Thoughts on La Jetée

One of the issues that most of the people we've read up to now have almost completely ignored is that of the image. The image is arguably the most essential part of film, and yet Wartenburg, Russell, Hanson and Hunt immediately reduce the film to its narrative, its meaning. Hanson at least discusses how her foil, Alexandre Astruc, thinks that in order for film to be an ideal form of expression it needs to rid itself of the visual (393).

La Jetée, by contrast, begins with the image and the image is central. In fact, it begins with the image that is still, yet is accompanied by the active sounds of planes, such that the still image is given life. What is more, and I think this is only significant for us, the images are black and white images, which have themselves a kind of meaning that is separate from color images. Black and white images are never transparent in the way that most color images are. In the color image, we see only the thing in the image. But the black and white image immediately calls attention to itself. And despite its explicit mediacy, we associate the black and white image with documentation. In other words, the black and white image has captured some fragment of reality and trapped it, made it eternal.

Marker plays on these expectations of the image and uses them to affect us more deeply. That is, what we believe is real seems more powerful than what is fiction. Example: the thought of the murder of Polish military officers at Katyn produces sadness, whereas the end of the lives of a planet of comic book characters elicits nothing. This power of the image to affect us is one of the principal concerns of La Jetée. The narrator begins by noting that the story to unfold concerns the way in which certain images troubled the main character.


I don't think we need to conclude that La Jetée offers response to the attempts of Wartenberg et al., to the problem of how film may be able to "do philosophy". Yet the film does argue for the irreducibility of the image, and via allegory, claims that images can lead us to our deaths, may lead us to madness ... the black and white image foregrounds that irreducibility. How does affect or emotion relate to this irreducibility? Does it imply that the irreducibility is something that can best be "known" in feeling (since not in language)?