Chris Marker: La Jetée

by Janet Harbord
Afterall Books, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, 2009
Distributed by The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA.
110 pp, illus. 37 b/w plates, 16 b/w inline. Trade, $ 35.00; paper, $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-84638-049-5; ISBN: 978-1-84638-048-8.

Reviewed by Mike Leggett
University of Technology Sydney

Mike.Leggett@uts.edu.au

The short film La Jetée has prompted many hundreds of articles since it was premiered in 1962 and claims for its influence have been widespread. In many ways it remains an enigma upon which this well illustrated critical study focuses, exploring the hermeneutic aspects of an artwork that at its inception undoubtedly had heuristic intent. The experiment was not restricted to the internal technologies of film form but essentially to the positioning of the individual attending (to) the film experience. The simplicity of immersive storytelling is challenged by reversing the role of the photographic image from motion picture sequences to still images conjoined with a narrator's words. The story, (in French, histoire ), operates episodic memory of the filmic experience in relation to the semantic memory of lived experience. History hovers close by: 'The question of what we can bear to know of the past and what this means for the future, is laid before us in this moment.' The narrative device for achieving this is some experiments in time travel conducted by German speaking researchers upon the protagonist in which "images begin to ooze, like confessions." The 'secret interior, a place of yearning' contains the catalogue of images, the faces, and places that under the poeisis of the spoken words maintain only a tenuous link with the narration. For us as observers, images begin to ooze significance that dialectically hover between the directly personal and the needs of the filmmaker's story.

The Cold War is the context for the film. In many ways the Gen-X and Y offsprings' knowledge of those times is no different from that of the baby-boomers, who like this reviewer also experienced the events through motion picture compilations and other texts. In quoting Kracauer, we are reminded that 'this storm of images from any historical context was an ominous sign of the capitalist abstraction of things from their sources, from their signs of meaning'. La Jetée was released the same the year as the Cuban Missile crisis occurred, a point in time many of us remember as politicising youthful energy for protest and galvanising the nuclear disarmament and peace movements. Technology itself was the bogeyman of the times, the handmaiden of presidents, captains and despots. Television and even the telephone were part of the electronic technologies beginning to become available to lesser mortals, producing a social impact only more recently evident.

But the truncation of such contexts by the author is understandable. Sensibly she sticks to the evidence, the 'text' of the film, inspected frame by frame, and those other texts of film theory and philosophy that intersect with her study. (In its original English release of course, it was also necessary to read the sub-titles.) This mode of study arising from a humanities tradition of interpreting literature however, maintains the film in view (for 'our own interpretive creations'). Evoking the filmmaker's options: 'In place of an image of the earth from outer space, Marker takes us . . .   into the minutiae of the world's matter, deploying a type of photography used extensively in science.' The delightfully occlusive moment of supposing Marker even envisaged such an option - the mission to the Moon had only just been announced (1961) at this point in time - is nonetheless recovered by the appropriately sage: 'To direct thoughts towards the future is one act, to imagine the future requires a change of dimension and perspective. It demands that we enter a different frame.'

The oft repeated fact that the nom-de-auteur 'Chris Marker' is another cipher in the layering of signifiers, is for the author 'marker . . . the name we have come to use for a problem of the relation of images to memory and time.' And of the film: 'As a text, it doesn't stay the same but transmutes, moving sideways into other objects and spaces', for instance, the internet sites where the artefacts of image and sound add further layers of time and change to varying online renditions of La Jetée that become someone else's photo-roman .

The commentary on the film, (another framing of the re-framed photo-roman form that the film itself establishes) and the analysis of its workings are developed across ten carefully prepared sections that deal with different aspects of the film's framings: through the camera, Photography After History, a fascinating chapter; through metaphors in time and space, Properties of Scale and Duration; through editing and montage, Assemblage; through sound, Song, Birdsong and Noise, etc. There is no bibliography or index but the footnotes are plentiful.

The film appeared the year after Alain Resnais's Last Year in Marienbad , which successfully re-established a highbrow art cinema almost absent since the silent film era. The film explores similar formal elements as La Jetée but is not referred to by the author at all curiously, as Marker had worked with Resnais previously and belonged to the same group of Parisian filmmakers, ( Rive Gauche) and writers, (Alain Robbe-Grillet), all in turn associated with the famous Nouvelle Vague group of filmmakers. In La Jetee, Marker's approach to filmmaking was established - the films that followed were similarly concerned with politics as discourse accessed through the evidence of history's motion pictures, interpreted with Marker's words. (See Chat Perchés - The Case of the Grinning Cat - 2004, reviewed LDR July 2006)

This title is one of nine so far in the One Work series auspiced by the University of the Arts London, who with the financial involvement of the Arts Council of England and distribution by The MIT Press, are setting out to expand in-depth critical responses to individual key art works from the 1960s to the present day. With some 100 monographs planned, other already published titles in the series include a key work by: Andy Warhol, Yvonne Rainer, Hollis Frampton, Ilya Kabokov, Bas Jan Ader, Michael Snow, Richard Prince, Joan Jonas, Hanne Darboven, Marc Camille Chaimowicz et al. Though a welcome change from the artist as hero approach, the precept of a 'key work' (as a way of avoiding the fustily unfashionable term 'masterpiece') nonetheless and unfortunately will divert attention away from the complexity of conditions from which a significant work emerges, thus obscuring the connections and relationships so evident in performative work, then as now.