Silent Movie

This is a story of four films, although I suppose it is really about love.

What made La Jetee so affecting when I saw it for the first time more than 30 years ago was the exposition of its argument, a poetry, lyrical and profoundly romantic, transcending its means or perhaps, transforming them. The form of the filmed foto-roman is banal and is matched by the film¹s formula of comic book science fiction. The photographs have a nostalgic aura to them but outside of the film, separated from it and each other, no more than that. The structure is predictable, the montage of the ruined city, the speaking heads of the future are little more than the stock sets of a silent two-reeler. And yet its thesis is simple and overwhelming, that in the midst of the queasy shifting of the past and future in which we are without ground, the only place we may find, the being of ourself and others, even the world¹s existing, is in the present. And that we reach that present in relation, in the utter attention to another. The film¹s apotheosis is not on the pier at Orly, however mysterious and beautiful, however it may have echoed through my life these 30 years, but in the hours spent with the woman before the war came and with it the shadow world.

This is the searching amidst displacement and separation of Marker¹s early films. It links the films that at first seem very different, Lettre de Siberie four or five years before La jetée, Le mystère Koumiko and Si j¹avais quatre dromedaries. As though trying to discover a place that feels like a far away land, at once intimate and unfamiliar. From the shifting film structure of testimony, of stories, glimpses of far off places there emerge, if only briefly, the face of a young girl, the sound of a voice, a glance, a gesture, a place and time so overflowingly full that it absorbs the whole world and ourselves. For a moment that is no longer instantaneous but which has an impossible duration, we inhabit a present that is specific and whole.

I don¹t know if Marker was aware of it, in a curious sense that innocence of the film making its Œculture¹, the habits and themes of its day allow this other to emerge. Marker regards some of these films as an embarrassment and it¹s true Lettre de Siberie is clumsy, politically naive and schematic and that Le mystère Koumiko may be little more than a diversion. But they connect with their time and ours in a way that Cuba Si! or Le joli mai, more fully realised, more conscious of history, do not, remaining documents, between the aura of the archive and nostalgic if sophisticated snapshots.

La jetée traces with the simplest of means an idea of the present, of the self and other and love. Marker was reported to have said that he didn¹t know where it came from, that he believed that it was given to him. He began again to rewrite his own history in the late sixties and others will argue more persuasively than I can for the many other things he has made. However that may be, for a while Marker inhabited a world that sometimes seems very distant but its loss would be of a part of our present.

I saw Max Ophuls' La Ronde on late night TV not so long ago and had the familiar and unwanted sensation of being lost. Not lost in the story, the narrative is simple and inevitable. (Maybe I should say that I was lost in myself.) It was a feeling not very different from the sense of disorientation, nausea, even terror that happens more often as I get older. It resembles the disorientation of being drunk or opiated, where everything shifts but the true fear is in not knowing the way back. It happens now on the edge of sleep, lying still, trying to cry out but knowing that there is no sound.

Ophuls¹ world was as different for me when I first saw the film as the world of Schnitzler¹s story was for him. Another country he remembered from childhood, another world that lay beyond reach. How quickly the threads of meaning, of memory knot together, longing and separation, the sense of being elsewhere, of exile from the past, of memories which are your own and those which slide away from one and can never have been your own, too far away... too long ago. The faces you cannot be sure any longer that you recognise, the voices that you may never have heard. In La Ronde it was something as ephemeral as sensibility that triggered my disquiet. So distant and so strongly recognised behind it came flooding in a world tumultuous and cruel, exorbitant and joyful and a narrative, a story of a culture that flowed through and around it, Ophuls to Schnitzler to Proust...

This is what film itself has flowed through in this century, it has been an epic that has acted as collective memory and a shared present. The separation, the sense of loss that Proust struggles against is not the separation from his past, a past he may never have inhabited, but from his present, a present from which we may almost always feel adrift. Marker, constantly rewriting his own history, struggles to find a place in the flux of a world in which the ruins are no longer of the cities at its centre, whether Paris or Alphaville, but the fragments of culture and faith, ideology and belief that shift without ground. The detritus of a war that will not end in our lifetime.

4th May, London

Craigie Horsfield