Cats, Avatars, and the Invention
of Chris Marker

Q: How did you first encounter Marker's cats?

A: The first time I encountered them I was actually a child. In 2006, Marker opened a YouTube channel — and this was at a moment when the platform was still a very specific niche, not yet the enormous search engine we know today where you discover everything. Nobody was really taking it seriously.

And suddenly here was a serious, known filmmaker uploading short films. I was fourteen. It caught me immediately — this sense that cinema didn't have to be something distant and untouchable. It could be something immediate, something even a fourteen-year-old could just find on his computer screen. Nobody was doing anything like that. The big names simply weren't there.

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Q: What exactly was he uploading? What was the most recognizable work from that period?

A: Most things were in the range of one to five minutes — lots of three-dimensional photo reels, images from his films, fragments you could half-recognize. But the best-known piece from that period is really a film he made of his cat, just running around the apartment chasing a mouse, and he put a score from a samourai film underneath it and edited it into something with a real rhythm. That was the standout work of that YouTube era.

What got me, beyond the content itself, was reading articles at the time where people were genuinely puzzled by his choices — why is this serious director putting short films on YouTube? And I remember being struck by the fact that they were confused at all. Cinema didn't have to be locked away somewhere.

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Q:And then you met him again properly through film school?

A: Both through formal studies and through my own independent research into the canon — what the central works actually were. That's when I got to his major films, and La Jetée hit me the hardest. I think I was around sixteen. I remember that afterward I started playing with the idea myself — still images, a soundtrack, building some kind of rhythm out of them.

From there I slowly found my way into his whole body of work: Sans Soleil, Level Five — and I started grasping the depth of what he was attempting, and just how singular it was. Especially in documentary. He was essentially a one-man show: one person with a camera, recording sound, writing a few lines of voiceover narration, putting it all together into something that simply hadn't existed before. From the sixties through the eighties, there really was nobody approaching cinema the way he did.

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"Cinema didn't have to be something distant and untouchable — it could be something even a fourteen-year-old could find on his screen."

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Q: How did the film itself come about? What were the circumstances?

A: The film was made during COVID, in 2020, when you couldn't leave the house and you couldn't go out and film the external world. The only option was to stay home and watch YouTube. And I rediscovered Marker and his channel — and started noticing strange things happening in the comments.

These weren't the usual stupid, throwaway comments you see under most videos. These were distinctly Markerian — comments that felt like he himself had written them. As if someone had entered the computer and was just typing responses to things, including things he himself had made. Like the Latin-language comments that same account had left across multiple channels. I don't know how many content channels have Latin-language comments — not many. And then a kind of lightbulb went on: there's a pattern here, there's something to investigate, something that isn't normal in the internet world.

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Q: And then you encountered "The Invention of Morel" — how did that open another door?

A: I read the novel and immediately understood what Marker was pointing at, what he was directing you toward. In the interview where he mentions it, the context is a museum he built in Second Life — which was this early metaverse from the early 2000s where people would log in, take on an avatar, and live there, meet people, talk, a substitute reality, though a much more rudimentary version of the VR headsets we have today.

And I understood that the museum he built there was directly influenced by the book — which takes place on an island where a kind of virtual reality is happening. The protagonist meets people, sees all these visions, and gradually realizes he's inside an infinite loop: the people he sees were recorded, and once the recording ended, they ceased to exist. They live in an eternal image, a film that others can watch and imagine how they were — but there's no real interaction, only the illusion of one.

So I understood that Marker had almost certainly read this book long before he built that island in the 2000s — it was published in the 1940s — and it had a formative influence on his entire career.

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Q: Say something about Marker's relationship to time.

A: His sense of time is paradoxical, looping, fluid. He loved playing with different time frames and different mediums — and for him it wasn't only time but also a certain space. Think of La Jetée: there's only one shot with actual movement, everything else is stills. He introduces a kind of doubt about whether you even saw movement at all — which is really doubt about time itself, about how we experience time and space.

That's something he kept returning to throughout his life. The question of time.

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Q: If you could meet him — what would you want to say, or ask?

A: First I'd probably invite him for a beer, something very casual, just to get him out of his studio — which I think he spent enormous hours in. More of a storage unit for his work than a home. He lived alone.

But honestly, more than a specific question I'd want to just experience him as a person. Because he always hid so completely — not just physically, what he looked like, but who he actually was. You can speculate about what he loved, what his hobbies were, but who he really was beyond the avatars, beyond the cats, beyond all the pseudonyms and constructed identities — that's what I'd want to try to catch.

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"He was obsessed with the idea of the self as an image — living not to die in the image, but to control how he would be seen."

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Q: Why do you think he was so secretive about himself?

A: I keep coming back to The Invention of Morel. If we take seriously the idea that he was pointing us toward that book — the whole thing is about a person whose image is recorded, and that recording is then subjected to a kind of manipulation, because those recorded figures are dead. Their existence has been captured in an eternal picture, and there's no real experience of them anymore, only the illusion of one.

So if Marker genuinely intended for us to read him through that book, then I think he was simply obsessed with this idea of the self as image. He wanted to escape the fact of being "the real one" — how he actually was — and through the avatar he could control how he was perceived. He could live rather than die. That eternal image, the way we see him, would be entirely in his hands. He wouldn't be subject to someone else's camera, someone else's angle. He filmed himself. Without a camera.

I also think it gave him creative freedom. All the films he made up to and including La Jetée — when retrospectives were held in his lifetime, before his death, he actually disavowed them. They didn't interest him. His view was that he invented himself with La Jetée as experimental cinema, and that experimentalism only became more avant-garde from there. The secrecy and the freedom were the same thing.

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Q: Would he have resonated with filmmakers of your generation?

A: Without a doubt. He adopted every new technology that appeared — he'd play with it immediately, understand it completely. So I'm convinced he would have been making films with AI, doing augmented reality with VR headsets — that's not even a question. At the very least, uploading it to his YouTube channel.

But I don't think he would have let AI create in his place. He would have played with it, used it the way a child uses a new toy — taken what exists and pushed it in a direction nobody had tried yet. Not skeptically, not cynically. Just: here's a tool, what can I do with this? And then uploaded the cat videos to YouTube.

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Q: You mentioned desktop documentaries — can you explain the form?

A: It's a genre that's existed for about a decade. The idea is to document not external reality but digital, virtual reality — and through that, in some measure, to understand not just the invented world we've created online, but what that world's consequences are for actual lived reality. To create a synthesis of the two worlds.

Or to put it simply: it's probably the most postmodern form of cinema that exists right now, because it's cinema without a camera. A film with no cinematographer, no actors — just a filmmaker and a screen. The virtual world has become day by day more dominant, perhaps more real than the reality in front of us. And that, I think, is exactly the territory Marker was already circling decades before the form had a name.