I fell in love with Marker all over again. In a way, I first knew him as a YouTuber, long before I came to see him as a filmmaker.