Film, Photograph, or Novel? Looking at Chris Marker’s La JetĂ©e in G. Uriel OrlowÂ’s “Photography as Cinema: La JetĂ©e and the Redemptive Powers of the Image” and Jean Louis ScheferÂ’s On La JetĂ©e”

Lisa Haegele & Victor Englund

 

In his article “Photography as Cinema: La Jetée and the Redemptive Powers of the Image,” G. Uriel Orlow discusses the redemptive power of the image in Chris Marker´s film La Jetée where the distinction between photography and cinema is no longer apparent. His goal is to “show how La Jetée powerfully turns this quest for an essence into a question of essence, defying the laws and definitions of both photography and film.” Orlow means that La Jetée, being composed almost entirely of still images, but projected as a film, liberates the image from the ontological constraints and thus gives the image a revolutionary or redemptive aspect. The still images in La Jetée are not only photographic, but profoundly cinematic with a syntagmatic relation between the images. They expose the illusion of duration in the cinematic movement, illustrating how cinematic movement is nothing more than a “very fast succession of immobile still images (frames).” In La Jetée the very core of cinema, movement, is exposed as a series of still images and is thereby deconstructed. In contrast to mainstream cinema, which seeks to hide the seams that hold the images together, La Jetée unveils the nature of the cinema as a series of individual moments in which there is in fact no movement at all.

 

According to Orlow, Marker´s film proposes a different kind of temporality that does not rely on movement and combines the temporalities of both photography and film. The photographic “this was” and “perhaps still is” is combined with the cinematic “this is” or “will be,” while the past, present and future are united in a holistic conception of temporality. Orlow refers to Gilles Deleuze’s conception of the “crystal-image” to describe the temporality in La Jetée, in which time, “freed” from its subordination to movement, is present in the image like “facets on a crystal.” La Jetée is therefore a “photograph-as-film” that encompasses both cinematic aspects of time as a present which always passes by as well as photographic aspects of temporality as a preserved past. Using Benjamin’s terms, Orlow argues that this multi-temporality can be described as dialectical. Benjamin defines the dialectical image as one “in which the past coincides with the now and in a flash becomes a constellation”. According to Orlow, this is what grants the image La Jetée its “redemptive” power, namely, that it is transported out of time and “emancipated” from the “tyranny of the present.” Film defined as “cinema-as-a-series-of-photographs” has gained autonomy not only from movement but also from time. The film is thus also able to demonstrate how meaning is produced, which does not take place within the image itself but between the image and another, or in the montage of images. This conception of image and gap correspond in many ways to the concept of memory, which is also a construction of images and gaps. We might want to ask ourselves after considering Orlow’s argument whether a photograph can be cinematic in the same way as La Jetée is photographic. If yes, what would the photograph look like?

 

While Orlow maintains that the image in Marker’s film has a “redemptive” function in that it is freed from the constraints of time, Jean Louis Schefer argues in his more skeptical reading in “On La Jetée” that the collision of past and present, image and time results in the “tragic” death of the subject, who, trapped in the images of his memory, is unable to write these images down into a coherent and linear form of narration. Referring to the film as a “photo-roman,” Schefer sets up his argument by claiming that La Jetée is a hybrid genre of photographic images and the written novel. For Schefer, the voice-over narration constitutes the “novelistic” element of the film, which is juxtaposed with the fragmentary visual images and their gaps that represent the subject’s “fragile,” “unpredictable,” and non-linear recollection of memory. It is this inability to translate image into text that results in the protagonist’s ultimate death.

 

Schefer argues that the subject in La Jetée is able to recollect and organize the images of his memory only within the science-fictional, experimental situation, in which time gets “used up.” Because these images are no longer subject to the constraints of time, as Orlow also argues, a surge of images is released from captivity in the past and the mystery of the “self” can be discovered among these images. According to Schefer, the “experimental subject” is “trapped in a labyrinth of memory” that is constituted only by images and not by time. Schefer also maintains, however, that these images constitute the “raw material” of temporal synthesis. In other words, the subject’s memory is “pent-up time” that has not been configured into a linear narrative. This kind of time does not frame actions or events, but rather it consists of personal sentiments. For this reason, Schefer claims that La Jetée is more of an outline for a novel rather than a film. It provides content as images that the narrator wishes to translate into narration, but, because the images are released from time and inhabit a space in which they may freely and unpredictably interact with one another, the film ultimately proves that it cannot anchor them within a coherent narrative form. The novelistic element of the film even fails to stabilize the protagonist, who himself becomes an image trapped within his own memory. Schefer thus concludes that the narrator is the protagonist who, driven by the “humanistic” desire to discover the nature of his self, enters the visual world of his memory and cannot survive this collision into the past, that is, the collision of the verbal and the visual, time and image. Unable to write down his images, the protagonist, swallowed-up in the visual world of his own memory, dies.

 

Schefer’s article raises interesting questions with regards to the relationship between the photographic image and text. He privileges the verbal over the visual in his argument, claiming that the survival of the protagonist is contingent on the narrative expression of his visual memories. Similarly, while the visual should be translated into the verbal, the verbal should not be consumed by the visual, as it would result in the subject’s death. In this respect, Schefer sets up a sort of antagonistic relationship between the visual and the verbal. Does this offer us new perspectives on other works that feature both photographic images and text, if we agree with his argument? Do we agree that the voice-over narration is “novelistic?” Why might an “outline of a novel” be presented in the cinematic medium? Lastly, do we, like Orlow, celebrate the emancipation of the image from linear narrative in its incorporation of present, past, and future, or do we, like Schefer, lament the swallowing-up of narrative in the chaotic world of the visual as represented in Marker’s film?

 

Works Cited

Orlow, G. Uriel. “Photography as Cinema: La Jetée and the Redemptive Powers of the Image.” Creative Camera 359 (1999): 14-17.

Smith, Paul, ed. and trans. The Enigmatic Body: Essays on the Arts by Jean Louis Schefer. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.