New Wave, Old Land

Can a foreign observer show up in another country, without living there or speaking the language, and say something original and definitive about it—something that wouldn’t strike locals as illiterate or banal?

Almost never. My answer would be the same, I imagine, as that of most Israelis, flooded as we are with the confident fantasies of countless such observers in every corner of social media and what’s left of the international press. Whether believing themselves to be journalists or tourists, what most outsiders see in a foreign country is nearly always what they bring with them from home. They mine distant lands for shiny rocks in which to view their own reflection. This seems truer of Israel than of other places because of the way this country and its residents have featured in the fantasy lives of others for so long.

But there are glorious exceptions. One of them was screened in a recent exhibit at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem: a documentary film of under one hour, shot in four weeks in the spring of 1960 by the French director Chris Marker. The film, Description of a Struggle, deserves to be more famous than it is. This is not just because it’s a portrait of this country—now weathered and scarred by hard living—as a newborn. It’s because the film is a master class in how to see a place and its people, and a restorative for anyone despairing of our ability to look at the world and create an impression in words or images.

When Marker arrived in Israel with his French crew, another foreign film was already shooting here: the Hollywood epic Exodus, starring Paul Newman. This movie, like the Leon Uris bestseller that inspired it, is an example of a fantastical projection with little connection to the actual place in question. In ticket sales and press attention, Exodus was to Marker’s modest film—in which the stars are anonymous kids, farmers, and a few Israeli cats and owls—what a Royal Caribbean liner is to a birch canoe. Sixty-five years later, Exodus is unwatchable and Description of a Struggle is hypnotic.

Chris Marker, who became famous as part of the French New Wave of the 1950s, was a slippery and playful artist. He claimed at times to have been born in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia. In fact his birth occurred, more mundanely for a Frenchman, in France, to parents who called him not “Chris Marker” but Christian Hippolyte François Bouche-Villeneuve. He chose his new name, he once explained, to make it easier to travel. Marker was active into his eighties, experimenting with video games and YouTube in his little studio in Paris. He died in 2012 at age ninety-one.

One of Marker’s characteristic tricks was discovered by Gilad Reich, one of the curators of the Israel Museum exhibit devoted to the director and his film. Reich and his staff were trying to track down a quote from Pushkin that Marker published with a photo he took during the shoot in Israel: “Did you know, said Elena Andreyevna as she leaned over the samovar, that in South America they have a flute whose sound can only be heard by its player?” The experts didn’t recognize the quote—because it was invented.

One of Marker’s best-known works remains his 1962 sci-fi hallucination La Jetée (The Jetty), a story of a postapocalyptic world told almost entirely in black-and-white photographs with narration. The film is held together by the meticulous choice of images precisely timed to Marker’s script, and the same sly and confident hand is apparent in the Israel film. Here, too, the attention of the viewer is held by the precise way Marker’s words set up each image. But unlike the unsettling La Jetée, which is set in catacombs under Paris after a nuclear holocaust, Description of a Struggle is set in the blistering Israeli sunshine after a real holocaust—and it’s here that a viewer meets Marker’s humane optimism and sense of humor. “Twelve years of statehood, nearly thirteen,” the narrator says as pedestrians pass before the camera on an Israeli street. “Two million inhabitants,” he continues, before a very pregnant woman crosses the frame, “soon to be three.” On a desert highway, Marker’s camera lingers on a road sign depicting two humps until the punchline finally arrives, at an unhurried stroll, in the form of a camel.

We meet children building elaborate bonfires and effigies for Lag BaOmer, a touching effort to exorcise Jewish weakness—that of their ancestors in an ancient war and that of their parents in the one that ended just fifteen years before. At the isolated Kibbutz Manara, on the northern border, Marker films a communal vote conducted by a pioneer of great charisma—she’s unnamed, like everyone else in the film, but it’s Rachel Rabin Yaakov, sister of Yitzhak Rabin. The narrator compares the ascetic kibbutzniks, smoking cigarettes and knitting as they conduct the affairs of their commune, to the Essenes. A shot of names carved into eucalyptus bark is contrasted with an image of digits tattooed on the burly arm of a tractor driver. When a troop of uniformed Scouts gathers for a march, he quips that this is an illness typical of young states: “khaki measles.” Jubilant Jews from North Africa celebrate the death-day festival of a mystic rabbi at Tiberias. Owls peer at the camera from a cage at the Jerusalem Biblical Zoo, where “animals live in the shade of verses taken from the Book of Books.”

He pauses to consider weighty questions. Will the sovereign Jews here forget the lessons they learned in other countries? Will they jettison the wisdom of the ages in pursuit of a dreary normalcy in the form of kitchen appliances, American movies, and military power? Marker perceives a struggle under way for the soul of this new country—the struggle that explains the film’s title, which he lifted from a Kafka story in which two antagonists turn out to be elements of the same person. “Beneath the scene of everyday life in Israel, this inner struggle is waged, less conspicuous than feats of arms, and maybe the only decisive one.”

At the very end, in a painting class for children, his camera lingers on a young girl with a swan’s neck who seems taken from a painting herself. “Look at her,” he instructs us, after describing the recent crimes of Europe—crimes he knew well from his own war years, which included a brief involvement with Vichy—“this little Jewess who will never be Anne Frank.” But the moral expectations of her, and of her new country, were high, perhaps impossibly so. “The greatest injustice,” he says, “may well be denial of the right to be unjust.” He goes on: “There she is. Like Israel. We must understand her, and remind her that injustice on this land weighs heavier than elsewhere—this land, the ransom of injustice.”

Marker had too light a touch to allow such thoughts to bog down his film, which is borne forward by what colleagues called his “flirty camera,” by the energy of Israel and the inhabitants of its unformed expanses. Israel isn’t yet a painting. It’s barely a sketch. We understand that these people have been down but they’re coming up. Hardscrabble kids mug for the camera in a dusty town. A Druze boy from one of the villages on Mount Carmel, perhaps a worker at a store or warehouse, races his makeshift wooden cart downhill as the narrator impersonates an Olympic commentator, urging him to the gold. The director serves the humanity of his subjects. They smile at him, clamoring to get in front of his camera. Out of the frame he smiles back, wishing them well and worrying for them.

For anyone used to the atmosphere of art and journalism in our own times, this approach—a strain of postwar humanism that petered out sometime around 1970, the choice of beauty over cynicism—is startling. More than the saturated hues of the old color film stock, more than the archaic ladies’ hairdos, it’s this attitude that marks the film as a transmission from another time.

The way Description of a Struggle was born was never entirely clear. Some elements of the film were mysterious: a scene, for example, in which the director gives his subjects photographs of themselves that seem to have been taken at some point in the past. Had he been here before?

The chronology was pieced together by the museum team and is recounted in an essay in the exhibit catalog by photographer and scholar Yehoshua Glotman. In 1959, the Israeli philanthropists and cultural pioneers Wim and Lia van Leer attended an international film festival in Moscow, where they were dismayed by the coarseness of the Israeli entries—socialist propaganda films with tractors and valiant factory workers. The audience was underwhelmed. Also screened at the festival was Letter from Siberia, Marker’s 1957 ode to Russia’s barren north, in which wry commentary and bursts of gleeful animation help guide viewers to the endearing character of what seems at first like the bleakest of Soviet provinces. The van Leers asked Marker if he’d turn his lens on Israel next. They’d fund the project but would have no veto on the content. Still, Wim van Leer couldn’t banish all traces of concern. “What if the film comes out anti-Israeli?” he asked. “I don’t usually do films ‘against’ things,” replied Marker. “Life is too short for that.”

The truth is that Marker wasn’t entirely new to the subject. He’d had an opportunity to ponder the forces that created Israel when he worked with his famous colleague Alain Resnais on Night and Fog, a 1956 film about the Nazi death camps. And he’d been the editor of a 1950s book series called Petite Planète, designed as an introduction for young people to the countries of the postwar world. Volume 14 was about the new Jewish state. “It’s not usual to taste a cocktail while in the making. But in the case of Israel nothing happens in the customary way,” reads a snippet of the text he commissioned from David Catarivas, later an Israeli diplomat:

Here are some of the ingredients: A little of the East, a little of the West, a little of the Middle Ages, a little of the Atomic Age, a pinch of mysticism, a few drops of Marxism, dozens of languages and human beings from as many countries; hopes, despair, dreams and prophecies, to be well shaken, spiced with the still burning hatred of proud people: those who have never accepted defeat at the hand of man, those whom no one thought capable of fighting. For this is a hot cocktail. A fiery cocktail. An explosive cocktail.

Part of Marker’s agreement with the van Leers involved the loan of a Vespa scooter on which he would tour alone to scout locations and characters several months before shooting began. It was during this first visit that he snapped around one thousand black-and-white photographs that would serve as a visual outline of his documentary. He had some of the photos printed to give to his subjects when he came back with the full crew, filming their delight; for many Israelis in 1960, photography was still expensive and rare. Some photos were used for the movie’s public relations, and the rest were lost. Description of a Struggle was released in 1960, and it won the prize for best documentary at the 1961 Berlin Film Festival, four years before West Germany and Israel established diplomatic relations. The movie opened in Israel while the country was transfixed by a different docudrama—the trial of Adolf Eichmann.

Since then, Marker’s film has had loyal Israeli fans and inspired at least two movies in two successive generations: David Perlov’s In Jerusalem from 1963 and Description of a Memory by Dan Geva in 2006. But the photographs, an artistic and journalistic achievement in their own right, were never seen again. No one even knew where the negatives were until sleuth work by Glotman, the photographer who helped mount the new exhibit, turned them up in the archive of the Cinémathèque Française in Paris. Marker had no children, so it took another year and a half of wrangling to track down the director’s legal heirs and get their approval to display 120 of the pictures for the first time. This being Israel, a country now five times its size in 1960 yet still a tightly knit place, many of the people in the photos have been identified by visitors to the museum, often their children or grandchildren.

Reich, the curator, hoped to spark renewed interest in Marker with the exhibit and to send the film and photos on a global tour. But as in so many other areas of Israeli and Jewish life, the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023, intervened to derail the plans. The international response to the Gaza war has rendered Israel’s reputation radioactive and expressions of Jewish culture increasingly fraught. Some foreign museums displaying artwork on loan from the Israel Museum, including works with no connection to Israel, are removing the museum’s name to avoid vandalism. The exhibit closed in Jerusalem in October, just as the war was ending, and no dates abroad are currently planned. The moment of this film’s creation, when it was possible for a European artist to sympathize with Jews building a new home for themselves in the Middle East, has passed.

When I saw Marker’s film for the first time early last summer, the screening was interrupted midway by the wail of a siren—Jerusalem had been targeted by a ballistic missile from Yemen. Museum guards hustled us to a lower floor.

Meanwhile, Rachel Rabin Yaakov, the calm kibbutz leader from the scene at Manara, in her thirties then and nearly one hundred now, had been exiled from the kibbutz she founded in 1943, which was emptied of residents and badly damaged by Hezbollah rockets. The swan-necked girl from the painting class, Ilana Steinitz, had left Israel long before and lives in Britain. As a child, it turns out, she’d been crippled by polio—but in a choice typical of Marker, he doesn’t reveal her disability, preferring her intelligent face and thoughts of her future.

The poverty and optimism of the young Israel on the screen has been replaced by prosperity, by political mismanagement, by a kind of fatalistic resilience in the face of hostility that has turned out to be deeper, more durable, and more deranged than seemed possible in 1960. The “petite planète” of our times is not the one Marker hoped for.

But in the world of his film, all of this lies in the future. The country consists of vacant lots with old tires, wheat fields that were recently swamps, expanses of sand, new telephone poles and sewage pipes. The sun is relentless, and so are the people. While they grin at a visitor’s camera, the past creeps up behind them. Chris Marker wanted to know what kind of place this would become. It’s still a good question.