by Catherine Lupton
Writing in The Guardian in November 2002, on the occasion of the UK cinema re-release of Chris Marker’s Sans soleil (1982), the critic David Thomson referred to its notoriously elusive maker as ‘the essential ghost’.1 An old hand at the trick of disappearing into his work, receding behind an array of legends, pseudonyms and alter-egos; ‘Chris Marker’ exists for us not as a physical, biographical human presence, but as a tantalising screen, one whose function is to assemble and perpetually 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. Working both successively and simultaneously through writing, photography, filmmaking, video, television, music and digital multimedia, Marker’s particular gift is less in narrating or cataloguing specific memories (although these are abundantly present across his œuvre), than in 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.
La Jetée (1962)
Dir. Chris Marker
The greatest short film ever created.
This is where I stand with this film, always and forever, but it arose with confidence once again in my mind after my much-delayed and deflating viewing of Nolan’s Inception. After Nolan quite simply broke his own rule of the logic of the film (to paraphrase a line of dialogue: “Dreams are about the feeling, not just the visual”) by delivering just that; a film devoid of feeling and purely about the visual, it couldn’t leave my mind throughout the remainder of the film… Nolan took nearly 3 hours to deliver a fraction of what Chris Marker did in 28 minutes. Marker’s film is as visually stunning as they come, but it’s the emotional backbone that keeps the film eternally prescient. And while I have a reason in Inception to share this film with you today, whether you’ve never seen it, or you’ve seen it 50 times, it’s always, always an ideal time to view the masterwork of short-form cinema, La Jetée. Enjoy.
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