"There's a wonderful French expression with no easy English equivalent, ésprit de l'escalier, and it's profoundly a writer's dilemma: the experience of thinking of something to say after the perfect moment to say it has passed. (The expression translates literally as "staircase wit" or "after wit"—the kind of wit that comes to mind as one is leaving, heading down the stairs.) Marker's artistic persona in his essay films is typically split between his identity as a spontaneous, roving cameraman and his identity as a writer thinking and reflecting much later about what he's shot. His essay films can be seen as waking reveries that finally permit him to join raw initial impressions with studied afterthoughts in an ideal sort of congruence—a marriage made in heaven, so to speak. This utopian control over the flow of time permits all sorts of mots justes that would never occur to anyone on the spot".

Fragmento de la crítica “On Second Thoughts (Marker’s The Last Bolshevik)” de Jonathan Rosenbaum, recogida en su libro “Movies as Politics”