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Chris Marker: Immemory: Gutenberg Version

Chris Marker: Immemory: Gutenberg Version

Paperback English 480 pages 20.4 × 15.3 × 3 cm

Description

Chris Marker’s Immemory: Gutenberg Version returns a work conceived for the CD-ROM to the older technology invoked by its subtitle: print. Originally issued in French in 1998 and in English in 2002, Immemory is a mixed-media memoir organized around “zones” of travel, war, cinema and poetry. Photographs and texts do not simply illustrate a life; they form a shifting structure through which memory is approached as association, recurrence and passage.

That structure belongs naturally to Marker, whose practice moved among filmmaking, photography and writing while absorbing the forms of the essay, letter, political argument, installation and computer game. The original Immemory asked its reader to navigate rather than proceed along a single prescribed line. This 2025 book therefore faces an unusually exacting editorial problem: how to translate a layered digital environment into the fixed order and physical progression of 480 printed pages without reducing its complexity.

The conversion was not conceived only after Marker’s death in 2012. He devised the title Gutenberg Version and began developing the project with Exact Change during his lifetime. Edited and introduced by Isabel Ochoa Gold, the resulting volume should be understood as a reconfiguration rather than a straightforward transcript: a collaboration shaped by Marker’s own intention to reconsider the work through another medium.

For collectors concerned with photography’s relationship to cinema, literature and digital culture, the book offers a particularly concentrated case study. It preserves access to an important phase of Marker’s cross-media thinking while making the act of translation visible: screen becomes page, interactive movement becomes sequence, and a memoir built from images and words acquires a new temporal rhythm. Its significance lies precisely in that tension—not in treating print as a neutral container, but in testing what memory becomes when its architecture changes.

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