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Cinéma & Cie. Film and Media Studies Journal
A Cinematic Path through the Virtual Museum. Exploring Chris Marker’s Ouvroir
Text.Serial.Journal
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2010-10-01
2022-12-09
2010-10-01
2024-02-14
Cinéma & Cie
Joana Pimenta
2010/10/01
Harvard University
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A Cinematic Path through the Virtual Museum. Exploring Chris Marker’s Ouvroir
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10
A CINEMATIC PATH THROUGH THE VIRTUAL MUSEUM.
EXPLORING CHRIS MARKER’S OUVROIR
Joana Pimenta, Harvard University




From the Linden Arcade to the Linden Lab
             The Lindenpassage (Linden Arcade) has ceased to exist. That is, it remains a means
                   of passage between Friedrichstrasse and Linden Avenue in terms of its form,
                            but it is no longer an arcade... The time of the arcades has run out.
                                              Siegfried Kracauer, Farewell to the Linden Arcade

  The Lindenpassage was a Berliner arcade that resembled a magical passage, one that we tra-
versed, writes Kracauer, as if one were underground between this street and the other 1. Walking
through it implied entering a fascinating world, full of sensuous stories, where everything that
was excluded from the bourgeois life, that could not be fit as an adornment for the facade, would
find its place 2. The space of the passageway was a space of dwelling, it implied a path which
inscribed the subject within its structure. Moreover, it required a practice of space that was meant
to bring forward the construction of a narrative that could not be limited by its frames. Holding
inside a bazaar, a world panorama, an anatomical museum, and a bookshop filled with paperbacks
whose titles aroused desires, the passage projected onto its surfaces images that crossed its phys-
ical borders and brought other stories and other places into its dark and porous structure, trans-
forming it into a lived place.
  By the time Kracauer writes his Farewell to the Linden Arcade the Lindenpassage had been
rebuilt as a new arcade, and the dark three-story structure replaced by a one-story construction
made of bright marble panels and a glass roof. These were understood as being more adequate to
the commercial nature of the arcade than the anarchic, sensual, somber structure of the passage 3.
However, even after having lost its previous form, the arcade retained something of its earlier
function: that magical world remained in the objects it held inside, that functioned like passages
in the context of the bourgeois life, still implying a complex relation between illusion and reali-
ty, proximity and distance.
  Linden Lab is the name of the corporation which created Second Life (SL), a virtual world
which first went online in 2003, and where everything is coined by Linden: we trade real dollars
for Linden dollars, or Lindens, that we use to buy from Linden the 1024 sq.ft. of virtual terrain
where we build our house, and before being able to customize our avatar, we are designed by
Linden. The Linden Lab also imposes on Second Life its own logic of circulation, one marked by
a cartography of links that we are supposed to go through by means of teleporting, or hyper-link-
ing. In this sense, the virtual space is no longer a passage and not yet an arcade. By rule, there is
no path in which the subject can be inscribed, the passage is not meant to be traversed, and the

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JOANA PIMENTA

possibility of inscription of the promeneur is reconfigured when both space and body are dis-
placed from their logic of projection and brought together in an image transmitted through a dig-
ital screen. The virtual space resembles a fragmentary, non-traversable space, where we are not
meant to take the time for traveling, the time for erring; we just have to click; and, by clicking,
everything is brought to a sense of proximity, all seems reachable.
   Chris Marker, a “multimedia-filmmaker” who has always been concerned with the idea of pas-
sage, not only in relation to the passages between images and memory, but also through their dif-
ferent configurations in an array of media, has recently created on Second Life, by joint initiative
with the Museum of Zurich and in collaboration with the architect Max Moswitzer, the archipel-
ago of the Ouvroir (fig. 1). As I will try to explore throughout the passages here proposed to tra-




                                          Fig. 1 – Ouvroir.

verse Chris Marker’s museum, the Ouvroir opens a space for wandering – through its islands, its
means of transport, its museum, or through its screens – and places it in the limiting and bound-
ing space that the virtual world creates for the inscription of the subject in its forms of circula-
tion. In that sense, it seems to be transporting the Lindenpassage to the space of the Linden Lab,
proposing a circulation that is closer to the promenade – and to the ways in which this prome-
nade connects both architectural and cinematic space and perception – than to virtual teleporting,
and thus bringing back to the virtual space of the digital screen different forms of passage
between material and immaterial. Instead of obsessive mapping, Marker creates a form of circu-
lation through the virtual museum that takes into account the possibilities of losing oneself, going
back and forth, wandering, repeatedly coming back and arriving at something different.
   The configurations for ethics and aesthetics Marker here puts in place, this questioning of a car-
tography of the virtual space and how to transform it into a mapping that does not imply enclo-
sure or domination but instead opens zones for a nomadic spectator to live the space, could not
come but from the nomadic cineaste par excellence. Marker has always been concerned with put-
ting in place a path through images, countries, and stories, but a path that also corresponds to a
circulation through different media, through different ways of traveling. From Letter from
Siberia (Lettre de Sibérie, 1957) or Cuba Si! (¡Cuba sí!, 1961) to La Jetée (1962) or Sunless
(Sans soleil, 1983), Marker shows a concern with traversing zones between documentary and fic-
tion, personal letter and political manifesto, the mapping and remapping of memory. He writes:
“My idea was to immerse myself in this Maelstrom of images to establish its geography,” 4 an
affective path through their obtrusive inscription in our daily lives. And as he travels from cine-
ma to video, CD-Rom or videogames, Marker mobilizes cinematic memory in order to open the

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space for his works to inhabit the fissures between a collective oblivion and a continuous moving
forward, enkindling an overlapping past which comes to inhabit the present images. Marker
reframes this question in his own terms through the relation he establishes in the CD-Rom,
Immemory, to his reference film, Hitchcockʼs Vertigo (1958), writing over an image of Scottie
facing the Golden Bridge:

  Scottie will have received the greatest joy a man can imagine, a second life, in exchange for the
  greatest misfortune, a second death. What else is offered us by video games, which say so much
  more about our unconscious than the complete works by Lacan? Neither money nor glory:
  another game. The possibility to start playing again. “A second chance”. A free replay 5.

  A “second life” for cinematic forms, and a remapping for cinematic spectatorship, which are
now brought to the space of the virtual museum.


Chris Marker’s Cinématographie sans Films: Exploring the cinematic passages
of the virtual museum
   As we begin our journey through the framework here proposed for understanding the circula-
tion through the space of the Ouvroir, I hope it will become evident the ways in which Marker
brings to the virtual space his idea of a cinématographie sans films, the ways in which cinematic
forms, as well as a cinematic frame for working perception, expand themselves throughout this
new media space, transforming its forms of circulation 6.
   Kracauer’s passage articulated a complex relation between proximity and distance, between the
objects that were close and evoked the distant, and the distant time-spaces that the images brought
into proximity 7. These spaces were circulated through the haptic path the subject performed,
which brought together an inherent relation between reality and image that was inscribed in the
spatial and temporal textures of the passage 8. Mary Ann Doane, on her essay on indexicality and
medium specificity, argues that the digital cannot make such claim of contact, touch, a physical
connection where the dynamics between close and distant is played, since it negates it in favor of
a fantasy of immateriality 9. In fact, while approaching the cyberspace of virtual teleporting, we
inherently lose an obvious material relation to haptic perception by the loss of a physical relation
to reality that is inscribed on the image. Within this framework for perception, wandering through
the passage becomes mapping and teleporting through what seems a disorienting and paradoxical
space, a space that seems as expansible as it seems devoid of any structures, fighting the
inescapable paradox of presenting itself as an always-expanding territory, at the same time that
we have been responding to our profound disorientation with an obsession for bounding and
enclosing.
   In fact, if a material relation, or an idea of distinction, between body and space is undermined
by the fact that they are both brought together in one image, the dynamics between close and dis-
tant is reconfigured. There is no center on the virtual world and no journey between one place to
the other since it all extends itself through the same surface. The virtual space is navigable but
not traversable, it is a space in which we are not meant to take the time to perform the journey,
we just have to click to be able to travel immediately from one location to the other. Constructing
maps that frame and bound space seems to be the means to master its defying structures 10. There
are a number of maps that are put in place on our Second Life screen (fig. 2), and there is even a

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                               Fig. 2 – Map on the Second Life screen.

website dedicated to map Second Life 11. However, these maps are entropic structures, without a
center or a sense of direction, composed by units that are not connected, where the main idea is
to discover the coordinates so that we do not lose a second to get there. Its own mappability is a
way of limiting an expansive world within defined borders, making it apprehensible even if we
cannot fully master its structures (in a sense, what we have been mobilizing in a different way,
more open to disturbance and resistance, by framing the world through a film screen). We are
caught within systems that propose spatial coordinates and require a form of perception we can-
not fully master at this point, and we try to make sense out of them by applying the same old
predicaments. We domesticate these environments in order to transform its fearful spaces into
habitable places. In this sense, “the modern metropolis and the new technologies” are both “wild
territories to be domesticated, if not urbanized, with maps” 12.
   As we travel to Marker’s Ouvroir, it is precisely the idea of a traversable path that is instead
brought forward, in a space where it seems to be, by definition, absent. Instead of obsessive map-
ping, Marker puts in place a return to cinematic configurations for perception which require us to
trace an affective path, an emotional relation to the images which are displayed. In the same
movement, he engages in a critique of both the limits of the space and how it is configured in its
duration. Instead of constructing limiting maps, he makes the user perform subjective paths, cre-
ating a space that is more open for the inscription of the subject and which takes him as part of
its modulation. By drawing back to filmic modes of perception, Marker creates a form of circu-
lation through the virtual museum that takes into account the possibilities of losing oneself, going
back and forth, wandering, repeatedly coming back and arriving at something different. The
passeur who traversed the passage and who was mobilized by the film screen is not displaced
from the virtual space of Marker’s museum (fig. 3). Instead, as it will be here explored, it is




                           Fig. 3 – Ouvroir, entrance in the main museum.

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                                Fig. 4 – Ouvroir, modes of circulation.

through his trajectories that he creates the space he circulates through, molding through time the
virtual spatial forms.
   To begin with, in order to go through the Ouvroir, Marker proposes a circulation that goes
beyond flying or teleporting, the usual means of mobility of the avatar. If not walking through
space, as it was previously implied, we traverse it by using a balloon, two different boats, or a
train which runs through the landscape (fig. 4). Moreover, inside the space of the museum, what
would simply suppose rapidly moving from one structure to the other is transformed into a reflec-
tion on the temporalization of space: Marker displaces the traditional walk/run forms of move-
ment of the avatar in favor of a cinematic journey through a series of images that are placed along
the structure, or through the ways in which the construction frames the surrounding landscape,
working on the duration of the space by framing a path which extends temporality, requiring us
to take time to traverse its passages.
   Secondly, instead of presenting a cartography of obvious liaisons, always framed by a “back”
button, Marker hides the links and makes us take decisions that are definitive, where the possi-
bility of going back implies arriving at something different. The islands are in a continuous trans-
formation, since Marker and Max Moswitzer are always creating new objects and altering their
configurations. Moreover, visitors are able to alter the museum’s images by clicking on their
screens, and these never return to a predefined disposition. Marker works on the feeling of end-
less construction that the virtual space seems to promise, while at the same time he explores its
desaturation, undermining the idea that empty virtual space just waits to be filled out. He does so
either by building labyrinths that lead nowhere, or by presenting an horizontal construction which
opens zones of void that are not meant to be closed. He undermines the unending linkage and sub-
stitutes it for an architecture that works on its disruption, on the creation of a temporalization of
space that implies the possibility of inscribing oneself, going back and forth and always arriving
at something different.
   Thirdly, in the Ouvroir, not only the memory of cinema remains inscribed throughout, but also
we are supposed to follow a cinematic path through it, slowing down, stopping, traveling through
its walls. In two of the floors of Marker’s museum we can see two of his video installations: Silent
Movie (1995) and Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men (2004). Right next to the main muse-
um, we find a futuristic film theatre, that links to Marker’s YouTube channel. And even below
water, hidden and without any indication of their location, we find screens which transmit some
of Marker’s new work. In sum, when we “get in touch” with the virtual world we have to learn
how to be the nomadic subject created at the crossroads between the passage and the film theatre,
to descend into this Maelstrom, the vortex Marker recalls from Poe’s story, that draws into itself
all the objects and reconfigures them 13. However, if we are here engulfed by the Maelstrom, then
find solace in Morel’s Island (fig. 5) 14.

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JOANA PIMENTA




                             Fig. 5 – Ouvroir, map of the Morel’s island.

   Concluding, cinematic configurations for spectatorship, worked by the medium throughout his-
tory, expand into the space of Marker’s museum, creating new forms of passage through the vir-
tual space. Cinema, as a moving sensation, reaffirms the presence of the subject, his embodiment
and inscription in the uncrossable passages virtual space proposes, and re-inscribes a shared expe-
rience of spectatorship, the potential for affection and change, by implying that we traverse pas-
sages where bodies are not merely dis-placed but space is open for appropriation and transfor-
mation by traversing its surfaces, thus mobilizing the articulation between a private travel and a
shared experience that is performed in movement. Marker opens the space for us to circulate
through this unfolding places, disorganized, and disframed, by modulating them within the
process of our transitions, affecting them through the temporalization the spectator performs. On
the one hand, as we go through the Ouvroir, it is neither the bird’s view nor the street view that
we face: one can never have a total view out of the island, and space builds itself as we walk
through it. On the other, the screens do not resist to the movements of the avatar, but allow us to
become part of the image, to be screened-through.
   An evident example of this logic are the screens place on the third and last floor of the muse-
um. The same images that are placed in the loop presented in Pictures at an Exhibition 15 (fig. 6)
– a work by Marker composed from the images he had included in the Museum section of the
CD-Rom Immemory, and released on his channel on YouTube through which the viewer circu-
lates in an unending loop through a gallery’s walls – are positioned in the Ouvroir in a different
disposition: they are exhibited in screens which are literally posed one on the other and they
merge into one another; and as we walk through, we become part of them too, since instead of




                       Fig. 6 – Pictures at an Exhibition (Chris Marker, 2001).

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resisting to the movements of the avatar they allow us to become part of the image. What this dis-
position tells us about the Ouvroir is that here, in the bounded virtual space, the place construct-
ed by Marker’s museum is meant to be traversed by a nomad that can take part of a the fluidity
of the screens he walks through. An errant cartography, as Giuliana Bruno argues in relation to
film, displaces here the directed topography at stake for the virtual world’s structures of mappa-
bility 16. A mobile, inhabited map of traversable passages is here played at the surface of the dig-
ital screen. Through the construction of this cinematic-virtual-space, cinema is re-located as a
moving inter-face capable of re-mapping the rigid division between a collective and private expe-
rience of spectatorship, between the limiting forms of immediate location and the act of travers-
ing an affective path in which the subject is both projected and affected.
   Lamenting the transformation of the Lindenpassage into the Linden Arcade, Kracauer writes:
“Now, under a new glass roof and adorned in marble, the former arcade looks like the vestibule
of a department store. [...] All the objects have been struck dumb. [...] What would be the point
of an arcade [Passage] in a society that is itself only a passageway?” 17.
   However if, as Mark Wigley writes, either in architectural, filmic or virtual space, we are never
lost nor found, but caught in between, then the time of the passages is not lost while we still may
inhabit its fissures, making use of the fluidity of its screens 18. Marker puts in place a path through
a constrained space that implies the possibility of inhabiting its intervals. Creating fissures, open-
ings, inscribe oneself. In Markerʼs Ouvroir, we circulate through this transitory virtual space, dis-
organized and disframed, by modulating it within the process of our own transitions, screening-
through its passages, passing through its windows, traversing cinematic dispositifs which were
dis-located into the virtual space of digital interaction. Cinematic configurations, and their de-
localization into virtual space, are here explored as a moving cartography, where a relation to
materiality, to traversing the crossroads between the physical and imaginary space in the passage
inscribed within the city-space, is transported to the frame of the filmic screen, creating a mobile
spectatorship which articulates interior and exterior space where the cinematic encounter takes
place. In the same movement, to explore the virtual museum through a relation that recalls the
modes of framing and circulation of both the arcade and the film theatre does not imply to fall
back into nostalgia but precisely to start delineating the transformations here brought forward by
this re-location of the cinematic dispositif in its second life in the virtual space. It is from within
this space of transition that we can open lines of resistance, rather than retreating that we can
indeed inhabit a world we continue to frame and bound through the screen.




1   Siegfried Kracauer, Das Ornament der Masse, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1977 (engl. ed. The Mass
    Ornament Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1995, quot. at p. 338).
2   Idem, p. 337.
3   Regarding the aesthetics of the arcade from within the commercial culture in which they are inscribed,
    in The Arcades Project, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 1999, Walter Benjamin writes (p.
    31) : “These arcades, a recent invention of industrial luxury, are glass-roofed, marble-paneled corridors
    extending through whole blocks of buildings [...] The arcade is a city, a world in miniature, in which
    consumers will find everything they need.”.
4   Chris Marker, A Farewell to Movies, Museum für Gestaltung Zürich, Zürich 2008.
5   Chris Marker, Immemory (1998), Exact Change, Cambridge (MA) 2008.
6   Marker’s exhibition, “A Farewell to Movies”, had as its original French title: “Cinématographie sans

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      Films”, a play of words with télégraphie sans fil (also known as TSF) that revealed itself impossible to
      translate.
7     See Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other
      Writings on Media, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 2008, and Siegfried
      Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, cit.
8     I am here relying on both Giuliana Bruno’s and Mary Ann Doane’s frameworks for the relation between
      indexicality and the haptic. See Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and
      Film, Verso, New York-London 2002, and Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time:
      Modernity, Contingency, the Archive, Harvard University Press, Cambridge (MA) 2002.
9     Mary Ann Doane, “The Indexical and the Concept of Medium Specificity,” in Differences: A Journal of
      Feminist Cultural Studies, no. 1, 2007, p. 142.
10    My framework for this relation is based on Mark Wigley’s approach to the feeling of being lost in space.
      See Mark Wigley, “Lost in Space,” in The Critical Landscape, 010 Publishers, Rotterdam 1996.
11    See SL-URL, a location-based linking on Second Life. SL-URL works by providing immediate teleport
      to in-world locations. In terms of representation, it is composed by a series of squared parcels of land,
      which we can zoom in, read the tag, and click. Each resident can build his own sl-urls. It can be found
      at http://slurl.com, last visit 6 June 2011.
12    Mark Wigley, “Lost in Space,” cit.
13    Edgar Allen Poe, “A Descent Into the Maelstrom,” in Id., Great Short Works of Edgar Allan Poe:
      Poems, Tales, Criticism, Harper Perennial, New York 1970.
14    Morel’s Island refers here to the island pictured in The Invention of Morel a novel written by Adolfo
      Bioy Casares and published in 1940, that is understood to be a meditation on the cinematic image. See
      Adolfo Bioy Casares, The Invention of Morel, New York Review Books, New York 2003.
15    Marker’s Pictures at an Exhibition can be found on his channel on You Tube at the address
      http://www.youtube. com/watch?v=1PThypeEt1Y
16    See Giuliana Bruno, Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film, cit., and Id., Public
      Intimacy: Architecture and the Visual Arts, cit.
17    Siegfried Kracauer, The Mass Ornament, cit.
18    Mark Wigley, “Lost in Space,” cit.




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