Oana Urcan

Photography

The still and the moving

An essay on the still and the moving image

Introduction

In this paper I will look at the still image and the moving image and some of the main philosophical concepts surrounding them. I will try to show that the photograph is indeed the basic cell, the essence of the cinematic, using Chris Marker’s classic ‘film’ La Jetee,, in which we also find the filmic of Roland Barthes.

Sources

Roland Barthes Camera Lucida

Roland Barthes’s seminal book on photography

Reference

Roland Barthes Image Music Text

Selection of essays

Reference

Andre Bazin What is Cinema?

Andre Bazin, a major theorist of the cinema and founder of the Cahiers du Cinema

Reference

David Campany The Cinematic

Selection of writings on the topic of the still and the moving image edited by Campany

Reference

Giles Deleuze Cinema 1

Deleuze’s first book on cinema theory

Reference

Walter Benjamin Illuminations

Reference

Rosalind Krauss Reinventing the medium

Article/ reference

David Green Visible Time

Catalogue/ reference

Garrett Stewart Between Film and Screen

Reference

Yve Lomax Images of thought

Reference

Catherine Lupton Chris Marker, Memories of the future

Reference

Michael Wetzel Acousmetrie, on the relationship between voice and image

On line article/ reference

Chris Marker La Jetee

Chris Marker’s film made in 1962

Reference

Contents

1. Still p.2

Theoretical and philosophical concepts of the still image

2, Moving p.5

Theoretical and philosophical concepts of the moving image

3. In between p.8

The photogram

4. La Jetee p.10

A look at Chris Marker’s film in light of the still and the moving image issues discussed in the previous chapters

5. Conclusion p.15

6. Appendix p.17

7. Bibliography p.20

On one side there is movement, the present, presence, on the other immobility, the past, a certain absence. On one side, the consent of illusion, on the other, a quest for hallucination. Here, a fleeting image, one that seizes us in its flight, there, a completely still image that cannot be fully grasped. On this side, time doubles life; on that, time returns to us brushed by death. (Bellour The cinematic, p.119)

Still

Photography and its arrival in 1839, was indeed a magical occurrence. A mechanism that allowed the recording of life that revolutionised human perception of reality and at once freed painting from compulsive representation.

The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model. (Bazin What is cinema? p.14)

Photography, through its perfect, non-human mechanism, allowed the arrest of movements, moments not seen by the human eye. ‘A different nature opens itself to the camera than opens to the naked eye-if only because an unconsciously penetrated space is substituted for a space consciously explored by man’1.

Benjamin defined the term ‘optical unconscious’, and photography as a theoretical object.

In becoming a theoretical object, photography loses it’s specificity as a medium. Thus in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Benjamin charts a historical path from the shock effects courted by futurism and dada collage, to the shocks delivered by the unconscious optics revealed by photography, to the shock specific to the montage procedures of film editing. (Krauss Reinventing the medium p.292)

There is a paradox of temporality in the photograph, whether it is a shock or a sense of the uncanny. Although it represents reality, it is a past reality existing in the present before our eyes. It somehow fulfils a psychological human need of death-defiance, of preservation against the passing of time.

Hence the charm of the family albums. Those grey or sepia shadows, phantom like and almost undecipherable, are no longer the traditional family portraits but rather the disturbing presence of lives halted at a set moment of their duration, freed from their destiny; not however, by the prestige of art but by the power of an impassive mechanical process; for photography does not create eternity as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption. (Bazin What is cinema? p.14)

In encountering this space-time of a photograph, the viewer has the time to reflect upon the ‘moment’ of that photograph, return to it, create a narrative from it. The moment has gone, irretrievable, yet the object that is the photograph touches our time line by its presence. By it’s existence, the photograph in itself contains two sheets of time, past and present.

The type of consciousness the photograph involves is indeed truly unprecedented, since it establishes not a consciousness of the being-there of the thing (which any copy could provoke) but an awareness of its having-been-there. What we have is a new space-time category: spacial immediacy and temporal anteriority- the photograph being an illogical conjunction between the here-now and the there-then.

(Barthes Image, music, text, p.44)

Because of its relation to time, because of its immobility of the thing that has been there, we cannot deny it’s previous existence. For Barthes, the photograph is related to death, as time is. When looking at a photograph of himself, ultimately what he seeks in it is Death: ‘Death is the eidos2 of that Photograph,’3 It is the funerary monument of a moment.

However life-like we strive to make it (and this frenzy to be life-like can only be our mythic denial of an apprehension of death) photography is a kind of primitive theatre, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless and made up face beneath which we see the dead.’(Barthes Camera Lucida, pp.31-32)

Barthes’s analysis of the still image and its precedence is in direct relation to the moving image, the filmic and the cinematic. The filmic, paradoxically, was to be found in the still. For Barthes the photograph takes precedence because it allows the ‘space-time’ of reverie, the stasis, whilst film imposes a clearly demarcated, premeditated and irreversible time-line. Peter Wollen echoes Barthes when he writes:

The lover of photography is fascinated both by the instant and by the past. The moment captured in the image is of near-zero duration and located in an ever receding ‘then’. At the same time, the spectator’s ‘now’, the moment of looking at the image, has no fixed duration. It can be extended as long as fascination lasts and endlessly reiterated as long as curiosity returns. This contrasts sharply with film, where the sequence of images is presented to the spectator, with a predetermined duration and, in general, is only available at a fixed programme time. (Wollen The cinematic, p.108)

The still then, contains within it always a past, the having been there, and yet exists in the present. This link with the past tense, the ability to portray things and people that are no longer there, the now, and it’s future implied, creates the most complex temporal possibilities. Its verticality is an important part. Why vertical? Instantaneous. The photograph has no duration per se it is a point in time and space.

For Barthes the photograph was a unique historical and ontological phenomenon. It’s singularity lay with an entirely originary phenomenology of space and time in which the photograph gives rise to the contradictory sense of what is photographed as being both spatially proximate yet temporally distant. The peculiar and paradoxical articulation of space and time that Barthes identifies with the photograph was also evident to some of the earliest commentators on the new medium but it seems possible that it is only with the latter advent of film that the discussion of photography comes to be dominated by the concept of time. (Green Visible time)

At the onset of ‘Camera Lucida’, Barthes says that he liked ’Photography in opposition to Cinema’, from which he ‘nonetheless failed to separate it’4. Which is in itself very interesting and a point of departure for this paper.

The photograph must be related to a pure spectatorial consciousness and not to the more projective, more magical fictional consciousness on which film by and large depends. This would lend authority to the view that the distinction between film and photograph is not a simple difference of degree but a radical opposition. Film can no longer be seen as animated photographs; the having-been-there gives way before a being-there of the thing. (Barthes Image, music, text p.45)

Moving

Film is no longer content to preserve the object, enshrouded as it were in an instant, as the bodies of insects are preserved intact, out of the distant past, in amber. The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. (Bazin, What is cinema? P.14-15))

While the photograph seems to ‘embalm’ the real and have as eidos Death, film seems to encapsulate life through the illusion of movement, a being there of the thing. ‘Film gives back to the dead a semblance of life, a fragile semblance but one immediately strengthened by the wishful thinking of the viewer.’5

Film works on many levels- visual, auditory; such as voice, music, ambience- and it exists in darkness, being a projection through light. It is a carrier of the narrative, although not always, experimental cinema and video art have changed all that. It allows for Deleuze’s time –image, oneiric, dream like experiences, Tarkovsky’s sculpting in time. I rather like Peter Wollen’s description: ‘Film is all light and shadow, incessant motion, transience, flicker, a source of Bachelardian reverie, like the flames in the grate.’6

Henry Bergson was the first philosopher to use the cinematic experience in regards to the way the intellect perceives time. Although Bergson’s particular interest was within the field of epistemology, nonetheless his ideas on Time-Memory-Duration are still relevant in today’s theory and aesthetics of the cinema. The way in which the camera records single frames and then they are reproduced in sequence, after being edited, so does the mind ‘sees’ reality. The intellect tends to fragment the perception of time, the past, present and future instead of allowing it’s natural continuity, it’s duration, duree. According to Bergson the cinema was incapable of replicating this duree, because of its mechanical nature.

We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, these are characteristic of the reality, we have only to string them on a becoming abstract, uniform and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge. Perception, intellection, language, so proceed in general. Whether we would think becoming, or express it, or even perceive it, we hardly do anything else than set going a kind of cinematograph inside us. (Deleuze Cinema one, p.2)

Through his analysis of mind in Matter and Memory 1896, Bergson intuits cinematic theory, and gave Deleuze a matrix for his Movement-Image and Time-Image studies, which offer an understanding of the way in which cinema has evolved.

What interests us here is that:

Cinema proceeds with photogrammes- that is with immobile sections –twenty-four images per second. But it has often been noted that what it gives us is not the photogramme; it is an intermediate image, to which movement is not appended or added; the movement on the contrary belongs to the intermediate image as immediate given. In short, cinema does not give us an image to which movement is added, it immediately gives us a movement-image. (Deleuze Cinema one, p.2)

The photogram is then the building block of film, the cell as it were, yet not two photograms are alike, movement inherent in them and between them. Each photogram then, if the film is stopped, could become a photograph?

Even when writing about film, in this case Eisenstein’s ‘Ivan the Terrible’, Barthes chose to write about the ‘still’, the photogram. In search of the ‘filmic’, ‘which is ’that in the film which cannot be described, the representation which cannot be represented’7. Barthes concludes:

The filmic, very paradoxically, cannot be grasped in the film ‘in situation’, ’in movement’, ‘in it’s natural state’ but only in that major artefact, the still. The still, then, is the fragment of a second text whose existence never exceeds the fragment, film and still find themselves in a palimpsest relationship without it being possible to say that one is on top of the other or that one is extracted from the other, the still, by instituting a reading that is at once instantaneous and vertical, scorns logical time. (Barthes Image music text. pp.65-68)

Is the filmic then, the instance where film escapes the linear, horizontal time and becomes vertical space-time? When the film is stopped, freeze framed? When the hurried spectator becomes the pensive spectator? Where times collide?

The still and the moving image are inextricably linked, perhaps, through death. Death 24xa second as in Cocteau’s words, for the moving appears to be made out of the still. Time is intrinsic in both photograph and film and it involves the viewer in different ways. On the one hand the photograph, vertical, the ‘mirror with a memory’8, in its own way timeless, frozen, connected to the unconscious; on the other, time lived within the time of the moving image, linear vibration, life-like in its apprehension.

In between

Whereas photography engraves the death it resembles, cinema defers the death whose escape it simulates. The isolated photo or photogram is still the work of death; cinema is death always still at work. (Stewart Between film and screen, xi)

It seems that a more thorough understanding of photography as a medium came from a direct relation to film and time. Barthes’s ultimate concern was the viewer’s imagination and he felt that the photograph gave more:

Do I add to the images in movies? I don’t think so; I don’t have time; in front of the screen, I am not free to shut my eyes; otherwise, opening them again, I would not discover the same image; I am constrained to a continuous voracity; a host of other qualities, but not pensiveness; whence the interest, for me, of the photogram. (Barthes Camera lucida, p.55)

Such instances have been analysed by Raymond Bellour. In ‘The pensive spectator’ Bellour writes:

Here we touch on the intriguing point that, in terms of a theory of the image, might best permit us to formulate the relation between cinema and photography. As soon as you stop the film, you begin to find the time to add to the image. You start to reflect differently on film, on cinema. You are led towards the photogram - which is itself a step further in the direction of the photograph. In the frozen film, (or photogram), the presence of the photograph bursts forth while other means exploited by mise-on-scene to work against time tend to vanish. The photo thus becomes a stop within a stop, a freeze-frame within a freeze-frame; between it and the film from which it emerges, two kinds of time blend together, always and inextricable, but without it being confused. In this, the photograph enjoys a privilege over all other effects that make the spectator of cinema, this hurried spectator, a pensive one as well. (Bellour The cinematic, p.123)

So what is the photogram? I think, ultimately, the essence of the photogram is photographic. The same technical parameters are involved. Yet in a film we do not see the photogram. The movement is too fast for the eye to register. The optical unconscious comes into play. The illusion is thus more perfect.

Garrett Stuart, who dedicated an entire brilliant book to the photogram called ‘Between film and screen’, writes:

The photogram is the individuated photographic unit on the transparent strip that conduces in motion to screen movement. Shot past the projector’s gate, the photogram propagates itself as film only in order to vanish onscreen. By definition, then, the photogram has no ordinary place in the movies, no prevalent role in the cinematic institutions…The photogram is the cellular unit pressed into the service of movement by ocular suppression in the apparatus – and then at times returned to(ward) view as if by the textual condensations and displacements (however mechanised) of the viewer’s specular unconscious. (Garrett Stewart Between film and screen, p.5)

Deleuze has a different view on this. Yve Lomax points out that ‘ for Deleuze cinema isn’t reducible to a strip of immobile images to which movement is added.’9 Deleuze’s time-image is a mobile section, not an immobile section to which movement is added. In short, Deleuze tried to rescue cinema, he argued for the potential of cinema to essentially contain Bergson’s duree, the life-like élan vital.

For Deleuze, time is where the real action is. The movement-image is its mere support, launching pad of temporality’s salient conceptual deviances…………

Because the world can already be understood as a decentered ‘metacinema’ in Bergson, Deleuze goes on quite literally to erect this’ plane of immanence’ into the screen rectangle, immediately dissolving its artificial verticality, however, into the flows of motion intersecting it from every angle-even from the multiple axes of time itself…..Duration is thus reclaimed from its supposed evasion by sheer mechanistic visualisation and given a twofold force-first within the time in the moving shot, then in the time negotiated between shots.(Stewart Between film and screen,p.147)

All this is very complex, and it is so because ultimately cinema is in a way mirroring human mind, the flux of thought, movement, the incessant flow of life. It is the ultimate invention that can simulate it. And the essence of the cinema is photographic.

‘Photography is a death in replica, cinema a dying away in progress’10

What Deleuze never acknowledges is that there is a wholly different level of perception involved from moving from the photogrammatic to the projected section, a different definition of ‘frames’ themselves. So that the eventual ocular or scopic mobility prized by Deleuze cannot rightly dismiss from consideration the optic or plastic fixity that permits it. Even the most advanced and adventurous montage of the time-image ‘proceeds with’-and proceeds from-those same activated fixities that Bergson had he written later, might still have found every reason to continue bearing, with disquiet, somewhere in mind. (Stewart Between film and screen, p.146)

Chris Marker La Jetee 1962

Still from La Jetee

Chris Marker’s film, photo-roman, is a case in point. So much so, that it was mentioned in most of last year’s lectures. Not once is La Jetee mentioned in Deleuze’s books about cinema, maybe because it is made out of non movement-images it is made out of stills; it would of not proved useful in his argument. It is an extremely powerful narrative created with still images, which are not stills from a film, photograms, but actual photographs.

The stills in La Jetee are often assumed to be individual frame enlargements extracted from a film shot in the conventional way, but they are in fact photographs taken with a Pentax camera. However, to call La Jetee a film made up of photographs (or even of production stills or frame enlargements) misses what is so tantalisingly cinematic about its fixed images. (Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker, Memories of the future, p.91)

In its 29 minutes, a great story unravels before our eyes, every bit as cinematic as say Gilliam’s re-make Twelve monkeys. In my opinion, Marker’s oeuvre is much better, because it works on so many levels. The diegesis is mainly driven by the voice-over, liberating the still images for as long as they are on screen, (in this respect Marker has complete control over time, the time each photograph stays on screen, the ‘contemplative’ time). The stills thus take on a rhythm of their own. Being freed, the images create a space-time of contemplation, reinforcing the Barthesian concept of having-being-there, for as long as they are in view. The still images, in stasis, are given momentum, movement by the addition of sound; voice over narrating the story and music. The narrative unfolds in an apparent time-line, yet somehow defying linear time.

As Barthes’ and Marker’s similar definitions emphasise, acknowledging the opposition of the independent image and sound editing, as well as the way the view and the voice are organised, serves to liberate the visual narrative, which should no longer be used to illustrate or imagine solely linguistic semantics. Conversely, the text must no longer expose the truth of the images, but instead, can devote itself with iconic detachment to the chronology of events in the universe of discourse, just as the visual track merely delivers images that simply want to be what they are: images. Marker allows the picture to have a referential dialectic with other absent images in order to use the written image to develop a new way of reading things, an analytical reading of the visual, which at the same time includes its inverse or the abyss of illusion, memory, or knowledge. (Wetzel, Acousmetrie, p.6)

The story itself is about time. Time travel, both in the past and in the future, time travel triggered by the memory of a face, a photograph of a woman’s face; and the realisation that on the jetty of the Orly airport, the protagonist sees a man dying. (For a synopsis of La Jetee see appendix). The world is doomed. We see Paris in ruins, after a Third World War. The photographs are powerful and evocative, visually fulfilling an atmosphere of apocalyptic aftermath.

As manifested by the falling away of it’s photographic glimpses, the aboveground world seems levelled to a disintegrating visual archive of it’s previous artefacts, with buildings, monumental sculpture, roadways, and airports crumbling grainily one into the other. Where consciousness has become all loss, the slowed photograph in passing, the no longer achievable momentum of film, has become the very figure for life in liquidation. (Stewart Between film and screen,p.102)

Those who survived are hiding underground, performing experiments of time travel, to find a way out of the doomed present. They need a man with a powerful memory of the past. ‘They threw emissaries into time to call past and future to the rescue of the present’11 Memory. Time. Stasis. Death. What a perfect way of representing these concepts…through photographs. They become the mirror with a memory. ‘Real birds. Real children. Real cats. Real graves. A face of happiness, but another one. Ruins’12 The strong image in the man’s mind is that of a woman. A photograph from peace-time, of a woman’s face. Strong enough to make the experiment possible. Strong enough to catapult him through time, into the past. This is Barthes’s having- been-there, is it not? Yet even though these are photographs, the feeling we get is intensely cinematic. This is because the stills are treated as film units, photograms and edited as such. Dissolves, overlaying, fades in, fades out, and of course the narrative, all add up to this experience as being a highly cinematic one.

La Jetee turns montage inside out and shows the seams which hold the images together. Through long fades it exposes the black interval present between all cinematic images and focuses our attention onto the fabric, operational mode, and redemptive potential of the gap and the image alike. The dialectical interplay between image and gap is, of course, very much analogous to a certain conception of memory.

(Orlow The cinematic, p.183)

Paradoxical as it may seem, at the same time it is also a reversal of the cinematic. It somehow shows the inner workings of the apparatus. The stills strung together to give a feeling of linear movement, momentum, advancing with the narrative voice-over.

The apparatus seems disabled in its full operation by the plot’s own thematic crisis, with the trauma taken out-played out- at the level of the strip itself. Cinema is reduced by Marker, to an editing mechanism for single photograms in a clinging duplication capable of sustaining no illusory movement but that of disappearance per se, where death haunts every interval. (Stewart Between film and screen, p.103)

He is thrown into the past. They meet. ‘Time builds painlessly around them. They have no memories, no plans.’13We see her sleeping in the sun. Here is a re-iteration of the photograph’s eidos. ‘He knows that in this world, where he has just landed again, for a little while, in order to be sent back to her, she is dead.’14

Returning to Barthes, and his utter dislike of the photo-novel, an ‘‘art’ born in the lower depths of high culture’,15 which nonetheless contains the filmic.

‘The innovation represented by the still would be that of the filmic (which it constitutes) is doubled by another text, the film.’16La Jetee is a photo-novel, which indeed has the filmic of Barthes, but is far too sophisticated to be placed in the ‘subculture’ genre that Barthes refers to.

Roland Barthes had circled around this paradox between stillness and movement when in his essay The third meaning he found himself locating the specifically filmic-what he thinks of as film’s genius as a medium-not in any aspect of cinematic movement but rather, paradoxically, in the photographic still. It is in the horizontal thrust of movement itself that Bartes sees all of narrative’s drive toward symbolic efficacy, which is to say, the various levels of plot, theme, history, psychology, on which narrative meaning operates. What the photographic still can deliver in opposition to this is something that strikes Barthes as counter-narrative, which is to say a seemingly aimless set of details that throws the forward drive of diegesis in to reverse as it were, scattering the coherence of the narrative into a disseminatory set of permutations. This counternarrative, with its resistance to the filmic illusion of real time, is where Barthes locates the specifically filmic. (Krauss Reinventing the medium p.298)

The crux of Marker’s oeuvre lies in the singular moving image of the sleeping woman opening her eyes. It is the moment when the still frames reach 24x a second, when they become film. And the effect is like a quickening of the heart. It is the moment of the being there of the thing, it is the momentary, swift passage of time which brings things to life. This is the moment in time where the protagonist wishes to remain.

Alas, the experimenters have a different idea. They throw him into the future, where he is offered to stay, but he refuses. He becomes a fugitive in time. Is it the past or the present he returns to? Orly airport. At the end of the jetty he sees the woman of his memory, waiting. He starts running. Here, the movements almost reach 24 frames a second. They almost become movement. But a guard from the future arrests that movement. As a child, at Orly, he witnessed his own death. There is no escape from time. The story itself is brilliant, operating in a warped temporality. It is like a Mobius strip, beginning and ending at the same moment in time.

Whilst the protagonist’s travel through and struggle with time in La Jetee is also a journey to and through the image (of the woman, and of his own death), the image’s struggle between movement and arrest, between the cinematic and the photographic is, in turn, a struggle with, and journey through time. La jetee opens up questions about experiential temporality and personal memory, ending in a moment of existential suspense, a kind of vertigo of life and death. This mirrors what is going on at the level of the representational apparatus, which is caught in the contradiction of the still yet moving images, interrogating assumptions about the temporal modus of both photography and cinema. (Orlow The cinematic, p.178)

In a way, Chris Marker’s film is a metaphorical construct of theory put into practice. It clearly shows that it is possible to achieve the cinematic through photographs. And vice versa, the photograph thus becomes the essence of the cinematic.

The still by instituting a reading that is at once instantaneous and vertical, scorns logical time (which is only an operational time); it teaches us how to dissociate the technical constraint from what is the specific filmic and which is the ‘indescribable’ meaning. Perhaps it was the reading of this other text that Eisenstein called for when he said that film is not simply to be seen and heard, but to be scrutinised and listened to attentively. (Barthes Image music text, p.68)

Conclusion

Chris Marker’s La Jetee successfully combines photography, narration and film to convey a truly cinematic experience. Both natures of the photograph as stillness and of the cinema as movement are encapsulated within it. We are made aware that the essence of the cinema is photographic. Watching this film, we become pensive spectators, having the time to contemplate each still image, vertical, with the voice-over driving the story forward into the horizontal space-time.

Marker’s film is interesting for a lot of reasons. First of all it is the exemplar of a fascinating combination of film and still; the film made entirely of stills. The effect is to demonstrate that movement is not a necessary feature of film; in fact the impression of movement can be created by the jump cutting of still images. Moreover, La Jetee shows that still photographs, strung together in a chain can carry narrative as efficiently as moving pictures, given a shared dependence on a soundtrack. (Wollen, The cinematic, p.112)

I also think it is an example of the Barthesian filmic. The fact that La Jetee defies in so many ways a logic of time, in the narrative sense as well as montage and use of stills and voice-over, at once vertical and horizontal, gives way to a potential ‘third meaning’ to exist and to contain the filmic of Roland Barthes.

The specific filmic (the filmic of the future) lies not in movement, but in an inarticulable third meaning that neither the simple photograph nor figurative painting can assume since they lack the diegetic horizon, then the ‘movement’ regarded as the essence of film is not animation, flux, mobility, ’life’, copy, but simply the framework of a permutational unfolding and a theory of the still becomes necessary. (Barthes Image music text, p.66-67)

Appendix

La Jetee transcript

This is the story of a man marked by an image of his childhood, the violent scene which upset him and whose meaning he was to grasp only years later, happened on the main pier at Orly, Paris airport some years before the outbreak of World War Three.

Orly. Sunday. There the parents used to take their children to watch the departing planes. Of this particular Sunday, the child whose story we are going to tell, was bound to remember the sight of the frozen sun, of a stage setting at the end of the pier, and of a woman’s face.

Nothing tells memories from ordinary moments; only afterwards do they claim remembrance, on account of their scars.

That face, which was to be a unique image of peace time to carry with him through the whole war time, he often wandered if he had ever seen it, or if he had only dreamed a lovely moment to catch up with the crazy moment that came next. The sudden roar, the woman’s gesture, the fall of a body, shrieking people. Only later did he realise that he had seen a man dying. And soon afterwards Paris was blown up.

Many died. Some fancied themselves to be victors. Others were made prisoners. The survivors settled beneath the Chaillot in a network of galleries. Above ground in Paris, as in the rest of the world, everything was rotten with radioactivity. The victors stood guard over a kingdom of rats. The prisoners were submitted to some experiments of great concern, apparently, to those who conducted them. The outcome was disappointment for some, death for others, and for others, madness.

One day they came to select a new Guinea pig among the prisoners. He was the man who’s story we are now telling.

He was frightened. He had heard about the head experimenter. He was prepared to meet the mad scientist, Herr Doctor Frankenstein. Instead of whom he met a reasonable man, who told him in a relaxed way that the human race was doomed. Space was off limits, the only link with survival passé through TIME- a loophole in time-and then, maybe, it would be possible to reach food, medicine, energy.

This was the purpose of the experiment: to throw emissaries into time, to call past and future to the rescue of the present. But the human mind balked. To wake up in another time meant to be born again as an adult. The shock would be too much.

Having sent only lifeless or unconscious bodies through different zones of time, the inventors were now concentrating on men with very strong mental images. If they were able to conceive or to dream another time, perhaps would they be able to live in it. At camp, police spied even on dreams. This man was selected because he was glued to an image of his past.

At first nothing else but striping out of the present. They start again. The man doesn’t die nor does he get mad; he suffers. They continue.

On the tenth day, images begin to ooze like confessions. A peace time morning, a peace time bedroom, a real bedroom. Real children, real birds, real cats, real graves.

On the sixteenth day he is on the pier at Orly, empty. Sometimes he reaches a day of happiness, but another one. Ruins. A girl who could be the one he is yearning for. He crosses her path on a pier. He sees a face in a car, smiling. More images pour out and mix. The museum. Perhaps the museum of his memories.

On the thirtieth day they meet. Now he is sure she is the one! As a matter of fact, it is the only thing he may be sure of. In the middle of this dateless world which first stuns him by it’s splendour, around him only fabulous materials: glass, plastics, terry cloth. Once he gets out of this fascination, the woman has gone.

The directors of the experiment tighten their control. They send him back. Time rolls back again, the moment happens once more, this time she is near him. He says something. She doesn’t mind, she answers. They have no memories, no plans. Time builds itself painlessly around them. As landmark, they have the very taste of this moment they live and the scribbling on the wall. Later on they are in a garden. He remembers there are gardens. She asks him about his necklace-the combat necklace he wore at the start of this war, which was to break out some day. He invents an explanation. They walk. They look at the trunk of a sequoia tree covered with historical dates, she pronounces an English name, he doesn’t understand. As in a dream, he shows her a point beyond the tree, he hears himself say: this is where I come from. And falls back exhausted.

Then another wave of time lifts him up, they probably gave him another shot.

Now she sleeps in the sun. He knows that in this world, where he had just landed again for a little while, in order to be sent back to her, she is dead.

She wakes up. He speaks again, of a truth too fantastic to be believed, he retains the meaning. An un-reachable country. A long way to go. She listens, she doesn’t mind.

Is it another day? He doesn’t know. They should go on like this, in countless walks, in which an unspoken trust, an unadulterated trust will grow between them. No memories, no plans, up to the moment where he felt ahead of them a Wall.

And this was the end of the first experiment.

It was the starting point for a whole series of tests in which he would meet her at different times. She welcomes him in a simple way. She calls him her ghost. One day she seems frightened, one day she leans over him. As for him, he never knows whether he moves towards her, whether he is driven, whether he has made it up, or, whether he is only dreaming.

Around the fiftieth day, they meet in a museum filled with ageless animals.

Now they have hit the bull’s eye! Thrown at the right moment, he might stay there and move without trouble. The girl seems also to be tamed. She welcomes as a natural phenomena the ways of this visitor who comes and goes, who exists, talks, laughs with her, stops talking, listens to her, then vanishes.

Once back in the laboratory, he knew something was different. The camp leader was there. From what was said around him, he made out that after the brilliant result of the experiment in the past, they now meant to ship him into the future.

Excitement made him forget for a moment that then, the meeting at the museum had been the last.

The future was better protected than the past. After many painful tests, he eventually caught some wave of the world to come. He went through a brand new planet. Paris rebuilt. Ten thousand incomprehensible streets. Other men were waiting for him. This was a brief encounter. Obviously they refused his story of another time. He said his peace; since humanity had survived, it could not only refuse to it’s own past the means of its own survival. That Sufism was taken for faith in disguise.

They gave him a power plant strong enough to put all human industry in motion again. And the gates to the future were closed.

Sometime after his return, he was transferred to another part of the camp. He knew that his jailors will not spare him. He had been a tool in their hands. His childhood image had been used as a bait to condition him. He had lived up to their expectation. He had played his part. Now, he only waited to be executed, with somewhere inside him, the memory of a twice lived fragment of time. And deep in these limbos, he got the message from the men of the world to come. They too travelled through time, and more easily. Now they were there, ready to accept him as one of their own.

But he had a different request. Rather than this pacified future, he wanted the world of his childhood, and this woman, who perhaps was waiting for him.

Once again, on the main pier at Orly, in the middle of this hot pre-war Sunday afternoon, when he was able to settle down, he thought in a confused way that the child he had been, was bound to be there too watching the planes. But first of all he looked for a woman’s face at the end of the pier. He ran towards her. And when he recognised the man who had trailed him since the camp, he knew that there was no way out of time, and he knew that this haunted moment he had been granted to see as a child – was the moment of his own death!

Bibliography

Campany David, The Cinematic, Documents of Contemporary Art, 2007, Whitechapel London

Barthes Roland, Camera Lucida, 1981, Hill and Wang, USA

Barthes Roland, Image Music Text, 1984, Fontana Paperbacks, London

Bazin Andre, What is Cinema? 1967, University of California Press

Benjamin Walter, Illuminations, 1999, Pimlico, Random House, London

Deleuze Giles, Cinema 1, 2005, Continuum, London

Green David, Visible Time: The work of David Claerbout, 2004,

Photoworks, Brighton

Stewart Garrett, Between Film and Screen, 1999, University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London

Lupton Catherine, Chris Marker, Memories of the future, 2005, Reaktion Books, London

Lomax Yve, Images of Thought,(volume one),2000, Salvo, London

Krauss Rosalind, Reinventing the Medium, 1999, Critical Inquiry, vol.25, no.2, accessed from Jstor

www.jstor.org (8 August 2007)

Wetzel Michael, Acousmetrie on the relationship between voice and image in the films of Chris Marker, www.medienkunstnetz.de/themes/art_and_cinematography/marker

(6 April 2007)

La Jetee 1962 Directed by Chris Marker, Argos Films, 29 mins (Video:VHS)