The Temporal Loop, the Spiral of the Gaze, and the Destruction of the Facial Image: On “La Jetée”, by Chris Marker

May 6, 2021

link to the film: https://youtu.be/U_hX_iFQu8Y

Events move not toward the future, but toward the past. The images emerge as an attempt to remember the future. And once they move toward the past, they return once again to the future. A kind of machine operating as a temporal vortex. Mise en abyme. The protagonist is drawn into his own memory. At what moment is memory constructed? Is it when we begin to narrate it, when we fix it outside ourselves, in a kind of exteriority forever exceeding the body? Or does it emerge, in fact, at the very moment the event takes place? And what does this “event” seek to tell us? For us, the

And what of us, the spectators? What relationship do we establish with this borderless narrative, this narrative without limits, one that neither truly begins nor ends, or rather, ends at its beginning and begins at its ending, infinitely? That is to say: what kind of relation can one establish with a narrative without edges, one that constantly exceeds the chronological and factual limits of its own unfolding, undoing itself in the very movement of its weaving? And what does this tell us about the image—or more precisely, about the mark it leaves upon time? A mark that persists simultaneously as archive and remembrance, as a fact engendered by fiction and as a fiction nourished by fact—a kind of anarchive: an archive without a home, an archive without command,^[1] spiraling through time without spatial direction. Of ourselves, those who watch, those who discover themselves being watched through the woman’s eyes and face, we too may say: this is the story of a man marked by an image.

Let us remember, if possible, within this torsion of shattered statues’ faces that is time.

These are the opening words of what Marker called a photo-roman:

“This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.

The scene that disturbed him by its violence, and whose meaning he would understand only much later, took place on the great observation pier at Orly Airport, a few years before the outbreak of the Third World War.”

That is all we are given. A few sentences. Brief clauses. Fragments, perhaps confused. Like the recollection of something fleeting. Something that happened long ago, or that has not yet settled into memory. Something whose occurrence itself remains uncertain, though its image persists, somehow recorded. Perhaps. But I do not wish to be distracted just yet. From its very beginning, or rather, from its very end, the film confronts us with the question of the mark, of what one carries within oneself; more precisely, of remembrance.

This is the story of a man marked by a memory, by an obsession. By a scene whose violence continues to haunt him. For Marker, the question of the mark, of remembrance, does not seem to be merely one theme among others. Obsessively, like an illness, indeed like what one might call archive fever, a pathology comparable to the death drive in its compulsion to repeat, it continually returns throughout his work. But once more, let us return to the beginning. The man. His temporal scar. The ruins of time.

This memory, in effect, becomes indistinguishable from the opening images of the film, which, like a fold, belong simultaneously to the narrative’s past and its future. There we are introduced to a world that still precedes the war: a sunny day, a Sunday afternoon, at Orly Airport. Of that world, only a few things remain: the brightness of an unmoving sun; the airport’s architecture; the face of a woman; and the violence of a body collapsing,^[2] dead. Yet almost immediately, perhaps even more quickly because there is already no room left, because we are already at the end, the narrator, that strange and anachronistic voice, tells us:

“Nothing distinguishes memories from ordinary moments. Only later are they recognized, by their scars. That face, which was to become the only image of peacetime to survive into the time of war, he wondered for years whether he had truly seen it, or whether he had invented that moment of tenderness in order to withstand the moment of madness that was yet to come. That sudden noise, the woman’s gesture, the body collapsing, the cries of people on the observation pier, all tangled together in fear. Only later did he realize that what he had witnessed was the death of a man.

And some time afterward came the destruction of Paris.”

Here, we ourselves are marked by a specter. Or rather, we are left with the mark of that which leaves no mark: memory itself, its capacity to archive things, to inscribe, from outside itself, through photography, a moment destined for the future. From the very beginning, Marker announces the ending. Memories do not exist for the sake of the past, in the sense that they do not simply remember what has been. Their relation to a historiographical past is far more delicate than that of mere documentation.

Perhaps too hastily, just as Marker himself does, I arrive at the following conclusion (but only because I would like this essay, like the film, always to begin at its ending, or end at its beginning, for I am always running out of time, or rather, of space): every memory is a form of destruction of the reality of the event, just as every medium that attempts to capture it destroys it in turn. Photography is no different. Spectral by nature, it exists as a promise, as a form of time travel. For the man, the film’s protagonist, the face of this woman allows him to traverse time, as we shall see. And for us, the spectators, it is the face that marks us precisely through its impossibility of marking. It is the face that embodies spectral becoming: one of those images that violently inscribe themselves upon the memory of a child and thereby make possible the emergence of another mark, the mark of death, of the falling body.

In this sense, the sun, the woman’s face, and the dead body collapsing possess a strange symmetry within this twisted temporality. Each is an instrument of time travel, just as each signifies the death of the very possibility of archiving representation. They are all forces that destroy time even as they make it possible. Later; perhaps. And I say perhaps because nothing guarantees that you, the reader, will ever reach the end of this essay, later this strange symmetry, this spectrology, what I name alongside Derrida as archive fever, the death drive of images, may become clearer in light of further elements.

But let us return to the story of the film. The world has been destroyed. Its surface has become uninhabitable. Nothing remains except ruins, remnants, bric-à-brac, refuse, accumulations of debris.^[3] Shattered statues. In Paris, where the film unfolds, humanity now lives beneath the earth. More precisely, this community survives beneath what was once a museum: the Musée de Chaillot. It is an extraordinary image. Beneath the ruins of that institution which sought to preserve time from itself, to preserve time from its own ruin, that is, the museum, it is now human beings who dwell underground.

In the subterranean chambers beneath the Musée de Chaillot, the survivors are divided into two categories: those who believe they have prevailed, and the broken ones; the guinea pigs. Those who believe they have prevailed carry out experiments upon the guinea pigs. The whispers of the underground. Experiments are conducted there. It is not yet clear what kind. What we know is this: some do not survive. Others die. Still others lose their minds altogether.

It is at this moment that we are introduced, for the first time, though it is no longer the first, nor could it ever have been, to the figure of the man who will accompany us throughout the film like a strange memory. Those who consider themselves the victors, who make up a kind of post-apocalyptic military organization, are the ones conducting the experiments. After countless failures, after killing some of their subjects and driving others mad, they discover that one element may determine the success of their undertaking: attachment to, indeed obsession with, an image from the past. It is here that we encounter this curious figure, the experimental subject known only as the Man. He is brought before the savant fou, a kind of Dr. Frankenstein, who, to his surprise, turns out to be an entirely reasonable man. He speaks the following words, delivered – as always — through the narrator’s voice-over^[4]:

“He was frightened. He had heard about the camp commandant. He thought he was facing the Mad Scientist, Dr. Frankenstein. Instead, he found a reasonable man, who calmly explained that the human race was now condemned; that Space had become inaccessible to it; and that the only possible connection with the means of survival lay through Time. A loophole in Time—and perhaps food, medicine, and sources of energy might be brought through.”

Here, the true purpose of the experiments is revealed. To traverse time. And I like to think alongside the English translation: a loophole in Time. It is within this loop, this vortex, this mise en abyme, that the entire narrative topology of La Jetée might be condensed. A system of positive temporal feedback, in which the event is generated by the memory of the event itself. The past remembering the future. The film is therefore perpetually folding back upon itself. Its obsessive gesture of endlessly remembering itself is precisely what ensures its continual destruction. And for this to occur, let us remember, there must be the face of a woman, a motionless sun, and the body of a dead man falling.

Perhaps the man was insane. Perhaps he had been one of the victims of the experiments conducted by the so-called “Dr. Frankenstein.” Perhaps none of it had happened at all, and even the memory itself was nothing more than a childhood hallucination — or else the product of an experiment, implanted in his mind by the scientists of the underground. A tragic scene that marked him profoundly, like a trauma, yet one that was itself the result of an experiment: the manufacture of a traumatic memory, a form of manipulation sent back from the future, orchestrated by the military regime beneath the earth. Such is one of the defining traits of the narrative: its slipperiness, its suggestiveness, its refusal of closure. Like a distant memory.

The sequence of photographs — the photo-roman — is itself, as a narratological mechanism, the very device through which this impulse is articulated. There are no scenes functioning as temporal ligatures between one image and the next. Each appears before us as an isolated fragment, devoid of any diegetic element capable of imposing an ordering principle upon the whole. Speaking about the photographic process and the editing of La Jetée, Marker remarked: “It was made like a piece of automatic writing. It was in the editing that the pieces of the puzzle came together, and I wasn’t the one who drew the puzzle.” (Harbord, 2009, p. 60)

The film is therefore marked throughout by a profound confusion: between memory and event; between the still image of photography and the moving image of cinema; between the presence of a false image and the absence of a real one. Even the film’s title, La Jetée, functions as a kind of trompe-l’œil. It does not mean its misleading cognate, the jet; a meaning almost imposed upon us by the metonymy of the airport where much of the story unfolds. It means The Pier: a curious anachronism.

Everything, nothing: it is within this in-between that the film’s narrative movement comes to rest. Everything in the film seems to converge upon a common point which, at the very moment it appears ready to tell us something, perhaps almost everything, ultimately tells us nothing, or almost nothing. A paradoxical point. My suggestion here is that Marker constructs a narrative machine that destroys itself through its own movement of perpetual repetition, through its incessant re-archiving of itself. Here I follow Derrida:

“The archive is hypomnesic. Let us note in passing a decisive paradox upon which we shall not have time to dwell, but which undoubtedly conditions this entire proposition: if there is no archive without consignation in some external place that ensures the possibility of memorization, repetition, reproduction, or reimpression, then we must also remember that repetition itself—the logic of repetition, indeed even the compulsion to repeat—is, according to Freud, inseparable from the death drive. Therefore, from destruction. Consequently, within that which makes archiving possible and conditions it, we find only that which exposes it to destruction and, in truth, threatens it with destruction (…). The archive always works, a priori, against itself.” (Derrida, 2001, p. 23)

The question of the archive is not simply one theme among many in the film, I would argue. Nor is it merely one concern among others throughout Chris Marker’s work.

The following passage, the following archive, comes from another of his films, itself composed from the ruins of images:

“Thinking about the end of the world on my Island of Sal in the company of my upright dogs, I remember that month of January in Tokyo — or rather, I remember the images I filmed during that month of January in Tokyo. They have replaced my memory with themselves. They are my memory. I wonder how people remember things they do not film, photograph, or record. How did humanity ever manage to remember?”

In this other film, Sans Soleil, we encounter a cameraman who addresses letters to someone who remains unknown to us. Indeed, everything in the film remains unknown: unnamed, unnameable, as in La Jetée. All that we know is what those letters tell us through the narrator’s voice, layered over the images recorded by the cameraman.

The question posed by this passage is unmistakable: there exists an inescapable relation between the exteriority of the archive, the medium used to record it, and memory itself. Those who do not archive are those who possess no memory. And yet, paradoxically, the one who archives is also the one who destroys memory, fixing it within an instance external to the body. Sans Soleil is likewise a film about time travel, even if it never explicitly claims to be. For it is the image itself, in cinema, or rather, the archive itself, that functions as an apparatus of temporal displacement. And, as we shall see, because it is always still to come, it does not serve merely as a vehicle for traveling into the past, but perhaps, and above all, into the future.

But let us return to my own obsession here. Let us return once again to La Jetée, and to the passage from Derrida I quoted a moment ago. If the death drive is that which conditions the very formation of the archive, and if one of its defining characteristics is an obsessive tendency toward repetition, toward the endless recollection of itself, then in La Jetée we encounter this movement in its purest form. The man’s death at the beginning does, in fact, inaugurate the beginning of his end. From the outset, we are already confronted with the destruction of the protagonist’s life. The narrative is obsessed with remembering itself.

But this alone tells us very little, or rather, it tells us nothing until we relate this movement to the production and economy of images more generally. If the archival gesture, the act of recording the past, is an actively passive gesture that inevitably produces ruins, that is, if without intending to and without even knowing it every archive always brings about the end of presence, then I would argue that the photographic image appearing at the very beginning of the film, the image depicting the death of a man, is precisely what brings about that death.

In other words, death becomes possible only because it has been photographed. What interests me here is that, from our perspective as spectators, the man is always already dead. From the film’s opening moments, he exists as a specter, a ghost haunting his own future. And so it is with us. We, the spectators, drawn toward these paradoxical images — those of a film about time travel that nevertheless remains so static, so motionless, so firmly imprisoned within time — we too become specters.^[5]

Observed by the woman’s face, marked by it, we too are granted passage into this temporal loop. This impression seems to be confirmed by the relationship the man develops with the woman, who, let us remember, is precisely what both enables him to survive as an experimental subject, that is, to travel through time, and condemns him to become the specter of himself. As a child, upon seeing the woman’s face, the boy associates it with a happy memory, one that stands in contrast to, and allows him to survive, the trauma inflicted by the image of the dying man. Yet once he is grown, once he realizes that he himself was the man he witnessed dying, the woman’s face no longer signifies consolation. It marks his end.

During the period in which he is subjected to the time-travel experiments, a period punctuated by countless journeys into the past, during which the man and the woman meet again and again, they spend a sunny afternoon together in a park. A giant sequoia trunk, cut clean through. Visits to the museum. Animals preserved by taxonomy. Frozen in time. Images that bear witness to an attempt to survive the passage of time. Neither the man nor the woman knows whether they will ever meet again. The man, especially, does not even know whether she has already seen him before. Every one of their encounters is marked by an ending, even though each has, in some sense, already taken place many times before. Statues. Ruins. Museums.

It is after this period, one that remains, inevitably, mediated by the metaphor of the museum, of the stuffed animals, that the narrator tells us:

“Around the fiftieth day, they meet in a museum filled with timeless animals. Now the target has been perfectly adjusted. Sent to the proper moment, he can remain there and move about effortlessly.

This marks the beginning of a whole series of experiments, during which he meets her at different moments. Sometimes he encounters her before the traces she has left behind. She receives him naturally. She calls him her ghost.

One day she seems afraid. Another day she leans toward him. As for him, he never knows whether he is moving toward her, whether he is being drawn there, whether he has invented her, or whether he is simply dreaming.

Is it the same day? He does not know. And so they continue, through countless walks, where an unspoken, uncorrupted trust gradually grows between them, without memories or plans.”

It becomes clear that, for him as much as for her, nothing is certain. Neither of them knows whether any of it truly exists. Whether they exist for one another at all. Whether they are not merely specters to each other, like those who gaze upon a photograph long after it has first been exposed to light.

No image leads us toward any final conclusion, except once again toward its own groundless beginning. Only later, just as the child eventually becomes an adult, do we discover that this was the image of his own death. The scene of the man’s death thus represents not only the end of the protagonist’s life, but the complete collapse of the distinction between inside and outside, fiction and reality, subject and object, insofar as character and spectator become indistinguishable. At the same time, it destroys the familiar temporal sequence of beginning–middle–end, since it is precisely there, at its ending, that the film’s narrative begins.

Within the spatiotemporal topology constructed by the film, one event continually encounters another without ever truly colliding with it. All of time takes place simultaneously. The man dies along the same temporal line inhabited by the child. And the child, despite this, lives. The man becomes a specter who haunts not the future but his own past. His own memory, indeed, the memory of his death, is what later makes the child’s life possible, since that child will eventually become the adult subjected to experiments beneath the ruins of a Paris destroyed by the Third World War. Thus it is the specter, that which no longer exists except as archived memory, that makes a future life possible. This paradox, not without a certain uncanniness, echoes the very movement through which life remembers itself. For life to remain there, pulsing, remembering what it is, it must always already be dead. This is, indeed, one of the reasons that leads me to conclude that the reflections contained in La Jetée overflow the limits of its own narrative, or even those of a meditation on life alone.

More broadly, we may understand its spatiotemporal topology as a meditation upon the visual sign itself, upon both the still image and the moving image. To record. To photograph. To fix in time. To eternalize.

Each of these is also a way of killing the image, of attesting to the murder carried out by time. Whatever lives, even without knowing it, is that which has already been, will always already have been, dead. Faced with the torsions of time, the image of life always seems destined to reduce itself to rubble, to remnants, to debris. It is no coincidence that the museum recurs so insistently throughout La Jetée: the survivors living beneath the Musée de Chaillot; the statues; the taxidermied animals. The moment the man finally becomes a stable subject for the experiment. He neither dies nor loses his mind like the others. He suffers. Real images begin to reach him.

“Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves. On the sixteenth day he is on the observation pier.

Empty. Sometimes he encounters a happy day—but a different one. A happy face—but a different one. Ruins. A young woman who might be the one he is looking for. He meets her on the pier. From inside a car he sees her smiling. Other images appear, blending together, in a museum that may well be the museum of his own memory.”

Real images, in the same way that the museum’s images are real. Real images, in the same way that the virtual images of memory are real. The image presents itself as the promise of its own disappearance. Every image is already a specter. The destiny of the man; his death, which inaugurates the beginning of his end (a death that, let us remember, occurs at the very opening of the film, the moment the first photograph breaks across the screen, when this writing of light finally emerges, marking and archiving the very light that appears)—is also the destiny of every image, of every archive: a promise, always a promise, and yet always an impossibility of continuing.

The museum, photography, memory: each is an archival gesture, an attempt to overcome fiction by means of fact. Each operates through the desire to fix something in time, to make possible a journey along the temporal axis. In this sense, Marker shows us that, in order to move through time, to traverse its chain and rupture the supposedly historiographical linearity that structures it, it is not strictly necessary to possess a time machine. Or rather, the very gesture of remembering, of reenacting an event, of restaging the “fact,” may itself be understood as a journey through time.

The mind, in its capacity as an archive, is already a time machine. And as spectators, this is precisely the question before which we are placed: not merely the possibility of returning to the past, of recollection, but also, and perhaps above all, the possibility of traveling into the future. Thus the archival gesture itself is, as Derrida reminds us, a spectral gesture. Which is to say: it promises a ghost to the future.

“The question of the archive is not, we repeat, a question of the past. It is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise, and of a responsibility for tomorrow. The archive: if we want to know what this will have meant, we will only know in times to come. Perhaps. Not tomorrow, but in times to come, later on or perhaps never.”^[6] (Derrida, 2001, p. 51)

Every archive is a remembrance of the future, perhaps even more than a remembrance for the future. Just as every specter is an image lost within the temporal vortex. In a singular way, Marker captures this aporia of the archive in his photo- roman: to remember is already to forget; it is already to forge a reenactment of an instant.

The image of death inaugurates an opening. The absence of life. The absence of presence. The absence of the sign. What is absent is precisely what sustains the desire for return. Let us remember: the film unfolds through images fixed in time. And what is true for the man is equally true for us, the spectators. What the man sees, we see. The sun. The woman’s face.

The memory of the woman’s face. We must carry that face with us as though it were our own memory if the film is to take place at all. The film places us in precisely this position. We are not merely spectators. Like the Man, we are inserted into the theatre of time. Like him, we become specters, equally contaminated by archive fever. And like him, we cannot escape it. The man’s destiny is, to a greater or lesser extent, the destiny of everyone who dares to remember, who dares to archive reality. When he falls in love with the woman, when he allows those images to become fixed within him, it is we who love her as well; it is we who preserve those images.

The relationship between memory and fiction grows ever more intimate. And then comes the final scene, the very scene that marks us as though it were the first, the one that, from the beginning, teaches us to remember the future: the woman’s face. What might she be thinking? As she witnesses the death of her specter… As she sees that we, too, ghosts ourselves, are looking back at her… After all, within this theatre of time, within this suspension of space and time that is both the archive and the photograph, who is watching? And who, in the end, is the one being watched?

REFERENCES

Derrida, Jacques. Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.

Harbord, Janet. La Jetée. London: Afterall Books, 2009.

Marker, Chris. Sans Soleil. 1983.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.

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