Image et Son N°213 1968, N°255 1971

Paris: l’U.F.O.L.E.I.S., 1968. First edition. 12mo (19×16,5cm), printed card wrappers. 128pp. Text in French. Light surface soiling and toning with minor rubbing and creasing at spine. A very mild dent throughout the book, barely visible. Overall very good and better.
Paris: l’U.F.O.L.E.I.S., 1971. First edition. 12mo (19×16,5cm), printed card wrappers. 144pp. Text in French. Light sunning to wrapper edges, with minor edge wear. Very good and better.

Founded in 1946 under the name Informations UFOCEL, and renamed in 1953 to Image et Son, the magazine was published until October 1992. Like many magazines from this era, Image et Son started out with a humanist, leftist approach to cinema.

The February issue of 1968, features a rare interview with Chris Marker about the collaborative projekt Loin du Vietnam with Joris Ivens, William Klein, Claude Lelouch, Agnès Varda, Jean-Luc Godard, and Alain Resnais.

Issue N°255 from 1971 is dedicated to the great Russian film director Aleksandr Medvedkin, who famously traveled from 1932 to 1935 with his CineTrain across the Soviet Union, documenting people at work during the day and showing them the resulting film for critical reflection in the evening. The mobile film workshop often returned to old locations to document the changes. The train, with its 30 employees, was equipped with an editing suite and a complete development laboratory.

Medwedkin was honored with a special award at the Leipziger Dokumentar- und Kurzfilmwoche in 1967, where he met Chris Marker, who was highly inspired by his work and later dedicated two films Le Train en Marche [The Train Rolls On] from 1971, and Le Tombeau d’Alexandre [The Last Bolshevik] from 1992 to Medwedkin.

In 1967, during the strike and occupation of the Rhodiaceta factory at Besançon, Marker and other SLON filmmakers founded the Groupe Medvedkine, which trained workers to produce their own films collaboratively. In this issue, Chris Marker wrote about his first encounter with Aleksandr Medvedkin and the beginning of the Groupe Medvedkine, followed by an article written by S.M. Eisenstein in 1936 on Medvedkin’s film Schastye [Happieness] from 1935. It also includes an excerpt from Medvedkin diary-like piece 294 jours sur roues, and a letter from Medvedkin to the Groupe Medvedkine.