La Jetée (BFI Film Classics), by Chris Darke

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I had read in an essay by the film scholar Philippe Dubois that the Royal Belgian Film Archive holds a trove of material relating to La Jetée, including a copy of a different version of the film, an exercise book containing an editing plan and a collection of correspondence between Marker and Jacques Ledoux, the former director of the Film Archive.

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In his later, post-filmic period, this curatorial principle can also be seen at work in the encyclopaedic bricolage of the cd-rom Immemory (1998), as well as in the Ouvroir (2008), Marker’s own imaginary museum in the virtual world of Second Life.

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Marker’s lifelong campaign of self-concealment required multiple aliases: Sergei Murasaka, Sandor Krasna, Michel Krasna, Hayao Yamaneko, Fritz Markassin, T. T. Toukanov, Jacopo Berenizi, Boris Villeneuve, Marc Dornier, Chris Mayor and Chris. Marker. ‘Chris Marker’ (minus the abbreviating dot) was only the most well-known pseudonym behind which the man born Christian François Bouche-Villeneuve in 1921 chose to operate.

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Time is this element, and it has deprived the film even of life’s motive force – movement. La Jetée is one of a number of films made in the post-war period where statues feature as emblems of mummification, of time moulded in stone.

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In an essay on Vertigo published in 1994, Marker described this as ‘the moment which decides everything’ and to emphasise its significance in La Jetée, Trevor Duncan’s musical theme rises on the soundtrack for the first time, its resemblance to Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo score adding a further layer of allusion.

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‘Whether the childhood voice of bedtime stories or the omnipresent voice of history, the narrator not only narrates the story but tells us that he is telling it.’

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And Marker toys with our desire. On the one hand, by filling his shots with things already stilled within the stills: statues and stuffed animals in glass cases. And on the other, by making these stills tremble on the verge of movement by suggesting their animation. Partly through music and sound – an aeroplane’s roar, the time traveller’s heartbeat, his captors’ whispered German – and also through cross-dissolves, fades to black and varied editing speeds.