French Studies, Vol. LIX, No.

1, 31– 37
doi:10.1093/fs/kni066

THE MEMORY OF THE IMAGE IN CHRIS MARKER’S

LA JETÉE

PATRICK FFRENCH

The fascination that Chris Marker’s short film La Jete´e has exerted since its
appearance in 1962 derives from the problems of recognition the film

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proposes, induced by the series of transgressions and transformations it
puts into effect. The film’s scenario — the story of a man haunted by the
image of his own death — draws on the enigmatic force of the scenario
of the ‘second death’ which finds exemplary literary figures in Faust,
Dorian Gray, Poe’s Mr Valdemar, Balzac’s Raphael Valentin, and in
Oedipus and Antigone as read by both Freud and Lacan. In the history
of cinema too, the survival of one’s own death or the trope of suspended
death is a privileged figure which has its avatars in Wiene’s Caligari or
Murnau’s Nosferatu, and in Hitchcock’s Vertigo. In these instances
cinema, which gives a semblance of life to a disembodied image, makes
visible a double of this visual afterlife at the level of narrative and puts
itself en abyme. This strategy is found also in the formal construction of
La Jete´e, which consists famously of a series of filmed photograms or
stills; the material basis of the moving image in the photogram is made
visible, as if the moving image, dissected and arranged as a series of still
images, is then re-filmed to create a ‘moving’ image which shows its deri-
vation from photogrammatic stillness. The fascination of the film also
derives from this stillness and from the fixation of the gaze on the still, a
stasis dynamically resolved through the montage and the narrative voice.
The proposition of a memory of one’s own death and of a ‘still’ but
‘moving’ image both pose problems of recognition; fascination derives
from this incapacity to recognize. Following Blanchot, for whom fascina-
tion relates to a paralysis of meaning1 and an absence of time,2 it is also
possible to read the movement of the protagonist as an Orphic and
Oedipal transgression. For Blanchot, ‘La mère [. . .] concentre en elle tous
les pouvoirs de la fascination’.3 The encounter with the maternal gaze of
the female protagonist which the hero has sought, emerging from within
her sleep in the film’s sole ‘moving’ image, precedes the encounter with
death in the form of the emissary of the underworld. A further doubling
1
L’Espace litte´raire (Paris, Gallimard, 1955): ‘Ce qui nous fascine, nous enlève notre pouvoir de donner
un sens’ (p. 25).
2
L’Espace litte´raire: ‘Écrire, c’est se livrer à la fascination de l’absence du temps’ (p. 22).
3
L’Espace litte´raire, pp. 26 – 27.

# The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for French
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32 PATRICK FFRENCH

is to be found in the unrecognizable visual configurations effected by the

dissolves which punctuate the film; at the internal limit of the movement
between two still images there emerges another figure, neither statue nor
human face, echoing the strangeness of the visual field with which the
film’s protagonist is confronted.
Beyond these aesthetic and formal considerations, however, this fascination
also derives from the inscription of history within the film. Produced in 1962,
the image of La Jete´e carries a meaning or has a memory which relates pro-
foundly to that historical moment and to the wider history of the twentieth
century. To this extent La Jete´e, Marker’s sole fiction film, is much closer

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to the documentary than to fiction, and causes the structure of fiction to
tremble through the interruption of the image as the vehicle of a historical
memory. Although, of course, the status of the image as truth or reality is
always problematic — one might speak after Barthes of the effet d’histoire of
the image4—La Jete´e sets up a structure in which the imaginary world of
the protagonist is shattered by the return of an image of the real by
which he has always been determined and which the fantasy of a life lived
twice is intended to screen off. The Lacanian understanding of fantasy
construes it as an unconscious structure which excludes the ‘Real’, that
which always returns in the same place and is resistant to symbolization.5
For the spectator of the film, the fiction is ruptured by the affective
return of an image which carries a historical memory.
The narrative of Marker’s La Jete´e takes place as if between the beginning
and end of a single sentence; it begins: ‘Ceci est l’histoire d’un homme
marqué par une image d’enfance’, and ends with what we might imagine
as a subordinate clause of this sentence, ‘cet instant qu’il lui avait été
donné de voir enfant et qui n’avait pas cessé de l’obséder, c’était celui de
sa propre mort’. From the start, the narrative programmes the death of
the protagonist as the encounter with a memory in the form of an image
which is as if inflicted upon him. The independence of the image and of
memory from the consciousness of the agent is underlined by other
elements of the film. When the experiment which engages memory, more
like torture or hypnosis than psychoanalysis,6 first starts to take effect,
4
See Roland Barthes, ‘L’effet de réel’, in Œuvres Comple`tes: tome II (Paris, Seuil, 1995), pp. 479 – 84.
5
See Jacques Lacan, Le Se´minaire, Livre XI : Les quatre concepts fondamentaux de la psychanalyse (Paris, Seuil,
1973), Chapter 4 .
6
There are obvious parallels between the ‘experiment’ of La Jete´e and psychoanalytic practice, but it is
worth insisting on the distinctions. Lacan in particular underlines that it is a question, for the subject, of
‘la réintégration [. . .] de son histoire jusqu’à ses dernières limites sensibles, c’est-à-dire jusqu’à une
dimension qui dépasse de beaucoup les limites individuelles’: Jacques Lacan, Le Se´minaire, Livre I : Les
Écrits techniques de Freud (Paris, Seuil, 1975), p. 25. This ‘re-integration’ is, however, a re-writing rather
than a reliving or a remembering: ‘Je dirai — en fin de compte, ce dont il s’agit, c’est moins de se
souvenir que de réécrire l’histoire’ (p. 28). The protagonist of La Jete´e differs from the psychoanalytic
subject in that he is forced to undergo the experiment, and also in that he chooses the mode of
reliving the past rather than rewriting it. The scenario is thus closer to that from which psychoanalysis
distinguishes itself at its foundation: hypnosis.
 THE MEMORY OF THE IMAGE IN CHRIS MARKER’S LA JETÉE 33
random images begin to emerge, ‘comme des aveux’: ‘Une chambre du
temps de paix, une vraie chambre. De vrais enfants. De vrais oiseaux. De
vrais chats’. It is as if the consciousness of the protagonist were tapping
into an archive of images in which time, ‘un peu de temps à l’état pur’,7
is preserved as though in itself, discovering the past as though distilled in
a series of ethnographic discoveries. The time the protagonist spends
with the woman whom he has sought out seems to weave itself around
them, suggesting again that this memory is independent of his conscious-
ness and of his voluntary memory and imposed by the narrative and by
the sequence of images. The film is populated with statues and with

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stuffed animals, so as to underline the concern with still life, with time in
so far as it is frozen and conserved in a mute gesture or gaze. The protagon-
ist’s memory is likened to a museum, ‘un musée qui est peut-être celui de sa
mémoire’, and this museum-effect is doubled by the stillness of the film,
whose images are withdrawn from the illusion of continuous motion.
Their stillness further withdraws the memory from the agent and
proposes rather a doubling of film spectatorship within the film: the man
views his memory as if he were watching a film, or as if he were visiting
a museum. This withdrawal and separation of memory from consciousness
and agency, of the image from the willed imagination of the agent, raises the
possibility that the image itself is or has a memory, independent of
conscious or volontary imagining or remembering. The film thus
proposes that the image remembers and in its remembering realizes itself
upon the protagonist. It explores the memory of the image itself, as
though the image had a memory beyond its insertion into a subjective
history, as if our subjective histories were thus determined by the
memory-life of the image itself, carrying and expressing history.
The thesis that the image has a memory, aside from its Proustian reson-
ances, has been the focus of recent work by Georges Didi-Huberman,
particularly on the great art-historian and librarian Aby Warburg. Didi-
Huberman’s L’Image survivante explores in particular ‘la me´moire à l’œuvre
dans les images de la culture’, according to a thesis which suggests that
historicity or memory is inscribed in the image in complex ways for
which standard modes of art-historical enquiry fail to account.8 Didi-
Huberman asks: ‘N’y aurait-il pas un temps pour la me´moire des images —
un obscur jeu du refoulé et de son éternel retour?’ and proposes that ‘Les
images aussi souffrent de réminiscences’.9 A more extended exploration
of the memory of the image than is possible in the limits of this article

7
I explore the resonances of this expression from Proust’s A la recherche du temps perdu in Deleuze’s
work, particularly on cinema, in ‘“Time in the pure state”: Deleuze, Proust and the Image of Time’,
in Time and the Image, ed. by Carolyn Gill (Manchester University Press, 2000), pp. 161 – 71.
8
L’Image survivante (Paris, Minuit, 2003).
9
L’Image survivante, p. 26 (Didi-Huberman’s emphasis) and p. 307.
34 PATRICK FFRENCH

would necessarily have recourse to this work. I should like to refer instead
to a short essay by Giorgio Agamben in which a similar idea is broached but
with a different orientation.10 Agamben proposes that it is erroneous to
confine Warburg’s enquiries to the dimension of the image. What is at
stake is an attention to the dynamism the image contains, a dialectic
between fixity and movement crystallized around gesture. Agamben
follows Deleuze in proposing that if the classical approach to the image
sees it as a pose, according to a Platonic notion of immobile form as the
expression of the Idea, Warburg’s perspective sees the image as at the
same time the negation and the conservation of an inherent dynamism.

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The image in this sense conserves within it a dynamic temporality which,
in an implicit reference to Proust, Agamben relates to involuntary memory:
Le premier pôle (de l’image comme réification et annulation d’un geste) correspond au
souvenir dont s’empare la mémoire volontaire; le second (l’image qui conserve la
dynamis intacte) à l’image qui jaillit comme un éclair dans l’épiphanie de la mémoire
involontaire.11

Any still-image can thus be imagined as ‘[le] fragment d’un film perdu’.12
Cinema realizes the dynamism inherent in the image, and, writes
Agamben, ‘ramène les images dans la patrie du geste’.13
Agamben also considers the vast project only commenced by Warburg,
to which he gave the name Mnemosyne, a montage of photographs of
different derivations representing gesture frozen in the image. This
montage proposes a history in terms of human gesture; in Warburg’s own
terms it allows the vision of pathological symptoms of an archaic level of
human history and culture. The Mnemosyne project is thus a montage of
photogrammatic images (still images withdrawn from a larger sequence)
in which a dynamic historicity is visible. The image here functions as a
‘cristal de mémoire historique’14 independently of individual volition, of
an individual consciousness or of an individual unconscious.
This allows us to see La Jete´e, beyond the limits of its fiction, as a montage
of photogrammatic images in which the dynamic tension between fixity and
movement is visible, and as a montage of images as crystals of historical
memory. The withdrawal of the images of the film from the illusion of con-
tinuous motion induced by shooting and projection at twenty-four frames a
second serves to emphasize, not to deny, the dynamism inherent in cinema.
One might say, with Deleuze, that in the classic Hollywood film the
movement of the image becomes frozen in the stereotype of movement,
and that it takes the stillness of the photogram to make visible, through
10
‘Notes sur le geste’, in Moyens sans fin: Notes sur la politique (Rivages, 1995), pp. 59– 71.
11
Ibid, p. 66.
12
Ibid, p. 66.
13
Ibid, p. 67.
14
Ibid, p. 64.
 THE MEMORY OF THE IMAGE IN CHRIS MARKER’S LA JETÉE 35
15
montage, the dynamic gesture in movement. The images of La Jete´e
confront the fixity of the pose—shots of statues, stuffed animals — with
the dynamism of movement in the sequences involving the protagonist,
in particular the sequence of his death, the dance of ‘ce corps qui
bascule’, but also in the sequences featuring the woman asleep, in which
the speed of the montage increases to a point of culmination in the sole
‘moving’ image of the film. The montage of the film realizes the liberation
of the dynamism conserved intact in the image, its ‘memory’, through the
strange effects of transformation imposed upon the statues by cross-
dissolves, and through the sequencing of images of bodies in movement.

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The memory of the image, presented by means of formal innovation, is
in this sense its dynamism.
The historical dimension of the memory of the image is particularly acute
in two image sequences of the film, which inscribe a historical memory. The
first proposes an extremity in which movement, gesture and memory would
be annulled in a total erasure of surfaces. The fictional projection of apoc-
alyptic destruction, figured in the film as an almost total destruction of the
earth’s surface, doubled by that of the erasure of the past, is a threatened
reality and a historical memory in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The
figure of total erasure is one which determines Marker’s work of the
period, including La Jete´e (made in 1962), which should thus be read in
relation to this extreme: the totalization of forgetting and erasure as an
imminent political possibility. This is the extremity towards which La
Jete´e’s stillness tends, and against which it proposes its dynamic memory-
images, its gestures. The release of La Jete´e coincides with the Cuban
missile crisis, the climactic moment of the Cold War and the moment of
the closest imminence to global destruction. The post-war period, and
the film, are overdetermined, moreover, by the two events designated by
the names Auschwitz and Hiroshima, names which recall the operation of
a totalized form of power, the realization of which produces or intends to
produce that effect of total erasure signified by the word holocaust.
Marker’s literary and cinematic production around this time is acutely
focused on this history and this possibility. To be brief, we can note only
a few instances: Marker’s ‘nouvelle’ ‘Till the end of time’ published in
Esprit in 1947, in an issue subtitled ‘Documentaire atomique’;16 the collab-
oration with Alain Resnais on Nuit et Brouillard;17 the resonance of Marker’s
concerns with those explored in Resnais’s and Duras’s Hiroshima mon amour,
whose cameraman Jean Chiabault took the stills used in La Jete´e.

15
See Gilles Deleuze, Cine´ma I : L’Image-mouvement (Paris, Minuit, 1983) and Cine´ma II : L’Image-temps
(Paris, Minuit, 1985).
16
‘Till the End of Time’, in Esprit, 129 (January 1947), ‘Documentaire atomique’, 145 – 51.
17
Marker worked as assistant director on Resnais’s Nuit et brouillard, whose commentary was written
by Jean Cayrol at Marker’s suggestion.
36 PATRICK FFRENCH

One could also ask why the proprietors of the post-apocalyptic under-
ground tunnels, referred to as a ‘camp’, whisper in German. The
reference to an underground network of caves beneath the Palais de
Chaillot (which hid a Resistance re´seau during the Occupation), and the
thematics of imprisonment, establish a resonance with the Occupation.
Jean-Louis Schefer has written:
On imagine assez que pendant longtemps la guerre et l’expérimentation sur les corps,
l’humanité devenue matière de laboratoire, étaient une chose allemande; que la
psychanalyse ou la science dévoyée, appliquée dans d’horribles conditions, effroyablement
humaines jusqu’au bout (selon l’admirable pensée de Robert Antelme) aient été la voix de

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cette langue allemande, issue comme un spectre d’un accident du savoir romantique sur
l’espèce et qui, après avoir interrogé la culture d’Occident, tente cette descente abyssale,
violente ou insinuante dans la mémoire de ses sujets.18

Schefer proposes that Marker is working with an unconscious image and

sound repertoire formed from historical events experienced as childhood
trauma. The images of the destruction of Paris in La Jete´e thus
‘remember’ in a certain sense the images of the devastation of Hiroshima;
the images of the underground tunnels remember those of the camps.19
The montage of La Jete´e is effected not only syntagmatically, in terms of
the horizontal sequence of images, but also paradigmatically, in terms
of their imagined superimposition on a vertical level on images of the
historical real.
The second example of what I have called paradigmatic montage, where
the image of La Jete´e is as if superimposed on a photographic instance of the
historical real, is better known. The image of the death of the protagonist of
La Jete´e is modelled on Robert Capa’s famous photograph of the Spanish
Loyalist Federico Borrell Garcia at the moment of his death. 20 That the
‘childhood’ image which marked the protagonist of La Jete´e itself
‘remembers’ this historical image of the ‘last instant’ means that the
hero’s encounter with his own death is also an encounter with the history
which would have marked the childhood of many viewers of the film in
1962 and 1963. The particular quality of both images is to capture the
movement of the body, ‘ce corps qui bascule’ as it falls, as the arm is
flung out either as a reflex or as a last gesture of defiance or resistance.
18
‘A propos de La Jete´e’, in Images mobiles: re´cits, visages, flocons (POL, 1999), p. 136. See n. 1 for a dis-
tinction regarding the imagined resonance with psychoanalysis.
19
A memory of the more recent historical past might also be potentially operative here, that of torture
during the Algerian war in Parisian caves, or also in Algiers, as depicted in Henri Alleg’s testimonial
account La Question, published by Minuit in 1958, especially as the wires attached to the protagonist
of La Jete´e for the ‘experiment’ evoke the electrocution device nicknamed la ge´ge`ne used by the French
military on suspected members of the FLN. That this is an issue for Marker, broadly speaking, is
attested by the almost simultaneous appearance, with La Jete´e, of the documentary Le Joli Mai, which
proposes an ethnography of Paris just after the end of the Algerian war.
20
The debate about the veracity of the photograph seems to have definitively come down in favour of
its authenticity. See Richard Whelan, ‘Proving that Robert Capa’s “Falling Soldier” Photograph is
Genuine: A Detective Story’, in Aperture, 166 (Spring 2002), 48 – 55.
 THE MEMORY OF THE IMAGE IN CHRIS MARKER’S LA JETÉE 37
This is to say that it captures not death but life, ‘a life’ in the terms
elaborated by Deleuze in his final article ‘Immanence: A Life’,21 a life that
is at the threshold between life and death, or a bare life that belongs to
no subject in particular but is an affection ‘à l’état pur’. This immanent
life is found by Agamben in gesture.22 If the image presents gesture in an
exemplary manner, it is perhaps because this life is revealed therein as a
pure potentiality to act, before any specification.
For the post-Holocaust generation — the generation for whom,
Agamben argues elsewhere, bare life is revealed as the primary object of
political power — Marker’s film thus proposes, through the formal inno-

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vation of a photogrammatic montage on both syntagmatic and paradigmatic
axes, the recovery of a memory which resides in the image. This memory is
not that of specific events, nor that of a specific subject; it is both a trans-
historical memory of the gestural life inherent to humanity and a fictive
vision of the potential annihilation of that life by the rigidity of a politics
of totality, threatening the present with non-existence. The film punctuates
the structure of its fiction with the image of a historical ‘real’, with history
or memory in the form of an image of extremity in which a life is revealed as
just that: a bare life.

KING’S COLLEGE LONDON

21
‘Immanence: une vie’, in Deux re´gimes de fous: textes et entretiens 1975– 1995 (Minuit, 2003), pp. 359 –363.
22
Agamben links his work on gesture to the Deleuzian concept of immanence in the essay ‘Absolute
Immanence’ in Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. by Daniel Heller-Roazen
(Stanford University Press, 1999), pp. 220 – 39.