Time, stillness, returning, remaking

How do your memories, your visual memories, come to you, as stills or as moving pictures? I have a hunch about this, but I wonder if the answer is generation-dependent, photographs no longer holding the monopoly on our access to the past they once did. Still, there’s something poignant about the arrested moment, the sense of having stopped time. It’s surely one of several reasons why La Jetée (1962), despite being a featurette (it’s only 28 minutes long), remains the mysterious French filmmaker Chris Marker’s most famous movie. Despite being a featurette, yes, and maybe even despite not exactly being a movie. Comprised of still photographs, voice-over narration, music and soundscapes, La Jetée calls itself a photo-roman. It is something between cinema, comic books, photo albums, radio drama and storytelling. And it’s a perfect marriage of form and content, this “story of a man marked by an image of his childhood,” an image of someone dying on the pier at Orly Airport, an image that is actually two images: he also remembers a woman’s lovely face. The man is one of a small number of survivors of World War III, forced to live underground due to poisonous levels of radiation on the planet’s surface. Because his fixation on this childhood image is so acute, so powerful, some rather sinister scientists select the man for an experiment in time travel, a way “to call past and future to the rescue of the present.”

Marker was inspired in part by Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958), and the homage made explicit by a scene in which the man and a woman, just like Scotty and Madeleine, examine the rings in an old tree as a way to read time. Like Vertigo, La Jetée is about projection and morbid nostalgia, about the desire to fashion the current object of one’s affection into a copy of someone long-lost—and in both films, the current object of affection and the long-lost love are the same person. The woman is played by Hélène Chatelain, an actress about whom I know little, but whose screen presence, whose captivating ability to transmit thought and emotion in just a handful of still images, is absolutely essential to the haunting power of La Jetée. There is a sequence, which could be memory or dream, in which the man remembers watching the woman sleep, the images of her slumbering head draped in light shadows, dissolving one into the other until that astonishing moment when this photo-roman, ever so fleetingly, becomes motion picture.

from Je t'aime, je t'aime (1968)

So this singular little masterpiece of French cinema is a genre film, a work of science fiction—another reason to love it. It could be a Philip K. Dick story. And it inevitably became a major influence on subsequent films, most obviously 12 Monkeys (1995), which Edmonton's Metro Cinema will be screening as a double-feature with La Jetée on May 24th, and which is essentially a big-budget, star-studded, elaborately designed extrapolation of La Jetée, though there are many, many others. (An eerie coincidence: between watching La Jetée and 12 Monkeys on DVD at home, I went out to a screening of Je t’aime, Je t’aime, Alain Resnais’ rarely seen 1968 film, which I bought a ticket to for no other reason than it’s being a rarely seen Resnais. I knew absolutely nothing about it. But my jaw dropped when about ten minutes in I realized it was about a guy haunted by an event from his past who’s selected by a group of scientists for an experiment in time travel! Also, for the record, it is deeply creepy, intermittently baffling, and very, very good.)

Maybe coming right off of the narrative elegance and emotional complexity of Chris Marker (and Alain Resnais) spoiled me. Maybe I’ll just never completely get the ostensible appeal of Terry Gilliam’s trademark cartooniness, his Dutch angles and bulbous long-lens close-ups. (This cartooniness strikes me as much more controlled and effective in what’s widely accepted as Gilliam’s masterpiece, 1985’s Brazil.) Maybe, no matter how much I’ve grudgingly come to admire his work in recent years, I’ll never stop feeling annoyed when Brad Pitt acts “crazy” and surrenders to that fidgety finger flinging he does when he seems to not know what else to do. (And yes, Pitt was nominated for an Oscar for this.) Maybe all of the above and other biases dulled my experience, but 12 Monkeys left me underwhelmed. The film utilizes every essential aspect of La Jetée’s story, yet seems to have misplaced that story’s soul.

That paucity of soul certainly can’t be blamed on any lack of woundedness being conveyed by Bruce Willis, in the role that seems to define his battered and bruised, vulnerable macho man persona. (He actually gets pretty hysterical at points.) And it’s hardly as though there’s any lack of imaginative production design: those cavernous, at times seemingly infinite interiors; the frost-encrusted post-apocalyptic surface ruins overrun by wildlife (who apparently aren’t affected by radiation?); the subterranean cages in vertical rows that make it look like living in the future will be like being trapped in a mine for your entire life. (Though all of these locations are weirdly over-lit, or just ugly-lit.) Perhaps it’s simply that, for all its 129 minutes of impressive spectacle, 12 Monkeys never takes the time to stop time, to suspend us in a single moment-image like the one that marks the man. Perhaps the only way to travel through time is to learn how to be truly still. 

                               

Magic Markers

“The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness...” These words, spoken by a woman never seen or named, and, rather briefly, the image these words describe, constitute the vestibule of Sans Soleil (1983), a film so devoutly forged upon inspired impulse and seductive digression as to result in a something like a labyrinth of sound and image. It’s a film I long to get lost in. The woman comments on, or reads directly from, letters she’s received from a vagabond cameraman named Sandor Krasna, over a dizzyingly diverse, rhythmically varied stream of images, presumably taken or compiled by Krasna. We visit Japan, Cabo Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Île-de-France, San Francisco, and, of course, Iceland. So maybe Sans Soleil is a travelogue, maybe an essay, maybe amateur anthropology. It’s associative and lyrical, playful and meditative. We circle themes of memory and history, time and its ceaselessness. There are continual leaps in editing, sudden freeze-frames, and the fleeting, rebellious thrill that arises when a subject looks directly at the camera. Sans Soleil is one of the best-known works of the reclusive 90 year-old polymath who calls himself Chris Marker. It feels like a hazy miracle, daring you to slip in and out of concentrated states of viewing, demanding repeat viewings. You can now watch it over and over again on blu-ray, thanks to a gorgeous new disc from the Criterion Collection that collects both it and Marker’s other most famous work, the masterful, haunting, equally sui generis “photo-roman” about traveling back in time before World War III, La Jetée (1962), aka, for a lot of people my age, the film that inspired 12 Monkeys (1995).

Revisiting Sans Soleil for the first time in years, what the film now reminds me of most is W.G. Sebald’s uncategorizable literary masterpiece The Rings of Saturn. We have the intimate voice that’s mostly talking about others, the rigorous wandering, the compulsive thought-detours into subjects such as street parades, video games, holidays, revolutions and military coups, panda death, Vertigo, television, Jean Jacques Rousseau, volcanic ash, public sleeping, Apocalypse Now, wildlife, the absence of adjectives in Japanese poetry, and large-scale advertising: “pictures larger than people, voyeurizing the voyeurs.” It’s a film for those who feel at home everywhere but at home, who are fascinated by the sacred-exotic, who want to remember everything even though they know perfectly well that memory’s really just the lining of forgetting. Or it’s for anyone drawn to the essence of movies, because that’s also what Sans Soleil is essentially about. In one of Criterion’s superb supplements filmmaker Jean-Pierre Gorin describes Sans Soleil as “a secret map.” Which again calls to mind the travelogue, except that Marker’s navigational skills are all tied up in the facilitation of his wanderlust. Which has guided him through a long career that embraces many forms, formats and themes. He’s still at it, some 60 years after helping to found the Left Bank movement, still embracing new technologies, still merging the very personal with the global, the political, the arcane. And he’s still too little known. My wish list for future Criterion releases? More Marker, please!

PS: Random cool thing I found via Wikipedia: the full text for Sans Soleil.

Don't worry, this'll only hurt for about 88 minutes

If you’re dying to know what it might be like to see a movie made entirely by robots you could do worse than Surrogates. This new Disney product is top to bottom a sleek, smooth and fully deodorized work, completely devoid of such pesky eccentricities as can occasionally spontaneously pop out of the human imagination. There’s an early scene where a boy FBI robot (a wigged and air-brushed Bruce Willis) and a girl FBI robot (Radha Mitchell, looking rather like Rebecca De Mornay) question a robot while another robot looks on. It’s like an interrogation scene played out between cucumbers, except not so lively. Or funny. Once an actual human or two enters the picture, with Willis receiving his requisite ass kicking quickly enough, things only get slightly more animated.


Surrogates is based on a comic book and adapted for the screen by Michael Ferris and John Brancato, both of whom worked on the last couple of Terminator flicks, which surprisingly weren’t enough to dissuade anyone to keep these guys away from more robot movies. Artificial intelligence is a subject that in theory lends itself to any number of provocative, thoughtful stories, yet it so rarely yields anything above a dim-witted extrapolation of Frankenstein or Blade Runner. In imagining a near future where everyone stays home and has their robot surrogate—usually a younger, blander version of themselves—go out and do everything for them, Ferris and Brancato, in league with T3 director Jonathan Mostow, convey a truly astonishing lack of interest in their scenario’s consequences. And if we can agree that science fiction requires a modicum of plausibility to counterbalance the fantastical, these boys are barely showing up to work. The opening flurry of boilerplate newscast exposition informs us that 98% of the global population is using surrogates. That’s right, Tibetan monks, Bangladeshi disaster victims, underpaid Peruvian coffee growers, homeless guys living under bridges, nomadic Kazakh goat herders subsisting without electricity or running water—all of them are plugged in, kicking back and having their robot doubles plow the fields, get laid, breakdance, and take out the trash. This is when ignorance becomes offensive. I don’t think 98% of the world’s population even owns a fucking radio.

Man, I wish I were in La Jetée, or at least 12 Monkeys.

Maybe a tanning bed.

The story as such concerns an investigation into a murder enacted with a secret zap gun that fries a surrogate’s insides so fast that I guess it somehow gives the same jolt to its human counterpart. Or something. Anyway the victim’s the son of the original surrogate inventor (James Cromwell), who now holes up in his mansion and is clearly up to no good. Bruce decides to rough it and try first-hand experience again after his surrogate is blown to bits following a chopper crash into the inner-city fortress of a band of anti-surrogate insurgents, all of whom, for some reason, are unpleasant, overweight, unshaven, and dress like pissed-off hillbillies. They’re led by Ving Rhames, dolled-up like a Rastafarian mystic, but there’s something fishy about him, too. So we sit patiently and wait for all the drearily predictable plot twists to play out, building to a climax that offers the one genuinely nifty sequence in the whole movie, with dozens upon dozes of life-size Kens and Barbies collapsing in the streets like they’re reenacting that Radiohead video where they guy can’t get up. Think how much better the movie could have been had it started there.