#chris marker

La jetée (1962)

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..."