two films by chris marker
memory of death
by Douglas Messerli
Chris
Marker (writer and director) La Jetée (The Jetty) / 1962
The death of filmmaker Chris Marker on
June 29 of this year provoked me into seeing two of his most beloved films, La Jetée and Sans soleil. The French director, a member of what was often
described as the Left Bank Group (including Alain Resnais, Agnes Varda, and
Armand Gatti—whose plays I have published), was born Christian
François Bouche-Villeneuve, changing his name to Marker because his love of
marking pens. Marker kept his life rather mysterious, claiming to have been
born in Ulan Bator, Mongolia; most sources name the Paris suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine
as his birthplace.
Surviving as a prisoner below ground in
the Palais de Chaillot galleries, the now grown man (Davos Hanich), so we are
told by the narrator (Jean Négroni), becomes obsessed with the vision of this
woman. The world now facing the survivors is in near destruction, and in order
to attempt a survival authorities are experimenting on several of the prisoners
with time travel, attempting to take them to the past and the future so that
they can discover how to cope. Most of the subjects die or become insane after
the experiments.
Without actually understanding the
consequences, the Man is told that he will now be sent into the future, his
visits to the beautiful woman suspended. In the future he meets up with a passive
group of men and women who seem to have switches implanted into their
foreheads—perhaps hinting at a more robotized or electronically-linked survival
of the species. At first they are suspicious of him and reject him, but
gradually accept him, offering him the possibility of regenerating his own
dying society.
The
haunting passages of Marker's work in this film obliquely discuss physical and
philosophical issues of the relationship of the past and future to the present,
suggesting that what we think we know of the past may have been shaped by the
future, and what we think is the past and future may be living out a kind of
present. Marker seems to be fascinated with the question about what memory
actually is. Is the beautiful woman, we can only wonder, possibly the boy's own
mother, and, if so, is his later relationship with her a projection of his
desire or a strangely incestuous obsession not unlike Oedipus'. Marker makes no
attempt to even pose these questions, let alone answer them. Yet his dream-like
images and poetic handling of his cinema cannot help but encourage us to
attempt to find our own links. Certainly, the film suggests what we believe to
be impossible, the memory of one's own death. Do we dream after death of death
itself?
In this sense, what might have been a simple
science fiction drama blossoms into a kind of muted tragedy, a speculation not
only on the death of single man, but the death of nations and the human species
itself issuing from, perhaps, its own inability to link past, present, future, presenting
us the specter of any culture's failure to recall the disasters of the past in
order to save itself for its future.
Los Angeles, August 8, 2012
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