[Chris Marker] SPECTACLES N°1: Cahiers d’Art du Theatre et du Cinéma

Paris: Éditions Spectacles, 1960. 4to (30,5×24,5cm). Grey cardboard in dust jacket. 78pp. Text in French. Dust jacket chipped with several nicks and a few stains. Front flap missing, rear flap shaky. Rubbing to front board with toning to board edges. Page 33/34 with small faint stains on top edge, which are easy to miss, else clean and unmarked. Very good in about good dust jacket.

This is the first and only issue of Cahiers d’Art du Théâtre et du Cinéma, published in 1960 by Gilles Quéant under the direction of Aline Elmayan at Éditions Spectacles. A second issue on Bertolt Brecht was announced but never published.

The designer of this issue was Frédéric de Towarnicki, who actually worked as a translator and critic. He was the one who organized the first meeting between his friend, the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Paul Sarte.

On the occasion of Anton Chekhov’s 100th birthday, this issue is dedicated to the Russian playwright, but also to Georges Pitoëff, the theater director who introduced Chekhov to a wider French audience in 1921.

After a look at the past, this issue also looks at young, emerging directors of French cinema, such as Alain Resnais, whose film career is examined by Frédéric de Towarnicki just two years after the great success of Hiroshima, mon amour.

Chris Marker contributed the piece Un Film blanc: Moranbong [A White Film: Moranbong], on Armand Gatti’s film Moronbong (1958), which was made during the same trip to North Korea as Marker’s photobook Coréennes. Agnès Varda is also represented in this issue with her photos of Gérard Philip, the icon of French cinema.

An interesting side note: The editor of Cahiers d’Art du Théâtre et du Cinéma, Gilles Quéant is one of the narrators of Chris Marker’s film Dimache à Pékin [Sunday in Peking], and Lettre de Sibérie [Letter from Siberia].

OCLC (10/2021) records only two holdings at Haute école de théâtre de Suisse romande, Bibliothèque; and Artesis Plantijn Hogeschool, Belgium.