The Harvard Film Archive celebrates a beautiful new edition of Chris Marker's long-unavailable photo-essay Le Dépays, a meditation on Tokyo, memory, desire and the photographic image made at the same time as his film Sans soleil, with which it is in rich and clear dialogue. Copies of the beautiful new edition of Le Dépays, published by the Film Desk, will be available for sale before and after the screening of a rare 35mm print from the Harvard Film Archive collection. Artist and writer Sadie Rebecca Starnes, who spearheaded the project and wrote an insightful preface for the new edition, will be joined in conversation by Max Goldberg, Creative Arts Archivist at Houghton Library.

Marker’s ruminative, melancholy masterpiece channels the imagination of a lonely traveling cameraman—evoked in letters from distant Africa and Japan—into a profound meditation on the creative conjuring powers of memory, place and image. Among the most brilliant examples of the essay film, Sans soleil uses a lyrical, associative structure to transform modern Japan into a vivid metaphor for the scintillating mosaic of fact, fiction and fantasy that defines the increasingly mediated imageworld in which we live. A crucial bridge between Marker’s adventurous earlier travel films and his growing interest in media and technology, Sans soleil is one of Marker’s most dazzling and inexhaustible works. – Haden Guest