Photographs are a way of imprisoning reality, understood as recalcitrant, inaccessible; of making it stand still. One can't possess reality, one can possess (and be possessed by) images — as, according to Proust, most ambitious of voluntary prisoners, one can't possess the present but one can possessthe past.

As photographs give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal, they also help people to take possession of space in which they are insecure.

You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write.

Photographs trade simultaneously on the prestige of art and the magic of the real.

Paintings invariably sum up; photographs usually do not. Photographic images are pieces of evidence in an ongoing biography or history. And one photograph, unlike one painting, implies that there will be others.

The possession of a camera can inspire something akin to lust. And like all credible forms of lust, it cannot be satisfied.

Chris Marker has a brilliant mind and heart and appetite for life, and it's a privilege to travel with him to whatever he chooses to remember and to evoke. He is one of cinema's all time greats - the most important reflective or non-narrative filmmaker after Dziga Vertov.