Eternal Current Events: Early Writings

by Chris Marker, Jackson B. Smith (translator)

The first English translation of Chris Marker’s early writings on film, religion, philosophy, politics, and art.

Before making his first films in the 1950s, Chris Marker was a regular contributor to the Paris-based magazine Esprit from 1946 to 1952. Unbound by genre or form, Marker's pieces range from short stories, essays, poems, and reviews to fabricated reportage and invented news affairs, all gemmed with the hallmarks of his a blurring of reality and imagination, a wry sense of humor, a sustained political engagement, and, of course, a limitless curiosity for animal life.

Eternal Current Events marks the first time these exemplary works are available in English, published in an adapted facsimile of the original periodical. In these short selections, what one encounters is less a past life before his turn toward cinema than a preamble to his celebrated body of work. Moving images did not replace Marker’s production as a writer but were incorporated into it. Before the “imaginary films” there were “imaginary current events”; before the travels through time in La Jetée there was a bulletin rethinking the psychogeography of the around-the-world trip; and before the musings on a Japanese temple consecrated to cats in Sans Soleil, there was a summary report on the theological implications of the 1952 Parisian Cat Fair. Marker did not just begin his career as a writer, he remained one throughout his life.

Genres: Film

240 pages, Paperback

Published July 29, 2025

About the author

Chris Marker is a French writer, photographer, film director, multimedia artist and documentary maker.

He is best known for directing La Jetée (1962), as well as Sans Soleil (1983) and AK (1985), a documentary about Japanese filmmaker Akira Kurosawa.

Reviews

[Shannon Kim]

I tried reading this while drunk and half of it was in French so I don’t think I fully understood it but it was beautiful
La pluie était destiné à tomber#FR

[Tosh]

Here is my review of the Chris Marker book: https://open.substack.com/pub/tosh/p/...

[Owen Hatherley]

A really interesting project - Marker's early feuilletons, poems and stories from the aftermath of the liberation of France to the early fifties - and beautifully produced, but let down by a non-existent editorial apparatus, which given how densely allusive this stuff is to the minutiae of French politics of the time, is pretty negligent. Fascinating though and with some haunting, strange writing - will go back to it; a 3.5!

[Talya Krupnick]

More 'interesting' than captivating, but it was cool to know what he was thinking about long before his reputable work and thoughts. The stylization of his imaginative work was actually quite surprising to me, it's not what I would have expected.