In August 1946, Marcel Duchamp spent five weeks in Switzerland, and stayed at the Hotel Bellevue (today, Le Baron Tavernier) near Chexbres, on Lake Geneva. It was here that he discovered the Forestay waterfall, which was to become the starting point for (and ultimately the landscape of) his enigmatic and final masterpiece, "Etant donnes: 1 la chute d'eau, 2 le gaz d'eclairage" ("Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas"). Now, for the first time, the full significance of the choice of this waterfall is explored. Among the contributors to this volume are Caroline Bachmann, Stefan Banz, Etienne Barilier, Lars Blunck, Ecke Bonk, Paul B. Franklin, Antje von Graevenitz, Dalia Judovitz, Michael Luthy, Bernard Marcade, Herbert Molderings, Adeena Mey, Stanislaus von Moos, Francis M. Naumann, Mark Nelson, Molly Nesbit, Dominique Radrizzani, Roman Signer, Michael R. Taylor, Hans Maria de Wolf and Philip Ursprung.

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 The photographs are accompanied by several unpublished texts by Marker, including the English language text of The Case of the Grinning Cat and Marker's annotations for some of the photos.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."