Lost & gained in translation
The many lives of Chris Marker’s «La Jetée»
Testo di Federico Antonini
This article (qui in italiano) has been featured on Progetto Grafico, an international graphic design magazine published by Aiap, the italian association for visual communication design. The issue #32, “Here, elsewhere”, has been edited by Serena Brovelli, Claude Marzotto and Silvia Sfligiotti. You can subscribe to the magazine here and buy the current issue here.
Although it is a common perception that adaptations from one medium to another, such as turning a book into a film often result in a loss compared to the original, the numerous adaptations and re-workings of Chris Marker’s classic short film La Jetée (1962), show not only a much more complex relationship between the starting situation and the new media, but even perhaps an improvement brought about by the meeting between literary language, book form and cinematic image.
Inspired by Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) and inspirer of Terry Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys (1995), Marker’s dystopian film is an experimental montage of several hundred photographs plus a short motion sequence, the whole accompanied by Trevor Duncan’s music and Jean Négroni’s narrating voice. In 1993 La Jetée was published as a book by MIT Press / Zone Books. The project was curated by graphic designer Bruce Mau, then arts director of Zone Books, in collaboration with Marker himself. If the opening titles of the short played on the nature of the film by announcing a photo-roman, the book form adaptation changed the subtitle to ciné-roman to emphasize the intermedial aspect of the project.
The original film’s twenty-eight minutes see the protagonist move through a Paris split between two time phases, before and after a nuclear apocalypse. During his incursions into the past, he meets the woman whose face is the only memory from his previous life. The evolution of the story and a coup de scène reveal the circularity of the narration, one of the most acclaimed aspects of the film.
Marker’s short becomes a picture in motion in La Jetée alla Sherrie Levine (2011)¹, a ninety-minute slow motion video in which artist Geoffrey Alan Rhodes turns the pages of the book La Jetée: ciné-roman, shooting the pages from extremely close up. In addition to the aspect of appropriation highlighted in the title, this work explores the particular use of time in the book that makes it possible to connect moments from the circular sequence of events unachievable in the linear narrative of the film.
In his autobiography Life Style², Bruce Mau recalls various difficulties that arose when working with Marker: the filmmaker’s reluctance — it took Mau six years to convince him — the difficulty transporting the photographs to Canada, in the hands of a particularly trustworthy employee of Zone Books, and the discovery of several missing shots, which were shipped at the last minute by plain old airmail. Another obstacle may have been the reverence for an author aware of the potential of the book format. Marker considered books the right medium for integrating or transcribing his films (see
A grin without a cat³), and personally supervised the layout of his own publications. Commentaires⁴, transcripts of his art house films, for example, inspired and anticipated by ten years Richard Hollis’s famous graphic design project for Ways of Seeing by John Berger⁵.
The relationship between the 1962 film and the book of 1993 was defined in different terms. The blurb used by Zone Books is a transcript of Marker’s response to the mock-up sent by Mau to get the green flag waving so the adaptation work could start: “It brings a total freshness to the work … Not a film’s book, but a book in its own right — the real ciné-roman announced in the film’s credits”.
Mau, though often accredited as co-author of the adaptation, prefers to define La Jetée: ciné-roman “a study on translation, not between languages but between different media”⁶. The concept is taken up again by
Michael Rock in Designer as Author: “Bruce Mau’s project of a book-version of the 1962 Chris Marker film, La Jetée, sets out to translate the original material from one form to another. Mau is certainly not the author of the work but the translator, of the form and spirit”⁷.
Instead, William Drenttel, in an article in Design Observer⁸, calls La Jetée: ciné-roman a “book about Chris Marker’s film”, suggesting a simple relationship of aboutness rather than the creation of a self-sufficient version.
Finally, in the controversial and hypertextual Pre /post-erous: La Jetée ciné-roman⁹, authors Jon Wagner, Tracy Biga Maclean and Chris Peters compare the book to a nostalgic and incomplete souvenir, guilty of eliminating Duncan and Négroni’s sound contributions — as well as the deafening cries of the swallows, the whispering in German of the scientists/persecutors… — of which only the credits in the colophon remain.
In Mau’s graphic design project, we shift from the monoscopic view of the short film to the stereoscopic one of the pages set side by side of the book. Arranged horizontally as on photographic film, the reduced image sequences give the page a paradoxically cinematic appearance, a characteristic that Mau himself considers essential to his way of doing things. However, the horizontal format — which respects the proportion of the original images, according to the iconography of the classic photographic book — and the two-language texts accompanying the images as captions do not help the graphic design to compete with the utilitarian beauty of the layouts that Marker had developed in the early Sixties.
By carefully comparing the unfolding images in both book and film, we notice that in the printed film sequences the photographs are arranged according to different hierarchies than those in the film. For example, the printed version makes little of certain shots, such as the one in which the protagonist observes the nape of the woman’s neck — considered by researchers such as Janet Harbord to be an important element of passion and eroticism¹⁰ — and sequences such as her awakening — a particularly significant moment which, among various photograph fade-outs, almost hides a short sequence in motion during which the actress blinks.
This is reduced in the book to a mere two frames.
The diary on show at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 2014 during the exhibition Chris Marker: A grin without a cat is the closest to a screenplay that a movie like La Jetée could have had. The page layout by the author, unaware of the book that would come along thirty years later, adds a degree of complexity to the whole affair. Note the method by which Marker groups the screen tests, glued together in scene units, which is reminiscent of some of Mau’s graphics but with the typical vertical motion of film reel.
The only additional content in Mau’s book compared to the original film is a footnote, almost a spoiler, and it would be interesting to know who penned it. In the film, when the two protagonists go up to the trunk of a sequoia with important dates marked on their corresponding growth ring (a reference to Vertigo), the narrator explains: “She says an English name he does not understand”. In the book, a zealous asterisk — “* Hitchcock?” — interrupts the story of the narrator, fleetingly betraying the presence of a commentator and a further level of content.
- The title pays homage to Sherrie Levine, photographer and artist of Appropriation Art.
2. Bruce Mau, edited by Kyo Maclear with Bart Testa, Life Style, London/New York: Phaidon, 2000.
3. Original title Le Fond de l’air est rouge: scènes de la Troisième Guerre mondiale, 1967–1977, film, 180’, 1977. A year later Marker published a book by the same name, Paris: Éditions Maspéro, 1978.
4. Chris Marker, Commentaires, Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961.
5. See Rick Poynor, The filmic page: Chris Marker’s Commentaires, in Design Observer, March 22, 2014. The article by the British historian pays tribute to the pioneering work of the French filmmaker in the field of graphic design, arguing that this piece of cutting edge publishing was in the past neglected because copies were so hard to come by and because Marker was not well known in the field of graphic design at the time.
6. In Bruce Mau, Life Style, Ibid.
7. Michael Rock, Designer as Author (1996), in Multiple Signatures:
On Designers, Authors, Readers and Users (Spring 2013)
8. William Drenttel, Chris Marker: La Jetée, in Design Observer, February 4, 2005
9. In ebr9, Spring 1999
10. Janet Harbord, Chris Marker: La Jetée, Cambridge, Mass./London: Afterall Books/MIT Press, 2009.
