Nostalgia for the Future

Written & directed by Brecht Debackere | Edited by Beppe Leonetti | Sound design Boris Debackere | Produced by Steven Dhoedt

A co-production with COBRA FILMS (BE) | GHIRIGORI (IT) | SERIOUSFILM (NL)

Supported by FLANDERS AUDIOVISUAL FUND | BELGIAN TAX SHELTER | FONDO AUDIOVISIVO FVG

On July 29, 1921, Christian Hippolyte François Georges Bouche-Villeneuve was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Other sources mention Île-aux-Moines, Beijing and Neuilly-sûr-Seine. He does not feel inclined to provide the correct information.

The name Chris Marker first appeared in Paris at the end of the 1940s and is but one of the many pseudonyms of Christian Bouche-Villeneuve. He rarely gives interviews and when asked for a picture, he sends one of his cat.

With more than 70 films to his credit, photos, cartoons, books, installations, … he is still virtually unknown to the general public. He describes himself as ‘the best-known author of unknown films’.

Based on his archive, now owned by the Cinémathèque Française, we try to find out who Marker was and how his work has a lasting influence on our visual culture. It is a search for the meaning of the archive as a whole, as well as its individual
entries. As a physical legacy, it forms Marker’s memory. Can we know the person from the documents – the memories – that this archive contains?

Nostalgia for the Future is a film about images, memory, time and nostalgia. Images as a time machine, a memory and a look ahead. What the images we make tell us about our society. How we imagine a future on the basis of images from
the past. It is a film about our history, about the world we live in today and what world we want to wake up in tomorrow.

It is an ode to the work of this ‘unknown’ artist and his ideas about images as cultural memory, on how our memories and the artefacts we leave behind make us who we are, as humans and humanity.

In Nostalgia for the Future, we sketch an image of Chris Marker using his work and his archive, and in doing so we try to answer the question: can we form an image of a person using the images and documents that he leaves behind?
The archive holds the possibility to remember, but first there must be a memory or an event that can be included in the archive as an ‘object’ to be preserved.