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| Marker (left) with Alain Resnais |
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| Writer/director Chris Marker |
LA JETÉE A aka: Death on the Pier France (28 mi) 1962 d: Chris Marker
Under the orders of Jean-Luc, I’ve said for a long time that films should be seen first in theaters, and that television and video are only there to refresh your memory. Now that I no longer have any time at all to go to the cinema, I’ve started seeing films by lowering my eyes [on a television or computer screen], with an ever increasing sense of sinfulness. —Chris Marker Film Comment interview, 2003
This post-apocalyptic science fiction drama was released in 1962, immersed in the doomsday, nuclear disaster mindset of the era, when there was an alarmist aspect of the culture in the late 1950’s and early 1960’s, when Cold War tensions and a threat of nuclear war convinced government leaders in the United States that millions of lives could be saved by the construction of bomb shelters (Nuclear Fallout Shelters Were Never Going to Work), with Life magazine, at the behest of President Kennedy, spurring a nationwide trend to build backyard bomb shelters, (LIFE Magazine “How You Can Survive Fallout”). Among the most popular films of the day was Stanley Kramer’s bleak depiction of the aftermath of a nuclear war in ON THE BEACH (1959), listed among the Top-Grossing Movies of 1959, while Pat Frank’s Alas, Babylon in 1959 was one of the first apocalyptic novels of the nuclear age, and Eugene Burdick and Harvey Wheeler’s Fail-Safe, depicting a nightmarish military nuclear fiasco, became a bestselling American novel in 1962, initially released during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And how could we forget Stanley Kubrick’s hilariously subversive Cold War satire, DR. STRANGELOVE OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE BOMB (1964)? Yet one of the most radical films of the era is simply a compilation of still photographs beautifully edited together in a 28-minute montage that film critic Pauline Kael described as “very possibly the greatest science-fiction movie yet made.” While this is his only foray into fictional narrative filmmaking, Marker is the undisputed master of the film essay, as evidenced by films like Le Joli Mai (1963), The Grin Without a Cat (Le Fond de L’Air Est Rouge) (1977), and Sans Soleil (1982), where his experimental style creates layers of dramatic intrigue that viewers are required to sift through in order to make sense of this disturbing WWIII scenario where the world is wiped out from nuclear annihilation, yet it ponders whether the past and future can possibly rescue the present. Much of this unravels through the power of suggestion, where a disembodied voice becomes a recurring narrative device in Marker films, reminding us of the importance of memories, existing in two versions, one in French and the other in English (Jean Négroni in French, James Kirk in English), walking us through a series of baffling events that continuously challenge the viewer. Even after more than half a century, viewers are still unsure of just what they’ve seen, as there’s an enigmatic quality to this film that is part of its enduring legacy, where so much is compressed into a brief window of time. By the early 60’s, Marker had already established himself as one of the major artistic figures in France, having fought in the Resistance during the war, he published his only novel, Le Coeur Net (The Forthright Spirit), in 1949, which is about aviation, followed in 1952 by an illustrated essay on French writer Jean Giraudoux, Giraudoux Par Lui-Même. He worked as an assistant director for Alain Resnais on his devastating Holocaust documentary NIGHT AND FOG (1955), and was also a prolific film critic, writing for the left-wing Catholic journal Esprit (magazine) and Cahiers du Cinéma. He was a tireless traveler, editing the innovative guidebook series Petite Planète for Éditions de Seuil, (Isabel Stevens on Chris Marker's "Petite Planète"), contributing his own photographs, playfully exploring the people and terrain of Siberia four years after the death of Stalin in LETTER FROM SIBERIA (1957), while in 1959, he published Coréennes, a photographic study of Korea. Making upwards of 70 films, many of them collaborations, Marker directed 20 or so feature films, becoming known as a filmmaker, poet, novelist, photographer, editor, and even a videographer and digital multimedia artist who has been challenging audiences for years with his complex ruminations on time, memory, and the rapid advancement of life on this planet. Many of his earliest films are personal travelogues, making trips to China, North Korea, Israel, the Soviet Union, and Cuba, with Marker assuming the role of a foreign correspondent in the intimate documentary ¡CUBA SÍ! (1961), chronicling the island’s transition from the dictatorship of Batista to the Cuban Revolution under Fidel Castro, including several interviews with him, ending with the Bay of Bigs incident, but the film was banned for two years for remaining largely sympathetic to Castro and the making of a revolution. But he became known internationally for making this film, made simultaneously with Le Joli Mai (1963), composed entirely of photographs by cinematographer Jean Chiabaud except for one startling 5-second shot of a mysterious woman lazily opening her eyes from a slumber as she blinks at the viewers. Our perception of a photograph is that it captures the present moment, yet it instantly becomes the past, as a photograph will always remain a memory.
Marker is part of the Left Bank Group spearheaded by Alain Resnais, who were more experimental and politically conscious than the French New Wave, fiercely defying convention, viewing cinema more as an art form, inhabiting the same mysterious realm as the nearly incomprehensible Alain Resnais puzzle film Last Year at Marienbad (L'Année Dernière à Marienbad) (1961), where this is among Marker’s more stylish and innovative films, an existentialist tale of doomed existence, and a parable of our modern fate, exuding a penetrating intelligence, and may represent cinema’s closest approach to poetry. Using a fragmented structure to show how brief the most impactful moments in our life can be, having an unforgettable gravity, as those memories shape our lives and make us who we are, yet this is only apparent when the film takes an astonishing turn into time travel, taking us into the realm of science fiction to examine what it is that truly makes us human. The opening of the film is strange enough, full of mysterious implications, yet what’s immediately clear is that something very precise and concrete has happened, as the sounds of a jet engine quickly become swallowed up by the voices of the Saint Alexander Nevsky Cathedral choir singing a Liturgy of the Good Saturday announcing the start of a nuclear war, LA JETÉE (1962) Dir. Chris Marker - YouTube (2:20), with the rest of the film delving into the hidden recesses of the imagination to explore the profound ramifications, The First Minute | La Jetée (1962) YouTube (1:21). Reminiscent of Kurt Vonnegut’s seminal time traveling novel Slaughterhouse-Five, where the horrors of war leave behind a catastrophic impact on the survivors, continually revisiting the trauma, where only science fiction allows him to explain what he witnessed, or THE LATHE OF HEAVEN (1980), a remarkable made-for-television adaptation of the Ursula K. Le Guin apocalyptic sci-fi novel, but instead of time traveling, the central protagonist has the power to alter the entire world through dreams. While the premise is similar in each of these films, using the fantastic to better understand the ordinary, it is achieved in radically different ways, becoming a story of trauma, memory, longing, and loss in a quiet and understated format. Marker doesn’t even have names for his characters, instead they are who they appear to be, a man, a woman, a prisoner, a doctor, who seem to exist only in the imagination, where what’s important are the ideas they generate, as that’s what sticks with us. In the aftermath of a nuclear war that has left the world in utter annihilation, a group of mysterious scientists (with the faint sound of untranslated German) test their experimental time travel program, which becomes a key instrument in the fate of the human race, in hopes that traveling to both the past and the future may find the resources needed to save the dismal present. Experimenting on prisoners, much like the Nazi’s did in WWII, their initial tests are all unsuccessful, insinuating some may have died in the process, or gone mad, leading to a prisoner (Davos Hanich), chosen for his strong attachment to a childhood memory, the image of a man shot dead on the observation pier at Paris-Orly airport, yet what captivated him was the shocked look on a woman’s face (Hélène Châtelain, only appearing in two short films), where he inevitably returns back to that moment searching for her, replaying it over and over in his head. His journey is structured by the memory of the woman’s face, as he is driven by his desire to reunite with the beauty of that face, the image that preceded the nuclear blast. A narrator dryly informs us, “Nothing sorts out memories from ordinary moments. It is only later that they claim remembrance, when they show their scars.” Other than retreating into tunnels underneath the Palais de Chaillot, resembling Fritz Lang’s underground world in METROPOLIS (1927), there is no explanation for how any of them have survived for so many years, though clearly there are one set of victorious oppressors and one of oppressed prisoners, with a stream of images of destroyed ruins left behind offering viewers a glimpse of a destroyed world, left trapped underneath the ground by a contaminating radioactivity, necessitating a need to seek out unimaginable solutions that don’t exist today, with suggestions that this is their only hope. While the film suggests he actually time travels, that is the nature of storytelling leaving that impression, as the prisoner never seems to leave his state of captivity, but may be encouraged to think so, where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s imagined, but this entire film may be a drug-induced dream happening inside his head.
Described as a photo-novel, in effect this is a blend of photography and cinema into a unique artform that is unlike any other film in the history of cinema, especially considering the depths of the experience, drawing upon the subconscious imagination and turning impossibilities into an existing reality. Marker completed the film while the Cuban Missile Crisis was unfolding in real time, where the imagined dystopian future mirrors the global fears of the Cold War, as the film’s bleak tones and dark pessimism must be contextualized as part of a larger story of post-War Europe, which was left helpless as the United States and the Soviet Union pushed the world to the brink of nuclear war. What’s also interesting is that the time travel journeys are not voluntary, but are forced, with subjects lying in a hammock with bandages over their eyes, with wires connected to a monitoring device, accompanied by the sound of his heartbeat, which is indistinguishable from the sound of marching feet, where one of the nefarious masterminds standing over him is Jacques Ledoux, curator of the Royal Film Archive of Belgium, using stimulants of some kind, perhaps a combination of drugs and hypnosis, and the prisoner is not sent into his own memory, but his memories are utilized as he’s first sent first into the past, and then the future, which opens up his eyes into what might be possible. One of the first signs that the experiment is working is his recognition of a pastoral landscape, and gardens, memories of peacetime, offering a moment of serenity amidst the draining psychological stress of the experience. This initial success leads to more, yet a driving interest may be his obsession to find this enigmatic “ghost woman,” who has often been compared to Madeleine in Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), as Marker was a fervent devotee of that picture. It’s also important to realize that what we see onscreen is not reality, but an artificial reconstruction of an alternate reality, where a common element is still shots of immovable objects, yet the rhythmic editing technique of shifting stills offers the suggestion of motion, as viewers are watching a “motion picture” even if the objects do not move. From the very start, the prisoner is not sure if the object of his desire even exists, or if she is a product of his imagination. Through subsequent sessions, they meet more frequently, spending a day walking through a park, showing close-ups of the woman’s face at rest, feeling the sun on her face, yet he comes and goes, before mysteriously vanishing, only to return again, as she waits for him, becoming attached, like lost lovers at the end of a dying world, always surrounded by static objects, even visiting a surreal museum of stuffed animals, accompanied by otherworldly music, La Jetée - A Museum Filled with Ageless Animals - YouTube (3:34). The images are initially silent, but soon we begin to hear the sound of birds, which only grow louder, leading to a bedroom scene, where he watches the woman sleep peacefully before she awakes to find him at her side, and blinks, as the movement of the camera becomes the only real moment in the protagonist’s life. Then suddenly he is pulled back to the underground camp, a prisoner directed by people whose motives he can only guess about, eventually realizing that he’s been duped, used as a guinea pig for their own purposes before likely being eliminated, stuck in a state of paralysis where he has no freedom of movement. As we might suspect, that one moment changes things, wondering whether her moving may be a dream, but it’s a dream associated with the freedom of escaping from the stillness, wondering if they could escape together into a world that could move, where the possibility of love might exist. This suggests a longing for a time he never thought he could revisit, one where he never actually belongs, associated with a longing for a women he could never really know, yet the mere possibility is an emotional jolt that is tremendously affecting to watch. What follows is a reverie of a different order, as he dreams of escape, but can he really escape the prison confinement, where every act is determined, any more than he can escape from his own consciousness, which has its own mortal limits. Memory forever connects us to the past, providing a sense of stability, yet loss is a central component to the film, providing a traumatic reference, as man is ultimately unable to extricate himself from his own historical circumstances. While this may be an essay on politics and transcendence, it also questions whether love can exist during times of war, where one attempts to reclaim their own sanity in the face of controlling and destructive forces. Marker challenges our sense of free will by telling a story where none of the characters possess it, where in this film the only freedom that really exists is the one within.
La Jetée (La Jetee 1962)FULL FILM - YouTube Criterion French version with English subtitles (28:06)
