Rare books from Chunking Books

This extremely scarce special issue DOK 50 Heft 3: Sondernummer Film und Kultur. 3, was published on the occasion of the International Film Club Conference in 1950 and features articles by André Malraux, Pudowkin, René Barjavel, Joseph Rovan, Jean Giraudoux, André Bazin, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Queneau, Maurice Jaubert, Jean-Georges Auriol, Henri Colpi, Hans Wollenberg, Le Veugle, Buddy Schulberg, Henri Jeanson and Chris Marker.In the stimulating intellectual climate of postwar France, numerous independent associations for popular education arose immediately after the Libération. One of them was the group Peuple et Culture, of which Joseph Rovan served as one of their directors.
In 1946, Rovan was invited by the French military administration to participate in the reconstruction of the German cultural sector. For this purpose, he initiated several Franco-German seminars in Germany, presenting not only literature and theater, but also films. André Bazin, then head of the film department of Travail… Read More

Unfortunately, not much is known about the photographer Diby Yao Christophe, but his photo book, Du twist à cocody, ou l'art de la natte, is an amazing document of hairstyles from the Ivory Coast of the 1970s.

This very scarce book was made between April 1970 and June 1972, in collaboration with the Institut d'Ethno-Sociologie
in Abidjan, which was at the time of publication the capital of the Ivory Coast. Interestingly, the book was published in French and English, by the French publisher Éditions Dalfoz, in 1972, translated by Timothy and Kathryn Weiskel.
Christophe ends his book with this very powerful statement:
"Why do some of our stylish women prefere [sic] bleached hair or wigs to genuine African creations? One's real hair, in my opinion, is worth more than faked hair, and an art evolved over time is always better than imported styles of others. I meet many of you who pretend to be European, trying to dress and act like white women.
Oh, my Black Sisters, why are you trying to forget… Read More

While working for Éditions du Seuil in 1955, Marker co-edited with Juliette Caputo, under the direction of Francis-Régis Bastide, a truly wonderful book on Fellini's masterpiece La Strada. Chris Marker and Juliette Caputo playfully combined film stills and illustrations with text, continuing the collaboration they had begun a year earlier with the Petite Planète series. In addition to the outstanding design, the book includes an essay by André Bazin and interviews with Giulietta Masina and Federico Fellini.---Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1955. First and only edition. 8vo (28x22cm), illustrated boards. 220pp. Text in French. A touch of soiling to front cover with mild creasing to spine. Contents clean and unmarked. Near fine.

After the international success of Jacques Demy's film The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Demy was offered to direct a Hollywood film with Columbia Pictures in 1967. Agnès Varda joined her husband to California, where she became fascinated by the counterculture that was taking place in Los Angeles – from the Vietnam War protests to the formation of the Black Panthers, the Women's Liberation, and the Hippie movement.
A year later in 1968, Varda completed her screenplay about the hippie culture in California, titled Peace and Love, which was commissioned by Gerry Ayres, the same producer who brought Jacques Demy to Columbia Pictures. The studio liked the script but would not grant Varda the final cut, leading to an abrupt end to negotiations with Varda walking away from the project.
In Varda's film Les plages d'Agnès [The Beaches of Agnès] from 2008, Gerry Ayres adds to this incident:
"Agnès had the chance to make a film for Columbia Pictures at the time, but she slapped the hand of the man who pinched… Read More

The french journalist Julien Besançon had been commenting on major live events, like John F. Kennedy's funeral and the first steps on the moon for the French television station Europe 1.

While covering the events of May 1968, Julien Besancon felt the need to preserve the graffitis, that the protestors had written on the walls. These writings, many of them fragments of literature, quoting poets and political thinkers, were as spontaneous as they were ephemeral.
The Japanese edition of Les Murs ont la Parole was published in 1969, one year after the first French edition, and offers a completely different experience through the powerful combination of text and images. Beautifully designed by Kiyoshi Awazu, one of the leading designers in postwar Japan.
---
Tokyo: Takeuchi-shoten, 1969. First Japanese edition. Oblong 8vo (13x19cm), French Flaps with printed obi. Unpaginated 144pp. Translated by Masayoshi Hirota. Designed by Kiyoshi Awazu. Text in Japanese. Small damp stain on obi. Slight… Read More

A truly rare and beautiful produced promotional booklet of Chantal Akerman's structuralist essay film News From Home. Like the movie, which overlays images and the sound of New York City with Chantal Akerman's voice, so too does this small publication, overlay images and text through transparent and colored pages.
---
Paris: Unite Trois, 1977. 8vo (30x21cm), staple-bound wrappers. Unpaginated 11pp [3 printed colour sheets, 9 printed transparent sheets]. Text in French. Slight creasing to wrappers with tiny loss on tail corner. Very good.

"We embarked – Pierre, Gatti, Vierny and me – at the end of August 1957 on an adventure …" – Chris Marker
In 1957, the group of Chris Marker, Armand Gatti, André Pierrard and Sacha Vierny was one of the first to travel and work in Siberia during the Cold War. Two independent works emerged from this trip – Chris Marker's Letter from Siberia (1957) and Armand Gatti's Sibérie – zero + l'infini (1958), which was one of the first Western reports on Siberia since 1917.
Armand Gatti, one of the most acclaimed theater playwrights of the 20th century, had already written eight plays and had received the Albert Londres Prize for his earlier work before pursuing a career as a journalist. Gatti came back from Siberia with eleven articles about the region, which were published in Libération, the underground newspaper of the Résistance movement.
The following year Armand Gatti continued to work on these articles, which then became the book Sibérie – zero + l'infini, accompanied by Chris Marker's… Read More

Artsept was a little-known periodical published in 1963 by the writer and film critic Raymond Bellour. Due to financial problems only three issues were published. With an editorial board consisting in particular of Raymond Bellour, Jean Cayrol, Armand Gatti, Jean-Louis Leutrat, Jean Michaud and Bernard Pingaud, Artsept's mission was to manifest film as the seventh art, embracing all other arts in their discourse. Each issue was dedicated to a specific topic, the first one to "real cinema", the second to "cinema and truth", and the last one to "love".

On the cover of the first issue of Artsept appear the names of Cayrol, Colpi, Durand, Gatti, Marker, Resnais, and Varda. This reads like the "Who's Who" of the Left Bank Group and already indicates a different approach to film than André Bazin's famous Cahiers du Cinéma. Each issue contains a comprehensive filmography and bibliography of the filmmakers who appear as authors or subjects in Arstept.
The remarkable texts from contributors like… Read More

Commentaires and Commentaires 2 assemble Chris Marker's early film commentaries in written form. Together they comprise nine commentaries from Les statues meurent aussi (1953), to Si j'avais quatre dromadaires (1966). When the first Commentaires was published in 1961, two of Marker's films included in the book had been censored and were not allowed to be shown in French cinemas: Les statues meurent aussi, because of its critical stance towards the damaging cultural impact of colonialism, and Cuba Si! (1961) because of its sympathy for Castro and the revolution.
A real pleasure are the commentaries L'Amérique rêve (1959) in Commentaires and Soy Mexico (1965) in Commentaires 2, which Chris Marker called his imaginary films. Both exist only in these books and are accompanied by fantastic images.
The dynamic layout, set by Chris Marker and Juliette Caputo, treats images and text as equally important. According to Rick Poynor, Commentaires are not only of interest in terms of film history, but also… Read More

L'An 2000 : une anti-histoire de la fin du monde by André Clément Decouflé was published twenty-five years before the year 2000. With the new millennial approaching the world was forced to think about it's future. At the time L'An 2000 was published in 1975, André Clément Decouflé was the director of the Laboratoire de Prospective Appliquée
in Paris, whose research focused on social foresight, which aims to prepare the future through a rational and holistic approach. L'An 2000 brings together a really astonishing collection of literature dealing with the prediction of the future.

Most of the books in the collection were written in the middle of the 20th Century and offer at the same time a great insight of this era itself. The list of references is long and includes books, like the influential environmentalist text A Blueprint for Survival; Frank Herbert's Dune; The Year 2000: A Framework for Speculation on the Next Thirty-Three Years by the military strategist Herman Kahn, who was the… Read More

Tiger at the Gates is the first English edition, translated by the English poet and playwright Christopher Fry, with a stunning cover design by Loudon Sainthill, who also was the set and costume designer of the Play. The book also includes the original theater programme of the premiere in 1955 at the Apollo Theatre in London, which was directed by Harold Clurman.
Jean Giraudoux wrote the play La guerre de Troie n'aura pas lieu [The Trojan War Will Not Take Place, which was retitled to Tiger at the Gates by Christopher Fry] between autumn of 1934 and June 1935, at dawn of the Second World War. Giraudoux draws a parallel between the situation in Europe in the 1930s, where everyone saw a new war coming without really preventing it, with the Trojan War in Antiquity.
One war is over, another is imminent, in this dramatic situation places Giraudoux the action of his play. The play takes place in the days prior to the outbreak of the Trojan War and narrates the efforts of the military commander Hector, who… Read More

La Renfermée La Corse is a collaboration between Marie Susini and Chris Marker with a beautiful and bittersweet essay by Susini on her birthplace Corsica, accompanied by Chris Marker's photographs. Both the text and the photographs break with the usual clichés of Corsica as a vacation destination and show a more rugged environment of the island.

At the age of six, Marie Susini was raised by nuns on Corsica, a period in her life that she processed in her first novel Plein Soleil
(1953). She later left Corsica for Marseille and then Paris to escape insularity and the confines of traditional gender roles. Corsica permeates all of Marie Susini's work, which was praised early on by critics such as Albert Béguin.
---
Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1981. First and only edition. 6to (28,5x21cm), illustrated boards. 90pp. Front top corner slightly bumped and a tiny bump at back cover turn-in. Very small inscription with pen at front end paper "Corse Sept. 89". Overall, in near fine condition.

This special issue of the NY Film Bulletin from 1962, was devoted entirely to Alain Resnais' film Last Year at Marienbad, written by Alain Robbe-Grillet. It features an extensive and rare interview with Resnais and Robbe-Grillet, translated by Rose Kaplin and originally published in the 123rd issue of Cahiers du Cinéma. Henri Colpi, one of the editors of Last Year at Marienbad, who had already worked with Resnais on Hiroshima, mon amour, gives a brief insight into the editing process of the film.

This very scarce issue offers a unique insight into possible interpretations of the film, a discussion on editing techniques, and new ways of storytelling.
---
New York: NY Film Bulletin, Inc / R.M. Franchi Alfred, 1962. 6to (27,5×21,5cm), staple bound in printed wrappers. 16pp. Text in English. Minor creasing and sunning to edges, slightly dog-eared on top corner. Crossed out price with red ink on front cover. Four discreet grammatical corrections with a ballpoint pen, overall a very good copy.

A wonderful copy of the socialist-feminist magazine Women & Film. Editors Siew-Hwa Beh and Saunie Salyer described themselves as part of the women's movement and cited as their concerns the sexism of the industry, the misrepresentation of women in film, the packaging of women as sex objects, and the masculinist bias of auteur filmmaking.

This 1974 issue includes interviews with Lina Wertmüller, Tra Giang, Agnès Varda, Gitta Nickel, and essays on Germaine Dulac, followed by an extensive three-part article on Third World Perspectives: Focus on Sarah Maldoror.
---
Berkeley: Women & Film, 1974. 8vo (28x21cm), staple-bound illustrated wrappers. 110pp. Text in English. Mild rubbing to wrapper edges and spine; overall toning; one page with small tear (1,5cm) at marign, not affecting the text; internally clean. Very good.