247 by Jonathan Crary

Author:Jonathan Crary
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books
Published: 2013-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FOUR

Chris Marker’s La jetée (1962) opens in a post-apocalyptic future where surviving humans inhabit cramped underground spaces beneath destroyed cities in permanent exile from daylight. The authorities in this near future are desperately experimenting with primitive forms of time travel to locate help for their beleaguered existence. Part of the crisis is the deterioration and failure of memory in all but a few individuals. The protagonist, and subject of the experiments, has been chosen for the tenaciousness with which he has been able to retain an image from the past. Clearly, La jetée is not a story of the future but a meditation on the present, in this case the early 1960s, which Marker portrays as a dark time, shadowed by the death camps, the devastation of Hiroshima, and torture in Algeria. Like contemporary work by Alain Resnais (Hiroshima, mon amour), Jacques Rivette (Paris nous appartient), Joseph Losey (These Are the Damned), Fritz Lang (Die Tausend Augen des Dr Mabuse), Jacques Tourneur (The Fearmakers), and numerous others, the film seems to ask: How does one remain human in the bleakness of this world when the ties that connect us have been shattered and when malevolent forms of rationality are powerfully at work? Although Marker’s answer to such a question remains unspecified, La jetée affirms the indispensability of the imagination for collective survival. For Marker, this implies a mingling of the visionary capacities of both memory and creation, and it occurs in the film around the image of the unsighted, blindfolded protagonist. Although most of the film, in its narrative context, consists of remembered or imagined images, one of its original premises is this model of a seer whose normative visual abilities have been deactivated in circumstances evoking the torture and inhumane medical experiments of the war and in the years that followed.

Marker here departs from understandings of “inner” vision that presuppose the autonomy and self-sufficiency of a voyant. In La jetée the seer’s subjective freedom is constrained, even partly directed, by the external compulsion of his circumstances, and his extraordinary recovery (or creation) of mental images occurs in an ambiguous overlap of scarcity and fear, on one hand, and the marvelous flux of a “vie intérieure” on the other. Marker is clearly familiar with previous explorations of reverie and daydream (from Rousseau to Nerval, Proust, Bachelard, and others), but the reverie of La jetée’s protagonist is not simply an aleatory suspension of self in a stream of consciousness. Instead, his drift between images is always counterbalanced by the exigencies of a doomed present, by the anxiety of a state of emergency, and by the application of biopower to compel his mnemonic cooperation. Marker may well be alluding to the Surrealist poet Robert Desnos, known for his ability to fall into deep trance-like sleeps, during which he uttered verbal outpourings of dream imagery. The mediumistic Desnos, who hosted a popular radio program on dreams in the 1930s, was condemned to a situation not unlike that depicted in the opening of

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