Chris Marker: The Lost Photographs

‘Chris Marker: The Lost Photographs from Israel’ is a co-publication with The Israel Museum which accompanies the similarly titled exhibition. The book presents still images of Israel from 1960 captured by the French Image maker Chris Marker, one of the postwar New Wave’s most original and influential directors. Photographed from Eilat in the south up to Kibbutz Manara in northernmost Israel, they were taken in preparation for a new type of documentary film about the young country. The film, Description of a Struggle, achieved renown – but the photographs vanished. A few years ago, more than 1,000 negatives from this project were discovered in the archive of the French Cinematheque; some 120 of them have been printed for the exhibition and are displayed here for the first time. Images of everyday scenes and ordinary people, they convey the same insightful humanism that Marker brought to his film.

The artistic power of Description of a Struggle, the first documentary about Israel produced by private individuals rather than Zionist institutions, earned it a Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin International Film Festival. Today, its poetic and almost prophetic acuity is more striking than ever. Deconstructing the film into the photographs that served as its basis launches us into a kind of time travel to a distant, almost forgotten era.

In addition, the book presents rare archival material that sheds light on how the film came to be, as well as on its reception in Israel and abroad. The book includes texts by Yehoshua Glotman, Gilad Reich, and Esther Dotan.