French filmmaker Chris Marker’s landmark film of 1962, La Jetée, is a photo-roman — it plays out as a series of still images. And the story is told through voice over narration:
‘This is the story of a man marked by an image from his childhood.’ A memory has haunted the hero of the tale since his childhood — the image of a woman and that of the killing of a man, at the jetty of the airport Orly in Paris. There is the timeless theme of star-crossed lovers, against the backdrop of an underground camp in a world completely devastated by a nuclear war. There are the rulers of the camps, who ruthlessly apply their scientific methods, supposedly to perpetuate life on the planet, while forcing humankind to give up on all that is beautiful. They use the memory of the hero of the story to catapult him back and forth in time, to find a source of energy, to save the human species. In his journey into the past, he meets a woman and a tragic love grows between them. After a series of events, the man eventually finds himself in the time and the place of the image that has always haunted him; he sees the face of a woman that represents to him love and life in a world without wars. Before meeting with her, he is killed by a camp guard who has followed him from the underground camp, from which he escaped.
The film was made in the aftermath of the Second World War. There is the theme of medical experiments at Nazi concentration camps — Marker was involved in the making of another landmark film, Night and Fog (Alain Renais, 1956) about the Nazi genocide. The only voiceover dialogue in La Jetée is that of two German speaking camp doctors. There is also the theme of the threat of nuclear holocaust. Stanley Kubrick’s film of 1964, Dr. Strangelove, was made shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 — the United States had given an ultimatum to Soviet Union to remove its missiles from Cuba. The world was pushed to the brink of a nuclear war. La Jetée seems to have had a premonition of that threat.
Every literary or cinematic masterpiece has its lineage. Shakespeare’s plays were often adaptations of Italian and Greek tales. Balzac made no secret of his admiration for the tales of A Thousand and One Nights (aka. Arabian Nights). Films are often inspired by works of fiction. What were the literary precursors to La Jetée? Here we list a few:
I- La Jetée is also the title of a poem by Henri Michaux (1935). Themes of travels to a jetty, reminiscences of a past life, and a return to meet the medical doctor, are partly inspired by this poem. Here is a partial translation — Michaux refers to the jetty by the sea, Marker speaks of the jetty at the airport.
‘I had not been to the sea, for the doctor had me confined to the room. But last night, weary of my solitude, I took advantage of the fog and built a pier (or a jetty, Jetée in French) all the way to the sea. Then at the end of the jetty, I sat and watched the sea breath ever deeply. There was a whisper on my right. An old man was watching the sea. And he set out to produce a wealth of precious items, from captains of bygone ages to beautifully dressed damsels. Then he set out to throw it all back into the sea. As for me, I was delirious and feverish. How could I make it back to my bed?’
II- Marker said La Jetée was a remake of Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) which was an adaptation of the French novel, D’Entre les morts (1954, translated as The Living and the Dead) by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. A detective is hired by a businessman to pursue a woman who is supposed to be his wife, Madeleine. According to the businessman, she has been acting strangely. The detective follows the woman around the city and gradually falls in love with her. But he later finds out the woman he pursued was not Madeleine. His client had deceived him as part of a plan to kill his own wife, the real Madeleine. In the second half of the film, the detective meets the woman he had pursued. This time she says who she is. They begin a love affair. But the past haunts them. There is an imaginary time loop. A man loves a woman in two different contexts.
The hero of La Jetée travels in time — like in the novel Time Machine (HG Wells, 1895). He is trapped in the drama of time travel. He cannot escape his fate. Why has time travel has ever been so intriguing in fiction In truth is, when we write about our past, we go back and excavate layers of our past memories, like a sealed train going through a foggy landscape. We may consider the act of reminiscence as a form of time travel.
III- La Jetée seems to have been partly inspired by passages in the latter parts of the novel Crime and Punishment (Feodor Dostoyevsky, 1866). The allusions are numerous. Raskolnikov, hero of Crime and Punishment, is haunted by his past memories. Same for the hero of La Jetée. But the latter can travel through time, to live the normal life of the pre-nuclear war. Later in the story, Marker nearly breaks the time travel device:
‘Since mankind had survived, surely it could not deny assistance to its own past. This sophism was accepted as Destiny in disguise.’
Here are a few partial fragments from Crime and Punishment:[1]
1- Crime and Punishment — ‘Raskolnikov dreamt he was back in his childhood in the town of his birth. He was a child about seven years old walking into the country with his father. There was a crowd [at] a graveyard. He dreamt he was walking with his father: there were crowds. […] With all his might [Mikolka] dealt a stunning blow at the poor mare. The mare stretched out her head, drew a long breath and died.’
La Jetée — On Sundays, parents bring their children to watch the planes… Of this Sunday, the child of this story would remember the frozen sun, the scene at the end of the jetty. [Moments] are only made memorable by the scars they leave. The face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. The sudden noise, the woman’s gesture, the crumpling body, the cries of the crowd. Later, he knew he had seen a man die.
2- Crime and Punishment — ‘He dreamt that the whole world was condemned to a terrible new strange plague that had come to Europe from the depths of Asia. All were to be destroyed except a very few chosen. Some new sorts of microbes were attacking the bodies of men. Never had men considered themselves so intellectual and so completely in possession of the truth as these sufferers, never had they considered […] their scientific conclusions so infallible. […] Only a few men could be saved in the whole world.’
La Jetée — And sometime later, Paris was destroyed. Many died. Some thought they had won. Others were taken prisoner. The survivors settled underground. Above ground, Paris and no doubt most of the world was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity. The victors stood guard over an empire of rats.
3- In Crime and Punishment, the two lovers are kept apart by the authorities of the penal institution; in La Jetée, by the camp’s doctors.
Crime and Punishment — ‘Sometimes Sonia came to see him at work. And yet everybody knew she had come out to follow him. Sonia had only been able to visit him twice during his illness; each time she had to obtain permission, and it was difficult. But she often used to come to the hospital yard. One evening, when he was almost well again, Raskolnikov fell asleep. On waking up he […] saw Sonia in the distance at the hospital gate. […] On the evening of the same day, […] Raskolnikov lay on his plank bed and thought of her.’
La Jetée — A girl who might be the one he seeks. He passes her on the jetty. He is sure he recognizes her. When he recovers from his trance, the woman is gone. This time, he is close to her, speaks to her. She welcomes him without surprise. Later, they are in a garden. Another wave of time washes over him. […] This time she is asleep in the sun. He thinks that, in the time it has taken him to return to her world, she may have died. She awakens, and again he talks to her.
La Jetée is a philosophical tale that threads a thin line between literature and cinema. It is a work of high literary and cinematic value.
[1] All fragments from Crime and Punishment are based on the 1914 English translation by Constance Garnett. Bantam Edition, 1958.
