Quand le Siècle a pris formes is a montage of events from the first thirty years of the 20th century – or “sensitive markers”, according to Marker's writings – deliberately treated in the cinematic language of the day (current events, “kino eye”, silent cinema, documents and fictional film elements). Films derived from WWI archives, the German and Russian revolutions, as well as the afterwar period are presented, interspersed with texts. The sequences are coloured shot by shot using a synthesizer, the Spectron, and connote the country that they refer to: brown for Germany, red for Russia, light blue behind the front lines in France. The film is punctuated by “period” music by Hanns Eisler. Originally entitled Guerre et Révolution, the installation was produced and presented for the first time in the great multidisciplinary exhibition Paris - Berlin organised at the Centre Pompidou in 1978. Configured at the time for twelve television sets, arranged in four stacked rows of three sets, the videotape was shown with a three second offset on every second monitor, thus creating “a doubling up of rhythm and perception”. It is not so much a “history lesson” as it is a matter of “isolating elements that make the end of World War One and the revolutionary era the repertoire of almost everything that modified the contemporary view of the world”.

Christine van Assche