The Mirror and the Scene

I am relatively new to Chris Marker, having seen only Sans Soleil (1985) and I feel almost shameful that his work has passed me by. Luckily (perhaps not for him) he died recently and so I was encouraged by a friend to check out his work. Sans Soleil reminded me of Koyaanisqatsi (1981) and Baraka (1992), but perhaps those are rather obvious comparisons, although chronologically Sans Soleil certainly sits nicely between the two.

Sans Soleil has this near Baudrillardian type aesthetic to it in both the monologue and the images, perhaps its this kind of dreamy new-age abstract-speak where everything seems vaguely poetic and vaguely profound or aphoristic. Often with Baudrillard there seems a beautiful illusion in the text and yet it communicates much about the modern world we live in, the space, time, memory, pace, and the interconnectedness of everything without ever really saying too much. This is certainly the case with Marker. There are also touches of Mark Rothko in the colossal stillness and grace that his film-work evokes and I also see kinship with Andrei Tarkovsky - Marker made the documentary One Day in the Life of Andrei Arsinevich (1999) - in the evocative imagery, the focus on memory and the recall of things lost; static images representing static moments, and the clashing together of half remembered life. Some of this is indeed also present in the work of Wim Wenders, notably Wings of Desire (1987)

However it was La Jetée (1962) a sci-fi (which served as the inspiration for Terry Gilliam's 12 Monkeys) composed only of still black and white shots (apart from one brief moment where we see the blinking of an eye) which floored me completely and most especially in its closing lines:

"He knew that the moment he was granted to see as a child was the moment of his own death."

La Jetée is unlike any sci-fi I have ever seen, certainly in the way the images are composed, although it retains the guy-falls-in-love-with-girl-but-can-never-attain-her trope which seems identifiable in a myriad of sci-fi from Nineteen Eighty Four (1984), Blade Runner (1982), The Spy Who Came In From The Cold (1963) to Brazil (1985) and more recent outings like Source Code (2011) and even Prometheus (2012). When I think of sci-fi I see that it is often significantly underpinned by a struggle or quest for life and knowledge and ultimately a struggle to find love. Sci-fi is often about a longing for someone or something lost, a fulfilment, a discovery, a memory, a moment of happiness and in most cases this always leads to a quest for romantic love, as with Plato's "love is the pursuit of the whole". All one has to do is look at science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick. The death of his twin sister within a year of their birth haunted him his entire life, so much so that she appears to have served as his muse and the primary reason he became a writer. His experiments with psychedelics and his belief in alternative realities seem connected to the shadow she cast not only in his life, but the traces of her still left in his mind. All great Art is born of loss, and her image, a girl with dark hair forever unattainable, recurs throughout most of his fiction. La Jetée certainly has something of this.

La Jetée captures beautifully the idea of the end contained in the beginning of the recursiveness and reflexivity of time and ultimately existence. We witness a man, a prisoner in a post-apocalyptic time period, who is sent back into the past to trace the memory fragment from his childhood of a woman he had seen on an airport platform and the witnessing of a man's death. The film traces his first encounter with the woman in a flea-market, his fascination with her and the pursuit of his love for her. Over 28 minutes this exquisitely brings us to the closing moments where he runs to meet the woman on an airport pier and is shot dead in his pursuit - becoming the man killed in his memory.

That is a synopsis in short, but between that concept of the end conceived in the beginning is a multitude of beautiful still shots guided by a poetically spoken narrative. The moment where the woman's eyes open and close as she lays in bed, which occurs about halfway through the film, has a dramatic affect, because the film up to that point had resisted the traditional film form of the moving image. It forces the viewer to completely absorb the still shots, perhaps to uncover more meaning than the steady motion of images might allow, and it then breaks this tension or spell, with a short release of movement. It has to be one of the most important moments in film history.

There are no other words to describe this film, just 28 minutes of still shots and a stunning spoken narrative. What La Jetée suggests is that we do not need to always rely upon the rapid movement of images to envisage meaning, to suspend reality or time. The still image can tell us more about the passing of time, about memory, about love, about loss, than the one thing we often think of as the companion of time, movement. Chris Marker shows us the poetry of stillness, but he also tells us something about life along the way.


The entire film can be viewed here:

The beautiful musical accompaniment by Trevor Duncan reminds me somehow of Georges Delores score for Godards's Le Mepris and even ever so slightly of the musical introduction to Her Song by Colin Blunstone (see all below).