I have apparently made a jump from the docufictions of Robert Flaherty to the essay films of French filmmaker Chris Marker (his adopted pseudonym). Tonight I rewatched his short film La Jetee (1962), a subtle homage to Hitchock’s masterpiece Vertigo (1958), and I also watched all the related extras on the Criterion DVD. Jetee is a a French word meaning “dock,” “jetty,” or “pier,” but in French the sound la jetee makes can also be heard as the phrase “I was there.” The play on words is significantly apt because Vertigo and La Jetee are both obsessed with the concept of human memory and the particular desire to recreate some object within the past. In the case of both films, that object happens to be women with whom the male protagonists fall in love.
Marker’s film is the only one I have so far seen in which each “scene” does not consist of filmed shots, but rather of photograms that have been (superbly) edited in such a way that they all combine to make a narrative whole lasting 26 or so minutes. There is only one moving filmed shot in La Jetee, and it lasts for only a matter of seconds before moving on to more photograms. Marker has admitted that this was due to his lack of funds while working on the film, but I cannot think of a more innovate cinematic assay, and I am quite surprised that this unusual method has not been more widely imitated.
In addition to an obvious obsession with human memory, Marker’s work also indicates a fascination with the 20th century sociopolitical Left. Icarus Films recently released a new edition of A Grin Without a Cat (1977), a 3-hour film essay that some have called Marker’s magnum opus. It is a detailed history of the political upheavals sparked by the Vietnam War and that shook the world during the 1960’s and 70’s. I added it to my Netflix queue but there was a “very long wait” for it, so out of impatience I decided earlier today to buy a copy of my own via Amazon.
