Chris Marker

Having begun writing this article on the film La Jetée (1962), Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve, or better known under his pseudonym Chris Marker, turned ninety-one on the 29th July 2012 and passed away on 30th July 2012. La Jetée also came fifty in Sight and Sound’s  greatest films of all time list. It is then only natural to expand a little more on one of his greatest pieces, from a collection of work that spans over forty years. Marker was a poet, essayist, critic, novelist, film-maker, videographer, photographer, editor and digital multimedia artist. There was no end to the mediums he employed. He began in photography and poetry before honing an interest in technological advances, where the root of his fascination was to find different experiences in reading. During the fifties he began film-making, establishing his style of separating images and intimate tones of narrative, questioning two themes that has spanned over all his works to some degree; memory and history. “Life in the process of becoming history”, this line from one of his films represent Marker’s interests in transitional societies. Where history does not exist apart from through our personal experience and interpretation of it, it was hung in the longing for the experience of meeting, of chance meeting, whether it was in a dream or whether it was truly real. Where in choosing to have that experience solidified ends in death this is the essence of Marker’s most famous films, La Jetée and his travelogue-essay Sans Soleil (1983).

Fascination with memory is nothing new,

“the great question of the Twentieth Century was the coexistence of different concepts of time” (Marker)

its ability to haunt and with its endless malleability there is no wonder why many artists are drawn to obsess with all its allure. Marker questions the complexities of time and memory merging concerns of the speed of our technological advancements in his film La Jetée, an interplay of text and visuals. A short film lasting only twenty-seven minutes, made from a collection of black and white stills beautifully edited together through fades, dissolves and wipes, except for a brief moving image at the centre of the film. It is the bare bones of science fiction, paring back cinema to create a futuristic poetic narrative, which has influenced many film-makers, in particular Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys (1995) which is a direct homage to La Jetée.

The film is set in Paris, post World War III, where the protagonist, an unnamed man forced into time travel, is obsessed with an image from his past. The story combined with the use of stills captures the essence of cinema itself; cinema as the time machine. Where the paradox of time travel has now become a science fiction staple. The opening sequence begins at Orly (the airport), where the brutalist architecture exhibits the stoic futurism Marker sets throughout the film. This is also reflected in the accompanying opening audio; the drone of the air craft and the static female voice. The later images of headless classical statues also registers with the new world, embodying the film’s fragmentation and the protagonist’s state of self. Suggesting the past culture of preservation has deteriorated in the post apocalyptic world, where the images haunt both internally and externally.

The dystopian future Marker paints mirrored the global fears of the Cold War and the Cuban missile crisis but it also unfolded secrets of France who has used torture during the Algerian War, where the State had censored public knowledge of that fact. Hence, questioning the national involvement with the Nazi occupation during World War II. The film weaves whispers of German commands during the underground sequences creating a time loop of echoes, intensifying the brain washing atmosphere. The hushed commands travelling along like time itself. La Jetée is also a film of love, the tragedy of desire and the growing lust transpiring through obsession. The male protagonist is brought together with an unnamed female, his fixation on the female figure who he wants to love and the impossibility of his situation in so doing.

Marker questions existence further, suspending time in the long sequence where the stills show the couple exploring a museum with taxidermy animals, yet the shots show no visible distinction between the dead animals and the couple observing.

“they are without memories, without plans. Time builds itself painfully around them. The only landmarks are the flavor of the moment they are living and the markings on the walls.”

Undoubtedly the most reflective shots in the film, where we are brought to ask whether the images lead us to question an animation of the dead or a reduction of the living to be dead. The end sequence returns to the opening sequence at Orly, where the film ends with the unnamed male frozen midair, statuesque reminiscent of the earlier classical relics, immortalised and fractured.

Marker’s approach to filming is much like many processes of art, “you never know what you’re filming until later.” For La Jetée he began taking pictures whilst filming Le Joli Mai (1963). This helped to create the abstract fragmentations in La Jetée, creating a more realistic illusion of memory, its impossibility and enabled its ability to distort the mind, to protect itself from losses imposed by time and forgetting. It is the unconscious forces that drive the story. As Norman Krasna states, it’s “the functioning of remembering”, to continually fabricate past events for the current interests of the present. Marker plays with history in the film in order to rewrite history. This also facilitated the events in the film to unfold in the form Marker created; essay film, a mix of documentary and personal reflection. His films merged poetics, politics and philosophy, establishing him as a major film-maker with his left-wing films. Where the poet Henri Michaux proclaimed; “the Sorbonne should be razed and Chris Marker put up in its place.”

In stripping the filmic illusion of motion by freezing the images and prolonging the audience’s eye on each sequence the experience of time is dramatized. The stills are the true representation of reality, a focused realism where the eye can scrutinize each moment. The twists in reality are the basis of Marker’s queries with memory; how lapses in time can be forged together and the ability to repress or deny experiences from the mind’s eye to the State repression, “the camp police spied even on dreams.” The film itself is a reflection on this, filled with lapses and loops between past, present and future, where cinematic tension is created through these strange mutations in time. Where the past is the Paris of the present.

Marker’s preoccupations with memory within La Jetée is also Marker’s own recollection of another film; Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), which Sight and Sound has now announced as the greatest film of all time in their recent poll. There are subtle hints in the form of the female character in La Jetée, her hair is styled in a manner similar to Madeleine’s own in Vertigo, to a more direct image of the couple with outstretched arms pointing to a space whilst examining a sequoia trunk. Mirroring Vertigo, where Madeleine identifies herself with a long deceased woman named Carlotta Valdez, she shows Scotty rings on the sequoia trunk, marking the points in time at which Carlotta was born and died. In Marker’s short the reference is reversed where the male protagonist from the future points to a time where he will eventually exist. Yet again nature is symbolised in tree form and is a continual image of longevity and existence. Even Trevor Duncan’s score is reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann’s for Vertigo, Duncan keeps the timelessness in his beautiful compositions that are hauntingly eerie, otherworldly, romantic and distant as if heard from afar. The score has the minimalism of Stravinsky, a mosaic mesh matching the stills, creating poetic rhythm and beat. The music is only one out of the four elements of sound that pace the film; the poetic narrative, the atmospheric noises of heart beats and birds to the silences that almost become crackles, that intensify Marker’s dream like photo-roman.

The film’s visual transformation of the quotidian into the dystopic has influenced many great directors to create films such as Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville (1965) and Wong Kar-wai’s 2046 (2004). Marker’s repetition with memory also infiltrated through to the mainstream, from Total Recall (1990) to Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004). His contributions to film extend to producing new work with his company, Société pour le Lancement des Oeuvres Nouvelles, financing work of his own and various other artists including Godard and Agnés Varda to name a few. As for the man himself, he was publicly shy described as “a curious spirit, an indefatigable film and video maker, a cat-loving poet, a secret person and an immense talent.” by the Cannes film festival president Gilles Jacob. He was truly a master in the art of poetic film-making.

For a collection of forty years of Marker’s work see Immemory