Chris Marker was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La Jetée, A Grin Without a Cat and Sans Soleil. Marker is usually associated with the Left Bank subset of the French New Wave that occurred in the late 1950s and 1960s, and included such other filmmakers as Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda and Jacques Demy.
His friend and sometime collaborator Alain Resnais called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man." Film theorist Roy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique...The French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."