Détour Ceausescu, 1990
PAL, sound, colour
Neither documentary, nor fiction, Chris Marker's work mocks boundaries and definitions and imposes, over and above any formal categories, moral guidelines and a philosophy for the "man behind the camera": to keep an open vision of the world, be in a state of self-readiness to cover an event, History, reality and its imaginary projections.
Chris Marker is a man on tenterhooks, always ready to record the great events of our civilisation, the staging, the multiple images that reached him via the written word, photography or the cinema in the past or via the computer or television today.
The eye behind the fixed screen, History being made/unmade: the trial of the Ceaucescus, their execution, the live spectacle of the end of a totalitarian regime. But what he astutely focuses on is not so much the place or time where History is made but the way it reaches us, firmly ensconced in a journalist's comments, in between advertising inserts. With critical elan, Chris Marker inserts each commercial inside the document itself, thus denouncing the absurdity, the morbid complaisance and voyeurism of the media. The editing here strongly signifies the perversion of such a distribution device and shows how the staging of an event can turn into pure representation of its selling value. A historical event becomes the object of economic exchange. Détour. Ceaucescu (Ceausecu Detour) is an urgently impulsive response to the manipulations by the media of one of the most important revolutions of the end of this century: the first to have been followed live by television viewers. This tape was included in Zapping Zone, an interactive multimedia installation, where fiction and memories intermingle.
Stéphanie Moisdon