Silent Movie From: Dom RotheroeTo: Chris Marker Subject: Re: Sans Soleil and emus
- You wrote: One day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long - piece of black leader. If they don't see the happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the - black. I know how important connections are for you and I think you were right - linking the image with others couldn't be done within the linearity of film and it was best left to the imagination finding itself in the black. But in memory's juggling of time and space it can be done and there I find so many images you put elsewhere that link with that happiness. Your most famous one came from many years earlier. But it's been too talked about, that eye-opening definition of movement, cinema and life in La Jetée, the complement to Bunuel's eye-slicing in Un Chien Andalou - two images from the beginning and end of cinema. - You wrote: Only one film has been capable of portraying impossible memory, insane - memory - Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. In the spiral of the titles I see time covering a field, - ever wider, that moved away - a cyclone whose present moment contains, motionless, the - eye. But it's the chain of details in between the opening and closing of eyes that interest me most, the banalities you track 'with the relentlessness of a bounty hunter' and gather together in Sans Soleil. A dog lying by the surf on a sandy beach. Sei Shonagon's list of Things Not Worth Doing or Things That Quicken The Heart. A hand on the rail of a ferry. A white-socked cat padding over volcanic ash. A Japanese widower who plunges into work, then kills himself because he can't bear hearing the word 'spring'. A ceremony for the repose of broken dolls. A young African woman trying not to look, but then looking at the camera for 1/24th of a second. And an emu on the Ile-de-France. > You wrote: In the nineteenth century mankind came to terms with space and the great question of the twentieth is the coexistence of different concepts of time. - By the way, did you know there are emus on the Ile-de-France? - In the Bijago Islands it's the young girls who choose their fiancés. - In the suburbs of Tokyo there is a temple consecrated to cats... The emu is especially important to me, the most banal detail of all, a recurring thought without real links in a film which links everything. It's the exception which gilds the rule and its seeming superfluousness in your travels through time and space says more to me about memory than, dare I say it, the whole of your beloved Vertigo. The emu, for me, is at the centre of it all, a symbol at the heart of the webs you propose, which, like memory (and, you guessed it, life), find the links between everything. It's these connections across time and space I value most in what you do, whether it's between the influence of an eleventh century Japanese lady-in-waiting and nuclear power politics or a child witnessing the death of his future time-travelling self at Orly. At a time when the global village is lounging into the global living room and when the television you call 'the memory box' is resisting ever more in the UK any links to that beyond both these shores and the present, feeding cheaply and voraciously on the lives of its telegenic viewers and voyeurising the voyeurs - I've begun to associate you with another image of yours. Just as you linked the struggles of the active Left with the culling of wolves from a helicopter in Grin Without A Cat, I'm starting to see you as one of those wolves. You may not be fleeing and they're not really shooting, but the tranquilisation darts are in the air. Unfortunately they're no longer coming from an obvious Right, but a capitalised Left with no sense of irony or moral politics and a real taste for ratings. The wolves are still running, but one day they may get exhausted and the images on the memory box will become completely amnesiac. By the way, did you know that the St Helenians didn't receive television till four years ago? I wonder how their memories are starting to reorientate. Maybe in the way mine did when I watched Sans Soleil again after writing this - when I saw that at the end of the film you did find images to graft round the Icelandic children. It was something I'd forgotten, though I think I preferred my memory. And I also forgot that - - You wrote: Finally his language touches me because he talks to that part of us which - insists on drawing profiles on prison walls - a piece of chalk to follow the contours of what - is not or is on longer or is not yet, the handwriting each one of us will use to compose his - own list of Things That Quicken The Heart. In that moment poetry will be made by - everyone and there will be emus in the Zone. I'd forgotten that the emus were equally important to you. Which, I suppose, had made the poetry my own. So in the end I have to thank you - for connecting and communicating. For reminding me and helping make the world strange again. |
