The State of Israel was but twelve-years-old when the great cinema essayist Chris Marker (La jetée and Sans soleil) completed this hypnotic documentary. It went on to win the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival. Images of a young country whose future lies ahead and the narrator’s meditative voice-over posit an existential struggle for identity that is relevant today.
Filmmaker Biography
French filmmaker Chris Marker is one of the world's most highly regarded and experimental figures in cinema. Marker's classic fiction film and best known work, La Jetée, was made in 1962; his first feature-length documentary was produced a decade before. His documentary work includes profiles of the artists Matta and Christo, and film directors Tarkovsky and Kurosawa. Marker's film works make deliberate use of a restricted visual palette, adopting the techniques of cinema's silent era, using dissolves, subtitles and montage effects.
Writes Bill Horrigan, curator at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio: "Although Marker is widely regarded as one of the few indispensable, inimitable figures of post-World War II international cinema, it becomes clear that, for him, cinema is simply one expressive domain, one 'zone' and perhaps, at that, an interim or intermediate one. Having recently written, 'I betrayed Gutenberg for McLuhan a long time ago,' the genuinely self-critical Marker continues to experiment with new technological frontiers...."
Chris Marker (Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve) was born in 1921 at Neuilly sur Seine, France. He fought for the French resistance during World War II and enlisted as a Paratrooper in the United States Air Force. In the 1950s Marker wrote for l'Esprit and Cahiers du cinéma and was an assistant to Alain Resnais. His work was been presented internationally. Marker was the subject of a film retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and was a featured artist of the exhibition Passage de l'image at the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and Documenta X, Kassel, Germany. He lives in Paris.
