In tandem with Sunday in Peking, Chris Marker had offered an alternative take on his visit to China in the form of a photographic supplement to the ‘Chine, port ouverte’ issue of Esprit. Entitled ‘Clair de Chine’ (‘China’s Light’), the pamphlet is presented as ‘a film in the guise of a greeting card’,and contains a selection of photographs accompanied by short commentary-captions. The pamphlet revisits images and episodes from Sunday in Peking, including the Beijing Opera and the alley by the Ming Tombs, and also contains new material that unfolds further perspectives on the film’s themes. The lateral affinities between Sunday in Peking and ‘Clair de Chine’ anticipate a similar relationship between Sunless and Le Dépays (1982), the latter an album of photographs and written reflections drawn from the same sojourn in Japan as the better-known film. The film and the photo-text publication are not designed to explain or absorb each other, but as an open-ended relay that invites fresh perspectives on their shared subject matter. Marker’s advice to the reader of Le Dépays could equally apply to the book’s relation-ship to Sunless: ‘The text doesn’t comment on the images any more than the images illustrate the text. They are two sequences that clearly cross and signal to each other, but which it would be pointlessly exhausting to collate.’
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