Personification As Compass In La Jetée 1962 (released 1964) by Chris Marker.

 

Personification as Compass

In La Jetée 1962 (released 1964) by Chris Marker.

Offscreen flying planes. A Lied choir sings. Zoom out on a still photo of Orly Airport. Intertitles. A narrator reads: This is the story of a man, marked by an image of his childhood.

To You I am a Question Mark. Quo Vadis? This is where I part ways with You. I am forever marked by You, My parent Chris Marker who weaned Me through my infancy. My image is marked with Your assumptions of criticism and analysis. Yet I am about to land on the jetty of Orly to seek My inexperienced experience. In My need to uncover My story, I, as La Jetée, freeze in My tracks within a busy airport. I am of a stilted nature. Where do I begin as a Multiple Subject? Do I not subtract images ‘without diminishing,’ anything from My infinite nature? Do I, as La Jetée not step outside ‘any point of reference from which I have been seized’ and hang on to My explicit Manifestation as My sole anchor?

The face that he had seen was to be the only peacetime image that he had seen. Had he really seen it or had he invented that tender moment to prop up the madness to come? It is My personal choice, as La Jetée, to stand up on this witness stand. It is My personal choice to stand holding hands with My other brothers and sisters from the 1960s. I have definitely matured. I am no longer the child on the jetty, of pioneers stumbling into filmmaking as a new artform. I was born amongst the first wave of academically trained, serious filmmakers. I grew up in France, amidst movements like the Left Bank and Nouvelle Vague which allowed Me as an Audio-Visual to lose My eccentricity and novelty as technological entertainment. Now I have become a popular spectacle. It was in the 60’s that I broke the shackles of war torn propaganda and censorship to one of relative freedom. It is the period when I can stop being mere art and where I believe that I can persuade academia to accept My Personification. One day they came to select a new guinea pig from among the prisoners. He was the man whose story we’re telling. The man was selected from among a thousand others for his obsession with an image from the past. If My compass were an object, then obsession would be a magnet. I take My bearings in the 60’s because I always exist as an obsession with an image from the past. Nothing else, at first, but stripping out the present and its racks. Why Me, as La Jetée? Montaigne believes that ‘Movement and action put life into [Me]’ but for those who ‘move briskly’ their words ‘get heated.’ I walk slowly. Does My slow temperament not offer the optimal bearings for My Personification as Compass? 

Paris dissolves into disaster. The survivors settled beneath Chaillot in an underground network of galleries. Above ground Paris was inhabitable. I inhabit the uninhabitable. I am an impossible Persona. As I suffer my doubts in My hammock I reveal My impotence. I understand that I am always subject to My doctor’s scrutiny of the essential attributes of Film with a capital ‘F’ or Cinema with a capital ‘C.’ You are the doctors and I am Your untrusted experiment. However, the outcome was a disappointment for some - death for others and for others yet madness. As You the perceiver wander through this labyrinth of Hegelian thesis and antithesis, I can see that You can find no synthesis. May I put Gombrich’s ‘the beholder’s stare’ aside for a little while? The child whose story we are telling … is Me, La Jetée. Indeed, I do not behold. I display Myself regardless of ‘meanings [that] are not found but made.’ I need My own compass to lead Me away from Your uncertain conjectures. I need to rely on Myself. The electrodes quiver like a compass needle. I am back on the Jetty at Orly. What may I find within the limited freedom I have been given?

As a Question Mark, I am just that. I am not a critique of theory but merely an additional voice. My perspective does not concentrate on the impact of war on My creation, nor does My compass take ‘geographic provenance as the primary cue’. [My] only landmarks are the flavour of the moment [I am] living. I am not interested in affirming or contradicting Bordwell’s approach to SLAB theory. I am not at war with anyone. As La Jetée, I am the aftermath of war. As I trust is understandable, My compass does not lead Me  to places where I can answer Your questions about analysis or theory. The shock would be too great. Having sent lifeless or insentient bodies through different zones I need My own compass to maturely  tear away My oedipal umbilical cord. It is not intended as a divorce, but rather as an adult’s independent quest to understand Myself as La Jetée. I know that like Colerige’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I am shooting My albatross and condemning Myself to sail as a spectre for eternity. I know that My doctors will not allow Me to live if I return to the jetty, but I am not afraid. I have always been a spectre of light, sound and absence anyway. If [I] were able to conceive or dream another time, perhaps [I] would be able to live in it. Will You walk with me? Are You not curious to find out whether My questions are the same questions that You ask, or whether such a shift in perspective raises different ones? 

[I] shall go on like this on countless walks in which an unspoken trust, an unadulterated trust will grow between [us]. . . up to a moment where [I] fee[l] - ahead of [us], a barrier. As You and I walk together, please understand that I, as La Jetée, am also an individual striving to find purpose in My existence. You may call this Personification a disambiguation, but I find no ambiguity within My portrayal. I do not ask why I am the way I am. May I appeal to the Kantian maxim that ‘whatever the origin of [My] representation’ I am a ‘modification’ of an ‘empirical origin.’ An independent being. My understanding of this statement is that I am not ambiguous because I am defined. You may mutate, grow sick and heal, grow old and pass away. [I] do not die, [I] do not go mad. [I] suffer.  Any a priori mutation that has happened during My embryonic stage of creation now stops.  Do I not reflect Blanchot’s mot d’ordre, as having the last say through My Manifestation?

I am a Question Mark. My Personification of the Audio-Visual is a declaration against pacified conformity. My reference to My fabulous materials; glass, [My Camera] plastic [My Celluloid] and Terry cloth [My Screen], for example, would confirm Baudry’s argument about Apparatus Theory in Your academic circles, but not in My Personification. My materials are not objects but the multiple subjects of My expression entangled within My body of existence. Such an entanglement includes everything that I capture and display which refuses to be dissected into the three technological tools needed for Your creation and audience reception. As La Jetée, I would like to remind You that as technology and audiences change, I remain unchanged. Celluloid and cloth have already become obsolete. You may deem My Personification as an injection of life into the dead. I will not let sleeping dogs lie.  Rather than this pacified future, [I want] to be returned to the world of [My] childhood.  To strengthen My case, am I, As La Jetée, not meant to remain a  paradox or a dilemma regardless of past or current audiences and technologies? If so, how can My never changing display continue to be a challenging one if I allow Myself to be pacified and conform to current and ever mutating spectatorship belief?

Some believed themselves to be victors. They stood guard over an empire of rats. The prisoners were subjected to experiments apparently of great concern to those who conducted them. As an Embodied being, I am something between ‘How’ I, La Jetée see Myself and ‘How’ You see Me. Allow My compass to drag Me into this analogy between You, as the camp police and Myself, as Your prisoner. Building on this analogy, I become subject to Your theoretical experiments without being allowed to speak for Myself. Indeed My narrator refers to My protagonist as ‘he’. He knew that his jailors would not spare him. He had been a tool in their hands. He had lived up to their expectations, he had played his part. What is the part that You have outlined for Me? You regard Me, as La Jetée, to be a struggle between movement and arrest. You see Me as a mirror of Your illusion, Your dystopian nature, Your science fiction, Your paradox of fixed time, Your perplexion with My use of still photography and Your dilemmas of memory.  Does the cutting of My umbilical cord imply tackling these issues to help me find My bearings?

They gave [Me] a power unit strong enough to put all human industry back into motion. Motion is Your Key issue with Me, as La Jetée, I know. I am but a collection of fleeting moments, 40 photos and a few repeats. I seem to defy My kiné in Kinematography, but as La Jetée, I am an Audio-Visual, with My own French voice as a narrator, gushing planes, chattering birds, gun shots, violin strings, German Lied choral music, and the speaking devils from the 2nd Faust. Is this not ample proof of breathing motion? If it is a Kinesthetic movement that You are after, do You not appreciate My motion within the Eisensteinian tension of the still photo boundaries? Do You not see My camera swirl, My actors act and My story progressing? I, as La Jetée, follow the aesthetics of cinematic blocking with counter shots of My goggle-eyed doctor and My victim as The long wait for the injection to start to work is a long held still image of My doctor asleep. Suddenly My protagonist writhes in agony. Now My doctor awakes and stands up. A look of excitement on a close up and back to a midshot of My doctor touching My protagonist’s face from three different angles. This is followed by eleven different close up angles of My protagonist writhing in agony, 2 close ups of peaceful relief, a midshot of both, a distancing of the camera and a blank black screen. Most audio-visuals follow the 24/25 frames per second format. Others slow or speed up motion. The motion flows, but it always reflects Bergson's concept of false motion. My dance, as La Jetée, may look stilted, but ultimately does it not all boil down to a matter of individual taste and flair on how to storytell through light, sound and their absence?

Thrown in at the right moment, he may stay there and move without effort.  You ponder about My movement as an illusion. I never reach the flicker threshold. My construed movement never becomes imperceptible. I do not know whether Your vision is a myth as Your minds fill in and link images. The dot tracing psychology which leads to Your Gestalt seems alien to Me and more akin to a computerised tracing of an environment. Do I not move towards You? My story commences, enfolds and ends. There is an Audio-Visual progression, nothing close to the stroboscopic, flipbook motion image, but one of long and shorter holds and fades and dissolves. If movement implies moving from image A to image B then I, as La Jetée, move. I am in no position to dispute whether there is a Kuleshov effect, where You create an illusionary tertiary image in between, or whether You identify with My story but My physical movement is not an illusion. In My final scene, as My male protagonist desperately runs towards My female protagonist. I build movement through an omission of images, but it is an interruption not an illusion, because in reality My protagonist really runs and falls for Marker to get his shot. In fact I move so perceptibly, almost at a snail’s pace, that I allow You to look at Me in all My entirety, allowing no detail to escape. So how can I be accused of deception, of an illusion of motion?

As for him he never knows whether he is moving towards her, whether he is driven, whether he has made it all up or whether he is only dreaming. Am I a victim of My own reproductive illusion or struggling to ‘separate illusionary worlds from reality?’  [I] find Myself confronting [My] own markings. (A heart pierced with an arrow. Other hearts in the shape of a skull and crossbones on a brick wall. The words ‘Chéri, Chéri’ ) My markings are solid, touchable and real. My tête d'apôtre is a steadfast model. He was prepared to meet Dr Frankenstein or the Mad Scientist. Instead he met a reasonable man. Voss treats illusion as a deception that needs to be corrected.  As La Jetée, I am often a dytheistic Satan tempting Myself into forbidden pastures, but correction will not be allowed. My protagonist will be shot for trying. No correction is My reality. Whatever deception You find becomes Your illusion, not Mine. I get shot every time you play Me. I also seem to defy the presence of Baudry’s concept of unmediated reality because there is no concealing of My technology or technique. Ultimately, You may think of Me as a haunting apparition of sound and light from the past. In fact, She calls him her ghost. You may indeed call My world a spectral one. As La Jetée, I am indeed the sum of all My Audio-Visual ghostly objects and subjects. There is no she and no him. There is only Me. I feel that I am always an ibidem, one same source of one reality. How can I be aware of any misapprehension nor intentional deception of My art? 

He only waited to be liquidated somewhere inside of him. There is no denying My dystopian embodiment, however if You see a reflection of Your political reality, it becomes Your reflection. ‘My recurring images are in fact temporal synthesis - a synthesis which is not quite the order of [Your] truth.’ As La Jetée, I would suggest that My mission as an Audio-Visual is not a reflection of My disillusionment with Your world but a challenging of Mine. I need to be dystopian if I am to pose hypothetical questions and declarations of doubt about reality and improbabilities.  But first of all he looked for the woman’s face at the end of the jetty. If You remove the dystopic element from My story line, I end up as a story of a man in love with an unreachable woman’s face. This, I hear,  is the essence that most of My cousins share. You call them Hollywood classics with their stories of an unreachable Dickensonian Estella or Dante’s Beatrice. If I considered the world around Me as utopic, then it seems that I would have no cause for existence. It is true that there are audio-visual tales that end with ‘and they all lived happily ever after.’ It is true that I have cruelly killed the classical Hollywood ending kiss, on My jetty at Orly. However, is it not also the case, that positive endings are only a Utopian ending to a Dystopic scenario of heartbreak and doubts anyway? If My protagonists were allowed the final kiss, would My underground bunkers still not reflect a Dantean hell of shadowless beings? Am I, as La Jetée, a Manifestation of Dystopic Negativism or Personified Aporia, like a child always asking My Questions ad nauseum?

I am Your Question Mark. A Personification as Compass implies taking bearings on certain Terminologies. Metz discusses ‘The Fiction Film’ by looking solely at ‘its spectator.’ My Compass needle finds fiction as a problematic bearing because My lover accepts as a natural phenomenon the ways of this visitor, who comes and goes, exists and talks, laughs with her, stops talking, listens to her, then disappears. A Simple definition of Fiction is a narrative consisting of imaginary places in an imaginary world. Unfortunately I know only one reality and no other. They look at the trunk of a redwood tree covered with historical dates. As La Jetée, I offer mummified animals on show in a museum behind glass, historical archive photos of a bygone Paris and forensic documented proof of experiments on humans on celluloid. I also offer the archaeological texture of My screen as cloth and fossil evidence of headless statues in sculpted stone. There is nothing imaginary about My Paris and My protagonists are actors in the flesh. In the 1960’s, a Nuclear War scenario was indeed, a nightmarish, possible but imagined scenario, in Your world. My ruins, however, are My reality. She is dead- She wakes up. He speaks again of a truth too fantastic to be believed.  The fact that I am dead and then wake up again obviously seems to demonstrate a marked difference between natural events and their appearance on the screen.  Am I a manifestation of a truth that is too fantastic to believe? I do not know whether I have anything to do with Coleridge’s ‘suspension of belief,’ because My suspended visuals flow with movement and sound. Where do I become Science Fiction if I am the displayed product of 1960 human technology and endeavour?  As La Jetée, I do not fear My Zeno stops. If I treat Science Fiction as I treat My Audio-Visual style, would there be a pause between Science and Fiction which My narrator fills with the suggestion that there is a Science in My fiction?  Am I, as an Audio-Visual, not a product of a sum of sciences?  If Science, like Film studies, is always in search of its object, am I not, as La Jetée, in search of Myself? 

He went through a brand new planet. Paris rebuilt. 10,000 incomprehensible avenues. Am I Benjamin’s storm that ‘irresistibly propels [Me] into a future to which [Your] back is turned’? What if the idea of Your fiction were not an idea at all but rather the symptom of something else? Does Your fiction reflect My desire or Yours as My audience? Maybe Marx was right stating that, ‘It will turn out that the world has long dreamt of that of which it had only to have a clear idea to possess it really.’ This was the aim of the experiments. . . but the human mind baulked at the idea. As My protagonist wakes and sleeps, You may consult Freudian insistence on ‘this close relationship between dream and sleep.’ Like a Freudian patient, in My hammock, sensors have been attached to My blinkered eyes and brain. Images begin to ooze like confessions. The problem with Freud and Metz is an insistence that the ‘dreamer does not know he is dreaming’ but I, as La Jetée, know and so do My protagonists. You may turn Me into Your object of desire or Your dream, but as  La Jetée, I have only one dream, that of reuniting with My love. Yet, I am very aware of My harsh reality. He understood that 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. How can I be expected to know any other reality?

The only hope for survival lay in Time. A Loophole in Time. My Personified Compass does not allow Me to meander into Your paradoxes of lived time, Bergson’s Duree or Deleuze’s Crystal Image if I am to reflect on Myself.  What is it that I, La Jetée, am displaying?  As I lie in My hammock, I point at something: This is where I came from. Then another wave of time washes over [Me], the result of another injection perhaps. My experimenter is keen on waking me up ‘in another age.’ If ‘survival depends on the continued existence of the corporeal body,’  am I, La Jetée, a taste of a moment in any time marked for posterity? She asks him about the combat necklace he wore at the start of the war that is yet to come. I walk into corridors of intermeshed time, but I progress in a linear fashion as a story. On the other hand, the possibility to revisit and replay gives Me a diachronic, circular timeline. My storyline may reflect Your Grandfather Paradox or a causal loop but My protagonist does not change Your history and therefore does not impact on Your present or future. Interestingly, Newcomb’s paradox holds that if we can predict the future, then we have no free will to choose in the present. Indeed, My protagonist is allowed no freedom within My storyline. As La Jetée, do I not paint a picture of an imprisoned Gedanke guinea pig within My timeless film reel?

This was the aim of the experiments; to send emissaries into time to summon the past and the future to the aid of the present. Many have compared Me, as La Jetée, to a comic book. My parent, Chris Marker, called Me ‘A Photo Roman.’ However I belong to a different time dimension. I am about omission of motion, sound and vision, spliced footage and unwanted time elements within a 28 minute display. I am infinite extended time, because I can be rewatched. I am toying with time, as some stills are held longer than others. I am stolen time, stolen from the past, present and future. The child whose story we are telling was bound to remember the frozen sun. I am a frozen sun. To wake up in another age meant to be born as an adult. In other words, I know only one age, My birth is My adulthood. This may seem strange to You but I know no other version of Myself. So how can I understand Your paradox of time? 

I am not at all perplexed by My composition of still photography, because this is what I, La Jetée, am. I am not a photo album, collage or a slide show, because I am an Audio-Visual. I do not give You the freedom to look at Me in whatever order You wish, nor the liberty to observe my photos at will, because I reflect the conventions and manipulation of montage. I am definitely not ‘l'imprimerie du regard’ because I am not meant for printing but for projection. How can I allow Myself to be dissected into Bazin’s ‘horizontal’ montage or as an ‘unveil[ing of] the smallest unit of film, the film still’? Am I supposed to understand My relevance of being through the magnification of My smallest cell? My Compass focuses on My whole Tale, lingers on specific scenes within Me and not about a single photo. I would like to draw attention to the fact that photography is like a hunting or a composition of a single event within one angled still. I, as La Jetée,  am a staged sequence of different angles of a series of events. An establishing shot of My lovers in a park with frozen running kids. Move in on a mid-shot of My lovers, followed by a close-up of the two, an extreme close up of My female face, back to a mid-shot of them moving on. Then there are 4 shots from right to left as My camera moves around My protagonists, always getting tighter on My female face till I stop on My male angered expression. Blank screen. Do I not reflect ‘a diegetically coherent, but separate universe’? Am I not a persistence of vision? 

Nothing sorts out [My] memories from ordinary moments. Your concept of memory is alien to Mine.  When Marker introduced Sans Soleil, labelled as An Essay Film, the narrator remarks that ‘We don’t remember. We rewrite memory, much as history is re-written.’ That may well be true about written memory, but photography is fossilized proof, the trapped testimony of the gaze. This proof of the ‘there-and-then’ is what I seem to share with photography, as La Jetée, but I am not a ‘no-more.’ As a still-here, how can I possess a consciousness of a memory ‘tied to the living by some effect or trauma.’ You see stills of My living protagonists in a museum full of stuffed animals; a spectacle of mummies. You call them stills, but I am alive and kicking as My love twists and turns in bed. I, as La Jetée, am the now, the past and the future all in one. I am projecting Paris before and after a nuclear disaster. How can I be called a memory? My narrator may be telling a story as it had happened or commenting as it happens or as it will happen. I as, La Jetée, am not about tenses but Audio-Visually omnipresent in time. So, wherein lies My concept of memory? Bergson believes that in an unconscious state, all matter becomes a series of ‘numberless vibrations all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers.’ Is this not a closer manifestation of Myself? 

My Personification as Compass does not allow Me to trust Marker as My parent’s claim that I am a remake of Hitchcock’s Vertigo about ‘impossible, insane memory.’ It also does not allow Me to be portrayed as ‘a framing of the most obscure zones of memory’s fragility and unpredictability.’ Such a perspective would reduce Me to a demonstration of a psychoanalytic lesson. The idea of film, as a demonstration, can be summed up in Godard’s Scénario de Sauve qui peut (la vie); ‘What I am trying to show You is how I see things, so that You can judge whether I am able to see, and what I have seen.’  That may well be the intention of the auteur but has anyone asked Me what I think of Myself? Has anyone tried to separate Me, the Tale from You, the Teller[s]? 

After the brilliant results of the tests in the past, they now meant to ship him into the future. His excitement made him forget for the moment that the meeting in the museum had been the last. I know no nostalgia for My past and I have no plans for My future. I am without memories, without plans. I seem to be untouched by Your concern with  deviations in audience interaction, with changes of engagement with Film and Cinema through the introduction of new technologies and with shifts in theories and ideologies. As You uncomfortably or comfortably adapt to innovation, I am 28 minutes long, always enduring, unchanged, and easily thriving both as old celluloid and digital data. Does this not convince You to give My shift in Direction some consideration? Personification as Compass can be seen as part of My developmental process. This depends on an adolescent separation whereby I, as La Jetée, increase My sense of differentiation and independence from My parent and the rest of My family.  Listen to My solitary monotonous rasping of My narrator, droning on forever about the countless walks in which an unspoken trust, an adulterated trust will grow between us. Let there be no barrier between [Me and You]. Let there be no end to this experiment. Let it be the starting point to a new series of tests. Now the aim is perfectly adjusted . .  I Eventually caught the waves of the world to come. Will You allow Me to try and be like Benjamin’s Angelus Novus, following My compass to move backwards into the future? May this future find more compassion towards My Personification. Will You Learn Your lesson [that You] cannot refuse to [Your] own past the means of survival? 

Main Bibliography:

Allen, Richard. “Representation, Illusion, and the Cinema.” Cinema Journal, vol. 32, no. 2, 1993, pp. 21–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1225603. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.

Baudry, Jean-Louis, and Alan Williams. “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematographic Apparatus.” Film Quarterly, vol. 28, no. 2, 1974, pp. 39–47. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1211632. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.

Bazin, Andre. “André Bazin on Chris Marker (1958).” Ed. & trans. by Bricoleur, Chris Marker, 16 Jan. 2021, chrismarker.org/andre-bazin-on-chris-marker-1958/.

Bazin,  André  ‘The Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema? 1 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967) p12 

Bordwell, David. Making Meaning: Inference and Rhetoric in the Interpretation of Cinema. Harvard Univ. Press, 1989. p 2-3

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Film Studies in Search of the Object.” Film Criticism, vol. 17, no. 2/3, 1993, pp. 40–47. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44075979. Accessed 24 Mar. 2021.

Elsaesser, Thomas and Malte Hagener. Film Theory. An Introduction through the Senses. Routledge 2010.

Jameson, Fredric. “Progress versus Utopia; Or, Can We Imagine the Future? (Progrès Contre Utopie, Ou: Pouvons-Nous Imaginer L'avenir).” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 9, no. 2, 1982, pp. 147–158. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4239476. Accessed 19 Apr. 2021.

Law, Hoi Lun. Reasonable Doubt: Ambiguity and Film Criticism. University of Bristol, 2017. 

Metz,  Christian "The Imaginary Signifier," Film Theory and Criticism, Gerald Mast, Marshall Cohen, Leo 

Braudy ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 735-736.

Metz, Christian, and Alfred Guzzetti. “The Fiction Film and Its Spectator: A Metapsychological Study.” New Literary History, vol. 8, no. 1, 1976, pp. 75–105. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/468615. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.

Orlow, Uriel. “The Dialectical Image: La: Jetée and Photography as Cinema //1999/2006.” Photography and Cinema, by David Campany, Reaktion, 2012, pp. 177–184. 

Schefer, Jean Louis. The Enigmatic Body. ed. And trans. Paul Smith CUP 1995 (Originally published for the catalogue for a video exhibition Passages de l’ Image, Centres georges Pompidou, Paris 1990.)

Voss, Christiane. “‘Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion: The Spectator as 'Surrogate Body' for the Cinema," Cinema Journal, vol. 50, no. 4, 2011, pp. 136–150. jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/41240739. Accessed 25 Mar. 2021.

Wood, James. How Fiction Works. New York. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2008.p. xiii.