Any new film and any new book by French filmmaker Chris Marker is an event. Marker gave film lovers one of their most memorable experiences with La Jetee (1962)--a time-travel montage set after a nuclear war that inspired Terry Gilliam's Twelve Monkeys (1995). His still camerawork is not as well known, but Marker has been taking photographs as long as he has been making films. Staring Back presents 200 black-and-white photographs from Marker's personal archives, taken from 1952 to 2006. Some of the photographs are related to his classic films (which include Le Jetee, Sans Soleil, Cuba Si , and The Case of the Grinning Cat), others are portraits of famous faces (Simone Signoret, Akira Kurosawa), but most are pictures of people Marker has encountered as he has traveled the world (an extra who appeared in Kurosawa's Ran, a woman seen on a street in Siberia). The central section of the book contains a series of photographs documenting political protests Marker has witnessed, including the march on the Pentagon in 1967, the events of May 1968 in Paris, and the tumultuous 2006 demonstrations protesting the French government's proposed employment policies. The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos. The book--which appears in conjunction with an exhibition at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University--also includes essays by Wexner Center curator Bill Horrigan and art historian Molly Nesbit. Chris Marker (born in 1921) is one of French cinema's most influential artists. Bill Horrigan is Director of Media Arts at the Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University. Molly Nesbit teaches at Vassar College. She is a contributing editor at Artforum and is the author of Atget's Seven Albums and Their Common Sense."

A beautiful presentation of a new suite of works made for the Menil Collection by Allora & Calzadilla The Puerto Rico-based collaborative duo Allora & Calzadilla created Specters of Noon as a group of seven large-scale works specifically for the Menil Collection. The ensemble is orchestrated around the idea of solar noon, a notion derived from Surrealist texts by Caillois, Cesaire, and others that probe the transcultural mythology of noon-a time when shadows vanish and delirious visions momentarily reign. The works include light projections, guano, ship engines, live vocal performance, and coal. Using the Menil's Surrealist holdings as a point of departure, Specters of Noon is infused throughout with a Caribbean perspective that addresses the instability of environmental and colonial politics; one work is a power transformer damaged in Hurricane Maria that is half-sheathed in bronze. Filled with stunning installation photography and insightful texts both commissioned and reprinted, this volume captures the spirit of Jennifer Allora (b. 1974) and Guillermo Calzadilla's (b. 1971) deeply researched and multifaceted work. Distributed for the Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: Menil Collection, Houston (September 26, 2020-June 20, 2021)