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Mubi's retrospective Chris Marker: An Essayist from the Future is showing July 29 - September 17, 2017 in many countries around the world.Chris Marker’s work exists in the intersection of fiction and documentary, in a realm of elusiveness that trades in interrogation, not in confident statements. He refuses categorization but, almost spitefully, a category was created to encompass his work, a category that isn’t quite a genre.In 1958, after watching Lettre de Sibérie(1957), André Bazin wrote that Marker’s first feature film resembles nothing hitherto seen in documentary films: “The important word is ‘essay,’ understood in the same sense that it has in literature – an essay at once historical and political, written by a poet as well. Generally, even in politically engaged documentaries or those with a specific point to make, the image (which is to say, the uniquely cinematic element) effectively constitutes the primary material of the film...

Experimental French director acclaimed for his post-apocalyptic film La Jetée

The essay film, a form pitched between documentary and personal reflection, exploring the subjectivity of the cinematic perspective, has now become an accepted genre. Jean-Marie Straub, Danièle Huillet, Jean-Luc Godard, Errol Morris and Michael Moore are among its main recent exponents, but Chris Marker, who has died aged 91, was credited with inventing the form.

Marker's creative use of sound, images and text in his poetic, political and philosophical documentaries made him one of the most inventive of film-makers. They looked forward to what is called "the new documentary", but also looked back to the literary essay in the tradition of Michel de Montaigne. Marker's interests lay in transitional societies – "life in the process of becoming history," as he put it. How do various cultures perceive and sustain themselves and each other in the increasingly intermingled modern world?

He was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve,...