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Cat Listening to Music
Chat écoutant de la musique
A cat is half-sleeping, half-listening to Federico Mompou’s “Pájaro triste”. This first tape in Chris Marker’s Bestiaire trilogy, a series of short films devoted exclusively to animals, features his beloved cat, Guillaume-en-Egypte, in his “most widely acclaimed” screen role. As Marker recalls, “he was fond of Ravel (any cat is), but he had a special crush on Mompou. That day (a beautiful sunny day, I remember) I placed Volume I of the complete “Mompou by Mompou” on the CD player to please him…”.
Bio Chris Marker
Chris Marker (France, 1921-2012) was a writer, poet, photographer, multimedia artist, and documentary filmmaker. He began his career as part of the French Rive Gauche group—parallel to but distinct from the Nouvelle Vague—with which he would later share certain themes and collaborators. Marker is considered a pioneer of subjective documentary and collective cinema. His films, such as La Jetée (1962) and Sans soleil (1983), are known for their poetic, essayistic, and often experimental qualities, blending a reflective voice with a fascination for memory, art, war, and politics. Over six decades of work, he observed the world with meticulous cu …
Recently, with the current situations of world politics being as they are, I’ve been seeking out more examples of this rare type of cinema—not a cinema of a tawdry happiness I hasten to add but one of a quiet moment of contentment which is not quite the same thing—and I don’t think that there’s a better example of this than Chris Marker’s short film Chat écoutant la musique (1988). Such is the quietude of the moment in Marker’s film that, in spite of having no dialogue, context, or dramatic event taking place, it rarely fails in moving me to tears.
400
- This film was #78 in the “Greatest” Short Films of All Time 2025