The Brooklyn Rail

The life of the enigmatic French filmmaker Chris Marker (1921–2012) spanned the era of silent pictures to the dawn of the aggressively visual internet we live with today. Few twentieth-century figures could have anticipated this new culture so intuitively. Marker’s career was defined by compulsive self-effacement, the manufacture of new identities, and a probing regard for lives far from his own—all qualities we now associate with being online. He was identifiable less by photographic or biographic detail than by his inimitable way of thinking. Always experimental, always political, the films of Marker’s oeuvre combine still photographs, archival footage, travelogue, and his idiosyncratic narration to tell stories about desire, distance, and the nonlinear nature of memory.

It’s fitting, then, that Marker’s most alluring and personal masterpiece was built on digital pathways. A kind of haunted mansion of the artist’s family history and archived mementos, Immemory was first coded in 1997 through software called HyperStudio, and released as a CD-ROM the following year. Somewhere between a blog and a video game, it opens on a menu screen with eight discrete points of entry, called “zones,” that establish Immemory’s themes (“Cinema,” “War,” “Photography,” “Poetry,” “Travel,” etc.) with no discernable endpoint. The idea is to get lost. Designed as a nonlinear “garden of forking paths,” to apply a term once used by Jorge Luis Borges, there are ample hyperlinks enabling one to jump between zones, opening up hidden passageways further into the author’s archival labyrinth. Instead of viewing memory “as a kind of history book,” Marker proposed a “more fruitful approach might be to consider the fragments of memory in terms of geography. In every life we would find continents, islands, deserts, swamps, overpopulated territories and terrae incognitae.” Immemory is his attempt to map his own psychic geography.

Because it was released as born-digital media in an era of rapid technological progress, Immemory was scarcely received before the software required to run it became obsolete. This happened several times; two iterations of CD-ROM eventually yielded to a complete recoding of the program via Adobe Flash, which allowed it to live in a web browser format beyond physical media from 2013 to 2020. In between CD-ROM versions one and two, Marker reached out to the indie press Exact Change, which had overseen the first release of an Immemory CD-ROM in English, with the idle suggestion of “a book incorporating all the texts, no image … which I’d call the ‘Gutenberg version.’” The irony that this oldest form of mass media could form a kind of failsafe, preserving Marker’s grand foray into futuristic technology, was surely not lost on him.

Thirteen years after his death, Immemory: Gutenberg Version has finally arrived, as a 480-page full color paperback. The final push to publish appears to have been caused by the demise of Flash, which Adobe scheduled for obsolescence on December 31, 2020. Adopting a method inspired by Julio Cortázar’s Hopscotch, Exact Change’s edition uses a complex decimal system in the margins to indicate the digressions once supplied by hyperlinks, allowing readers to continue on the path they started or jump to another section at will. In seeming contradiction to Marker’s wish for a “no image” book (allowing the reader to imagine “a different set of images, as convincing, if not more” for his text), the Gutenberg Version is fully illustrated, with nearly every screen from Immemory preserved as a thumbnail (often the maximum resolution that could be extracted from the old CD-ROMs). It’s a valiant, if inevitably compromised, attempt to preserve Marker’s vision.

No matter how appealing the alternative wayfinding system may be, bound books demand to be read linearly, cover to cover. Treating Immemory: Gutenberg Version this way, one will undoubtedly unlock most of the knowledge that Marker wished to impart—and may even pick up further insights by flipping back and forth between zones. But the format, and by extension the rhythm, texture, and tone of this work is lost in a version that offers itself up more as documentation than experience. The design of Exact Change’s Gutenberg Version shows just how spooked the publishers were by the loss of the digital format; the result is too legible, too navigable, without the air of mystery the original emanated.

But this archival adventure comes with a twist. It appears as though two preservation teams were working independently to save Immemory in the days leading up to the demise of Flash without knowledge of one another. A digital preservation team at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, which was responsible for the initial transfer of the program to a browser version, endeavored to update the project once more, orchestrating yet another recoding into HTML5 and thus allowing the program to run (at least for now) on the web once more. Though they don’t advertise it, the Pompidou also maintains the Marker-affiliated website gorgomancy.net, which features a treasure trove of the artist’s late-career videos and new media works, including his 1989 docuseries The Owl’s Legacy and the updated, HTML5 version of Immemory. Unfortunately, it’s only in French.

In her introduction to the Gutenberg Version, film scholar Isabel Ochoa Gold mentions the website as a footnote, seemingly unaware of the Pompidou connection. Curious, I typed the domain into my address bar, and was immediately transported to the dark, spooky, and creaky world of Gorgomancy. Though it now runs on modern software, the site is clearly a translated product of the early internet, and everything takes several seconds to load (which can feel like eons in 2025). Navigating through Immemory’s forest of knowledge, experiencing its graphic animations and sound effects as Marker had intended, I found myself returning to the Gutenberg Version only as a translation and index. Alone, either experience would be incomplete to the English reader. Together, with a laptop on one’s desk and the printed tome in one’s lap, they form a complete experience of the artwork.

This will undoubtedly be too much effort for many potential explorers—especially in the increasingly frictionless experience of today’s digital environment. But Marker’s ponderous depths were never for the faint of heart. One of his most unexpected legacies, beyond the twentieth century cinematic maverick and cypher, is that of the twenty-first century digital prankster and oldhead, whose online presence—in the game Second Life, on his YouTube page Kosinki, and in the posthumously maintained Gorgomancy—encourages fellow travelers to dive in deep. Simply trying to verify which of the memories in Immemory were real led me to parts of the internet I had never been to before, and put me in conversation with a small but dedicated crowd of enthusiasts. Its heart-quickening sense of discovery felt so different from the surface-level scrolling that the internet almost uniformly offers us now. In the web browser Immemory, the ghost in the machine seems reanimated, laying clues at one’s feet. It’s a captivating submersion into memory’s chasms, for which its Gutenberg Version may serve as a life jacket, a way to pull us back out into the world of the real.