Description of a Struggle | Description of a Memory

Chris Marker was invited by Wim and Lia van Leer in the early 1960s to create a documentary about Israel, examining in a remarkable way the establishment of the Jewish state. 

A cinematic journey to the recesses of the photographed memory in Chris Marker's 1960 impressionist film about Israel, Description of a Struggle, which won the Golden Bear at the 1961 Berlin Festival. A half century later, Marker’s original text is transformed into a system of fragments of hints and secrets which the film before us attempts to decode anew. In Description of a Struggle, Marker wove together everyday images of a young country whose entire future is ahead of it. The images are accompanied by a reflective text that identifies the focal point of the struggle as the question of the spiritual identity of the nascent state. For Marker this struggle is an existential one, and the images are a basis for a personal, historical, poetic and philosophical interpretation whose essence is hidden from the naked eye.

Nearly 50 years later, Dan Geva confronts the original film and creates a cinematic dialogue with the original text. Geva takes us to places that Marker warned about half a century earlier and to those which the French master could not even have imagined. The present film goes into the innermost parts of the original and places Israel's present as a future to Marker’s film. It allows us to ask: when in the future our present becomes the past, will we miss what we have today?