Apr 4
Patricio Guzmán - The Battle of Chile: Part II (1976)
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Patricio Guzmán - The Battle of Chile: Part II (1976)
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La Jetée (1962) dir. Chris Marker
La jetée (1962)
Chris Marker
La Jetée, Chris Marker, 1962
Le Mystère Koumiko (1965), dir. Chris Marker
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“I Had Four Drome Diaries”, Chris Marker (1966)
Chris Marker, Letter from Siberia, 1957
Chris Marker's notebooks from the sequencing of La Jetée
In the upper level photo classes that I teach I give a lecture on the different approaches to sequencing, and on that day we watch Chris Marker's La Jetée, which almost none of them have ever seen. How many different ways are there to sequence a body of work, a book, a film? Narratively? Chronologically? By correspondence? Juxtapositions? Eccentrically? I usually don't point out that the film is made entirely of (422) still images until we start talking about it, and they realize that they didn't even catch that, as the film is so absorbing. What changes for the viewer if Marker makes a film of still images, versus using moving picture film? How does it change the experience of the film? How does repetition get used to memorable effect? What is a photo-roman and does it change how we view the still image, or how we view traditional moving film images?
What is a contact sheet when it is made and used in the service of a photo-roman?
Both still and moving film is concerned with the property of time; film theorist André Bazin remarked that photography "embalms time," whereas cinema "...presents an image of duration, a visual unfolding of time." The making of La Jetée subverts both genres, as film theorist Campbell Mah satisfyingly points out in his analysis of the film, where he writes: "By incorporating conventions of both photography and film, La Jetée exists as a middle ground that both self-consciously subverts and plays with the diametric oppositions between the two mediums..."
So how is Chris Marker subverting the form of contact sheets in his construction of La Jetée through a series of still photographs, with the contact sheets serving as a storyboarding device for this self-reflexive short film? It's an invigorating thing to look at and think about. On the left, the protagonist is equipped with a device that blocks his sight but provides access to other times, both future and past. The cut out frames suggest a roving around the subject, to capture the events from both an objective "omniscient" POV and from that of the person instigating the experiment, and observing his patient's reactions both up close and from a slight distance. In the mock-up in the in the upper right, where the man inhabits the dream space with this unknown woman that he encounters repeatedly when in the experiment, we have three POVs represented: his, hers and the objective, pulled-back camera angle that looks at them both simultaneously. We see each of them looking, and separately, but not what they are looking at. While the still image is definitive, it is not all-knowing.