Synopsis for Sept. 3-5, 2008, "La jetée and the photographemic heart of cinema"

We spent this week discussing the experimental French film, La jetée (1962). The film begins at an airport runway. We witness a sequence of black-and-white still shots in which we see a young boy, whose memory this scene is supposed to represent. He sees a beautiful young woman and what he later realizes to be the death of a man. The background music is a choral piece (evocative of a requiem, as Dan Campbell pointed out).

I suggested that what we are being presented in Marker's film is an allegory for film itself; I also asked you to consider why Marker decides to present us his film in a series of still images. Here is what you said.

The Discussion

I first showed the very first scene, in which a camera zooms out of the shot of an airport pier. As Jen Rukavina explained, the scene thus creates the sense of movement even though we are actually inside a still shot. The film creates the illusion of properly cinematic movement. We are thus given an optical illusion, much like the optical illusion we will examine next week at the beginning of "Jose Chung's From Outer Space." Already, the film could be said thus to deconstruct the medium of film, since the opening shot thus reminds us that ALL film is, in fact, an optical illustion: a series of still shots made to assume the appearance of movement. Robin Johnson added that the illusion goes further: it appears as if we are in a position of mastery with relation to the scene (we are above the runway in a position of overview, as Andrea Lemieux pointed out) and it appears as if we are going somewhere yet, in the end, we go nowhere, much like our main character who thinks he is moving forward when in fact he is fixated on one moment from his past; I suggested that, since the camera is moving backwards along a runway (itself a metaphor for narrative, as Rachel Newbury pointed out), we have here a metaphor for time travel. Though we are at the beginning of the narrative, the film thus suggests movement backwards in time. Joshua Wolf also pointed out the irony inherent in the fact that airports are places where one both begins and ends one's narratives of travel: as we come to see, that undecidability is important here since the next scene will give us at once the beginning and end of a character's life. (The child is actually seeing his own death on the jetty.) We may even have an aural analog here since it's hard to tell from the soundtrack whether we are hearing planes taking off or landing, whether we're at the beginning or end of a plane's journey. Jake Elliott and Greg Lindberg explored other ways that sound is used to create the film illusion of temporal movement. In various ways, then, the discourse here perfectly mirrors or literalizes various story elements. Add to all that the fact that La jetée, a film all about psychoanalytical fixation on a moment of childhood, is discursively literalized here through the fixed image of the still photo, as Joshua Wolf explained, just as regression is here literalized as time travel.

We also discussed other ways that the discourse mirrors the story in the film. The first time our protagonist time-travels, we are for example given a sequence of images: real children, real birds, real cats, real graves, and then the jetty from the start of the film. Each image is separated out by a black screen. As Brittany Lock argued, we are thus given in short and by metaphorical association the full circle of the narrative from childhood to death. Indeed, the cut from graves to the jetty suggests a metaphorical alignment which turns out to be quite literal: the jetty does represent the protagonist's death. In cinema, such editing often suggests a metaphorical relation between the two disparate scenes thus spliced together. (Martin Scorsese calls any edit the "opening of a third eye" because of such metaphorical implications.)

Amber Worman also gave us a lovely reading of the main character's blinders, which he is forced to wear through the experiments. The blinders strip the character of his present, as the narrator states, allowing him to open his third eye, in a different sense than the one above. (Such a third eye is literally represented by the time-travellers he meets from the future.) The third eye thus serves as a metaphor for clairvoyance or the stepping outside of our present reality. As Amber argued, the same situation exists for the audience: when we watch a film we too are invited to strip ourselves of the present (the reason why the lights go down in a cinema at the start of a film), so that we can travel to the time of the film. As Constance Penley argued at the very start of your reading assignment, in this way all film could be called a time-travel device.

I pointed out how the opening sequence highlights the ways that temporal structures are encoded even within still images: not only hair blowing, etc. but also the ways that any still image implies a whole slough of temporal signatures (the gaze of the characters, the implied movement between elements within the frame, even the movement of our eye across the still canvas). Consider the last image before the outbreak of WWWIII: a blurred image, which could be suggestive of the very POV of the subject. Either the camera itself must be moving to achieve that effect, or we could be seeing the falling perspective of the dying subject, an interpretation that is underlined by the black screen of the next shot (and the two deaths encoded here: the death of the subject and the death of humanity because of WWWIII).

Also of interest in the opening scene is the fact that the effect here (the subject's death) could be said to precede the cause (his subsequent life after WWWIII), much as the effect precedes the cause in that other time-loop narrative we saw last week, Star Trek: TNG's "Cause and Effect."

I tied our discussion finally to the Constance Penley reading. What we are being given here is literally a "spatialization of time." Narrative, as we've been discovering, is not the same as life. It desires to step outside of the flow of chronological time (out of what Penley, following Frank Kermode, calls chronos) in order to achieve the knowledge that comes from being outside of time (or kairos). The desire, in other words, is to close the circle of narrative (and thus to give it meaning) rather than to see it flow forward as a straight or squiggly line. That opposition is represented metaphorically here: the straight line of the airport runway vs. the closed circle of the tree rings. Our protagonist, who can time-travel, stands metaphorically outside of time, which is one reason he points to a space outside the tree. What the tree and also the jetty give us is the "spatialization of time" that Constance Penley describes in our reading for the week.

And, as we've learned from Peter Brooks, we can align the pleasure principle with the chronological line and the death drive or repetition compulsion with that repetitive circling around a central trauma (which ultimately represents our fascination with death). The tree rings are a perfect metaphor for this spatialization of time. Indeed, we could even say that the rings even exemplify trauma since they are caused by the seasonal repetition of winter, a literal trauma for the lifespan of the tree. That desire to return to a moment of the past, to the moment of our fixation, is impossible. We are driven to repeat the moment because of the death drive; however, as La jetée makes clear, to achieve it finally is akin to experiencing one's own death once and for all. Indeed, the psychoanalytical drama here is further underlined by having the instrument of death be a man, who thus comes to stand in for the psychoanalytical figure of the "Law" or "Name of the Father." We are thus given a perfect psychoanalytical allegory for the mechanism of the Oedipus complex. (More on that later by way of Buffy.)

The final point that needs to be made is that, as Garrett Stewart argued in our readings for Friday, La jetée here is encoding the very history of film, a point suggested in class by Sarah Wright and Emily Ponder (all of whom discussed the black-and-white still medium the film presents us). The opposition of film to photo also exemplifies the difference between the pastness of photography (especially B&W photography, as Amber Worman and Brittany Lock pointed out) and what Constance Penley termed the "'here-nowness' of the illusionistic (filmic) movement" (139). The film is self-conscious in many other ways too, of course. For one, the events themselves could be interpreted either as a long subjective treatment (the protagonist is only dreaming these events, as he suggests on several occasions) or as an actual objective treatment (he is really travelling through time). As Garrett Stewart put it our Wednesday reading, we are "in a narrative pitched between science fiction thriller and existential reverie" (297).

The one time in the film when we move from still shots into regular film is in the hauntingly lyrical moment when the love object's eyes open and look directly into the camera—another superb example of the film's self-consciousness. The one point when we move from the static frames of the dead photo into the apparent continuity of a film's frames (the here-nowness of film) is at the moment when the protagonist's desire is consummated: the woman in bed waking from her sleep. Ecstasy (Greek, ex-tasis, meaning "out of place") comes to represent the one moment when our protagonist is most purely "in the moment" of the past. And yet, the moment of consummation is also the beginning of the end. The moment thus remains in tension, Robin Johnsen and Amber Worman argued, between the metonymic forward movement of the pleasure principle and the repetititive insistence of the death drive, which is the result of attempting to reconstruct a moment from the past upon which one has become fixed/fixated.