Getting Lost with Chris Marker
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Chris Marker was a total cat guy. It’s hard to pin down much else about the legendary French “film essayist,” as he loaded his work and biography with misdirection and mythology, pseudonyms and maybes. But cats abound, never more than in his pair of love letters to Japan: the 1982 photo essay Le Dépays, a book of text and images, and its film counterpart released the following year, Sans Soleil. Both works are at the center of the Tomorrow Theater’s “An Evening of Chris Marker” this Saturday (November 9, $25). Though Marker translated the book, which pairs black-and-white photos he made of cats and people while strolling Tokyo with musings and dreamlike reports of his encounters, into English himself at one point, it’s been commercially available only in French until this year.
As part of the theater’s one-year anniversary celebration, Plus Plus, this event brings the film and book together. First, the artists Midori Hirose and Matt Carson will read Marker’s text from Le Dépays as its images are projected and the composer Spencer Doran performs an original score written in response to the book. After the performance, the theater will screen Sans Soleil.
In an introduction to this new printing, the artist Sadie Rebecca Starnes writes that “Le Dépays—a neologism meaning the un- or anti-country—is drawn from dépaysement, a nearly untranslatable feeling that approximates the thrilling disorientation of being abroad, of being un-countried.” Dépaysement, she goes on, functions here as a “tool of poetic estrangement”: to find yourself lost, pleasantly. Marker was a famously enchanting and elusive writer and artist. Everything is a slipstream with him. But his trick was to make you understand, while leaving even the most scrupulous critics and scholars at a loss attempting to track, much less explain, exactly how he got his thoughts across. Borrowing a tag from Roland Barthes’s book about Japan, The Empire of Signs, Le Dépays begins with a warning that the reader shouldn’t work too hard to connect the images in it to its text, but instead let both wash over them. “Just be there,” Marker writes, “and everything will come your way. Well, something, at least.”
More Things to Do This Week
Books Peter Ames Carlin
7pm Fri, Nov 8 | Powell’s City of Books, FREE
In The Name of This Band Is R.E.M., Seattle-based writer and former Oregonian reporter Peter Ames Carlin makes the case that, despite their mammoth commercial success, the onetime college radio darlings from Athens, Georgia, never sold out their creative autonomy, even if they committed the cardinal sin of signing a major-label deal. Carlin, who previously authored biographies of Bruce Springsteen, Brian Wilson, and Paul McCartney, will chat with Portland radio host and author Rick Emerson.
art Jeremy Okai Davis
Nov 7–Dec 7 | Elizabeth Leach Gallery, FREE
Davis’s distinctly collage-like paintings always promise a story. Trace his references, and you’ll find Black pioneers and overlooked or ignored Black musicians and athletes. This conceit has driven years of painting series, and Davis is nowhere near exhausting the idea of its energy. His subject in from the stage, a calling… is Black performance. How have dance, music, comedy, vaudeville, magic, and more—stagecraft, wholesale—served as an escape, a form of joyous expression but also exploitation, of the Black experience historically? What about today? His pictures give due posthumous credit to their subjects while exploring and complicating their legacies in the present tense.
music Liberace & Liza
Various times Nov 10–Dec 22 | Portland Center Stage, $23–66
David Saffert, a renowned Liberace impersonator and pianist, and Jillian Snow, who’s similarly gifted at channeling Liza Minelli’s song and dance, together make the Portland-founded show Liberace and Liza. In real life, Liberace and Minelli never performed together, but what if they had? People would love it and the pair would tour around the country every year wooing audiences during the holidays, of course.
