I owe everything to Nicole Vedrès. It might seem incredibly presumptuous to say that Nicole, in just two films, taught me that cinema is not compatible with intelligence. Just who does he think he is? Everyone else was an idiot? Let me be more specific. We’re not talking about the intelligence of filmmakers, but the idea, quite common at the time, that intelligence is the basic material, the raw matter guiding commentary and editing for the creation of an object called film.

Chris Marker, Marker Mémoire, Cinémathèque française program, January-February 1998