Description of a Struggle

The documentary describes Israel twelve years after its founding. The film uses footage shot on location together with archive material and calls at places very different from one another: collective farms, Arab villages, religious quarters and the sites where tourists come. The struggle of the title stands for the country’s search for an identity in a region changing fast. The view of the account belongs to the year 1960; it asks the questions of that day rather than those of ours, and it is worth reading with that in mind. The director offers no single explanation; he sets the things he has seen side by side and leaves the tension between them standing. For that reason the voice of the account is not a certain one but a questioning one. Chris Marker’s sixty minute French documentary was completed in 1960.