The older that I get, the more often I stumble on snippets of information online that immediately triggers personal memory links to my own experience. In this category, I recently saw a reference to the innovative science-fiction short La Jetée by the underappreciated French cinema director and writer Chris Marker. My “link” to Marker isn’t his brilliant film work, but a little known travel guidebook series called Petite Planète .
The Petite Planète collection consists of a series of little travel guides by the French publishing house Edition du Seuil where he conceived and designed a series of travel guides called Petite Planète. He considered each volume “not a guidebook, not a history book, not a propaganda brochure, not traveler’s impressions, but instead equivalent to the conversation we would like to have with someone intelligent and well versed in the country that interests us. Chris Marker was hired as the editor and often photographer, designer and writer of the series, establishing an unorthodox approach to travel literature, both editorially and visually. The narratives were full of commentary and critique and the visuals surprising or unsettling, avoiding the glossy clichés of typical guidebooks. The covers in particular had a deliberately cinematic approach, each with a face of a woman, often staring at the viewer (or looking off) in a powerful, knowing way.
Over the years, I’ve only owned a few books from the series. Too often when I found copies for sales in European book markets, they were in poor condition from heavy use.
“Apart from the ambition to provide something different from run-of-the-mill guidebooks, histories, or travelers’ tales,” writes Catherine Lupton in Chris Marker: Memories of the Future, “the most innovative aspect of the Petite Planète guides was their lavish use of illustrations, which were displayed not merely as support to the text but in dynamic layouts that established an unprecedented visual and cognitive relay between text and images.” Though Marker contributed some of his own photographs (as did his French New Wave colleague Agnès Varda), his chief creative contribution came in blending these and a variety of “engravings, miniatures, popular graphic illustrations, picture postcards, maps, cartoons, postage stamps, posters, and advertisements” into “a heady and heterogenous mix of high cultural and mass-market scenes,” all arranged with the words in “a manner that engages knowingly and playfully with the parameters of the book.”
