La Jetée – the film that received a cult status soon after its release, along with Sans Soleil is regarded as Marker‘s best film. Every frame in this film is a black and white photograph. It unites photography and cinema and develops a new language that Philippe Dubois calls “cinématogramme” (cinematogram) [1]. A film that incorporates the movements and editing techniques, of cinema like slow dissolves, varied tempo, match cuts and dolly zoom shot [2] into photographs.

Photographs lock meaning and realities representing the subject. The subjective interpretation of a photograph does not interfere with its temporal reality of having existed in the past. Concurrently, the photograph is never separate from its referent or at least not immediately [3]. Though photographs are the primary element of cinema, but cinema is not as ‘complete’ and ‘full’ as the photograph. It does always carry the referent but the referent in cinema keeps changing. Hence the impact of the referent is not as great as that in a photograph[4]. But what can be extrapolated from the understanding of the hybridisation that reflects cinema like La Jetée?

The stills in La Jetee are not frames cut out from a film reel but they are actual photographs shot from a Pentax camera. By engaging Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida with Marker’s La Jetée, another dimension of temporal reality materialises. According to Barthes (comparable to Andre Bazin’s idea in What is Cinema), a photograph is not a copy of reality but the emanation of past reality [5]. A photograph is a deferred reality. A reality that existed once upon a time but is no more. The image of the woman in La Jetee was “of reality and of past” [6], more so because it not only activated the past for the man, but made it his present.

Barthes talks about death in a photograph, presence of time and the look of the photograph. A common circumstance of Barthes in Camera Lucida and the man in La Jetée is instrumental in their juxtaposed interpretation – the obsession and love for one image – the image mirroring their deaths. In La Jetée, the image of the woman at Orly that the man carries with him throughout the war is actually the image of his death. Whilst Barthes redeems The Winter Garden photograph of his mother that ‘inscribes his own death’ [7].

In Camera Lucida, Barthes has expressed his fondness for photography as opposed to cinema. But what meanings are called upon in a cinema constructed of photographs.  How the photographs are resurrection in La Jetée? What happens when the medium becomes the meaning? How does one understand La Jetée– as a film or photograph? The following conversations are trying to engage Chris Marker’s La Jetée with Camera Lucida by Roland Barthes. The two photographs illustrate a few points of observation on the effects of time, space and death.

This is a work in progress.

“Photography’s noeme has nothing to with analogy (a feature it shares with all kinds of representations).”

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida

In this photograph the man is looking straight into the camera while the woman is looking at him. It is the first time he looks straight into  the viewer. There have been other instances in the film when people have looked into the camera. Those have been didactic – to acknowledge somebody out of frame [12]. But in this photograph, the man acknowledges the presence of a viewer.  As Barthes says in Camera Lucida– “For the photograph has this power-which it is increasingly losing, the frontal pose being most often considered archaic nowadays-of looking me straight into the eye” [13]. The man looks into the lens with anger, fierceness and a truth that he is very well aware of. It is as though the man is acknowledging the secret that the shares with his confidante, the viewers; he is in the ‘past’, where the war is going to break out soon and that the woman for whom he has travelled in time is actually dead. He  belongs to a life which is just the opposite of where he is right now. He belongs to the underground life where people live like rats. He is fearful, angry and in love (with the image of his past). This is the look of madness that Barthes talks about is the noeme of photography, the reality-‘That-has-been’, together with the truth-‘there-she-is’ [14].If we take another view point and see it from the eyes of the subject , we might be able to understand the photograph better. In this overlap of reality and truth, the reality of the man as ‘that-has-been’ is the past that he is living in right now and the truth is that even if he can see her and feel her with him at this moment, she is dead in his present (because of the war). The photograph affects and conveys the intention not of the photographer but of the subject.The punctum[15] in this photograph is the shadow of a branch of a tree on his face. There is a shadow on the woman’s face also but it is not so clear and conspicuous. The image takes us beyond what we see in the frame creating a “blind field”. The shadow of the branch can be read to have a “symbolic meaning” [16]. It signifies the shadow of the war that looms large. These kind of metaphors are used a lot by Marker in La Jetée. The broken female sculptures later on in the film is another example.