Review: La Jetee (1962)

In Matter and Memory, French philosopher Henri Bergson posits an implausible notion – the pure present: “The pure present is an ungraspable advance of the past devouring the future. In truth, all sensation is already memory.” Since time is a movement, an unending progression, there is not a definite point as that of a present moment, Bergson seems to suggest, but an admixture of the past and the future, the has-beens rapidly encroaching on, and eventually subsuming, the what-ifs. In a sense, and as absurd as this may sound, the present is ever elusive to our consciousness: what we perceive of the now, at the very moment in which it is being registered, is already relegated to the realm of the past. The past seems, therefore, the only reality we have really experienced; the reality that we are predestined to never possess.

Chris Marker’s La Jetee (1962) envisages a future in which man finally discovers the means of triumphing over time’s irrevocable logic: experiments are conducted to send people to different time periods in the hope of casting for a possible way of survival in the wake of World War III. The scientists settle upon a prisoner, whose childhood obsession with an unknown woman (hence his inextricable tie with the past) makes him a perfect subject for the test. Withstanding the risks of death and madness (the normal and invariable consequences that befall the other candidates), the man is transported back in the past, where he spends time with the unknown woman, strolling through the streets of pre-war Paris and visiting the natural history museum, and at length they develop a romantic relationship. This successful instance prompts the scientists to send the man to the future, much to his reluctance, and despite manages to procure a promise to live permanently in that time zone, the man yearns to be reunited with the woman of his past. His wish is granted; he finds himself at the very spot where, as a child, he saw the woman for the first time. Exultantly, he spots her in the crowd. But he also recognises standing next to her one of the scientists who, he realises too late, is ordered to carry out his death. The man dies making peace with the idea that never is he going to escape Time.

This abstruse but meditative allegory is accompanied largely with still images – save one blinking instant when the woman, lying on a bed, opens her eyes. Those powerful few seconds calls to mind Anton Chekhov’s rhapsody of divine, aching beauty: “The dam, flooded with moonlight, showed not a bit of shade; on it, in the middle, the neck of a broken bottle glittered like a star.” If stillness, in the film, signifies the general passage of time; that momentary motion is like a promise of timelessness.

Stripping off its poetic trappings, the core of La Jetee is actually a reiteration of Bergson’s theory: that man cherishes his memory because the past, being the only period whose outline remains to him the most tangible, reminds him of what he used to possess but is no more. The act of remembering entails a tacit acknowledgement of time’s inexorability, and is thus, as the film seems to imply, an infinitely better option than the vain wish of transcending temporal barriers, of attaining immortality, which only brings one to the foreseeable consequence of death. But the difference between remembering and reliving is underscored – by way of that ingenious insertion of an epiphanous moment of movement, the possession of which belongs exclusively to those who are brave and foolish enough to dream.