Chapter 9

 
On La Jetée


Introduction, by Paul Smith





                                                                
The following article is Jean-Louis Schefer's meditation upon Chris
 Marker's 1962 film, the "photo-roman" La Jetée , and was published
 for the catalogue of a video exhibition, "Passages of the Image ," 
that toured Europe and the United States in 1991 and 1992. 
	Marker's film, an astonishingly powerful experiment with word and image,
 is made from a series of stills and a voice-over narration that tells of
 experiments carried out on a prisoner in the underground camps to which
 everyone has been forced after the holocaust of World War III. The 
experiments will purportedly save humanity by sending "emissaries" into
 both the past and the future to bring back help. The experimental subject
 (the film suggests this is the narrator himself) is chosen because of his
 obsessive attachment to an image of the past½a young woman on the quay
 (la jetée ) at Orly Airport when he was young. Under the auspices
 of the experiment, he reaches the past and spends time with this woman;
 but he is then brought back by the experimenters and sent to the future.
 The people of the future offer him refuge with them, but instead he asks 
them to return him to his past, to the quay at Orly and to the woman--and,
 as it turns out, to his own death. 



	The arrangement of time in this narrative is what Schefer's essay is 
largely concerned with--what he calls its tragic syllogism of past,
 present, and future. That is, Marker's film replicates with almost 
uncanny clarity the investigations of several of the essays translated 
here. Specifically, Marker investigates the desire attached to memory; he
 understands memory as a hope½which necessarily turns out to be an 
illusion--of returning to a childhood image; and he allegorizes the way in
 which, as Schefer might say, humanity is tortured in its attachment to 
the image. 



	There is, then, a certain consonance between the film and Schefer's
 concerns which he exposes. But Schefer is also interested here in 
something the film does not say but only enacts: that is, once again, the
 relation of image to writing, where the character's search for the image
 of childhood, the impossible secret of "ourselves," the mysterious birth 
of our subjectivity, is caught somewhere between the novelistic or
 narrative element of the film and its visual element. The central
 character is narratively put to death by the conflicting experience of 
images or by this "tragic syllogism" of time. He is caught in their 
collision and dies from it, because, as Schefer says, he cannot write 
these images down. 

















 	



	"This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood."
 That's the opening (the first voice) of Chris Marker's film. The phrase
 broaches a story (the hero will travel in time toward that childhood 
image); the destruction of cities and the devastation of the earth's 
surface have threatened the very reality of the present and have thus let
 loose temporal virtualities normally locked up or held captive in the 
past (the past consisting only of a series of images that have become 
autonomous, tied to the living only by some affect or trauma). The fiction
 of La Jetée  is thus a certain kind of work--whose object is the film's 
hero--concerning the paradoxes of memory, concerning the inclusion of the
 past that lives on within the hero as an image, as a secret that the 
laboratory experiments in the underground camp will try to make him 
confess. The realization of the confession comes with the death of the
 hero himself as he relives a moment of his past, as he meets once again
 the girl whose image has haunted him. 



	So it's a science-fictional hypothesis that underpins the organization of
 this film and, with particular emphases (the distance of the narrator,
 the modesty of the novelist), regulates the metaphysical problems that
 are then rapidly elaborated into a science-fictional argument in such a
 way as to render the paradoxes of lived time with the exteriority of an 
implacable syllogism. That syllogism is what leads the living human to
 meet his death, a death whose image is his secret.



	But why that hypothesis? The originality of Chris Marker's film obviously
 resides, as has been regularly demonstrated, in the work of the image
 itself: a framing of the most obscure zones of memory's fragility and
 unpredictability; and a montage that replicates gaps in recollection. The
 image itself constitutes an unusual organization of storyline: Marker
 invents a type of narration that literature cannot often produce.
 Literature here appears only in the voice of the narrator-commentator: it
 borrows its script from the narrative mode of a Kafka.



	Beyond its novelistic argument, the film consists in something other than
 an autobiographical project whose shape it wants to trace. These intimate
 recollections, essentially tied to the return of the figure of a
 childhood love, can only be organized in a science-fictional scenario
  (the role of that obsessive image is also to denaturalize the fiction):
 such a scenario constitutes the expansion of the field where the subject
 of memory, of recollection, of relived affects, is put into an 
experimental situation. He is the milieu, the strictly individual and
 lonely guinea pig, of an experiment of which he is both the key and the
 secret. 



	I want at least to remark the way this hypothesis works around a
 "novelistic" autobiographical project within the framework of a
 science-fictional scenario: the subject of memory is implicated as the
 place where time itself, in some strange way, gets used up. What
 constitutes the subject's secret is always the image of a personal event,
 a mystery of his "self" that's supported and guaranteed by recourse to
 recollections of a person he once loved. The science-fictional hypothesis
 contains precisely what one might call the non-Proustian aspect of
 recollections in the form of images: the real time of the experimental
 subject isn't constituted in the kind of invisible images (syntheses of
 smells, sounds, forms, vague affects) that animate Proust's writing and
 make all his pre-scription seem symbolic, but instead is made up of alien
 images that frame the subject.



	This experimental subject is trapped--as in a labyrinth--in the drama of
 memory whose whole experience consists in making something his own (in a
 certain way he dies within himself, by a reconciliation or a coincidence
 of time and images). The paradox of the experiment (extirpating the
 subject's intimate images) is the construction of a fiction around the
 very act of memory: the subject (that is, the nameless hero) is obviously
 constituted only by those images through which he begins, or leads to
 term, a kind of transaction, or in the course of which these images
 become the equivalent of a piece of time--and time becomes the equivalent
 of the object of the experiment, having no other consistent
 representation except in those images that retain faces and affects
 (affects that in a certain way indifferentiate his objects: in other
 words, images of the "present" alone, images of the work of destruction,
 are alive, and fragile). Recurring images are in fact the raw material of
 temporal "synthesis"--a synthesis which is not quite of the order of
 truth (nor of verifiability--torture is endless and ineffectual unless it
 procures the confession of a secret). It's that the subject (I don't know
 whether to call him the hero or the narrator), confesses, articulates,
 discovers something that is the constitutive principle of his soul (and
 no philosophy stops us from imagining this as the producer of synthetic
 time, an excess).



	Also (beyond this demonstrable paradox that's the proper object of
 autobiographical rather than novelistic writing), I'm well aware of the
 actual context for the hypothesis: that is, the invention of the
 machinery or the narrative motor that starts up the experiment through
 which the subject (at first believing himself to be constrained)
 discovers for himself this living object mortally trapped in a coil of
 time.


 
	That, for those of my generation, is the memory (an imperfect memory, but
 one that induces the greater part of our sensibility), the memory of or
 the kind of mnemonic damage caused by the war in our childhood: a primal
 consciousness of an era of planetary destruction which has lodged a soul
 within us, like a bullet or a piece of shrapnel that hit us and by chance
 reached a center where it could live on after having done no more than
 destroy a town or kill someone other than us.


 
	And yet this paradox (that is to say, this artifice) touches something
 very profound in us; you see it in Rousseau, in Proust: the frailty of
 the intimate object, or the frailty of the secret, cleaving the subject
 (the self) to this tenuous thing that we usually take to be a sign of our
 unique individuality (and no doubt it is such a sign): our justification
 and our licence for braving this waning of time (that is, the work
 itself) always come by way of an insignificant little ritournelle, a tiny
 machine that repeats our access to childhood. 





	I can't do a proper account or a real analysis of Chris Marker's
 photo-novel. I can't exactly decide whether it's a film or the outline
 for a novel (trapped terribly in that tragic syllogism). The striking
 thing--or the impeccable thing, perhaps--is that the syllogism which
 defines this whole theatrical act defers the death of the hero for as
 long as he can speak, for as long as he can evoke the world of the
 living, can say his evening prayers: the syllogism of this tragedy is a
 scenario. That's how I explain to myself--artificially--the material of
 this narration and the discontinuity in it that gives me the idea of an
 essentializing selection, exactly; the sketchy, fragmentary aspect of the
 evocation and of the narrative, the elaboration on pent-up time,
 rediscovering the characters alive in that antique "place" where images
 cohabit and commingle. 



	Can this film possibly substitute for the writing of a novel? To whom to
 attribute the continuous voice accompanying the images? By whom is this
 adventure told? A witness, the depersonalized essence of the hero? An
 experimenter? Or someone who has absolute knowledge of time, death, and
 the paradoxes of memory? The narrator or commentator (whoever is
 describing the whole experiment and its length, and who possesses
 knowledge of the hero's soul--of the subject of the experiment),  the one
 who speaks in the film, he is not its author, but the author of the novel
 that the film blows apart, sketches out, jettisons, cuts, and whose
 substance it reworks. That substance is the secret: the secret that 
animates the novel's unending quest for that lost face and produces the
 petrified image that makes the character disappear behind the reality of
 an experimental subject, this nameless hero who can't survive the
 conflict of images--who can't, that is, write it down. He himself is an
 image, precisely the thing that the novel disperses or can never
 stabilize.



	The almost constantly present face of the "hero" nonetheless makes me
 believe or understand that it is in fact the hero who's speaking and that
 it is the novelist who comes to describe the world according to his
 subjective science. Knowledge in process (Condillac's statue worked by
 way of its details in his memory: mortgaged by memory) is an image of the
 past (that is, something of the intimate consciousness of time).



	The girl is protected (the statues, the museum, her slumber) by time. She
 is the face of time and, above all, the very content of time (its secret,
 its truth). He, as the subject of time (she is his sovereign), becomes
 the agent of her quiet truth: the machinery of time puts the hero to
 death by the coincidence of two images.


 
	But what remains unexplained is how the past itself can be  edited into a
 form: the form of the film itself; more exactly, how can a fiction of the
 past be edited into something that can represent the past for someone
 whose experimental life consists in being affected by a form of time as
 it reconstitutes the fragments of a disappeared world--fragments that
 make up the suspended life of this subject who is composed entirely by
 his suffering of time. Time isn't a content, nor a frame; it's no more
 than an affect, in that it is a consciousness that has become autonomous,
 become independent of the events that were once its form. Those events
 have opened up a whole world of sentiments, rather than actions.



	It would be absurd and not very useful here to try to demarcate the
 film's objects, its degrees of reality or expressivity. Yet I feel that
 by attaching myself to the story I'm neglecting something. The story
 isn't in fact quite equivalent to the narration, which is made up of
 particular narrative devices (images and their continuity, the montage
 techniques and editing that produce the continuity). Almost the opposite,
 the story itself, presented in narrative form, partly utilizes that form
 as a sort of ephemeral theater in which another part--the part that makes
 this story come alive for me½remains invisible and necessarily deprived
 of images. This same story (it could be written) without its
 science-fictional alibi (that is, without its luminous originality as
 well), where I search for that girl from my own childhood (my life can in
 a way be said to depend upon her, and yet, when any event from what we
 call the past is thrown into jeopardy...), this same "written" history
 will have to work with still another paradox: it is an investigation of
 faces that have become invisible.



	This film, however, is something other than that. The story (which, I
 tell myself, is what grips me most of all) is perhaps the alibi or the
 cause of the film's organization and its material, in the same way as a
 face, a person, or a "type" are actually the cause of a portrait rather
 than its object.



	The extreme emotion of images fading to white, fading to black,
 constitutes a subvention of the film's material or its narrative mode.
 The destructible image in the eclipsed world (being reduced to a surface,
 a shot), this jostled image--all its cuts, angles, and surprises--is for
 me strangely linked to the whispering sound of the German language (the
 film's narrative is in French, but the protagonists who speak do so in
 German; they enunciate the phases of the experiment). Why does the whole
 secret of the experiment reside in the Murmeln , the FlŸstern , so
 close to the heart of a remembered Lied  that speaks falteringly
 from out of silence? It's easy to imagine that for a long time the war
 and the experiments on bodies, where humanity becomes laboratory
 material, were a German thing; to imagine that psychoanalysis, science
 gone astray and applied in horrible conditions, yet remaining
 frighteningly human to the last (according to the admirable thinking of
 Robert Antelme),  spoke in the voice of this German language, like the
 ghostly symptom of Romanticism's sense of our species; and easy to
 imagine that, once it has interrogated Western culture, it begins its
 abysmal and violent descent to insinuate itself into the memory of its
 subjects.


 
	In this score, in the choir whispering this stifled Lied , I hear too the
 heavy dialogue of the devils from the second Faust; the young girl of the
 romantic stage is revived, the eternal mystery of survival to a mad or
 dead poet; the young girl of ancient Greece in Hegel, who represents both
 knowledge and the innocence of philosophy; or the woman whom Kierkegaard
 imagines to know already what Socrates does not.  Romanticism has
 translated Dante so that Beatrice stands for the very insistence of death
 because death has become an amorous vocation, and the limits of the world
 have thus been redefined--and that same century was discovering
 negativity. So it's from this hell--that is, the place from which,
 progressively, through jump cuts and flashbacks, memory's event is drawn
 by the sweetness, the violence, and in any case the capture of
 recollection (from a time that resists elision because a part of the
 subject began to be born then)--it's from this experimental terrain (this
 terrain which consists in a man navigating blindly, struggling along in a
 body alienated from its own images, in the film version of his
 unrecognizable life), it's from here that the flower of pure love arises,
 the object of all of humanity's nostalgia, the memory of a love becoming
 innocent in the image.


 
	We're fascinated by the destruction of this image that we believe is an
 essence only because it's so fragile and feeble in its characteristics,
 and because we believe that our very existence, so dependent upon this
 reality locked away in the past, is consistent with that image since, in
 the end, something of ourselves, our soul, or our secret (our intimate
 time), is affected by its fragility. We're persuaded, equally, that this
 fiction of a time rolled up in time, preserving the old film of what we
 once were, we're persuaded that this parenthetical time within time
 articulates or produces or proves the approach of an ancient death. All I
 see there is this: images of life sliding, being destroyed, and growing
 dark within the story that they give rise to. The beauty of this thought:
 that the experimental subject of memory lives on only in the experiment;
 he dies from it or can't survive what it has awoken.  Just as a face
 can't survive the notion of resemblance that makes a portrait something
 other than an idea or something other than the representation of an
 absent person. A fidelity: sometimes fidelity to the game where someone
 sits for the painting. But sometimes it's the fleeting fidelity to a
 destiny in which that game is but a ruse. 

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