This installation by Chris Marker, OWLS AT NOON Prelude: The Hollow Men, is the first element of a work in progress conceived specifically for The Yoshiko and Akio Morita Gallery. No filmmaker has embraced the digital image more enthusiastically than Marker. He has been making films for over fifty years, sifting through images that play with the concept of memory and exploring the paradoxes of time.
This nineteen-minute piece takes its starting point and its title from T.S. Eliot’s 1925 poem “The Hollow Men,” which reflected on the European wasteland that resulted from the first World War. Marker’s meditation mixes his thoughts on the the poem with images of wounded veterans and achingly beautiful women, evoking the hopelessness of those who lived through Europe’s near suicide. As this war comes back to haunt us in both the Balkans and the Middle East, Marker combs a vast beach of images to create an echo chamber in which the viewer can either remember or witness for the first time the reality of a civilization’s self-slaughter.
The continued presentation of Hollis Frampton’s Lemon (1969) and Gary Hill’s Inasmuch as It Is Always Already Taking Place (1990) is also featured in niches near the film and media gallery.
Co-organized by Mary Lea Bandy, The Celeste Bartos Chief Curator of Film and Media, The Museum of Modern Art, and Colin MacCabe, Distinguished Professor of English and Film, University of Pittsburgh.
