Documentarian, experimental filmmaker, essayist, photographer, multimedia guru, and all-around Renaissance Man Chris Marker passed away in his home country of France yesterday, allegedly his 91st birthday. Marker had a long, accomplished, celebrated, and prolific career as a pioneer of what is now known as the essay film – a form of documentary that artistically investigates a thesis rather than seeking to “objectively document” its subject. Marker, along with other French cinematic pioneers Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda, was part of the Left Bank Cinema movement of the 1950s, a coalition that influenced and overlapped with the French New Wave. Marker made many powerful and expressive non-fiction films, but he was perhaps most famous for his sole fiction film, La jetée (1962), a time travel short told masterfully through still images.

For a filmmaker who completed only seven feature films in his lifetime, Andrei Tarkovsky has made an enormous impact. In addition to his artistry, perhaps the enduring fascination with his work has to do with the story of a life cut short. After all, several European filmmakers who were born before Tarkovsky, like Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, are still around and making new films. Each of Tarkovsky’s seven films are brilliant works that each possess an ambition towards perfection and cinematic transcendence, but when bringing the filmmaker’s abrupt death by lung cancer into the equation it’s difficult to avoid the saddened feeling that there’s a great deal more time-sculpting he had left to share. So it makes sense then that the number of documentaries about Tarkovsky (or prominently feature the filmmaker) far exceed the number of films the director himself completed, and this fact gives a clear indication of his broad cinematic influence. These films are made because people want more, and desire to understand the depth of Tarkovsky’s work better. Films like Voyage in Time (1983), Moscow Elegy (1987), Directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (1988), and Meeting Andrei Tarkovsky (2008) have examined the auteur’s method, life, philosophy, and impact. But easily the best documentary about Tarkovsky thus far is French visual essayist Chris Marker‘s One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsenevich (1999), recently released on DVD by Icarus Films.