Chris Marker (1921-2012) was born in Neuilly-sur-Seine, France. Marker was a cinematic essayist and audio-visual poet. Marker began as a writer after the World War II, publishing his first book in 1949. In the 1950s he turned to documentary filmmaking. Among his classic works from this period are Letter from Siberia, Cuba Si!, Le Joli Mai, and La Jetée. In the 1960s and 1970s he was actively involved with SLON, a filmmaking collective dedicated to activist production. Marker reemerged to make films under his own name again in 1977 with Le Fond de l'air est rouge (A Grin Without A Cat) and received worldwide appraisals for his film Sans Soleil, made a few years later. Creatively reworking his life as if editing one of his own films, Marker made films on other filmmakers during the 1980s and 1990s. He also explored video and computer-generated imagery with a continued emphasis on the intersection between personal and political themes in films such as Level Five and The Case of the Grinning Cat.