PHOTO-300/3 A: Foundations of Photography: Theories & Practices BEYOND A PROPOSAL - Toward the Ontological Ubiquity of a Renewed Photography and

the Cinematic Mechanisms of the Photo-Roman

Francesco Casettis article entitled An Interlude: The Feeling of the New describes the jump point (1959) to the new wave cinemas, with their new theories and individualistic styles of production, encompassing the earlier precursor films of the neorealist Italian cinema of Rossellini and De Sica; and later, the post-neorealist films of Antonioni and Pasolini, the structuralist films of Warhol and Snow, and the subjective cinema of the French nouvelle vague authors. At the forefront in the push for a new world view was the new avant-garde of the modernist movement, the French nouvelle vague, and it marked the onset of the postmodernist expressionists who were going to foreground their alternate representations through photography and cinema. The new wave cinema developed in coordination with social and political changes (especially after WWII), where there was a new landscape in postwar Europe. While other European countries saw important changes in film making practices and styles (such as the Czech and British new waves) in the late 1950s and early 1960s, it was in France that the nouvelle vague challenged most profoundly the established cinematic order and had the biggest international impact. The new artistic expression was designated as a freer approach to film, existing outside the traditional production and stylistic norms (professionalism, studios, literary sources, large budgets, stardom, ect.), an approach which privileges spontaneity and the individual expression of the auteur-director. In an article written by Robert Stam, Alternatives Aesthetics (in Robert Stam and Toby Miller, eds. Film and Theory: An Anthology, Department of Cinema Studies, New York University: Blackwell Publishers, 2000), he presents the possibilities for new alternative aesthetics that go against the normative aesthetics of Hollywoods classical cinemas. These alternatives perceptions and expanding sensations produce the postmodern avant-gardes, who put a stress on

the representation of cinematic processes (Andy Warhols structural films, like Eat), emphasizing no movement in the shots {Chris Markers La jetee (1962)}, the disjunctive dislocation of image/sound (Hollis Framptons Hapax Legomena I: nostalgia (1971), and the subversion of classical aesthetics and myths as a carnivalesque or masquerade {Andy Warhols Kiss (1963) and Kenneth Angers Scorpio Rising (1963)}. Of the many films made between 1957 and 1962, the central ones are the Cahiers du Cinema critics own: Truffauts Les Quatres cents coups (1959), Chabrols Le Beau Serge (1957), Rhomers Le Signe du Lion (1959, rel. 1962), Rivettes Paris nous apartient (1958-60), and Godards A Bout de souffle (1960), a flagship film for the new wave in its location shooting, rulebreaking editing, casual acting, and references to American film noir. While aesthetically innovative and exhilarating, these nouvelle vague films lacked interest in political and social issues, concentrating on personal anxieties among the male Parisian middle class; another less media-prominent band of nouvelle vague filmmakers, known as the Left Bank group, such as Chris Marker, Alain Renais, and Agnes Varda, showed greater political awareness and mental agility. Alain Renais Hiroshima mon amour (1959) and LAnnee derniere a Marienbad (1961), a modernist expression of human geometry, the complexity of thought and its mechanisms, and Chris Markers La jetee (1962, rel. 1964) are representative examples of an apolitical strain within this more socio-political, left-wing nouvelle vague. In Alain Renais Hiroshima mon amour (1959), the memory is of events related to the atomic haunting and the fear it brings to the present, and to the survivors who react to flashbacks of this dreaded past, and of the destroyed relationships it engendered. Hiroshima mon amour is a womans point-of-view suffused onto the sphere of a love story set within an historical framework, combined with the dynamic narrative vehicle of memory as the emotional impetus mediating the interrelations between two diverse national histories, including definite differences and discernible similarities. It is a new look into reality, using dialog in a self referential manner, and more importantly, memory to violate the conventionally classical idea of temporal order - the mark of new wave directorship. In contrast, Chris Markers La jetee (1962) is a new view of a more outlandish cinema, a radically alternate discourse expressing unfamiliar ideas about reality, and the relation between the individual and history. La jetee deals with Einsteins space-time relations at the level of hyperreality and simulation, where the power of memory becomes a projection into a hypothetical future, of what might happen, in terms of history in general, and of an individuals potential histories. It is an experimental study in time and stasis, where powerful narcotics and hypnosis are initially used to simulate time travel back to the past, and of the retrieval (back to the future) of memory fragments synthesized from the encounter of a couple, whose historical structure closes itself to the impossible moment of memory (past, present and future). La jetee uses narrative formal strategies of voice-over (an older technique) with sequences of still photographs (a new view), a new cinematic approach representing a certain reality as fragmented world.

Photographed by Marker, La Jetee is a fabulous photo novel, an incredible achievement in experimental photo-montage in which a succession of still photographs, tells a futuristic story of an eerie reality; suffused with high contrast, diffused black-and-white images, as it augurs of the hypothetical condemnation of the human race, a reflection on the present state and status quo of world affairs. The use of memory, as an impulsive metaphor for the cinematic transport of new views about recurring themes of history, culture and art, especially in cinema and photography, as depicted in La jetee and Hiroshima mon amour, forms the conceptual basis for my photo-essay project, fulfilling the Photo-300 fall/2001 & winter/2002 portfolio production requirements. Chris Markers La jetee (1962) is the paradigm for this photographic narrative production, a fantastical photograph-fiction entitled The Agony of the Ecstasy, a Mariendian-like place infested by Renais Night and Fog (1955) and incinerated by the gamma rays of Renais Hiroshima, mon Amour (1959). The Ecstatic agony is a strange anterior future, a past future, yet to come and already gone. La jetee is not explicitly significant, except in what the viewer thinks it says, and how it makes one feel it is; sometimes it feels like an oratorio, a wrenching cantara of a tragic world inclined to torture, terrorism and massacre. La jetee is like time, a changing reality, transforming itself moment-to-moment; and then it is not, never changing, like a stasis in time. It is a meditation on time, a coherent muse; a duration that is lived, but a time that is thought (because unpondered time is no time and no thing). Paradoxically, thought necessitates language, yet language is not a product of thought (an internal process); but there cannot be thought without language (an externally agreed upon set of codes). And if time is thought and thought is reason, then language is La jetees time machine, and the narrator, not the hero, is the time traveler. The driving force in La jetee is the voiced commentary which unifies the sequences of images, giving them a definite sense of dramatic continuity. The impression of flow is accentuated by the sound track, whose music, sound effects, dialogue, and voice-over are set at a normal pace, gives the film duration and a sense of proceeding. What is interesting about La jetee is the documentary quality of its grainy film stills, testifying as permanent records of the existence of people that are no longer living; moreover, they conjure animistic feelings within the viewer, a stronger wanting for these fixed personages to move and to live. However, they cannot move because they have been annihilated by the apocalyptic cataclysm of a thermonuclear war; herewith the melancholic feeling of mourning is stressed onto the audience, and it is at this point that Markers cinematic genius shines through in the most powerfully charged emotional moment of the film, a momentary instance of live motion. This is the critical corner stone in La jetees plot, and an extremely bold new view in cinematic representation.

Its formal narrative strategies split it into two worlds, one of story and another of discourse; therein lies the storys movement where the stills represent the narrators point-of-view, separate from the diegesis. Just as the distinction between life and death is made to dissolve in Tibetan Buddhism; so too does the apparent difference between event time and screen time vanishes into a systemic representation of a new kind of cinema. Marker is able to simulate the stasis of an instant in time, and express the ability of the mind to transform what it sees and what it presents (on screen); in essence, just as one cant escape time, so too, one cant escape film. The play on words is intense because Le jete of a dancer signifies a leap, referent to the heros romantic aspirations, while La jetee signifies something that is thrown, as in the verb projeter; and can refer to a projection into the sea or the projection of film. La jetee can also mean the political and scientific set of limits having to do with time, time travel, memory, and conscious thought. It enables differentiation between memory and time, where the hero is not sent into memory; but instead, the power of memory is used to re-infiltrate the past. Moreover, the consecrated romance of the hero and young woman suggests a transfigured instant of time; where at the middle of the film, the eidolon of the woman moves, setting her apart from the stasis of the film (images of statues, stuffed animals, and stills abound) and outside of time. La jetee suggests that reality is not composed of stills, and that even the singular moment of time is a constructive mentalization; because to fragment reality into pieces (as does photography) means to analyze, but to move (like the woman does), inside the flow, is to intuit. Hence, the motion of the woman, presented as if it was a dream, something apart from the ordinary reality, is an indication that non-analyzable love is an intuition and the vehicle of time travel, allowing the hero to blastoff from the earthly constraints of analysis, and penetrate the outer space of intuition, where he visions powerful memories that transcend the photographic stills. The heros irreversible dilemma is that he must escape from destiny and time, from the scientific controllers of the mind experiments, which he is subjected to in the post WWIII scenario, and from the potential inertia of the frames of film and their cinematic abettors. His only escape is the romantic vision, as the narrator comments: Moments to remember are just like other moments. They are only made memorable by the scars they leave. The face he had seen was to be the only peacetime image to survive the war. Had he really seen it? Or had he invented that tender moment to shield him from the madness to come? Thus, he is unsure if she is real or not, because the world of the image is that of time; and the implication, that she and her movement are either not real, or not real like the other real things, is expressed by the commentator: She calls him ghost He is never sure whether he seeks her out or is sent, whether he invents or dreams. She may be a creation and her motion a dream, but it is certainly a dream of escape from stasis, a dream set in motion, the dream of the leap of intuition. La jetee does not violate its narrative strategy of fixity, but it is made to simulate movement in the way the womans stills are presented in rapid succession. Beginning with slow dissolves, the interval of change of her still images becomes shorter and shorter, reaching the rate of 24 stills per second.; at which point, no more dissolves are necessary, standard cinematic movement is

reached. But this motion is only an illusion because her movement must always be presented as a sequence of photographs; thus, it is impossible to escape time, and impossible for film to escape from its own processes and procedures. Film seems to exist in a field of inertial confinement, where critical mass is made to exist, and where an immense destructive force balances on the edge of release; making it appear to be a dangerously oppressive, creative art form in its control of reality. La jetee is more than a reflexive paradox, where the hero cant escape the nature of the medium; it is also a set of comments on the mortal limits of the mind, the correlation between politics and transcendence, and the romantic mood amidst world annihilation. It is also an attempt to clarify the path to peace, as an unified collective world view in loves determination to recapture the primeval innocence and sanity, that once were envisioned to exist, from the abettors of destructive forces who live in subterranean ruins with statues and ancient machineries like the gang of cannabilistic Morlocks, in George Pals The Time Machine (1960), adapted from H.G. Wells novel}. Because if let alone on their quest for terror, these massacres of people will continually rise up from the depths of the underworld, to demonstrate their ability to retell the oldest of all stories, that of violence. La jetee is not a science fiction film in the conventional sense of the genre, and in a vague manner, it is about film politics and political fiction; and it can be seen as one of the multitude of alternate ways that films can made to be rendered and perceived. La jetee is not a film composed of fixed shots, but of arrested photograms; it is a decoupage of a hyper-painted film and its immediate reconstruction into a fragmented reality, where the future discovers itself in the present and finds that it has already gone by, making the spectators the survivors of the Apocalypses. La jetees genius is its defiance of the essence of cinema, putting it in direct contradiction with its means, limits and codes of production; and in a magic moment in time, it exalts film through a photograph that moves. Marker accomplishes his art through the use of still living, trace elements left in photographs, suggesting them as mummies of time, and the use of photos as non-living, inert images, suggesting them as fossils of time. And at that hallucinatory instant, when the narrator is out of mind and the sleepy heroine turns, opens her eyes, blinks twice, and looks straight into the camera, a Fellinian mindlink occurs between the viewer and the viewed. The living stills now come to speak of the memento mori, a time to live and a time to die; aphoristically saying all at once that: This is what it is, will be so and has always been. There is no romanticism in this doomful love story, only the naked vision. Moreover, why use such a brief shot of the young woman who appears to literally step out of time? Because it brands into the mind, not the cinemas perpetual presence; but of its eternal power, and its ability to retire itself, at the precise moment, as a great mythical champion, like a wizardly eidolon of a Merlinian dream gone by, leaving the storys earthly task to the fixed dialectics of the word. The power of the cinema is like an instant in the life of a lightning bolt, descending from the heavens, the ontological earthquake of a machine that recreates life, and the awakening of itself in itself to the ubiquitous reality of photography.

But foremost, La jetee is about the tathata (that reality, there it is) of life, sunya (that void) of death, and sunyata (that no mind); it is about the sad humanistic apathy that figures into the threat of Armageddon, and the awakening of thought that comes to exist within the awesome distinction of being dead or alive.