This project was rooted in a very clear concept, which was to explore the shadow of Ancient Greece in modern society, with a view to offering a complete overview. This was a Rossellini-like project destined to take in science, art, politics, anthropology, history. […]
In the Sixties and Seventies, Marker was kept very busy with the business of counter-information, counter-reportage… Now he came to television. He did so methodically and thoroughly, offering 26 minutes episodes, each one constructed around one of twelve keywords – except that he ended up giving us a baker’s dozen of thirteen, like any good baker.[…]
The work was witty, especially the introductions and links. Television is not usually witty. Marker sprinkled film-references freely, inventively and metaphorically within each episode, as well as picture and sound archive. He also displayed an unexpected sense of serialization. It was absolutely brilliant.
The shape of the work was really found in the cutting-room. But the major conceptual decision and, if one considers, the most surprising one, came with the face-to-face interviews. […] Marker spent two years on these, recording interviews round the world through 1987 and 1988.

Thierry Garrel 

Chris Marker wanted to make this film. The Onassis Foundation paid for it. Chris brought philosophers, writers, logicians, politicians, artists before the camera to discuss imagination and imaginary worlds, music, inner space, mathematics, sense of history, misogyny, entanglements of desire, truth in lies, nostalgia and received ideas over thirteen episodes, not to mention the Athens of Athenians and the owl, symbol of wisdom and of the polis. To say that this made for fascinating filmmaking is to state the obvious. To say that an unfortunately convoluted production history kept the work confidential is a sad truth. But the reasons for its not finding an audience have nothing to do with its main theme, which is wisdom and freedom.
Coming to its senses, the Onassis Foundation has wisely agreed to hand Chris Marker’s film, L’Heritage de la Chouette, over to the Cinémathèque française. And the Cinémathèque is making it available to audiences, as it must, since its very raison d’être is to show. Showing this film is also a means of expressing the Cinémathèque’s enthusiastic admiration for Chris Marker, as a person and as a filmmaker.

Costa-Gavras

Released in April, 1940, Lights Out in Europe offers, in the words of B.R. Crisler in the “New York Times”, “the first panoramic picture of the world crisis in all its infinite political, economic, racial, propagandistic and brutally military ramifications which has yet reached the screen”. The work of Herbert Kline, a member of New York’s left-leaning Film and Photo League, and the Czech photographer and editor Alexandr Hackenschmied (later known as Hammid), this pulse-pounding documentary offers an image of Europe on the very brink of war, from German troops rolling into the Free City of Danzig (captured on the spot by Kline and his young cinematographer, Douglas Slocombe, here on his first professional assignment) to Londoners lining the banks of the Thames with sandbags as they look anxiously into the sky, awaiting the first wave of German bombers.
With a narration written by the British novelist James Hilton (Lost Horizon) and read by the actor Fredric March, Lights Out in Europe was addressed to an American public still uncertain of what role, if any, the United States should play in the European conflict. With its indelible images of refugees fleeing before the Nazi troupes, including the heartbreaking aftermath of an aerial attack on a train carrying women and children to the Polish border, the documentary makes its case without propagandistic embellishment. For the director John Ford, quoted in newspaper advertisements, Lights Out in Europe was “the most intelligent use to which the camera has yet been put”, while the Communist review “New Masses”, committed to the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, sternly warned its readers, “Everybody had better stay away from this picture”.

Dave Kehr