by Brian Dillon
Guardian
Viewers emerge from Chris Marker's La Jetée (1962), a film made almost entirely of still photographs, marked for ever by its imagery yet somehow unsure exactly what they have seen. It is a film that mines deep seams of memory, but whose surface, though hardly forgettable, remains enigmatic in retrospect. After almost half a century, it is still hard to say what Marker achieved in his masterpiece.
La Jetée (The Jetty)
Release: 1962
Country: France
Runtime: 29 mins
Directors: Chris Marker
Cast: Davos Hanich, Hélène Chatelain
On the face of it, the half-hour film ought to be easy to précis, because its futuristic plot is familiar to the point of banality. (In Twelve Monkeys, Terry Gilliam's hyperactive "remake" of La Jetée, it's only the clichés that remain.) In the aftermath of a nuclear war that has destroyed his native Paris, a prisoner is dispatched across time to secure the resources that the present lacks. Chosen for his attachment to a childhood memory - the image of a man shot dead on the observation pier at Orly airport - he spirals inevitably back to that moment, which is revealed as the scene of his own death.
But the recursive narrative of the film is just the pretext for a more involuted essay on time, memory and the lure of images. Marker's protagonist recalls the shocked face of a woman on the jetty, and as he is thrown back in time he finds her again, becoming (as the film's calm voiceover informs us) "her ghost". It's here, before the prisoner is abruptly recalled to the future, that La Jetée conjures its most haunting images. The man and woman perform a heartbreaking choreography of discovery and loss, becoming sci-fi avatars of the petrified figures on Keats's "Grecian Urn". He leans immobile over her face in sunlight, they stroll among static children in the Jardin des Plantes and halt suddenly before the "wall" of their impossible future. In the work's most extraordinary moment - at screenings, the critic Janet Harbord says in her recent book on the film, there is always "a collective bodily intake of breath" - the sleeping woman opens her eyes and the film moves for the first time, before a sudden jump-cut to the frozen and desolate time to come.
La Jetée, as Harbord notes, is littered with ruins. Paris - and, one presumes, much of the world - has been "blown up". In a sequence depicting the wake of the third world war, we see a city - or cities, because the photographs clearly derive from the second world war, and might show Dresden or Hiroshima - bombed almost flat, and what appears to be a mock-up of the amputated Arc de Triomphe. In the tunnels to which civilisation has retreated, there are hunks of broken statuary at which the hero stares aghast. In his journey into the past, he catches sight of more statues, headless or defaced; at his last meeting with the woman, they wander among the stuffed relics of a natural history museum, and Marker's camera frames them as if they were themselves dusty specimens trapped in its vitrines.
La Jetée is a complex and poetic reflection on the destructive and redemptive powers of memory. (Film itself, we might say, is an art of forgetting: how much do you actually recall of your favourite movie?) But none of the above should imply that it's a work of pure aestheticism or merely psychological insight. Among the merits of Harbord's concise study is her insistence that La Jetée is a film about the politics of memory, a point confirmed when one considers the films that its director worked on in the preceding decade. There are stray images, easily overlooked in light of the film's more exquisite moments, that clearly recall certain shots in Alain Resnais's devastating Holocaust documentary of 1955, Night and Fog, on which Marker was assistant director. (The tunnels rhyme with Resnais's images of the inmates' quarters in the death camps; the mysterious German-speaking scientists in La Jetée resemble stills of Nazi doctors.) In 1953, Marker and Resnais made Les Statues meurent aussi, a short film on African sculpture that is also an obvious polemic against colonialism and the museum artefact as effacement of history.
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