Short Film News (SFN)- Chris Marker, a celebrated French film-maker best known for La Jetee, dies at the age of 91.

Marker collaborated with cinema greats including Akira Kurosawa, Costa-Gavras and Alain Resnais over the course of a career spanning six decades in which he made over 50 films, many of them inspired by his left-wing and anti-colonial politics.

He was best-known for his 1962 short-film La Jetee (The Pier), a story of a survivor of a future war travelling back in time to relive his own death.

The highly stylised film inspired Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys sufficiently for Marker to be credited as one of the writers on the 1995 feature.

Marker was notorious for keeping his private life to himself, shunning interviews and refusing to be photographed.

He even teased the world by claiming he was born in Mongolia despite the fact that he actually hailed from Paris suburb Neuilly-sur-Seine. However, the friend to several famous directors of what was known as the “Left Bank Film Movement” like Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda and Henri Colpi, Marker wasn’t a misanthrope according to Costa Gavras who told French newspaper Le Monde on Monday: “He was a profoundly honest man, both politically and cinematographically.” 

He worked as assistant director on Resnais’ famous Holocaust film Night and Fog. Resnais has described Marker as "the prototype of the 21st century man".

Marker certainly wasn’t shy with his art. He worked as a journalist and a critic for famed French film magazine Les Cahiers du Cinéma. His first film was Olympia 52, a documentary about the 1952 Helsinki Olympics. His 1961 title Si Cuba was banned in the US since it supported Fidel Castro and criticized America.