[1] Reprocess those visual, textual and aural traces that resonate in us as memories, whether of the public events that compose our sense of History, or of the fleeting, intensely personal and often supremely trivial moments that we treasure as keys to our own subjectivity … functioning as a sort of avatar of Memory itself: drawing the reader/viewer directly inside memory’s characteristic obsessions, random drifts, and fatal elisions; while continually providing an elegant, unforced meta-commentary on how memory functions, and to what possible ends … intensifying development of a self-reflexive, intransitive and non-linear historiography to the wider crisis in France after World War Two of Hegelian and Hegelian-Marxist models of teleological history, and the emergence of post-structural approaches to depicting the past.
[2] Patrick ffrench, in ‘reading Immemory as one might read Proust’, neatly cracks open the ‘immense edifice of memory’ to begin to explore the tension and interplay in Marker’s work between two distinct models of memory: the Freudian paradigm of trauma, loss and mourning that he finds articulated primarily in La Jetée, and the Proustian / Deleuzian mapping of memory as an immanent, virtual present, spreading out across the virtual textual surface of Immemory … Marker’s works generate points of contact or exchange between collective, historical memory (which ffrench characterises as the domain of the ethnographic and documentary image), and the realm of private, personal recollection.
[3] … his films are cinematic essays on the passage of time and the mutable nature of historical memory … has used filmmaking as a way of compiling personal and collective histories, returning time and time again to memories of the past, that establish in sum a highly personalised image repertory of our time …. the persistence [of certain countries], despite westernisation, of alterity, of difference, of other modes of thinking that have remained recalcitrant to western imperialism and its technocratic rationalism; the residual store of traditions, customs, fables, past historical experiences that still discreetly inhabit the everyday language and cultural rituals of non-western societies … an archaeological quest for ideas that western civilisation in the course of its long history has gradually forgotten or marginalized.
[4] … the allusive interplay of private and public memory, Marker revealing how his impressions of ‘picturesque’ China were coloured by childhood memories of reading Jules Verne and watching Hollywood movies.
[5] … we become aware that for the cameraman the places visited are permeated by historical and personal memory.
[6] These characters provide Marker with the opportunity of interweaving and dispersing material that together forges, in his own words, a ‘collective fictional memory’.29 The memories of the past relayed in Sans soleil are therefore neither entirely fictional nor entirely factual, but exist at the interface of these categories … we are made aware that history, like memory, is, to paraphrase the historian Michel de Certeau, a treatment for absence, for what is represented of the past is merely a series of fragments detached from the midst of the original moment in time in which they belong … As such history provides a vision of the past that can never be commensurate with the events it represents. Rejecting the idea of history as a ‘mirror’ of the past …
[7] Marker has seen in film’s capability for interweaving moments of past and present a poignant metaphor for the processes of memory, and a mechanism for compiling a historical archive of images of the past … Marker’s fascination with the image as a spur to recollecting the past recalls Proust’s exploration of involuntary memory. The photographic ‘trace’ is extra-temporal, providing an impression of momentary liberation from the destructiveness of time, by preserving in the present access to something that belongs to a time outside of it … They [the images] have substituted themselves for my memory, they are my memory … the slippages between reality and celluloid. ...
[8] ‘How can one remember thirst?’ … The ‘memory box’ of the television, with its crush of ‘alienated’ signs and images, characteristically occludes the signs of its manufacture, …. The Zone by contrast takes cultural memory as its subject matter, but only to transform those representations into a mutable and opaque surface. …
[9] The Pillow Book is also regarded today as one of the most important historical documents of the mid-Heian period. … lists such as ‘Things that arouse a fond memory of the past’, ‘Elegant things’, ‘Rare things’, ‘Dispiriting things’, ‘Things that are not worth doing’ or ‘Things that make the heart beat faster’: lists that evoke the full register of the senses and emotions, and offer insights into the sensibility of the Heian period that exceed the compass of more orthodox historical tracts. … By learning to draw a kind of melancholy comfort from the contemplation of the tiniest things, this small group of idlers left a mark on Japanese sensibility much deeper than the mediocre thunderings of the politicians.
[10] ‘The letters, the comments, the images gathered; the images created; together with some images borrowed . . . out of these juxtaposed memories is born a fictional memory.’ ..
[11] Marker’s central themes, which he has pursued in his films for years, are memory and recollection. His most important films, La Jetée (1962) and Sans soleil (1982) connected times and places in a way that reflected the workings of memory. of how certain key images of one’s memory can be moved instantly into ever new constellations … open up new possibilities for the memory theme .. give a tour through the private repository of an individual, to give each user the opportunity to put together, with the help of the computer, their own geography book … referring to ‘impossible memory’, ‘insane memory’ … a memory that creates its own legends or inventions to cope with traumatic experiences … ‘It is trite to state that memory lies. It is much more interesting to regard this lie as a form of instinctive protection, which we can direct and shape. At times, we call it art.’ .. Marker’s model of ars memorativa … The zones are: Memory, Museum, Travel, Photography, Cinema, War, Poetry.
[12] ‘It’s my hypothesis that every extensive memory (and every collection) is more structured than it appears. … The idea of presenting his œuvre as a topography – a description and depiction of geographic places – is increasingly common in Marker’s presentation of his work….
[13] Theoretically, the article is concerned with the tension between an approach to memory of a Freudian character, which emphasises elements of trauma, recovery, mourning and redemption, and an account informed by the thought of Gilles Deleuze, which would configure memories as subjective elements on a single plane of immanence … the same question pertains to Proust’s novel Remembrance of Things Past: to what extent is subjective memory inferior to art as a means of capturing the immaterial essence of things, which persists in a temporality ‘in the pure state’? … The Proustian hypothesis of Chris Marker’s La Jetée (1962) is that a different present can weave itself around a memory- image, triggered by a sensory perception. We could call this a virtual or ideal present, with reference to Proust’s phrase, ‘Real without being present, ideal without being abstract’ cited by Gilles Deleuze in Proust and Signs. The virtual present can redeem the actual present but cannot replace it. … In Proustian reminiscence: the madeleine enables the narrator of Remembrance of Things Past to remember large swathes of his childhood at Combray, inaccessible to voluntary memory, which is the memory of the intelligence. [ ]
[14] In his reading of Proust, Deleuze proposes that each present conserves its own past as a monadic virtuality.8 What Proust’s narrator ‘remembers’ is not the past, but the past ‘in the pure state’, conserved in itself as a virtuality, existing tangentially to the actual present until a chance encounter throws a relation between the two.
[15] Deleuze refers to the ‘crystal of time’ as a point of bifurcation and indiscernability between actual and virtual, between the present and ‘its’ virtual past, contemporary with it. … The other might hesitantly be called Proustian in that it proposes a redemptive and totalising aesthetic whereby a single subject’s memory can be mapped onto a flat texture, a painting, screen, text or dress, and in that ultimately this aesthetic reconfiguration of the past can produce a total and infinitely navigable map of Time. … Despite the Freudian (and Lacanian) resonances of Vertigo and La Jetée (being haunted or ‘marked’ by an image, the pathology of obsession, the space between two deaths), Marker’s memory- aesthetic in Immemory, I would propose, tends towards the second type.
[16] There is, then, a tension in Marker’s work between a Deleuzian plane of immanence, between immanent ethnography, and the self- portraiture or autobiographical recovery of subjective memory.
[17] We are thus led to ask if Marker’s travelogues are a lateral version of remembrance, travelling in space rather than time, and thus to see memory as a form of exploration and encounter of the other rather than of subjectivity.
Notes:
madeleine: something that triggers memories or nostalgia: an allusion to a nostalgic passage in Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past
Chris Marker, Immemory. The CD-ROM was produced by Marker and the Centre Georges Pompidou. The locations related to references to its texts and images will be apparent from the analysis.
Gilles Deleuze, Proust and Signs (George Braziller, 1982), p. 57.
Chris Marker, La Jetée. The commentary or voiceover for La Jetée is printed in French and English in the unpaginated book Chris
Marker, La Jetée: ciné- roman (Zone Books, 1992).
Deleuze,Gilles. The Time-Image, pp. 68–9.
Jacques Lacan, The Seminar Book 17: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (Penguin, 1987).
Deleuze, Gilles. Cinema I: The Movement-Image (Athlone Press, 1986), p. 5.
Barthes, Roland. Camera lucida (Flamingo, 1984), pp. 4–5.
Barthes, Roland. ‘The Death of the Author’ in Image; Music; Text (Fontana Books, 1977; translation modified), p. 148.
[1] Lupton, Catherine (2005) ‘Chris Marker: The Art of Memory’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 46
[2] Lupton, Catherine (2005) ‘Chris Marker: The Art of Memory’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 47
[3] Kear, Jonathan. (2005) ‘The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of Representing History’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 49
[4] Kear, Jonathan. (2005) ‘The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of Representing History’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 50.
[5] Kear, Jonathan. (2005) ‘The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of Representing History’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 53
[6] Kear, Jonathan. (2005) ‘The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of Representing History’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 57.
[7] Kear, Jonathan. (2005) ‘The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of Representing History’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 59.
[8] Kear, Jonathan. (2005) ‘The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of Representing History’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 60.
[9] Kear, Jonathan. (2005) ‘The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of Representing History’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 60.
[10] Kear, Jonathan. (2005) ‘The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of Representing History’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 63.
[11] Tode, Thomas. (2005) ‘Film – That Was Last Century! Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 83.
[12] Tode, Thomas. (2005) ‘Film – That Was Last Century! Chris Marker’s CD-ROM Immemory’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 84
[13] ffrench, Patrick. (2005) ‘The Immanent Ethnography of Chris Marker, Reader of Proust’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 87.
[14] ffrench, Patrick. (2005) ‘The Immanent Ethnography of Chris Marker, Reader of Proust’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 88.
[15 ffrench, Patrick. (2005) ‘The Immanent Ethnography of Chris Marker, Reader of Proust’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 89.
[
16] ffrench, Patrick. (2005) ‘The Immanent Ethnography of Chris Marker, Reader of Proust’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 91.
[17] ffrench, Patrick. (2005) ‘The Immanent Ethnography of Chris Marker, Reader of Proust’, Film Studies 6:summer, p 92.
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