In spite of many researches devoted to Chris Marker’s La Jet?, the fact that this film principally relies on an abyss in the narrative line isn’t sufficiently investigated. Nearly all of its main events can be explained in terms of a causal narrative development, except the last scene where an abyss...
In spite of many researches devoted to Chris Marker’s La Jet?, the fact that this film principally relies on an abyss in the narrative line isn’t sufficiently investigated. Nearly all of its main events can be explained in terms of a causal narrative development, except the last scene where an abyss emerges in the narrative line: the image of a man’s childhood memory is finally revealed as that of his own death. This conception can simply be defined as an ‘impossible memory’. The profound stratum of the film, an pure mental love story with a woman in one’s memory, is a total expansion of this ‘impossible memory’. Chris Marker draws out this conception from his unique interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. According to Marker, its Part Two, which begins with the appearance of Judy, can be interpreted as a pure lie of a person who has an insane memory. The visiting scene to the Muir Woods National Park, which is directly cited in La Jet? with modifications, is clearly related to the ‘impossible memory’, in the sense that the heroine speaks of what she didn’t experience. However, in a full confidence, her statement causes an significant movement in the mentality of the hero, where the spacial vertigo (acrophobia) transforms into temporal one. If we accept the thesis of Roland Barthes, according to which the essence of the photography is “it-was-there”, this medium raises in itself an insupportable melancholy of time travel. La Jet?, which is almost exclusively composed of the photographs, makes this emotion the movement itself of the film. Since the attribute of the memory is also fragmentary, inexplicable and contradictory, La Jet? finally belongs to the big stream of ‘cinema of the memory’, which was initiated by Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959).
In spite of many researches devoted to Chris Marker’s La Jet?, the fact that this film principally relies on an abyss in the narrative line isn’t sufficiently investigated. Nearly all of its main events can be explained in terms of a causal narrative development, except the last scene where an abyss emerges in the narrative line: the image of a man’s childhood memory is finally revealed as that of his own death. This conception can simply be defined as an ‘impossible memory’. The profound stratum of the film, an pure mental love story with a woman in one’s memory, is a total expansion of this ‘impossible memory’. Chris Marker draws out this conception from his unique interpretation of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo. According to Marker, its Part Two, which begins with the appearance of Judy, can be interpreted as a pure lie of a person who has an insane memory. The visiting scene to the Muir Woods National Park, which is directly cited in La Jet? with modifications, is clearly related to the ‘impossible memory’, in the sense that the heroine speaks of what she didn’t experience. However, in a full confidence, her statement causes an significant movement in the mentality of the hero, where the spacial vertigo (acrophobia) transforms into temporal one. If we accept the thesis of Roland Barthes, according to which the essence of the photography is “it-was-there”, this medium raises in itself an insupportable melancholy of time travel. La Jet?, which is almost exclusively composed of the photographs, makes this emotion the movement itself of the film. Since the attribute of the memory is also fragmentary, inexplicable and contradictory, La Jet? finally belongs to the big stream of ‘cinema of the memory’, which was initiated by Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima, Mon Amour (1959).
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