Multi-column

Surprised by La Jetée

Highlights

id745967289

No less than its inspiration, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), La Jetée demands equal attention to the elusive image and to the dilemmas and rewards of its pursuit—dilemmas and rewards that circle the stubborn problem of authorship and the limits of narrative surprise. La Jetée’s great theme of the transporting power of images finds striking form in the film’s concatenation of still shots, but the voice-over narration never fully prepares for these shots, which therefore always verge on surprise encounters. 🔗

id745967410

As the priority of plot recedes, so does the stability of the film as an object, releasing not just local analysis but the general critical scene from the fantasy of the author in various guises. 🔗

id745982827

The image I saw haunts the end of La Jetée, an apparition that weirdly doubles the film’s fatalistic narrative. Recall the looping plot: a boy witnesses the death of a strange man on an airport observation deck. After an apocalyptic war, he grows up in a prison camp where, due to his strong attachment to this scene, his captors select him for involuntary time travel. What he remembers vividly is the face of a woman who also witnessed the death at the airport, a woman who for that reason becomes his tether to the past. After many visits with her, interrupted by a world-saving trip to the future, he eventually goes back to the moment at the airport he witnessed as a boy, only to realize that he himself was the strange man and is now going to die. It is with this narrative twist that my image surprised me: as the man died, I saw the grim reaper facing me on the observation deck, or so I thought. And for years I carried a memory of this figure so vivid that it served as the memory of the film, a kind of emblem in my mind of the experience of seeing La Jetée for the first time. 🔗

id745983300

What I thought was the grim reaper facing me I could now see to be the time traveler facing away—an image of death, yes, but one suffered by the traveler, not claimed by the reaper (the small figure is the woman). 🔗

id745983301

🔗

id745984878

Like fishstick Jesus, the reaper raises the obvious problem of psychological projection, of the tendency to see what one wants or fears in images, especially the kinds of significance that support one’s prevailing beliefs. And like the duck-rabbit, the reaper cannot appear apart from its counterpart. Seeing it is not a choice between something and nothing, signal and noise, but between something and something more, something improbably co-existent. 🔗

id745985813

one particular example from Strangers on a Train, in which a minor character can be seen to act out an unsung lyric from the tune playing on the soundtrack, a performance of course visible only to a viewer 🔗

id745986173

His lack of searching lends suddenness to his discovery, but only in his mind when he instantly became aware and in ours when he shows us. My case is different, for I have known about the reaper much longer than I have known that it has not been widely seen by others. I had to discover my discovery, discover that the reaper was a discovery. As I have detailed, this process has been slow and complicated. But the image itself partakes of a double suddenness unlike what Miller finds in Hitchcock. 🔗

id745986319

a cut to the Grim Reaper also presents a special kind of suddenness, for when it happens it is already too late. Someone is about to be — or already is — dead. This is the speed of the uncanny, so fast that time rushes backward to meet what will have been the case all along. The temporal paradox of this “back to the future” formulation performs something of the ambiguity that Mark Currie finds in the future perfect, “the tense that refers to something that lies ahead and yet which is already complete.” (12) In this way the reaper’s message reinforces much of the poignancy of the time traveler’s story, who even as he dies, merely catches up to the death he has died already at the beginning of the film. Late for his own death, our hero is for us long gone. At most we can chase him back to the beginning of the film and lose him all over again. 🔗

id745986570

The reaper does not belong to the traveler, the traveler belongs to it, for the initial assumption that the reaper presides over the traveler’s untimely death does not fully describe its mission. On the contrary, it seems equally necessary to acknowledge that the reaper, inhabiting and redirecting the traveler’s body, thereby appears through him to address us. 🔗

id745987165

what makes the surprise of art inexhaustible is the democracy of information—with no external authority to impose hierarchy, details endlessly re-present themselves to reward new viewings. Only the idea of the author can threaten this. 🔗

id745987931

“the work of art is never available to a first reading [and] it’s never exactly available to a second reading either” 🔗

id745988067

Calling a first viewing of a film “experience” and a second “understanding,” Michaels argues that it is only through the second that we truly apprehend form 🔗

id745988266

like the audience of a magic trick, we collude in the surprise ending, and that this collusion establishes a relationship, an imagined bond with the artist—weaker, perhaps, than the effect of hidden pictures, but often strong enough for a lifetime’s loyalty. Why? Because what gets twisted in these twists is not just plot but time, which had been indifferently passing us by, until the surprise reveals in a flash that all of this has been arranged for us. More powerful than the grim reaper, such intention reads as love, and waves of sociability surge outward as members of the audience compare their appreciation of the stable form that would seem to guarantee it. 🔗

id745988635

of “a peculiar sense of ‘suddenly’ — one that speaks more to surprise at an unexpected and radical shift in the ontological status of the image and our relation to it than to a more superficial narrative or formal surprise.” 🔗

id745988679

In Sobchack’s words:

everything radically changes, and we and the image are reoriented in relation to each other. The space between the camera’s (and the spectator’s) gaze and the woman becomes suddenly habitable, informed with the real possibility of bodily movement and engagement, informed with lived temporality rather than eternal timelessness…. In sum, what in the film has been previously a mounting accumulation of nostalgic moments achieves substantial and present presence in its sudden and brief accession to momentum and the consequent potential for effective action. 🔗

id745988814

Like me, the time traveler can be taken for a lonely lunatic, seeing things that are not there. Perhaps neither of us really gets anywhere. But if I am interested in securing a common viewing on new terms, that interest merely follows the film’s strongest cues. After all, why does he remember the woman to begin with? Because they saw something together. She was there on the jetty when he was a boy and a man died. When he finds her in his time travels, the basis of their relationship does not change: they look at things, tourists of a frozen world. What they see reminds us of the value of looking at this film again. 🔗

id745989051

What they do not see, at the end on the observation deck, complicates the relation between story and image that might otherwise feel so binding. The narrator tells us that the time traveler realizes that the boy must be there, but this claim is only a logical deduction, for, as Janet Harbord has noted, he is not in the visual field. 🔗

id745989414

Thus we might wonder whether the pseudo-surprise ending, as old as Oedipus, that the object of the man’s quest is himself, does not yield its narcissistic fatalism to the boy’s truly surprising absence. Instead, it is the girl’s appearance that haunts us. As the boy’s substitute, the girl short-circuits the plot, opening up the past for non-repetition. As the reaper’s partner, she restores the end of the film to our viewing present — not, as in Sobchack, by way of the transition from photography to cinema, but as a startling excess to the fiction. In the suddenly un-impoverished moment, we face the deeper mysteries of photographic sociability and address. 🔗

id745989745

🔗

id745989770

Obstruction is at issue in this conversation, both the kind to respect and the kind to remove. As an adult hand clasps hers, she in turn clutches a purse, the insides of which pose a metaphysical conundrum about the limits of seeing things in films: the purse is in the film, but what is in the purse is not. It is a hole not just in the diegesis but in our experience, and it reticulates mystery itself. Impervious to investigation, it will not surrender its contents to any amount of rummaging through this film, just as, in rehearsing the story, we will only ever encounter the girl’s non-assimilation. 🔗

id745989910

When photographic eyes hold our gaze, it is not just that they fail to see us; it is that, raising their sights to the future, they see that we see their failure to see us. They know that their gaze will journey blindly across time to confront sighted eyes, and they appeal to those eyes with their gaze. This staggered encounter is a form of telepathy, a meeting of minds closed tight as any purse, for what’s shared is an awareness of photography as such, in all its fundamental asymmetry. If a young girl’s awareness remains relatively vague, prompting a look of troubled concentration, that look must perfectly mirror my own as I consider what she is doing in this film. 🔗

id745990258

If there is no difference between seeing death and seeing nothing because death and nothing are the same thing, then all the difference resides in the way we translate the experience of something into conversation. Such is the opportunity of any challenging image, a chance to chase the unexpected together. 🔗

id745990366

Ariella Azoulay offers this situation’s best description: it “takes into account all the participants in photographic acts — camera, photographer, photographed subject, and spectator — approaching the photograph (and its meaning) as an unintentional effect of the encounter between all of these. None of these have the capacity to seal off this effect and determine its sole meaning.” (26) Thus we can have the reaper or not, but the question is ultimately social, not so different from deciding which films to watch together. And if we do choose to keep watching La Jetée, it is well worth attending to the claims of this girl. If all went well, she would be in her fifties now, a bit older than I am, and yet in every viewing she has remained a child, poised to veer off into unknown futures. Replacing not just the boy in the plot, or the reaper in the image, but the now dead director in the world, the girl thus carries the surprise of the film that she endlessly exceeds. 🔗

id745990470

When an interviewer did ask Marker questions about his older films, the director replied that “If I were to speak in the name of the person who made these movies, it would no longer be an interview but a séance.” 🔗