This post is offered in tribute to Chris Marker, who died yesterday (making "Memory" the obvious-choice humour of the day, in keeping with the theme of this long-dormant blog). I wrote this piece back in ’97 with no real aim for it beyond a vague notion of "Maybe I'll try to publish it somewhere, someday"—this was before the days of blogging, of course. Re-reading it now, it seems earnest but not especially publishable, in the sense of some outside arbiter deciding to kill a tree in its behalf, and there are a number of elements in here I'd change (e.g., typos, factual slip-ups, saying "comprised" where I should say "composed," public lusting over Irène Jacob) if I were to start trying to make improvements. But I know I won't have time to do so, so I'll take a warts-and-all, "good enough for Blogger" approach and just click "Publish" (closing an aspirational circle of sorts). Spoiler alert: There's a La Jetée spoiler in here, so if you have yet to see the film, do skip the paragraph beginning "The plot twists. . . ." Or better yet, get your hands on a copy of the film and watch it—a much better use of your time than this humble essay, if you're new to Marker.—MC
Still
Life With Motion: The Images of Chris Marker
An outdoor
shrine where people offer up prayers to their lost cats, so that when the
animals die, the spirits will know their names.
A gathering in
a public square of young people who dress colorfully, like clowns, and move
about jerkily, in imitation of robots.
A department
store display with a JFK robot that lip-synchs to “Ask not what your country
can do for you...” while an eerie female chorus echoes, “Ask not, ask not...”
In my mind, there is a messy
drawer holding scraps of information on each place I have never visited but
would like to, one day. I might glance through its contents when I come across
a new image of the place in question, before adding that image, in turn, to the
pile; I might also do some rummaging at a party, comparing my fading mental
pictures with the more reliable narrative snapshots of travelers.
The three scraps shown above
inhabited my “Japan” drawer, and were gleaned, it seemed to me, from magazine
pieces I had read over the years, supported perhaps by clips on television or
by NPR reports. How surprised I was in 1993, then, while watching a videotape
of the movie Sans Soleil (‘Sunless’), by
French film maker Chris Marker, to realize that all three of these images,
along with an embarrassingly high number of the rest of my Japanese
“recollections,” came from this one film, which I had first seen five years
earlier.
This phenomenon, the casual yet
crystalline image that lodges itself inside one’s memory, is not only a
recurring property of Marker’s work, it is quite often his subject matter. In
his creation of such elemental images — film sequences that behave like still
photos in the memory, or, conversely, stills that behave like moving images —
he ponders not only how such memories are made, but how these images look back
at us over time, guiding us and, as I learned firsthand, often deceiving us.
Marker’s 1962 short film La
Jetée (‘The Jetty’), is comprised entirely* of black-and-white still photographs, linked by a spoken narration and a sparse
soundtrack of faintly heard music and incidental voices. The inspiration for
Terry Gilliam’s full-length feature 12 Monkeys, La Jetée is the story of a post-apocalyptic era in which the
inhabitants of a ravaged Paris send emissaries both forward in time, to seek
power sources from the re-built civilization of their descendants, and
backward, in order to try to prevent the ruin they have wrought upon
themselves. (Whether they deserve such a reprieve is another question, as they
have created a subterranean totalitarian state in which citizens are forced to
take part in these time-travel experiments, which routinely render them mad,
or, just as often, dead; one would think that, after having destroyed one
civilization with nuclear weapons, presumably through an excess of selfishness,
it might dawn on these folks that a little live-and-let-live would be in order,
but some people never learn, I suppose.)
The nameless hero of the film is
chosen (read “coerced”) to be one of these emissaries due to his strong visual
link to the past — in particular, he is haunted by a single image from his
childhood, of a woman’s face on the jetty at Orly airport at the precise moment
that a man nearby is murdered. The present-day experimenters know that, due to
this propensity toward visualization, this man will be able to successfully
relocate his own past when projected backward (the procedure seems to be
somewhat noncorporeal; while the exact mechanism is never explained, this does
not detract from the film, as the real issue here is not “how” he time-travels,
as in genre science fiction, but “that” he travels).
The plot twists, as the
mysterious, dark-toned still photos progress, until the man makes a final
decision to remain in his past and, finding himself on the jetty at Orly
airport one day, runs to meet a certain woman, only to encounter a certain
goggled, armed emissary from his own present, only to realize that it was his
own death he so memorably witnessed all those years ago.
What do the still photographs
suggest? Aside from their mimicry in form of the time-traveler’s single image
of fixation, they suggest a story that has already been told. When we watch a
“live action” film, we lose ourselves not only in the story, in the characters’
predicaments, but in the illusion that the events we witness are taking place
as we watch them (even if we are viewing an old movie: just watch Sunset
Boulevard, and feel your heart seize up
when Nora Desmond takes aim and fires into Joe Gillis’ back — Joe Gillis,
another screen quasi-hero who, at the beginning of the film, bears witness to
his own death).
With stills, though, we know that
this film has been “processed”; while most of us have not directed films, we
know what it is like to have photographs developed, and there is no illusion as
to their reflection of past events. We thumb through them and see, for example,
the progression of events in our family vacation: we were driving from San
Francisco to San Antonio, so first, we see several shots taken within fifty miles
of our Bay Area home (we’re all a bit trigger-happy at the beginning of a new
roll of film), followed by two or three of the Mojave Desert (whether separated
by five miles or fifty, it’s hard to tell, the landscape is so uniform),
followed by Arizona desert outside Phoenix, with cactus, and so on, until the
final exposure that we saved for the Alamo. We know as we look at these
pictures that we have been to all of these places, but we are certainly not
there now; we are just looking at highlights of our trip.
Likewise, the images of La Jetée proceed
in an inexorable order, like photos laid down one-by-one on the dining room
table — the highlights of a man’s life, from youth (and adult death) to death
in adulthood (and youthful witness of it), a series to be replayed again and
again without reshuffling, for, as the narrator says, you cannot escape time.
So are we, in fact, viewing these
stills from a safe perspective in the past? Can we be fooled into thinking
these images occur in an ever-present present? Before you answer, consider the
fact that every film, including Sunset Boulevard, is nothing other than a series of still photographs. Is La
Jetée, then, a collection of stills, of
snapshots, assembled in the temporal order of a movie, or an actual movie that
has been selectively — even extremely — edited down to its most memorable images? Or is all this really just
a question of scale, and not of form? And is there, at bottom, a “smallest
indivisible unit” of meaning in the Marker image?
In Silent Movie, a 1996 installation at U.C. Berkeley’s University
Art Museum (now renamed the Berkeley Art Museum), Marker stacks five
televisions in a tower formation. Each screen plays images from a laser disc
Marker has produced: antique film footage (of buildings, clocks, etc.) combined
with new images shot on video by Marker, of a handsome yet slightly mannish
woman dressed in clingy femme fatale
garb and executing a number of film noire gestures (smoking seductively, looking furtively over her shoulder,
etc.). The content of the images says, “We are all of the same era,” but the
video format says, “No, I am newer.” While each television shows images from an
identical laser disc, a computer orders these images differently on each screen
through random selection.
Over a half hour’s time, as I
watched the various screens, the individual images recurred quite a bit. But
while the pictures became familiar, their temporal order, of course, did not.
As time passed, I could sense a feeling of familiarity, even of nostalgia,
rising in me via this exhibit — nostalgia, clearly, for events that had never
happened. These images had not just become detached from their original
temporal order; there had been no original order. I now knew them all well, but
simply as a jumble.
But isn’t this how much of our
memory works? Remember that driving trip from San Francisco to San Antonio? I
made it with my parents in 1978 (I was twelve), and I now recall the Grand
Canyon in Arizona, the Carslbad Caverns in New Mexico, and a beautician’s sign
in El Paso, Texas (which featured a man on a surfboard with what appeared to be
a tidal wave curling over his head and a caption that read, confusingly,
“California Hair Salon”), with equal clarity, and only my knowledge of basic
Western States geography serves to inform me that these images were experienced
in the order just presented.
Silent Movie, then, undermines our notions of traditional
narrative, but it does so in the familiar language of memory. So this “movie”
comes closer to our daily reality than we are accustomed. How like those first
silent movies, in which incredulous viewers were riveted by the image of a man
sneezing (as though he were contaminating their very breathing space!) or
terrified — and sent ducking for cover — by the image of a silent,
black-and-white train hurtling toward them, though of course they knew that
there were no tracks leading into the theater. (Didn’t they?)
An aside: Recently, after
watching the film Microcosmos, a
beautiful nature “documentary” (I put the word in quotes because there was more
classic narrative in this film than in a good number of recent “dramatic”
movies; especially winning was a retelling of the myth of Sisyphus through the
indefatigable efforts of a certain dung beetle), I was hypothesizing that there
is no human equivalent to the behavior of certain insects in mating with
species of flora that mimic the look and smell of their own species’ genitalia.
Nope, we wouldn’t fall for that, I mused. And then I thought of the arousal we
might experience while viewing a film (in my own experience, for example,
watching Irène Jacob doing her stretching exercises in Red), and I realized that we, in our squeaky cinema
seats and with our feet planted firmly on the sticky ground, are the bee
pollinating the flower. There is no sexy woman or man up there — it’s just
light on a screen, a succession of stills. But for a moment, you could’ve
fooled us — and in fact, someone did.
Which brings us back to Chris
Marker, who fools us, in Sans Soleil,
into thinking we are experiencing the filmic notes and written correspondence
of a late filmmaker and world traveler, Sandor Krasna, as gathered somewhat
arbitrarily by his widow, or surviving lover. A few seconds of a cherry blossom
festival in Japan. A few frames of a woman in a bustling marketplace in Cape
Verde who avoids and then confronts the camera (and, by extension, the viewer),
this moment being frozen into a still image before our attention flits
somewhere else in the world. All in all, a series of short clips that all
function like stills, like color slides arranged in a carousel in questionable
(unfathomable, irrelevant) temporal order.
The narrator explains: “He wrote,
‘I’ve been around the world several times, and now only banality still
interests me. On this trip, I’ve tracked it with the relentlessness of a bounty
hunter.”
As the film progresses, a
dichotomy arises between two public cultures: the crowded Cape Verde, where
refuge from cameras is, nevertheless, sought and defended, and the even more
crowded Japan, where all is recorded, and the image — the clever copy — is
celebrated. “Ask not, ask not...”
Sans Soleil begins and ends with a single image, that of three children
walking down a road in Iceland in 1965. Why is this image present in this film,
this feigned posthumous documentary on Japan and Cape Verde, on viewer and
viewee? It was said to haunt Sandor Krasna. As the voice-over informs us, “He
said that for him it was the image of happiness, and also that he had tried
several times to link it to other images but it never worked. He wrote me, ‘One
day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece
of black leader; if they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll
see the black.’” Black, as in “Sunless”?
I think so. After my third
viewing of the film (and the second confounding of my memory of the film), in
late 1996, this thought came to me: In architectural circles, there is often
talk of “positive space” and “negative space.” Positive space is occupied by plasterboard,
beams, doors — the “stuff” of buildings. Negative space is concerned with what
remains when the building is removed: the walking space, the living space, the
space that makes the building useful (in
the sense of Chapter Eleven of the Tao Te Ching, which, to paraphrase, asserts that it is the empty
space in a vase, and not the clay, that makes the vase useful). I believe
Marker is thinking along these lines when he calls this collection of filmed
images “Sunless”: it took sunlight to make all of these images, but it is only
when these images are stored away in our individual memories (where it is
absolutely dark), becoming the remembered scenes that haunt our own lives, that
they take on their true meaning. The “Sunlessness” makes them useful, the frame
for our images of happiness.
Three years before he filmed the
Icelandic children on their road, Marker came across another primal image of
happiness in his documentary Le Joli Mai
(translated a bit too bouncily for my taste as ‘The Lovely Month of May’), which
he shot in Paris throughout the month of May 1962. A man who sells suits for a
living (and who wears a white dress shirt that maddeningly obliterates many of
the film’s white-lettered English subtitles) describes to the camera his unhappy
life; he is angry because he can never get ahead, he is always working, there
is too much traffic, his wife nags him. When asked about politics, he says he
has no interest in it, nor in films that make him think. “I like a picture
where guys bring out their guns and do some killing” he says, “or where they
use the phone.” After reminiscing about these images, and attesting to his
vicarious enjoyment of seeing tough guys on the screen (“being small myself and
running to fat”), he contradicts his earlier position, asserting that basically
he is, in fact, happy.
____________
* OK, this is the one factual error I need to address. There is one key, brief scene in which La Jetée becomes a "motion picture." Silly me, I either missed it or forgot about it back when I was writing this. Or, in keeping with the film itself, perhaps I blinked.....
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