Shout Out - No. One - The Owl's Legacy
Shout-Out is a column whereby we share dope shit by dope people. In edition No.1 our Chief Communications Officer Furtado Melville shares out of his extensive mind map Chris Marker’s The Owl’s Legacy 1987 film on ancient Greece and its pillars that to this day define how we live our lives in the West. Or as he puts it:
French “prototype of the twenty-first-century man” filmmaker, writer, photographer, multimedia artist and film essayist Chris Marker is one of my favourite artists. I’d like to appreciate in him everything that I’ve become without knowing I was becoming it. The third sentence of his Sans Soleil [1983] epos is a piece of text that always stuck with me: “He wrote me: one day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.” It was also the first time I encountered my country of birth Cabo Verde in a film. A first I’ll always cherish. Especially the images of people on street markets and waiting for the boat accompanied by the text, “They are a people of wanderers, of navigators, of world travelers. They fashioned themselves through cross-breeding here on these rocks that the Portuguese used as a marshaling yard for their colonies. A people of nothing, a people of emptiness, a vertical people.” Some things resonate more if you’ve lived through it.
ARTE’s press release describes it as follow: “The Owl’s Legacy [1987] was conceived as a film in 13 episodes about the influence of Greek culture in our Western society. On the model of the ancient banquet, men (and some women) drink wine by exchanging ideas, filmed by Marker in five places: Tbilisi, Athens, Paris, Tokyo and Berkeley.”
Monoskop has all 13 episodes for your viewing pleasure. The mind has to travel.
