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.

At some point during the war he left France and joined the United States Air Force as a paratrooper,[1] although some sources claim that this is not true.

The French publishing company Éditions du Seuil hired him as editor of the series Petite Planète ("Small World").

[6] That collection devoted one edition to each country and included information and photographs,[1] and would later be published in English translation by Studio Vista and The Viking Press.

Around this time Marker met and befriended many members of the Left Bank Film Movement, including Alain Resnais, Agnès Varda, Henri Colpi, Armand Gatti, and the novelists Marguerite Duras and Jean Cayrol.

In the film, Marker's commentary overlaps scenes from China, such as tombs that, contrary to Westernized understandings of Chinese legends, do not contain the remains of Ming dynasty emperors.

[1] After working on the commentary for Resnais's film Le mystère de l'atelier quinze in 1957, Marker continued to refine his style with the feature documentary Letter from Siberia.

[9] An essay film on the narrativization of Siberia, it contains Marker's signature commentary, which takes the form of a letter from the director, in the long tradition of epistolary treatments by French explorers of the "undeveloped" world.

In producing a meta-commentary on narrativity and film, Marker uses the same brief filmic sequence three times but with different commentary—the first praising the Soviet Union, the second denouncing it, and the third taking an apparently neutral or "objective" stance.

It ends with an anti-American epilogue in which the United States is embarrassed by the Bay of Pigs Invasion fiasco, and was subsequently banned.

[11] It tells of a post-nuclear war experiment in time travel by using a series of filmed photographs developed as a photomontage of varying pace, with limited narration and sound effects.

In the film, a survivor of a futuristic third World War is obsessed with distant and disconnected memories of a pier at the Orly Airport, the image of a mysterious woman, and a man's death.

Beginning in the spring of 1962, Marker and his camera operator Pierre Lhomme shot 55 hours of footage interviewing random people on the streets of Paris.

The questions, asked by the unseen Marker, range from their personal lives, as well as social and political issues of relevance at that time.

(Société pour le lancement des oeuvres nouvelles, "Society for launching new works", but also the Russian word for "elephant").

[1] After the events of May 1968, Marker felt a moral obligation to abandon his own personal film career and devote himself to SLON and its activities.

La Bataille des dix millions was made in 1970 with Mayoux as co-director and Santiago Álvarez as cameraman and is about the 1970 sugar crop in Cuba and its disastrous effects on the country.

In 1971, SLON made Le Train en marche, a new prologue to Soviet filmmaker Aleksandr Medvedkin's 1935 film Schastye, which had recently been re-released in France.

(Images, Sons, Kinescope, Réalisations, Audiovisuelles, but also the name of Vladimir Lenin's political newspaper Iskra, which also is a Russian word for "spark").

La Solitude du chanteur de fond is a one-hour documentary about Marker's friend Yves Montand's benefit concert for Chilean refugees.

The concert was Montand's first public performance in four years, and the documentary includes film clips from his long career as a singer and actor.

The film chronicles events in Chile, beginning with the 1970 election of socialist President Salvador Allende until his murder and the resulting coup in 1973.

Upon release, the film was criticized for not addressing many current issues of the New Left such as the woman's movement, sexual liberation and worker self-management.

A sequence in the middle of the film takes place in San Francisco, and heavily references Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo.

"[1] The film's commentary are credited to the fictitious cameraman Sandor Krasna, and read in the form of letters by an unnamed woman.

From 1985 to 1988, he worked on a conversational program (a prototypical chatbot) called "Dialector," which he wrote in Applesoft BASIC on an Apple II.

Marker created a 19-minute multimedia piece in 2005 for the Museum of Modern Art in New York City titled Owls at Noon Prelude: The Hollow Men which was influenced by T. S. Eliot's poem.

In the 2007 Criterion Collection release of La Jetée and Sans Soleil, Marker included a short essay, "Working on a Shoestring Budget".