Chris Marker

Known for: La Jetée (1962), Sans Soleil (1983)

Chris Marker was a filmmaker, writer, photographer, and multimedia artist who invented the essay film as a sustained form in works including Letter from Siberia (1957) and Sans Soleil (1983), a meditation on time, memory, and the images with which we constitute history. La Jetée (1962) — a short film composed almost entirely of still photographs — became one of the most widely cited films in cinema history and the source of Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys. He guarded his privacy so intensively that no reliable portrait photograph of him is known to exist.