Chris Marker (French: [maʁkɛʁ]; born Christian-François Bouche-Villeneuve; 29 July 1921 – 29 July 2012) was a French writer, photographer, documentary film director, multimedia artist and film essayist. His best known films are La Jetée (1962), A Grin Without a Cat (1977) and Sans Soleil (1983). 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.

His friend and sometime collaborator Alain Resnais called him "the prototype of the twenty-first-century man." Film theorist Roy Armes has said of him: "Marker is unclassifiable because he is unique... French Cinema has its dramatists and its poets, its technicians, and its autobiographers, but only has one true essayist: Chris Marker."

Marker was born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve. He was always elusive about his past and known to refuse interviews and not allow photographs to be taken of him; his place of birth is highly disputed. Some sources and Marker himself claim that he was born in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. Other sources say he was born in Belleville, Paris, and others, in Neuilly-sur-Seine. The 1949 edition of Le Cœur Net gives his birthday as 22 July. Film critic David Thomson has said, "Marker told me himself that Mongolia is correct. I have since concluded that Belleville is correct—but that does not spoil the spiritual truth of Ulan Bator." When asked about his secretive nature, Marker said, "My films are enough for them [the audience]."

Marker was a philosophy student in France before World War II. During the German occupation of France, he joined the Maquis (FTP), a part of the French Resistance. At some point during the war he left France and joined the United States Air Force as a paratrooper, although some sources claim that this is not true. After the war, he began a career as a journalist, first writing for the journal Esprit, a neo-Catholic, Marxist magazine where he met fellow journalist André Bazin. For Esprit, Marker wrote political commentaries, poems, short stories, and film reviews.

During this period, Marker began to travel around the world as a journalist and photographer, a vocation he pursued for the rest of his life. The French publishing company Éditions du Seuil hired him as editor of the series Petite Planète ("Small World"). That collection devoted one edition to each country and included information and photographs, and would later be published in English translation by Studio Vista and The Viking Press. In 1949 Marker published his first novel, Le Coeur net (The Forthright Spirit), which was about aviation. In 1952 Marker published an illustrated essay on French writer Jean Giraudoux, Giraudoux Par Lui-Même.

During his early journalism career, Marker became increasingly interested in filmmaking and in the early 1950s experimented with photography. 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. This group is often associated with the French New Wave directors who came to prominence during the same time period, and the groups were often friends and journalistic co-workers. The term Left Bank was first coined by film critic Richard Roud, who described them as having "fondness for a kind of Bohemian life and an impatience with the conformity of the Right Bank, a high degree of involvement in literature and the plastic arts, and a consequent interest in experimental filmmaking", as well as an identification with the political left. Anatole Dauman produced many of Marker's earliest films.

In 1952 Marker made his first film, Olympia 52, a 16mm feature documentary about the 1952 Helsinki Olympic Games. In 1953 he collaborated with Resnais on the documentary Statues Also Die. The film examines traditional African art such as sculptures and masks, and its decline with the coming of Western colonialism. It won the 1954 Prix Jean Vigo, but was banned by French censors for its criticism of French colonialism.

After working as assistant director on Resnais's Night and Fog in 1955, Marker made Sunday in Peking, a short documentary "film essay" in the style that characterized Marker's output for most of his career. Marker shot the film in two weeks while traveling through China with Armand Gatti in September 1955. 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.