Chris Marker: Unknown Cosmonaut
Sometimes you encounter a film that is so far removed from your experience that it takes your breath away. Chris Marker’s La Jetée is one such film. When I first saw it, it was unlike anything I’d ever seen before.
Only 28 minutes long, Marker described the film as a “un photo-roman” (a photo-novel). With one brief exception, the story is related via a sequence of black and white still photographs, accompanied by sound effects, music and voiceover narration. Perhaps this is what makes it all the more remarkable. Made in 1962, it cut against the grain of the mainstream cinema of the day.
Haunted by the past
The narrative begins at an airport in a present-day Paris, where an unnamed young boy observes a beautiful woman and then sees a man killed by an unknown assailant. These memories continue to haunt him. Years later, after a destructive world war, the boy, now grown up, is a prisoner in the post-apocalyptic radioactive wasteland that Paris has become. Survivors live underground. While scientists research time travel, hoping to "to call past and future to the rescue of the present."
They struggle to find people who can survive the shock of time travel. But decide they have found their man in the protagonist, whose obsessive memory of the woman he’d seen on the observation platform at Orly Airport appears to assure his safe passage into the past.
He successfully returns to the pre-world war period and develops a close relationship with the women. The scientists then send him into the future, where he acquires the means of regenerating his own society.
On his return, he realises that, with his mission accomplished, his jailers are going to execute him. His friends from the future offer to help him escape to their time permanently. But he asks instead to be returned to his childhood. Returning to the jetty at the airport he searches for the woman. At this point, he spots one of his jailers, who has followed him into the past to kill him. In his final moments, he understands what is about to happen.
As the narrator observes, “he understood there was no way to escape Time, and that this moment he had been granted to watch as a child, which had never ceased to obsess him, was the moment of his own death.”
The enigma of memory
By finishing where the film started, La Jetée offers a metaphor for the paradoxical nature of life. It challenges us to consider the contradictory nature of time, perception and memory. The use of still imagery compounds the implicit tension between stasis and movement. It also reminds us that motion in film is an optical illusion, based on a series of still images projected at, for technical and financial reasons, 24 frames per second.
La Jetée can be regarded as a dystopian science-fiction tale, a commentary on Cold War brinkmanship and political repression, a philosophical meditation on time or an exploration of the rich narrative possibilities afforded by the medium of cinema. Perhaps it is all of these. After all, they are not mutually exclusive. Whatever your perspective, it remains a remarkable exercise in the power of film to transport us to a new realm.
Intriguingly, Marker noted in a 2003 interview with Libération, that La Jetée, “was made like a piece of automatic writing… I photographed a story I didn’t completely understand. It was in the editing that the pieces of the puzzle came together, and it wasn’t me who designed the puzzle.”
This could be read as a mark of respect for the editor, Jean Ravel, and others involved in the production process. It might also reflect his belief that filmmaking creates new perceptions of reality that open up different ways of looking at life. For Marker, we are all observers, travellers and makers of our own history.
I defy you to watch the film and not be moved by its singular character.
Remembering and forgetting
We rewrite memory and we rewrite history. Understanding this is crucial if we are to understand that there is no escape from time, or the world around us.
Chris Marker made many fine films over the years, mostly documentaries. He travelled the world, collecting fragments of experience which he assembled into a uniquely personal vision of the human condition.
He was motivated by boundless curiosity: “I keep asking: How do people manage to live in such a world? And that’s where my mania comes from, to see ‘how things are going’ in this place or that.”
The writer and film critic Jean Queval described Marker as “our unknown cosmonaut”. Not widely celebrated outside France – at least not until Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys, which was inspired by La Jetée – it’s a fitting description of a filmmaker who believed that we are all travellers, through both time and space.