University of Cape Town – FAM3003S

Jacques De Villiers

14 October 2016

‘Laps(e)’:

The foggy ruins of time in Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) vis-à-vis Bazin, Barthes and Mulvey’s Photographic Theory

Firstly, this is not a film. Maybe it’s Cinema. But to hold it to its own word, Chris Marker’s La Jetee is a “photo-roman” – a novel composed of photographs. In this regard it belongs in a marvelous clique with Luis Bunuel’s Un Chien Andalou and Maya Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon; short sequences that breezily put most other self-conscious attempts at inventing an Avant-Garde cinema to shame. And it succeeds, in just less than half an hour, at narrativising the twin ideas that photography is an index of death and that every image, every present (re: Deleuze), is simultaneously haunted by both a past and a future.

Emerging as it did from the first great swell of the Nouvelle Vague, La Jetee claims its kinship with the moment by attempting to exist as both theory and practice – a film essay more than just a film. Its Cassandrian twist – that time-travel can do nothing to change a man’s destiny, does in fact ensure it – makes literal the moebius-band, feedback-loop logic of Barthes’ and Bazin’s shared point that though in the moment of its taking a photograph may seem to preserve life and put up an impediment against entropy, it then inevitably sticks around instead as a testament of the true inevitability of death and a frozen elegy to a time already far gone. In other words, a photograph is a memento mori just as much as it is a memento.

La Jetee is a collection of photographs because all films are just collections of photographs, technically. The fact that it presents itself as a slide-show of sorts has the ironic double effect of emphasizing the arbitrariness of time as such (that all supposedly stable moments are always already like installments in ‘a family album’) and that of letting us linger outside the constraining continuity which almost all other films take for granted. It also brilliantly re-enforces the conclusion that Freedom and Control are ultimately illusions. When the protagonist drifts into the future and confirms humanity’s survival, he knows that it is the result of the success of his present mission, that the people of the future will ensure their own existence by giving him a MacGuffin to take back with him to jump-start civilization. So why worry? And this just foreshadows, or post-shadows, the realization of the ending, that the very same time-image which marked the protagonist as a prime candidate for the time-journeys he’s undergone is the one which coincides with his, and their, abrupt arrival at the final destination. He unwittingly sacrifices himself to himself so that he may live to die again one day.

To correlate this with reality proper, whilst Barthes and Bazin may insist that a photograph is a moment’s ‘emanation’ – an incontrovertible, even non-aesthetic, record of time – the most eerie moments in La Jetee are surely the ones in which we see a Paris destroyed by nuclear war, the Arc de Triomphe in pieces etc. This is a Paris-to-come, and one which looked stupidly likely in 1962, just before the Cuban Missile Crisis. We know the images are fake, but the logic of photography, which convinces us that everything we see in a picture must once have really been before the camera, convinces us to some extent that there is something more real in them than the pretenses of science fiction would usually allow. We are already lost, our cities are already in ruins, and our descendants will end up in the catacombs anyway, alive or dead.

But while La Jetee is as openly bleak and sincerely existentialist as one could want it to be, it does allow for a moment, a rightly famous moment, of realist grace a la Bazin’s Catholicism. Mulvey synthesizes Barthes’ and Bazin’s reflections on photography to claim that Cinema is ‘Death 24 times a second’ but when the unnamed woman opens her eyes in bed after a concentrated flurry of pictures of her sleep, what we see is life itself as congealed tenderness. This is a break in the cycle, even though it doesn’t last either. We are in love with her too and she knows it. In this, and perhaps only in this, can a good infinity be found and held dear.