[Chris Marker] Cinéma 53 à travers le monde

Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1954. First edition. 12mo (18x12cm), illustrated card wrappers. 196pp. Text in French. Slight creasing and rubbing to spine, crease on corner of front cover. Price sticker ghost to rear cover. Contents clean and remarkably untoned. Very good.

Chris Marker was also involved in another publication entitled Cinéma 53 à traverse le monde, published by Éditions du Cerf in 1954 and dedicated to cinema that was rarely seen outside its countries of origin.

The publication contains three articles by Chris Marker, including And now this is cinerama, a collaboration with Gavin Lambert in which Marker considers the new widescreen technology Cinerama as a new kind of “theater cinema”.

In Hollywood: sur place, he reports on Hollywood’s new interest in television, the Tenney Investigation and the related “cleansing” of communists in Hollywood, the situations of Unions such as the IATSE, and lastly the role of the director with its conceptual differences between Hollywood, Europe, and the USSR.

In Cinéma d’animation, Marker praises the former Walt Disney employees who were fired after a strike in 1941 and continued to work as United Productions of America (UPA), creating innovative animation work, such as fake television commercials for Claude Binyon’s film Dreamboat.

These fake commercials inspired Marker to make his own animated sequences for his films, which can be seen in Letter from Siberia or Cuba Si. His admiration for Czech animation artist and puppeteer Jiri Trnka is also expressed in the text.