Dan Geva confronts Chris Marker’s Film “Description d’un Combat” (1960) and creates a poetic and philosophic cinematic dialogue with the original images and text. Marker’s film wove together everyday images of a young country whose entire future is ahead of it. Geva takes us to these places that Marker warned us about half a century earlier and to those which the French master could not even have imagined. Telling details and careful observations are used to thoughtfully explore the personal consequences of the inconceivable yet routine devastation left by the ensuing decades. Geva’s quest for Marker’s original subjects, and his exploration of his own complicated history, reveals a series of unpredictable and gripping narratives in the shadow of vast political upheaval.
It allows us to ask: when the future will turn our present into its past, will we longingly remember this morning?
Marker himself has described this film as beautiful and heartbreaking, stating in 2006, “As for my film, with an immense generosity you (Dan Geva) extracted the few elements that could still make sense, and raised them to the level where it is possible to deal with all the essential themes of today.”