Israel of yore seen in Jerusalem exhibit of French photographer’s works

There’s a deep sense of familiarity and prescience in “Chris Marker: The Lost Photographs of Israel,” a new Israel Museum exhibit presenting still images captured by the influential French director of the post-war New Wave period.

The mostly black-and-white images feature regular folk in their daily lives, eating lunch in a kibbutz dining room or striding along a Tel Aviv or Beersheba street, with signs and symbols of the emerging nation always apparent in the background.

Marker took the stills during a month-long trip to Israel in 1960, when he traveled on a Vespa moped from north to south, gathering material for a documentary film about the young country, produced by film lovers Wim and Lia Van Leer.

The resulting one-hour film, “Description of a Struggle,” won first prize at the 1961 International Berlin Film Festival.

Then the photographs vanished for decades.

It was through the efforts of retired photographer Shuka Glotman that the stills were eventually located. Glotman and curator Gilad Reich created the exhibit of 120 stills, which opened on April 14 (through October 14), and offers a snapshot of Israel some 12 years after statehood.

“There was this rumor that Chris Marker took all these photos of Israel,” said Reich, who began working at the museum two and a half years ago, “and I said, ‘Okay, maybe one day I’ll have time to look for them.’”

By chance, Glotman and Reich met soon after Reich began his curatorial position.

Glotman asked Reich if he knew of Chris Marker, who had died in 2012. “I right away asked him, ‘Have you found the stills?’” recalled Reich.

Glotman had been searching for the stills for a decade, until Lia Van Leer told him to check with the French Cinematheque. It took the arthouse theater another four years to locate the stills, which were stored in a box with the word “Israel” scrawled on top.

The pair, working with the museum, obtained permission from Marker’s family and put together the exhibit, dividing the long-missing stills into several sections: Jerusalem, Tel Aviv, south, north and photos of the production.

The entire exhibit offers a view of Israel from more than 60 years ago, at a time when the tensions of capitalism vied with the local love of nature and the biblical land, said Reich.

Marker was an insightful photographer, as is apparent in the photographs exhibited, from his look at ordinary people to the icons and symbols seen in their towns and cities.

“He was interested in the symbols, in [Theodor] Herzl as an icon, featured in posters, or in the menorahs situated above buildings,” said Reich. “Those were the tensions that interested him.”

Marker called Israel the “land of signs,” whether in a highway sign warning of camels as one ambled by, or by talking about Israel’s population growth while showing a pregnant woman walking down the street.

He was also familiar with the recent history of the Jews and understood that Israel was a country forged from the ashes of the Holocaust.

“A generation came to forget,” says Marker in his voiceover in the film.

Some of the photos in the exhibit have never been seen before, including public relations photos of the film that had been in the possession of Wim and Lia Van Leer, Israeli movie aficionados who eventually founded the country’s Cinematheque theaters.

The Van Leers also had two self-portraits of Marker, including one taken in the Van Leer apartment in Haifa as well as a photo of the younger Van Leers sitting with friends in a Haifa pub.

Marker came to Israel at the invitation of the Van Leers, as the pair had a vision of what they wanted in the documentary.

“They saw one of Marker’s films in 1959 about Siberia, and they wanted a film like that about Israel,” said Reich. “Something artistic and without clichés, without tractors and the Jewish National Fund, or hospitals or government ministers at ceremonies.”

Marker agreed, demanding a month on location in Israel on his dime. He requested a Vespa for use in January 1960, with plans to travel from north to south.

He eventually built the script for “Description of a Struggle” based on his stills, which are nearly all featured in the film, winning first prize in the Berlin International Film Festival before the two countries even had diplomatic relations.

Exhibit cases also include faxes exchanged between Marker and Lia Van Leer and clips from other landmark film projects inspired by Marker’s work, including “In Jerusalem” (1963) by David Perlov and Dan Geva’s “Description of a Memory” (2006), a visual interpretation of Marker’s film that was enthusiastically approved by the French director.

Geva’s film so impressed Marker that the two films are now always screened together in a “double feature,” said Reich.

A full screening of “Description of a Struggle,” with a voiceover by Marker, is shown at the end of the exhibit.

(The Jerusalem Cinematheque, founded by the Van Leers, offers a full screening of the film online, after registering for free with the site.)

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