notes on Chris Marker

[Chris Stolz]

Howdy foax.

The Pynchon List's occasional digressions into the world of film
discussion have recently been at a low due to the _IJ_ thread and
this amotal business...I should like to mention a filmmaker who
has some interesting Pynchonian parallels.

Chris Marker is the pseudonym for a French filmmaker of unusual
documentaries.  He got the name from Magic Markers, and nobody
has seen or interviewed or photographed the man since the late
'50s.  His most influential film-- one of the masterpieces of
film, period-- is the 1962 _La Jetee_, a beautiful and haunting
30 minute piece about time travel which is remarkable in that it
consists entirely of _still_ photographs (with voiceover), with
one brief, stunning exception of moving image.

_La Jetee_ was the film which directly inspired the messy and
foolish _12 Monkeys_ (directed by Terry Gilliam, the only man who
has ever close to approximated the Pynchonian aesthetic in *all*
its forms in the brilliant _Brazil_).  Marker does in 1/2 hour
what Gilliam failed to do in two.

Marker has said that if he ever went to a desert isalnd and could
bring only one film, it would be Hitchcock's _Vertigo_, itself
the Hollywood masterpiece of the '50s and Hitchcock's only film
that rises above the director's metafictional trickery and into
elegant and elliptical metaphysical specualtion.  _La Jetee_ has
one blatant reference to _Vertigo_ (the scene where Scotty and
Madeleine look at the growth rings of the old redwood tree) and
is built around similar concerns-- the circular nature of
artistic texts and off the operations of memory in general
(obsession, the return to the past, the fact that "memories are
made such only because of the scars the leave").  The other major
Hitchcock refrence in _La Jetee_ revolves around the fact that
Hitchcock said that he was only interested in making films as far
as the storyboarding process-- beyond that he lost interest.  _La
Jetee_, itself composed of stills, is thus the ultimate homage to
the American director.

It is at this point-- Marker and Hitchcock's interests in
circular and unending narratives-- that the Pynchonian connection
starts to reverberate.  The most immediate echo here would be
Tyrone Slothrop's presence at his own death, but better analogues
would be the endings of _V._ and _CL49_, as well as their
circular structures.  _V._ ends before it begins, and works as a
series of incidents that repeat and recycle the past, while in
_CL49_ we find the whole structure of the story endign at the
story's beginning-- with the title.  There is storng evidence to
suggest that _V._'s narrator is in fact Stencil, which makes the
novel as a whole a kind of Markeresque obsessive time-travel trip
with V. functioning as a kind of Madeleine/the female figure in
_La Jetee_ eternally receding object whose capture would ground
the narrative in some sort of certainty.  In _CL49_, the novel's
blatant refusal to answer the questions it raises along with its
circular structure suggest that its narrator (like the narrator
of Colerdige's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner") is doomed to
tell the story over and over, looking (or begging the reader) for
clues to what it has left out, a key.  

At the heart of Marker's narrative (and of the first two Pynchon
novels) is the deconstruction-like concern with the need to
pursue and simultaneously fail to capture your object of
interest.  These works unfold into significance because of the
delicate balance they strike between revealign their objects'
essences and  keepign them hidden, which has the effect of
blurring our vision, focussing on the objects themselves as well as on
the space around them on which they leave their mark.  It is the
possibility of certainty balanced with its deferral that
maintains our attention and keeps us circling back to find what
we may have missed last time around reading.  Marker's
protagonist is fated to circle endlessly thgrough time chasing
his Madeleine, just as Stencil and Oedipa seem to be with their
respective objects.  

Anyways, if anybody gets the chance to see _La Jetee_ you might
the sort of minor epiphany I did regarding Pynchon and
Marker...the film is in any case a beautiful and eerie document
on par with classics like _Vertigo_ and _Blow-Up_.

chrios


-- 
chris stolz		16 oakview pl. sw calgary ab canada t2v-3z9
cstolz at acs.ucalgary.ca	(403) 281-6794