On Making The Invention of Chris Marker
By Matan Tal
A conversation on desktop film, digital investigation, and the beauty of making something for 99 people.
This interview was conducted by film students at the Sorbonne in Paris, following screenings and discussions around The Invention of Chris Marker. The questions cut closer to the craft than most — how the film was made, how the desktop form shaped the investigation, how a film intended for almost nobody ended up connecting me with people who actually knew Marker in Paris. I've lightly edited my answers for clarity and flow.
Q: How do you define yourself as a filmmaker?
A: As a filmmaker, for sure — someone who creates works of visual art, in film. That's the best definition. And alongside that, after this project, also as a desktop filmmaker. Though in the case of The Invention of Chris Marker, it wasn't really a choice I made — it was a necessity the material imposed. From the very beginning, when I started thinking about how to make this film, I realized the only way to get to the essence of Marker's online presence was through a desktop film. The form and the subject were inseparable.
Q: Did you know what a desktop film was before making one?
A: I had seen a few. I remember when I was studying film in Tel Aviv, they showed us what I think was one of the earliest desktop films ever made — called Noah, about a guy browsing online and having a fight with his girlfriend over Facebook. It left an impression. There was something about it that stayed with me: the idea that a screen could be a location, that the desktop itself could be the space where a film lives.
When I started working on the Marker piece, that film came back to me immediately. I thought — it's possible. You can make something with this genre that goes deep into a subject and is also genuinely entertaining, genuinely interesting. The form didn't limit the investigation. It enabled it.
Q: The film is structured as an investigation — was that the intention from the start?
A: It became an investigation because the material was purely digital. When I started encountering those comments — left by the account "Guillaume" on every available Chris Marker video, including uploads and re-uploads of his own work — I wasn't interested in finding out who the real person was behind the screen. I was interested in the avatar, in the phenomenon itself. That felt so deeply Markerian — so completely in his spirit — that it became the spark.
But over time the investigation transformed. It stopped being a detective story and became something more philosophical: not just who is doing this, but who is Chris Marker, and what is he all about at the deepest level. The detective question led to the existential one.
"I was interested purely in the avatar, in the phenomenon — it was so Markerian to do something like this."
Q: How did you discover that Marker had a museum in Second Life?
A: I had heard of Second Life before, but when I was researching Marker's work I found a reference to a whole museum he had built there. My first reaction was: Second Life must not exist anymore — it was established in the early 2000s, and I was making the film in 2020. But I found a link that still worked, that transported you directly into his museum. I clicked it.
And suddenly I was just launched into Marker's world — almost in his presence, exactly as he had left it. The museum was still intact. Everything was still there. That was one of the most uncanny moments of making the film: the sense that he had built a space and simply walked away from it, and it had been waiting ever since.
Q: How much of the film was recorded live versus staged or re-shot?
A: It depended on the moment. When I was following a lead in real time, I wanted an authentic response — I wanted the surprise to be genuine, even for me. I noticed early on that when I discovered something unexpected, the way I moved on the laptop, the way the cursor hesitated or accelerated, was different from anything I could simulate. You felt it on screen. So I recorded long sessions — sometimes thirty minutes straight — just going from one thing to the next.
In Second Life, I recorded non-stop from the moment I entered until I left, over about two days of going in and out. Almost none of it is in the film. The moments where the avatar is flying and crashing into things, stumbling around — that was entirely spontaneous, pure slapstick happening in real time. I thought: that's funny, and it's also true, and it belongs in this film.
That said, there were videos I had already seen that I re-recorded, knowing I could use them. So it was a mix — mostly live discovery, occasionally reconstructed, but never simulated in the sense of faking a reaction I didn't actually have.
Q: The editing took much longer than the shooting — what made it difficult?
A: The shooting was about four days. The editing was three weeks. The challenge was the narration — building a coherent story around the investigation, finding the through-line that made it a film rather than just footage. I kept thinking about something Marker said in an interview about making Sans Soleil: he had all this material and knew something was there, but he kept rewriting the narration and couldn't quite find it, until suddenly he had the film. The same thing happened here. I had the material, I started editing, and I thought the film was going one way — but the film had a voice of its own and kept pulling in a different direction. At some point I stopped fighting it and tried instead to serve it: to make sense of where it wanted to go, and to build the narration around that rather than impose one on top of it.
Why those particular songs? The music feels very specific.
It wasn't accidental. The film is called The Invention of Chris Marker, which echoes the title of the novel Marker himself recommended — The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, which also directly inspired his Second Life museum. The two songs used in the film are both mentioned in that novel. Particularly "Valencia," sung in an almost operatic voice — it's in the book, and when I placed it on the timeline during the edit I thought: that's it, it belongs here, it creates another layer. It builds a connection between the novel, the Second Life museum, and the whole story. When the music landed in the right place in the edit, the film suddenly felt complete in a way it hadn't before.
"I made this film for 99 people. I was wrong."
Q: You wrote in the film's description that nobody would see it. What actually happened?
A: I was surprised, to say the least. The film came about almost accidentally — I was supposed to shoot something else in May 2020 but COVID postponed everything, I had a window of time, and I just made it. As a passion project. I uploaded it to YouTube immediately without even thinking about film festivals — I thought, Marker is a niche filmmaker, this is a niche film, let's just put it out there for whoever wants to find it. I genuinely wrote it for 99 people.
But I think closer to 1,500 people saw it (in 2020), and more importantly, the right people found it. Friends of Marker in Paris reached out. I ended up having meetings last summer with people who had been involved in his films, producers, people from his actual life. None of that would have happened if I hadn't just put it out.
That's something I think about a lot. The blockbusters that millions watch and forget within a year. And then the small film you make and release into the world, and a few hundred people find it, and it creates real connections, teaches something, touches someone. You genuinely never know. That's the beauty of cinema — that's purely what it is.
