Staring Back by Chris Marker (Hardcover)

Published by Wexner Center for the Arts, 2007
Sewn-bound hardcover
159 pages
8x11.5 inches

Near Fine condition

“The authentic quality of witness that attends Marker's reflections and pronouncements in his cinematic work is evident in the two hundred photographs in this collection...Accompanied by text in Marker’s inimitable voice, the collection stands as further testimony to his commitment to record not just social struggle but the poetry behind it.”—The New Yorker

”What [these photographs] do demonstrate abundantly is Marker's endless curiosity about human (and animal) physiology, and the shy, seductive promise of what Buber called the I-Thou encounter.”—Film Comment

Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. 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, 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 The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos.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 also includes essays by Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and art historian Molly Nesbit.