I have already talked a little here about a film class I went to earlier this year in which Daniel Fairfax developed a radical theory of montage. The thrust of his thinking ran something like this – the politics and philosophy of cinema is what happens between the cuts, in the intersection of images. The chaining of separate frames to one another to create meaning. Following this, rapid fire editing is apolitical, seeking even to obscure the place where politics occurs. It provides a fake continuity in which we do not regard the image but rather simply coast along with the action. Montage, on the other hand, encourages a philosophical approach to image association.
If this theory stands, it does so by leaning on Chris Marker’s 1962 film La Jette. La Jette is a featurette composed entirely of still images in montage. Set partially in a post apocalyptic, lightless, underground world, it tells the story of a man sent back in time to the scene of his childhood. A time before the catastrophe. He is chosen for these experiments because of his enduring memory from that time.
Memory makes time travel easier. But once you have the hang of it you can go wherever. After conquering the past, the man is sent into the future to discuss saving his ruined society with the posthuman beings that dwell there. But this is almost beside the point. What matters is that woman from the past and what happened on the pier.
The plot was later fleshed out in Terry Gilliam’s 12 Monkeys but what remains entirely Marker’s is the technical aspects and aesthetic of the film. With no moving action the viewer dwells in each image.
In the images of ruined Paris for instance we are reminded that we have seen the end many times. That the Second World War was apocalyptic in its devastation, or at least, it was when you add the narrative context.
Apocalypse is above all a narrative gesture i.e. a way to tell a story by driving a cut into its bones: before/after.
Skeletons of buildings, aerial shots conjure Hiroshima. I remember plumes of smoke even if there were none.
The experiments too conjure up our collective memory of Nazi Germany, the black and white film stills that have emerged to horribly elucidate the technical manifestations (medical, scientific, mechanical) of ‘the final solution’.
In the images that compose the man’s experience of the past we are invited into a nostalgic space for viewing our own every day. Real children. Real birds. Real cats. Real graves. This is the space of memory but also of advertising. Nostalgia is always in some sense a seduction. We are invited into a lusty lament. The man’s memory is ‘a museum’. He meets the woman in ‘a museum’. Everything is doubled by desire and nostalgia. Even the man himself. A child fixating on a beautiful woman, and a man come back to the memory from trauma and horror. We are reminded of the letters of soldiers ‘it was your face that kept me going’.
The chaining of images in wartime. A collapsing village and a photo of a bride.
The woman, for her part accepts his visits ‘like a natural thing, like the ageless animal’. The image associates a great Triassic skeleton. But then we hear she calls him her ghost. Are the dinosaurs ghosts among us? Or can we only reduce them to code, a genetic legacy? Ghost in machine.
If the man is above all nostalgic, she is prescient, a future facing woman, unafraid of the inexplicable. A calm arm reached out to what comes suddenly from the horizon. And she is the fetish of the lens. Her face meant to contain all of humanity and it’s unfulfilled or at least unsustained promise. Does our warning lie here?
I’m not sure there is one. A warning is too unilateral a thing. Rather, meaning is for you to read between the images, and of course, in their intersection with your world, beyond the screen. A blink is a cut if you consider it.
Girl and Gun 