academic writing

A Philosophical Analysis of Chris Marker’s Masterpiece Film, La Jetée (1962)

1.Memory as an Image:
One could say that the opening title-card of La Jetée captures the heart of the film. “This is the story of a man”, it reads, “marked by an image from his childhood”. Upon my first viewing the choice of words seemed ordinary, but upon my second, the nuanced nature of the vocabulary made itself visible. Why has Marker chosen the word ‘image’ instead of ‘memory’? I tried to equate the two and got inclined to the idea that every memory in its essence is more of an image than it is real.

As John Berger articulates it in his book/TV series, Ways Of Seeing, 'An image is a sight which has been recreated or reproduced ... which has been detached from the place and time in which it first made its appearance’. Similarly, a memory is a sight stolen from our perceived reality and recreated repeatedly in our minds. They shape-shift over time, warping to the tune of our desires and fears to act as an antidote for the suffering of the present.

In La Jetée’s post-apocalyptic world, hope is scarce. Humans live in a subterranean world, the ‘kingdom of rats’, and are attempting to save their species by travelling through time. The atmosphere is bleak and lifeless, the world above is ravaged to ruins by nuclear war. The world below is divided into scientists who spy on dreams and conduct experiments for time-travel, and the lab-rats, prisoners-like experimentees, live under the thumb of the tyrannical scientists.
Even though humankind survived, almost no humanity remains. It is in a cold world like this where our nameless protagonist’s memory serves as a lifeboat – not just for him but for humankind as a whole.

The idea of memories being shape-shifting lifeboats which carry us through the many storms of life is one that stayed with me after watching the film and reading Coates’ essay. It places the soul of a memory not in its legitimacy or exactness to reality, but in what remains of a memory when the tides of time wash over it. What we remember, how we remember it, what we hold on to… Hence, characterizing memories as ever-evolving images enriches their value and amplifies their true nature rather than debasing them.

After our protagonist is chosen, his memories resurface from the depths of his consciousness on the tenth day. Frames of simple life emerge – which are pressed upon as being ‘real’ – of birds, a bedroom, a happy day. Coates’ observes that the emphasis on their realness only bring to focus that they are in fact, images, a shadow of a reality that once was. It is an instance of the film speaking to us in a false tongue to unveil the truth.


2. The Mind as the Time-Travelling Machine:
La Jetée doesn’t use grand, peculiar-looking vehicles which travel through wormholes as a time-travelling machine. It uses the most accessible yet complex device we have at hand, the human mind. (Coates, it is only the mind that travels). Instead of aggrandizing the sci-fi concept by making it reliant on hyper-technology, Marker makes us look into and avail our interior worlds, which are often far more advanced than the instruments we build.

And in our protagonist’s time machine, the fuel is love, which propels him into the past and enlivens his memories to such an extent that he can revisit them. It is the image of the mysterious woman, who manifests herself in his memory, that catches a hold on him in this otherwise disorienting world. The time-traveller is experiencing the enigmatic phenomenon of jamais vu. He cannot place himself, both in time and space, yet everything is uncannily familiar, and the only one he is sure he knows is the woman. It is strange how the one thing he is sure about is not a fact, like the name of the city he is in, but a feeling. This is when our memories take the shape of dreams, when they are both woven of the same mystical fabric.

It is frequently in dreams that we know something with absolute assurance to be true, a knowledge that comes from deep intuition rather than logic or reason and is untainted with doubt. Often-times, this self-knowledge needn’t be proved or even communicated. It is true and we know it in our hearts.


3.Love as a Transcendent of Time:
Their love blossoms in an ethereal realm – one where the river of time freezes into an icy lake – a place unbound by strains of the past or the future. A love growing in such place is purer, stronger. It speaks through glances and silences rather than words. It’s sensuality is palpable, even if not visible. It is their fortune to fall in love in that unpolluted realm. Perhaps it is imperative too, for only a love like that could transcend time. Only it could, even if for a brief second, bring the film, a staccato of still photographs, to life, when the woman looks at us and softly blinks. That pivotal moment in the film is also one of those rare occurrences, when the medium is speaking to us as clearly as the content. The abrasive cutting between frames in previous scenes, like when the syringe is injected in the man’s arm, now softens into dissolving overlaps of the woman’s tender movements in bed. It is an imagery of pure beauty. She looks like a porcelain statue gradually coming to life to the crescendo of the morning chatter of birds. A moment of love, of true aliveness, as compared to the death-like stillness of the film. (Coates, “The very form of the film is an imprint of death”).


4.The Protagonist as Sisyphus:
During the course of the film, the narrative is a deceivingly linear, until the very end when we realise its circular form. (Coates,
“As beginning and end interlock, the open linearity upon which time- travel feeds collapses into a circularity that is strangely satisfying, even as it entraps us”). Not only is it circular though, but Sisyphean in nature. The circle is merciless and eternal, akin to a noose, which the protagonist must put around his neck incessantly, but never have the gratifying taste of death. He is not doomed to die, but rather to live forever. Under the thumb of the scientists and separated from his love. It is this infinite toil which is the real tragedy, not his demise at the end. This gives the film its existential core, since the ‘to live is to suffer’ philosophy can be found from Buddhism texts to Nietzsche’s writing. Evidence for this can be found in the scene when the narrator describes the protagonist’s predicament whilst being experimented on, “He doesn’t die or go mad… he suffers”. It is also where the second part of the title-card comes into play. The protagonist is marked by the image of the man getting shot. Like a curse bestowed upon him, a permanent scar he must bear. His obsession with the image is one he cannot escape, perhaps because, as Coates hypothesises, it is the image of his death, but even though he doesn’t know this consciously, it is the subliminal reason for its allure, the reason he cannot let go of it. (Coates, “He haunts-and is haunted by-the scene of his future death; like all of us, he is so habituated to living life in a linear fashion that he can make no sense of the vouchsafed glimpse of the future.)

5.Perhaps to Live (and Love) is Better:
With the theme of existentialism, always come sub-themes of death and mortality. The lovers’ ideal day at the Natural History Museum, one which radiates a soothing happiness compared to the otherwise arid psychological landscape of the film, gives us a sense of relief, and perhaps even an opposing view to the protagonists Sisyphean plight. The two gaze at these ‘eternal creatures’, frozen in time, immortal. But their immortality comes at the cost of non-existence. They are only immortal in their immobility, deathless in their death. Hovering in the liminal space between being and non-being. So, perhaps it is better to live, even if it is to wander within the labyrinth of ungraspable memories and float back and forth through the currents of time. It comes with the reward of moments of solace, when he can gaze at the nape of his lover when she lifts her hair or wake up next to her on a musical morning.


6. La Jetée as Quintessential Cinema:
Throughout this essay I have called La Jetée a film, even though it looks like a photo-montage and speaks like an Orwellian novella. Yet, knowing that the form isn’t traditionally cinematic, all its strings entwine together to create the very DNA of cinema. It bifurcates the two elemental components of film – sight and sound, into two separate beings. While the images are still, the sound flows, often overlapped, in crescendos, in whispers or heartbeats. (Coates, “The images may be frozen, but the words one hears are not. The images float upon the soundtrack like ice flows upon a river”).
But this separation doesn’t weaken the visual or narrative structure of the film. Instead, one can see Marker’s bold leap in avant-garde storytelling, where form and content mirror each other (Coates, “The use of still photographs creates a sense that all that remains after the disaster of World War III are the fragments of a narrative. The very form of the film is the imprint of death”). His artistic choice to abandon the motion picture and adopt moving-still images is what makes the story impactful and highlights the themes it offers. And as the highest reward, it has brought La Jetée an everlasting spot on the list of timeless films.