Kirjahaku

Formative writings by French avant-garde filmmaker Chris Marker It is hard to imagine French cinema without La Jetée (1962), the time-travel short feature by the reclusive French filmmaker Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, better known as Chris Marker. He not only influenced artists ranging from David Bowie to J. G. Ballard but also inspired the cult film 12 Monkeys. Marker’s influence expanded beyond his own films through his writings for the French monthly Esprit as well as anthologies and newly founded film publications. This first English translation of Marker’s early writings on film brings together reviews and essays, published between 1948 and 1955, that span the topics of film style, adaptation, and ideology, as well as animation and the debates surrounding 3-D and wide-screen technologies, ranging from late silent-era films to postwar Hollywood’s efforts to contend with the rise of television. Readers will find commentary on Laurence Olivier’s 1944 screen adaptation of Henry V, a scathing review of Robert Montgomery’s Lady in the Lake (1947), critiques of Walt Disney productions, a discussion of the pitfalls of prioritizing commercial success over aesthetic values, and more. An indispensable resource for cinephiles and scholars alike, these texts document the emergence of Marker’s critical voice and situate him alongside such contemporaries as André Bazin and Eric Rohmer, as well as the future French New Wave figures Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut. They show how his remarks on individual films open onto his engagement with films as social and cultural phenomena.

Photographs by one of French cinema's most influential and enigmatic artists.Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jetee (1962)-a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995). His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films (which include Le Jetee, Sans Soleil, !Cuba Si!, and The Case of the Grinning Cat), others are portraits of famous faces (Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa), but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world (an extra who appeared in Kurosawa's Ran, a woman seen on a street in Siberia). The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies. The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos. The book-which appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University-also includes essays by Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and art historian Molly Nesbit.

Images and script (in both French and English) from one of the greatest experimental films ever made by a master of the form."This book version of La Jetee is, to my mind, astonishingly beautiful. It brings a total freshness to the work and a new way to use photos to deal with dramatic events. Not a film's book, but a book in its own right; the real cine-roman announced in the film's credits."; Chris MarkerLa Jetee, the legendary science fiction film about time and memory after a nuclear apocalypse, was released in 1964 and is considered by many critics to be among the greatest experimental films ever made. (It provided the basis for Terry Gilliam's 1995 film 12 Monkeys.) Chris Marker, who is the undisputed master of the film essay, composed this postapocalyptic story almost entirely of black-and-white still photographs. The story concerns an experiment in recovering and changing the past through the action of memory, yet the film can be read as a poem dominated by a single moving image, which in its context becomes one of the supreme moments in the history of film. This Zone Books edition reproduces the film's original images along with the script in both English and French.