Author’s Original Manuscript: this book chapter was published in Rhythms: Essays in French

Literature, Thought and Culture, edited by Elisabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

A SHORT FILM ABOUT TIME: DYNAMISM AND STILLNESS IN CHRIS MARKER’S LA

JETÉE

Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme marqué par une image d’enfance. La scène
qui le troubla par sa violence, et dont il ne devait comprendre que
beaucoup plus tard la signification, eut lieu sur la grande jetée d’Orly,
quelques années avant le début de la troisième guerre mondiale.1

These are the opening lines of Chris Marker’s 1962 short film, La Jetée, spoken

in voiceover. They point towards the marking of an anonymous man by some kind of

revised primal scene – a mark that is only made meaningful many years later. So

reflexive is this process of marking that it resonates even with the name of the

filmmaker. Marker’s work invokes such marks and representational difficulties,

addressing critical issues between cinema, subjectivity and temporality. His oeuvre

itself oscillates between writing and critique, filmmaking and photography, video

installation and poetic monologue. His work continually questions: what constitutes

cinema? What constitutes subjectivity? Or indeed temporality? La Jetée (1962),

perhaps the most remarkable of Marker’s fictional work, absolutely refigures notions

of cinematic continuity and cinematic temporality.

La Jetée’s image montage of photographs or photogrammatic images is

accompanied by a voice-narrated story: one set in the future but staged as a series of

voyages to a past contemporary to Marker’s making of the film, and an

unrecognisable, illegible post-futural landscape. A series of predominantly static

images, the film could equally be described as a visual photographic novel played out

on screen. Nonetheless, each image is carefully staged within a set of cinematic

conventions that ‘read’ as a film, in spite of the stillness at work in each image.

1
Chris Marker, La Jetée: ciné-roman (New York: Zone Books, 1992). No page no.

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

The events of La Jetée occur in a fictional time, somewhere between our past

(the film was made in 1962), and an imagined post-apocalyptic future, where atomic

war has ravaged the earth to the extent that the only remaining survivors live in

subterranean caverns below Paris. The protagonist, an unnamed lui, is coerced into a

form of psycho-physical time travel, induced by injections of an unknown, unnamed

drug, in order to travel into the future to ask for help from the future generations. His

psychical journeys initially throw him back into a pre-apocalyptic time, (thus

contemporary to the production of the film), where he meets an unnamed woman,

with whom he subsequently falls in love on his fleeting visits to the past. The film

culminates in his doomed attempt to escape from the post-apocalyptic present into the

ambrosian past of his childhood, where his fate has always been sealed. The

childhood image that marks him is also the instant of his own death, which he comes

to realise only at that moment. The narrative is consequently locked into a perfect

cycle, where beginning is end and end is beginning.

La Jetée is not the only ‘photo-roman’ of its kind to have emerged in French

filmmaking of the 1960s. Philippe Dubois contextualises this in his article « La Jetée

de Chris Marker ou le cinématogramme de la conscience ». He cites Agnès Varda’s

1963 film Salut les Cubains, which is entirely made up of 1800 photographs that she

took on a visit to Cuba in the winter of 1962-63, and Philippe Lifchitz’s film X.Y.Z.,

made from post-cards2. Like Marker, Varda accelerates and decelerates the shifts

between photographs, and accompanies the images with real-time sound, in order to

give the impression of animation or de-animation. There are also numerous polemical

film-photo-montage projects from the Montreal animator Arthur Lipsett, dating from

2
Philippe Dubois, ed., La Jetée ou le cinématogramme de la conscience. ed. by Philippe Dubois. Vol.
6, Théorème (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002). p.11

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

the early 1960s, such as Very Good, Very Good. However, as many critics have

explained with reference to La Jetée the film is not photographic, as are both Salut

Les Cubains and Very Good, Very Good, but rather photogrammatic, as will be

explained in further detail later3.

La Jetée’s rhythms of halting continuity and relentless linear narrative are both

engaging and slippery, and move outside the bounds of narratival cause and effect.

Thus, the film engages with questions of psychical and subjective relations to time,

both in its content and its inter-textual medium. In particular, La Jetée’s specific

interrelation between dynamic sound and still image, between the rhythm and

duration of the image on screen and the temporal shifts of the narrative, make this

film particularly influential upon questions of contemporary cinema, more than 40

years after its release. La Jetée intersects between film and photomontage, between

linear narrative and disrupted subjective temporality. However, what is at stake in the

internalised temporality of La Jetée, both represented and subjective, are the kinds of

movement that this oscillation takes: from the rhythmic form of a regular pendulum,

to a more halting, stuttering rhythm, without resolution or conclusive pattern.

RHYTHM AND (DIS)CONTINUITY

As both Mary Ann Doane and Laura Mulvey have pointed out, the effectiveness

of cinema rests upon an illusional logic, where the projection of 24 still images or

frames per second ‘moves’ objects through filmic space and time, creating a

fundamentally discontinuous but nonetheless highly effective simulacrum of our own

subjective space-time. A pertinent issue is raised by Mulvey in her most recent book,
3
To name but a few, Barthélemy Amengual, 'Le Présent du futur: sur La Jetée', Positif, 1997 1997, pp.
96-98. See also Philippe Dubois, La Jetée ou le cinématogramme de la conscience, and Nora M. Alter,
Chris Marker. ed. by James Naremore, Contemporary Film Directors (Urbana; Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2006).

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

with regard to what she describes as new forms of cinema spectatorship enabled by

new technologies’ emphasis upon the possibilities of the freeze frame, the still, and so

on. She states:

When narrative fragments, and its protagonists are transformed into still,
posed images to which movement can be restored, the rhythm of a movie
changes. The supposed laws of smoothly distributed linear cause and
effect are of minor aesthetic importance compared to another kind of,
more tableau-oriented, rhythm. 4

It is important to note at this point that Mulvey does not discuss Chris Marker’s

experimental works; rather she is referring to the effect of new digital technology

upon iconic film images, particularly those of golden age Hollywood Cinema.

However, the intersections between this analysis and an examination of Marker’s film

La Jetée are striking.

The images of La Jetée retain all the traces of cinematographic mise-en scène,

lighting, close-up, even including extra- and intra-diegetic sound. Nonetheless, the

rhythm of this ‘film’ is composed via processes of fragmentation and reassembly. The

flow of narration is inherently detached from the diegesis – the on-screen events, and

the protagonists and images are still and posed. Movement, or dynamism, then, is

produced diegetically via apparent movement and extra-diegetic sound, only to be

disassembled once that dynamic moment returns to the englobing narration of the

voiceover and stillness of the photogramme. Thus, the cinematographic-

photogrammatic forms and narrative drive of Marker’s ‘photo-roman’ fundamentally

disrupt the illusional logic of cinematic time. In spite of this, the diegetic rhythms of

La Jetée do not quite adhere to the fragmentary qualities set out by Mulvey as
4
Laura Mulvey, Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion, 2006). p166

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

examples of tableau-oriented rhythm. Is La Jetée then, a pre-emptive example of a

different kind of tableau-oriented rhythm in film, while still retaining a relentlessly

linear narrative – the kind of narrative, in fact, that Mulvey first posited in her 1975

essay on Hollywood narrative cinema?

Patrick ffrench points out in his article, “The Memory of the Image in Chris

Marker’s La Jetée”:

The withdrawal of the images of the film from the illusion of continuous
motion induced by shooting and projection at twenty-four frames a second
serves to emphasise, not to deny, the dynamism inherent in cinema. One
might say, with Deleuze, that in the classical Hollywood film the
movement of the image becomes frozen in the stereotype of movement
and that it takes the stillness of the photogram to make visible, through
montage, the dynamic gesture in movement.5

ffrench’s counterintuitive logic of the dynamism invoked by stillness seems to

have historical echoes both backward to cinema’s origins in the tracing of the moving

image, and forward, towards a cinematography of stillness as described by Mulvey. In

revealing the dynamic gesture of movement, the stillness of La Jetée’s images allow

for a deeper, less momentary contemplation of what it is to think time in the cinema,

or in other words, to examine cinematic temporality.

The presentation of temporality in the film is very much part of the dichotomy

between dynamism and stillness. One could argue that Marker’s move away from

illusional cinematic movement and continuity in the photogrammatic film La Jetée

makes obvious the impossibility of a pure representation of time. The

5
Patrick ffrench, 'The Memory of the Image in Chris Marker's La Jetée', French Studies: A Quarterly
Review, 59 (Jan 2005), 31-37. pp32-33

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

photogrammatic image-moments are not displayed on the screen as inseparable and

are not even necessarily linked sequentially or indexically. Quite the opposite in fact:

each image serves its carefully structured purpose as a tableau vivant within the

narrative frame. Consequently, the manner in which the narrative is told – rather

appropriately defined by Bakhtin’s as the suzhet – constructs the temporal journeys,

indeed, the time travel, of its central protagonist, while guiding our personal cinematic

experience through linear time. Consequently, both subject matter and medium

invoke an exploration of a subject-in-time. They do so through a narrational and

image-based temporality that is deliberately striated, separated, made unreal and cut

into moments. Furthermore, the artificiality of each of these moments is foregrounded

by the slow pace of the changing images and the compositional distinctness of each

photogramme.

A STILLED CINEMA?

As Catherine Lupton points out in her text on Marker, La Jetée’s

photogrammatic images cite the technical aesthetics and mise-en-scène of the cinema:

Like shots in a conventional film, the photographs are separated by

straight cuts, fades and dissolves of varying duration, while individual
sequences are broken down into the recognisable patterns of classical
narrative cinema, with establishing shots, eyeline matches, shot-
countershot, close-ups and so forth, all working to create a sense of
narrative coherence and momentum.6

Consequently, duration is conceived of across the cut and the dissolve so that

the cinematic form emerges from a ‘momentum’, rather than a temporality

represented by the moving cinematic image. Editing becomes the means to accessing

6
Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion, 2005). p91.

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

the film’s own temporality, alongside the inexorable linearity of the narrative. This

position also aligns itself with Mary Ann Doane’s assessment of film theory, from an

early theoretical and historical position. Doane suggests that the possibility of a

production of meaningful cinematic temporality can come into being via editing

technique, in particular the cut:

Ultimately it is editing, the possibility of a cut in the temporal and spatial

continuity of the shot, that is fetishised as the semiotic imperative of the
cinema. For general cultural theorists such as Walter Benjamin and
Siegfried Kracauer, the cut was the incarnation of temporality in film, and
it constituted the formal response to the restructuring of time in
modernity.7

In this respect, Marker’s film not only invests in a temporality distinguished by

the cut, and by the gaps between images, but has perhaps the most marked investment

in multiple qualities of temporality – that is, in durational distinctions between

photographs, photogrammes and cinematic images.

Filmic space is cut, framed, and pasted together in accordance with the content.

However, this content is drawn together by a voiceover that dictates the signifying

power of the image. The narrative voice forces the spectator through the images

without apparent permission of divergence or reflection, forging an inviolable bond

between narration and image seems inviolable. There is however, an affective charge

to this inviolable narrative bond – one of viol-ence. When narrative is forced and

forged onto the images, the tranquillity that might be associated with a still, non-

7
Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive
(Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2002). p184

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

moving, undynamic image is ravaged, generating an affectively dynamic image in the

face of its stillness.

This stuttering affective rhythm seems absolutely in excess of the montage

construction – it exists on a plane – indeed, a tableau – which is both within and

between the sound, image, and spectatorial reception of La Jetée. Furthermore, its

affective intensity is more specific than the violent re-production of time and space

that Walter Benjamin highlights in that well-used phrase from his essay The Work of

Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, where film “burst this prison-world

asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second” 8. Rather than a violence of the

contingent, the cinematic narrative within La Jetée forges a painterly or authorial

interpretation upon the image, re-inscribing the supposed contingency of the

photogrammatic film still onto a carefully bound cinematic object – in this case, the

protagonist’s passage through time.

This carefully composed and almost obsessively precise montage seems to be in

exact opposition to the possibilities of total and chance representation that a

contingent, moving, mass-mediated image might bring, and which early 20th century

theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin suggest9. La Jetée is totally

legible – in some ways, it is the perfect narrative, tied at both ends into a perfectly

circular story. Thus, paradoxically, the images of La Jetée, which bear such

resemblance to photographs, are, unlike the photograph, tightly bound to a narrative

construction. La Jetée’s photogrammes leave no visual or diegetic space for

8
Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, ed. by
Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999). p229
9
See Walter Benjamin, ‘A Small History of Photography’ in One-Way Street and Other Writings,
trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London and New York: Verso, 1979), p.240-57. Also
‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ and Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of film: The
Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

contingency or the chance event, the possibilities of which Benjamin expounds both

in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction and in A Small History of

Photography, and which Roland Barthes gestures towards in La Chambre claire10. In

driving away contingency via the inexorable driving forward of narrative, the

dynamic of La Jetée reveals its visual cartography as definitively, regularly,

rhythmically conceptualised.

In terms of its total legibility, forged narrative and the iconic significance of

each image to the forward thrust of the narrative, La Jetée seems to construct itself

within a highly conventional set of linear storytelling forms; closer indeed to a novel

than to a film. Philippe Dubois takes care to note in his discussion of the

photogrammatic images of La Jetée, that the subtitle “photo-roman” of the film is

altered to “ciné-roman” in the printed version of the screenplay and storyboard,

published in 1992 by Zone Books – a slippage that crosses between media and which

traverses the communicative strategies of each art form – novel, photography, film.

Dubois is quick to point out this inter-imagery, calling upon Raymond Bellour’s text,

L’Entre-Images11, while retaining his own interpretation:

[...] conformément à sa stratégie permanente de brouillage des pistes et de

refus des cloisonnements, Marker a joué d’emblée et délibérément sur le
double support (non pas ou mais et), tournant à la fois en photo et en film,
et sur les deux effets, photographiques et photogrammatiques, tressant
inextricablement un film d’entre-images entre les deux dimensions.12 (12)

10
Cf. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie, Cahiers du cinéma (Paris:
Gallimard, 1980).
11
See Raymond Bellour, L'Entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo, Les essais (Paris: Éditions de la
Différence, 2002).
12
Dubois, ed., La Jetée ou le cinématogramme de la conscience. p12

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La Jetée takes on an intermediary quality, between photography and film,

between layers of temporality, and between qualities of the cinematic. This

intermediary quality seizes upon the narrative positions of the protagonists, while also

acknowledging the crucial role of the stilled image in imbricating one layer of

temporality upon another.

AFFECT AND MATRICES OF MEMORY

In addition to the complex temporalities played out between La Jetée’s form

and content, its suzhet and fabula, another complex network of qualities enters into

and between the photographic, narrative and filmic elements of the film. Affect

saturates each image in this intensely structured photo-roman, the effects of which

emerge even on a notional level in terms of the strategies of narrative coercion

already discussed. In Barthesian terms, the studium of the photograph13 - its narrative

purposiveness, is privileged over all other aspects in Marker’s photogrammes.

Consequently, our emotional and affective journey is guided, or indeed, coerced, by

the narratival construction of image and voiceover. This coerced psychical act of

moving into and out of the past is interestingly analogous to a number of descriptions

of memory. For instance, Dubois in his article on La Jetée argues that the inviolably

ordered and precisely narrated montage of images represent a psychical matrix of

memory:

De l’enfance à l’homme, et de l’homme à l’enfance, il ne peut y avoir que

des trajets, un jet et un rejet, une pro-jetée et une re-jetée. Donc un voyage
dans le temps entre soi et soi, qui, comme tous les voyages dans le temps,
ne peut-être qu’un voyage par les images et dans la pensée, un voyage en
image-pensée. C’est ce qu’on appelle la Mémoire. Chez Marker elle
13
cf. Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire

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fonctionne exactement comme matrice narrative et discursive, tant

diégétiquement (elle est le thème du scénario) que formellement (elle
incarne l’entre-deux visuel du cinéma et de la photographie)14

Dubois thus argues that Marker’s project is a matrix of thought-images, which

move through the multidimensional narrative, discursive and diegetic theme of time

and temporality. Effectively, there is no present moment represented by the

photogrammes, as image dissolves into image, and the pace of the montage quickens

and slows. On a primary narrative level, as the protagonist’s mind (and a

photogrammatic representation of his body) moves between past, present and future,

the sole visual, rather than diegetic, clues to temporal location are the repetitions of

images – faces, birds, trees. Nonetheless, in spite of the roles of past images as

memory-images, present images as inter-mediary and inter-mediatory images, and the

ethical and philosophical complexities of the faces represented in the protagonist’s

travels into the future, each image must also inevitably be ‘read’ as part of the

sequential narrative. Each image – one by one – offers the possibility of a reading that

does not reduce itself to the individual, ‘photographic’ studium of the content of each

image, but rather the quasi-indexical traces that each prior images leaves upon the

next. The legibility of the images of La Jetée then, is entirely reliant upon the rigid

narrative, in spite of the role of individual photogrammes as thought-images in the

course of this process of narrativisation.

RHYTHM, IN/ANIMATION AND SUBJECTIVITY

In its rupture of the rhythms of cinematic convention, La Jetée approaches a

kind of anti-representation of time: a metaphysical, rather than an actual

14
Dubois, ed., La Jetée ou le cinématogramme de la conscience. p17

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

representation of movement. Even at the instant of the protagonist’s death, the image

is deeply resonant, affectively dense, but set in an impossible instant that nonetheless

fixes our gaze upon it as spectators, and retains an affective afterimage that remains

after the screen has faded to black. The impossible instant of death brings about the

culmination of a perfectly (impossibly) cyclical account of time, beginning with the

obsession of a lived moment and ending in death, sealing together the ‘sole’

protagonist’s subjectivity within his perfect psychical loop. Just as the cyclical and

circadian rhythms of human subjectivity begin and end with birth and death, with day

and night, past and present, so these cyclical rhythms dictate the beginning and end of

the protagonist’s subjectivity. As such, one could argue that La Jetée moves beyond

an illusory representation of time, whose condition of possibility is the very

impossibility of representing time itself. Instead, the film embraces this impossibility,

towards a representation of an agent of psychical time (the protagonist). La Jetée is a

film fully aware of its own impossibility, unrepresentability, and caesura between

moments.

Time and temporality are crucial in the formation of Marker’s psychical and

animate subjects. The male protagonist always remains subject to and within a series

of psychical temporalities, necessarily stilled within the photogrammatic sequence

itself. He is constantly in the process of becoming what inevitably he always was –

the signal of his own death and his own subjective coming-to-be. In the sense of a

Deleuzian becoming, his subjectivity paradoxically attempts to escape and recuperate

itself from within the inevitability of the psychical loop. The only possibility for this

is via the destruction of temporal flux, of syncopation, and rhythm itself. The still

photogram, a passage between present, past and future, serial and changing, but

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

nonetheless halted and discontinuous, is constantly in tension with the flight of

psychical subjectivity. The photogram coexists in a stuttering, rhythmic, antagonistic

relation with the psychical temporal loop that ultimately either destroys the

subjectivity of the protagonist in death, or condemns him to a cycle of constantly

interrupted becoming, where he may never be still, or indeed, just be.

Such an interpretation of La Jetée is somewhat pessimistic – the protagonist is

locked within a temporal loop that both creates and destroys his subjecthood. There is,

however, a moment within the film, whether the temporally and diegetically

structured subject is momentarily able to escape the confines of the static image.

Significantly, it is only at a moment of awakening – and indeed not the awakening of

the central male protagonist, but of the woman he amorously pursues – that the

images are elided and sped up to the extent that they teeter on the brink between

moving and still image. In this set of photogrammes, a woman stirs and begins to

wake. The extra-diegetic birdsong animates the still image even before the female

figure opens her eyes. Movement, or dynamism, then, is restored, both physically,

literally for the duration of the blink of an eye, and diegetically via narrative and

extra-diegetic sound. The movement of the woman’s eyelids from closed to open

serves both as a visual metaphor sliding between nonvision and vision, dream and

consciousness, but also opens up the possibility of an animated subject that exceeds

the photographic or photogrammatic frame, into a cinematic and temporal one.

By highlighting this particular moment between sleep and the inanimate,

between wakefulness and the animate, Marker toys with the raw material of cinema –

its moving image – in order to make a subjective encounter with this image of a

woman ‘come to life’ all the more poignant. While the male psychical subject-in-time

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

is trapped within the circadian and cyclical rhythms of a singular, temporally-closed

destiny, this woman, immobile, stilled by her unconsciousness, by the spectatorial

fetishisation of her body, and by her inability to move at will through past, present

and future, is in fact the only subject of the photogrammatic images to be able to

exceed her inviolable temporal rhythm. If La Jetée is in fact a short film about time,

then it may suggest that time travel is not an escape if one cannot escape from one’s

own temporal rhythms – be they dynamic or still.

For Victor Burgin, the female protagonist lacks subjectivity or narrative force –

instead her image is nothing more than an affectively invested object driving the

desire, and consequently the narrative, of the masculine protagonist:

Alternately fully present and fully absent, like the object in the fort/da
game, she is nothing other than that with which the man seeks to be
(re)united. Making no demands of her own, compliant signifier of the
man’s desire, she is pure function: precipitating the cause of the narrative.
For both the man and for his torturers, all the mortified and
somnambulistic movements of the underground prison camp come to turn
around this single fixed point.15

However, such a reading ignores the complexities of a ‘single fixed point’ that

is also the sole moment of animation. The wakeful, unthinking female protagonist

emerges also as an animated subject who gazes back at the viewer, about whose

psychical agency we know nothing at all. Consequently, her momentary dynamism,

and the halting rhythms of stillness and dynamism in La Jetée itself paradoxically

point towards an escape from fixity, allowing a different kind of subjectivity to

emerge. Subjectivity not rooted in the psychical temporal loop, but always moving,

15
Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film. p99

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always shifting, not even located specifically in a body in space and time, but in the

stuttering form of dynamism itself. The ecstatic moment of this relational subjectivity

is perhaps where Marker’s film can take us in viewing contemporary cinematic

theory. Indeed, Catherine Lupton highlights the moment of the female protagonist’s

awaking as a moment of dynamism and a realisation of the possibility of cinematic

transformation:

[…] for a few seconds, normal film duration is established: the woman
opens her eyes to look into the camera and smiles. The moment is echoed
on the soundtrack by a rising pitch of birdsong, which heralds this brief
flight into life, out of the fixed frames and inexorable logic of the fated
narrative.16

The transformative moment fulfils the cinematic promise of Marker’s film, a

moment exceeding the narrative temporality imposed upon the framed images. The

subtlety of movement within the frame makes this moment of dynamism unsteady

and uncertain. Paradoxically, it is a flight from the narrative voice – a momentary

diegetic and dynamic remove from the unavoidable drive toward a conclusion. But it

is also the ultimately cathected moment of cinematic desire – the woman’s partially

occluded face is unavoidably fetishised via the close-up, immobilised in order to

retain the precarious delineation between stillness and movement. Although this

moment of dynamism escapes the inexorability of the narrative, it is still party to the

same limitations to representations of temporality in the moving image.

By contrast, D.N. Rodowick describes a kind of subjective temporal freedom in

the very stillness of the image in La Jetée:

16
Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. p91

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Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

Movement, drained from the image and divorced from the representation
of action, has relinquished its role as the measure of time […] The painful
binding of the subject – physically stilled no less than movement is frozen
in the image – liberates him briefly in time, just as the image of time is
released from its subordination to movements linked to physical actions17

If La Jetée functions as a presentation of cinematic dynamics or movement, but

which does not aim to represent, then Rodowick argues that, in La Jetée, subjective

temporality is released from its binds to the representational image. In other words,

there is some subjective release when ‘the image of time’ no longer needs be linked to

the movement of time – the image takes on a different, subjective, affective quality.

To extend this line of thought, the female protagonist’s awakening presages an

ecstatic moment of escape from the fixed rhythmic exchange of one still image for

another. In effect, only she is capable of moving beyond the inexorably committed

temporality that constitutes the male protagonist’s world.

Temporality is crucial in the formation of Marker’s animate and psychical on-

screen subjects – whether this is a cinematic temporality in the case of the former,

where the woman is an animated subject that gazes back at the viewer, or a psychical

‘function’ of temporality animated in order to disturb the photogrammatic sequence.

The still photogramme, as a passage between present, past and future, is both serial

and changing, but nonetheless, halted and non-continuous, and is constantly in tension

with the psychical temporal loop of the central protagonist. Consequently, Marker’s

film enables a loosening of notions of the cinematic, of subjectivity, of the

intersections where these two meet amongst a matrix of temporalities that permeate

the material image, the temporal gaps between images, and the durational experience
17
D.N. Rodowick, Gilles Deleuze’s Time Machine (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1997).
p4

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Author’s Original Manuscript: this book chapter was published in Rhythms: Essays in French
Literature, Thought and Culture, edited by Elisabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

that we have as viewers watching the film. Perhaps the most that we can hope the

rhythms of La Jetée can do is to in order to shed a little more light onto the flickering

screen of cinematic temporality and its subjective encounters.

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Author’s Original Manuscript: this book chapter was published in Rhythms: Essays in French
Literature, Thought and Culture, edited by Elisabeth Lindley and Laura McMahon (Oxford: Peter
Lang, 2008) pp.217-232

FILM DETAILS:

Chris Marker, La Jetée, (France: Argos Films, 1962), 28 mins

USEFUL READING

Nora M. Alter, Chris Marker. ed. by James Naremore, Contemporary Film Directors
(Urbana; Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2006).

Barthélemy Amengual, 'Le Présent du futur: sur La Jetée', Positif, 1997 1997, pp. 96-
98.

Roland Barthes, La Chambre claire: note sur la photographie, Cahiers du cinéma

(Paris: Gallimard, 1980).

Raymond Bellour, L'Entre-images: photo, cinéma, vidéo, Les essais (Paris: Éditions
de la Différence, 2002).

Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in

Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt (London: Pimlico, 1999).

Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the
Archive (Cambridge, Mass.; London: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Philippe Dubois, ed., La Jetée ou le cinématogramme de la conscience. ed. by

Philippe Dubois. Vol. 6, Théorème (Paris: Presses Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2002).

Patrick ffrench, 'The Memory of the Image in Chris Marker's La Jetée', French
Studies: A Quarterly Review, 59 (Jan 2005), 31-37.

Catherine Lupton, Chris Marker: Memories of the Future (London: Reaktion, 2005).

Chris Marker, La Jetée: ciné-roman (New York: Zone Books, 1992).

Laura Mulvey, Death 24X a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London:
Reaktion, 2006).

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