In 1959 the notoriously elusive yet evidently fraternal Chris Marker lent both his name and his pet owl Anabase to Walerian Borowczyk's short animation The Astronauts (Les Astronautes), the Polish director's first film after his emigration to France. According to Catherine Lupton, Marker cosigned the film as a “favor” to Borowczyk, who then lacked a permit to work in his adopted country. Just as Marker provided The Astronauts with one of the creatures particularly privileged in his own cinema, so, a few years later, did Borowczyk's wife and favored female star Ligia Branice appear briefly in Marker's celebrated “stills movie” The Pier (La jetée, 1962). These wisps of collaboration point to the underexplored connection between Borowczyk and the “Left Bank Group,” a band of (mostly) French filmmakers, including Marker, who are alternately considered a “subset” of the Nouvelle Vague and its more literary and politically engaged counterpart. These gestures not only suggest a shared milieu and real-life sympathies, but also foreground tactics and tropes common to both the Parisian “movement” and the fiercely independent Polish émigré.

The contribution of cherished mainstays from one's domestic life, whether a pet owl or a spouse, points to the modest, artisanal, and “home-made” qualities of Borowczyk's or Marker's cinema: to that extent The Astronauts itself, a vignette concerning an eccentric inventor and his little home-made spaceship, is a portrait of the artists involved and the inscription of its own production methods.