The Cinematheque

New Restoration

“Glorious … Something for the ages … At once illuminating and confounding, heady but playful.”

J. Hoberman, New York Times

In what may be his most ambitious project of all, Chris Marker (Sans Soleil), cinema’s greatest documentary essayist, offers an agile, engaging, and altogether fascinating 13-part symposium on ancient Greece, its influence on Western civilization, and the way various historical eras and societies (including the Nazis) have reinterpreted Greece’s legacy according to their own needs. Marker’s signature themes were always memory and time; his favourite topics history, politics, culture, and cinema; his approach wry, irreverent, insightful, playful. He was a marvel at montage and assemblage, at unexpected juxtapositions. Each episode here is titled after a Greek-derived word—Democracy, Music, Misogyny, Tragedy, Philosophy, and so on—and provides a wide-ranging exploration of that concept in contemporary culture. Conversations (and symposia banquets) with artists, philosophers, and scholars, conducted in Athens, Berkeley, Paris, and Tbilisi, are intercut with movie clips, documentary footage, and graphics. Images of the owl, symbol of Athena, goddess of wisdom, loom large. Marker’s series, written with veteran screenwriter (and frequent Buñuel collaborator) Jean-Claude Carrière, and produced with Thierry Garrel (now a Vancouver resident), was broadcast on European television shortly after it was made, then unseen for two decades—because one of its funders, the Onassis Foundation, objected to some of the opinions expressed in it about modern Greece. The first three episodes were presented at DOXA in 2017. Now newly restored, The Owl’s Legacy screens here in its entirety.

“Rejoice … A testament to the extraordinary omnivorous mind of this defining film essayist.” Nicholas Elliott, Film Comment

“It is talky, pedantic, and adorable. I love it.” Charlie Markbreiter, Artforum

Program I (78 min.) 1: Symposium, or the Received Ideas
2: Olympics, or the Imaginary Greece
3: Democracy, or the City of Dreams

Program II (78 min.) 4: Nostalgia, or the Impossible Return
5: Amnesia, or the Sense of History
6: Mathematics, or the Realm of Signs

Program III (78 min.) 7: Logomachy, or the Root of Words
8: Music, or the Inner Space
9: Cosmogony—or the Ways of the World

Program IV (104 min.) 10: Mythology, or the Truth of Lies
11: Misogyny, or Desire’s Traps
12: Tragedy, or the Illusion of Death
13: Philosophy, or the Owl’s Triumph

Introduction (March 13, 6:30 pm) by Thierry Garrel, producer

Thierry Garrel, a French Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres and 2015 recipient of the Prix des Auteurs de la SCAM, is former Head of the Documentary and Junior Authors Division at France’s Insitut National de l’Audiovisuel (INA). He was founder and director from 1987 to 2008 of the Documentary Film Department of La Sept and ARTE France, the European cultural channel. Since 2015, he has curated the FRENCH FRENCH section for Vancouver’s DOXA Documentary Film Festival. He and Chris Marker produced The Owl’s Legacy.