Time, Memory, ‘La Jetée’ and ‘(nostalgia)’.

Photography and cinema provide two very different and yet very similar ways of representing the world we live in. Both produce their creations using man made machines, continually developed throughout the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries and have yet to shown signs of reaching a “perfect” machine that can go no further in reproducing our world with its technological capabilities. New digital cameras are being released every few years with higher resolution, better image quality and more functions for the user to control the image, allowing clearer and more realistic images. Filmmakers are continually pushing the boundaries of film by using IMAX film, High Definition and 3D visualising cameras to maximise the visual impact that cinema can have on audiences.

Moving away from a technological viewpoint, both photography and cinema are incredibly important in the development of our popular culture, and the initial developments in the 19th century have influenced contemporary art irreversibly. It allowed a new group of artists to move away from the process of showing the world painted or drawn on a canvas using materials which abstract the original image. Photography allowed images to be created that were free from artists interpretations of real life. Painting created centripetal based images, making it impossible for any world outside the frame to exist, but because photography captured the real world, it was possible to imagine the surrounding environment, which meant that the image could be analyzed for its choice of framing; picking this way of viewing a subject rather than any other.

As Susan Sontag mentions , photography created a direct link to the real, and created images from experience (1990). From that point on, any moment in time could be chosen to be recorded (potentially) forever. Trends in landscape and portrait photography developed. People were no longer restricted to seeing images removed from the immediacy that the real place or person contained, the could finally see different parts of the world with their own eyes, and see pictures of famous people and family preserved for them to gaze upon whenever they liked.

As Barthes noted in ‘The Photographic Message’ (1961), photographs, containing denotations of what they show (a flower, a house etc) are also filled with connotations which are altered by the choice of framing, layout, or colour adjustment. These alter the impact and meaning of the photograph and its subject, and these choices can have very powerful effects. If a important cultural figure is captured in a photograph in a compromising situation or placed within a context that is detrimental to their beliefs, in can have a very influential effect on societies view of them.

People are no longer restricted to using their memory when recalling recent events, or lost loved ones, and are able to relive ‘an “embalmed” moment’ (Mulvey 2006: 65). The ability to capture events in time effectively freed human memory; this machine was doing the remembering for us, showing us a crystallised image in time. Photographs allow us to put the past in front of us in the present, and lets us access the potentialities of their existence, straddling the past and present and pointing us towards the future. It is now completely natural to take photographs at every kind of personal event; to have something to remember it by, and to possibly discover a moment that temporal existence is unable to reveal.

But the photograph still contained a barrier for the viewer. Trapped in its frame, the actual place/event depicted could only be accessed through its representation created by the single photograph. Although objects can be copied by photography, they are not exact representations. Recorded sounds are exact reproductions of the original, but as Stanley Cavell noted, ‘we cannot say that a photograph reproduces a sight’ (1971: 19)
There is only one way to see the image, and that is how it is constructed within the frame. The viewer cannot enter into the event or place shown, and cannot hug or kiss their loved ones, even though they are depicted right before them.

Photographs hold one moment still forever, crystallising its connotations and denotations into one immovable from; it allows one person to look at it in secret, remembering the memories that it holds, and allows millions of people to see it in a gallery or a book, creating a cultural imprint in society. When a photograph has moved beyond the confines of the photographer, subject and surroundings, to be printed and reproduced into a cultural context, it allows more and more people to witness it, maybe not always entirely willingly, but its viewers hold the unconscious knowledge that this image is important and holds some greater meaning to the world. The photograph is a simulacrum, in its infinite reproductions is the knowledge that it will never dies, it will always live on in some form, despite the fact that the original copy (and the subject and even the photographer) are lost or dead.

Cinema, however, represents not a captured moment for eternal reflection but the world copied and projected in front of us, letting us see not just a single image, but actual experience. Moving images capture the world directly, and uses centrifugal framing to emphasize the choice made by the selection of the image, hinting at the world outside the frame as well as inside. Cinema adds another dimension to the reproduction of images, the movement of the camera physically capturing subjects in time as well as space. Cinema allows different places and events to be stitched together in time by editing. Two random events can be placed next to each other to reveal something that they could not show on their own.

Cinema coincided with the development of the modern world; the industrialisation of society. It became apparent that time needed to be controlled more rigidly, so that trade and commerce could run more efficiently around the world. The standardization of time across the country and the creation of global time zones meant that everywhere was running by the same standardized clock. ‘Modernity was perceived as a temporal demand’ (Doane 2002: 4), and the emergence of cinema created the perfect temporal accompaniment. The creation of moving images, where before we were at the mercy of the still photograph and pictorial representations, provided a way of Man to observe himself within his technological advancements.

Pieces of time are captured by the camera and imprinted into celluloid, one image occupying 1/24th of a second. These images are then projected onto a screen for an audience to watch and experience, to immerse themselves in the temporal unfolding of time within time. Early cinema presented both static frames showing a single event unfolding, and also the act of moving through space by the movement of the camera; for example early travelogues where the camera is attached to the front of a train to move through the landscape. Laura Mulvey also claims that modern cinematic narratives embody this tension between stasis and movement. Films are constructed using the immobile forces of the beginning and end of a film and filled with the momentum of the main narrative. (2006: 70)

Film later developed to contain several of these moving photographs to establish longer narratives moving through longer scenes. This created something the photograph could not, different images shown in the same physical space one after the other. Photographs can only ever occupy one space, their own, it is impossible for another photograph to occupy that particular point in space and time. But cinema has the ability to show 24 different images every second, and any number of different scenes or images after each other in the same projected space. This allows cinema to enter a temporal realm that photography will never be able to, and allows audience members to enter into its temporal representations of reality rather than standing on the outside looking in.

Photographs are judged upon a different set of aesthetic criteria to that of cinema, although they may appear to have many similarities. Photographs are judged on their composition, framing, use of colour and they way that they illuminate their subject in that particular moment. Photography allows you to capture single moments that often reveal the tiniest details that you may miss simply observing something in time, and therefore in cinema. Cinema can be judged in many different ways depending on the intentions of its creators. Composition, mise-en-scene, cinematography, are all similar to ways in which people judge photography; but viewing things such as editing and the movement of the camera takes cinema into a new temporal realm that photography cannot enter.

When photographs or still images are then placed within the cinematic realm, they are transformed into new temporal creations. Film can be frozen at any point to show a freeze frame of a certain image, such as in ‘Slow Motion’ (Jean-Luc Godard 1980) and ‘Les Quatre cents coups’ (Francois Truffaut 1959) where images are briefly frozen to highlight the physical and emotional states of the characters. These are often jarring to witness and feature more prominently in European art films which are more interested in pushing the boundaries of what cinema can represent, but can provide more immediate insight into characters than any amount of on screen dialogue or exposition. When actual photographs are inserted into cinematic narratives, the results can often provoke deeper emotional responses. Rather than showing temporal experience of a traumatic event, a photograph shows a crystallised moment that you cannot escape from, one that has been taken directly from human history rather than created especially for cinema.

Another aspect to differentiate between the methods of photography and cinema production is the nature of their authors. Photography is almost always created by one individual; the photographer, although they may use an assistant or a model is some specialist situations. Cinema however, is created by innumerable individuals. A film starts off its life by being created by a scriptwriter, sometimes going through several different draughts by a number of different people. It is then put into production by a director, producers, art directors, cameramen, a director of photography etc. Even when the film is finished it may be subject to editing alterations by studio heads or producers who wish to see it changed. When seen in this light, contemporary Hollywood cinema could been seen as a commodity to be created a sold to people, rather than a piece of art.

There are however many films created by individuals over long periods of time for little money and in the knowledge that few people will ever see it compared to a mainstream production. It is in carefully crafted shots and images that the real meaning in these films are created, much like a photographer may spend time arranging a subject in space, taking a few rolls of film and then pore over them afterwards to select the best shots. Artists take time making sure each from and sequence is arranged in the correct order to maximise the desired emotional outcome.

This is certainly true for the two films I am going to look at; ‘La Jetée’ (1962) by Chris Marker, and ‘(nostalgia)’ (1971) by Hollis Frampton. Both filmmakers use still images within a temporal cinematic narrative, but in different structural ways and with different results. I hope to discover how the tension between still and moving images are created in these two films, and how this tension leads to a greater understanding of what cinema can achieve as an art form.

Over the past fifty years, the filmmaker/artist Chris Marker has created a huge body of work. Containing numerous documentary shorts and features in a number of different formats, his body of work creates a tapestry of visual ideas dealing with history, memory and the nature of representation. Early film such as the culturally specific ‘Sunday in Peking’ (1956) and ‘Letter from Siberia’ (1958) which experimented with cinematic conventions such as rapid editing, different coloured film stock, inclusion of still photographs and newsreel footage, show an attempt to play upon audiences expectations of documentary and attempted to provoke an attempt to show the difference between ‘private and public memory’ (Kear 2005: 50). Even this early on in his career we can see themes which have pervaded his whole career; using the juxtaposition between still and moving images, and attempting to address issues of how cinematic representation affect the interpretation of history and human memory.

One of Marker’s films ’Le Train en Marche’ (1971) shows a good example o the ways in which cinema has transformed the modern world. The film is a documentary dealing with the ‘agit-prop’ trains of Soviet Russia in the 1920’s, which shows how a group of filmmakers travelled throughout the country documenting everyday life of ordinary Russians. The train possessed all the equipment for filming, editing and screening, and allowed the public to witness themselves and distant parts of the country on screen. They also filmed agricultural and factory work and compared efficient workers to less productive operations on-screen in an attempt to improve the countries production capabilities. This shows a very influential way in which cinema transformed a part of the modern world and displays the capabilities the moving images has to change peoples lives.

‘La Jetee’ is by far the most famous of all Marker’s films. Used as the original source material for the for the film ‘12 Monkeys’ (Terry Gilliam 1995), it inspired one of the most visually impressive science fiction films of the 1990’s. But whereas ‘12 Monkeys’ was applauded for its fantastical vision of a devastated and technologically advanced future and its impressive portrayal of time travel, ‘La Jetée’ provides us with a more contemplative view of cinemas visual capabilities. The film tells a story of a man, who as a child, sees a man killed on a pier. At an unspecified point in the future, the surface of the earth is left uninhabitable after a world war, and the remaining humans live underground. A group of people decide to attempt to travel to the past and the future to search for help and answers to their situation, and the man is chosen as a subject. While in the past he falls in love with a woman who was present on the pier at the start of the film. He attempts to escape into the past from the people manipulating his temporal existence but as he runs towards the woman on the pier he is shot; he is the man who he saw die at the start of the film.

What is special about the film is that it is told almost entirely with still images; photographs taken not from an existing film but by a photography camera. The film still uses cinematic techniques such as zooming in on images and fading, and uses the editing techniques to create the impression of movement. The film embodies the tension between the still and the moving image, between photography and cinema, simultaneously showing the limitations and the possibilities that both mediums possess. It demonstrates how a photograph is unable to show temporal experience, but cinema has the ability to manipulate a series of still images into a form that it could never inhabit on its own. The photographs shown in the film are not physical objects like normal images in a book, they are given a temporality which allows them to only exist in front of us for a limited period of time. While we can continually refer back to photographs by looking at their original copies or reproductions; ‘La Jetée’ forces us to use our memories to remember past images and connect them together to form the narrative sequence that the film places before us.

But when we see a still image, we are not seeing a single image; we are seeing 24 images every second. Each photo is multiplied numerous times on the filmstrip, cinema tricks us into seeing one image when we are in fact seeing several. Each photograph we see in the film is made up of possibly hundreds of identical images, which moves the existence of the photographs from being single forms fixed in time, into multiplicities with each different part only existing for a brief moment. This transforming ability is what gives cinema its power, and the nature of ‘La Jetée’ displays this more than normal films can.

‘What will the future make of us when we have become its past?’
(Lupton 2000: 87)

Lupton’s quote identifies the conundrum surrounding the ideas of time present in the film, as the narrative deals with the issues of time and memory in a complex way. At the beginning of the story, we are told that the film is ‘the story of a man, marked by an image from his childhood’. This initial voiceover tells us that we will be seeing a story that uses the childhood past and the current life of an individual, and that a particular image in the man’s memory will be the key to the link between the past and the present. The first scene of the film shows this memory; as a boy, he sees a woman standing on a pier (la jetée) and soon after witnesses a man being shot. The film then moves into an unspecified point in the future, after WW3 has left Paris devastated. This takes the film out of the seemingly realistic narrative of the first scene and pushes it into the future, into the realms of science fiction. The images that we see of a ruined Paris also create a tension between the past and future, as we are meant to be seeing images of the future, but we are clearly seeing images of ruined buildings that have already been destroyed in the past. When we see an image of the destroyed Arc de Triumph, the film seems to ask us to question what we have been seeing; whether these images are from the past or are actually from the future.

In this future world, the main character is chosen as a test subject for a time travel experiment. He is chosen because of his strong memories of the past, in particular the image of the man being shot on the pier. He is sent into the past, where he finds and befriends the woman who he saw on the pier in his childhood. This means that the man is simultaneously in the past, present and the future; his body is in the present, which is also the future (after WW3), and some part of him is existing in the past. Because the film displays every temporal possibility, viewing the film also allows us to exist in the past, present and future. We are transported from having our physical bodies trapped in the present, to being immersed in the past and the future at the same time; we are transcending time, our memories and dreams turned into a single visual plane.

Later on in the film, the man is also sent into the future, where he encounters a rebuilt Paris and a group of futuristic humans. This mission, even further into the future, destabilises the man’s present; if he knows that he can exist in the far future as well as the past, then that makes the time he is originally from the past and the future. While he is travelling through time, all he has are his memories of each place, it is his memories that define the future and the past for those who send him back in time for information. In real life, we can only possess memories of the past, the future is ungraspable to us. In the film, the man cannot deal with his repeated missions through time, and decides to try and escape from his captors to the moment he remembers so well from his childhood. This proves a futile exercise, as they already know where he wishes to go because of the power of his memories. He is shot on the pier as he runs towards the woman, and as the film ends at this moment, we know that somewhere, the man as a young boy is watching, and will grow up to systematically repeat this series of events.

The film also contains several visual signifiers of the way time and be manipulated by Man. Early on there is a series of shots showing ancient statues of human figures (similar to Markers earlier collaboration with Alain Resnais, ‘Statues also Die‘ (1953)), but their faces and limbs are missing, eroded and weathered by time. This could be seen as showing the futility of classical representation of the human figure, as time inevitably degrades all Mans attempts to remember himself. Later on in the film, when the man and woman are walking through Paris, and we see a number of a stuffed animals in a museum and a taxidermist. These animals are trapped in time, unable to move out of the form they occupy in the present, and gives a counterpoint to the way the main character is able to freely move from the past to the future. This could be seen to representing ways in which Man attempts to preserve objects and make them impervious to time, which can be connected to cinema and they way that it preserves the images and movements of people and places in its images.

There is one moment in the film where the tension between the still images of photography and the temporal nature of cinema could be seen to collapse. Midway through the film, we see the woman lying asleep in bed, and the film fades between several images showing her slight movements as she sleeps. Suddenly, she opens her eyes and looks at the camera, blinking; the film is showing a moving image for the first time. It is as if the film could no longer keep the tension between the still and moving images contained, and for a brief moment had to fall into true cinematic representation at this moment of beauty. This moment is where the film appears to transcend its own construction; seemingly unable to simply tell a story only with still images, it has to show a single moment of time unfolding naturally before the film can continue.

Many of the ideas surrounding time, memory and the nature of still and moving images which have been mentioned in relation to ’La Jetée’ are also present in Hollis Frampton’s ‘(nostalgia)’. The film does not feature a straightforward narrative like Marker’s film; instead the camera observes a series of photographs lying on a hot plate which slowly catch fire while a narrator describes the images. The photographs are all images taken by Frampton, and the film can be seen as a document looking back over his career as a photographer. Frampton takes certain measures to apparently distance himself from his work, as he does not narrate the film himself, instead using Michael Snow repeating Frampton’s words, and separates the speech from the photo they mention by discussing the next photo in the sequence; not the one we are currently seeing.

The film manipulates time in a different way to ‘La Jetée’. When viewing each photo, we are stuck in a temporal flux in which we are being pulled into the future and pushed into the past. We attempt to remember the dialogue spoken in the previous scene as it contains information relating to the creation and context of the photograph we are witnessing now; but at the same time we are listening to a description of a photograph we have yet to see. While we are forever trapped in the present, the film tries to force us into the past and inform us of the future, but the process of dealing with these forces can become too much, and it is inevitable that we will only recall snatches of information and dialogue that can help us in our understanding. The very nature of the films construction shows that it is impossible to completely rely on our memory to return to the past for information; and that even a recording medium such as cinema cannot provide the true authenticity of the captured past.

These attempts to distance the photographs from their history and meaning, and from their creator, are seemingly at odds with the connotations of the films title. One definition of nostalgia is “a sentimental yearning for a former place or time”, but the film does not seem to possess a desire to return to the past. Rather, it attempts to show us the futility of trying to enter a place only accessible in history, and although cinema can go some way to achieving this, the end result may not be what was originally desired. The end of the film also displays a reaction seemingly at emotional odds with the title. As we are told the story of how the photograph we have yet to see was taken, we listen as the narrator recounts how he enlarges one portion of the photo again and again until it fills the image. This image of nothingness apparently filled Frampton with such fear that he thinks he may never take another photograph again. But we do not see this photo, we are only shown a black screen for several seconds before the film ends. This glance into the past results in the end of Frampton’s photography career and marks the beginning of his film career; symbolising the death of one art and the birth of another. Frampton’s nostalgia for taking photographs reminds himself of this moment, and shows the viewer the potentially destructive effects that nostalgia can have.

According to Frampton himself (Moore 2006: 47), the final photo which he describes, and that we do not see, was never actually taken. He was in a situation like the one he describes, but never actually took the photo. Although this information is only available when researching the film, it provides an interesting footnote to the film. The photo which is claimed to have effectively ended Frampton’s photography career does not actually exist. Although he describes it as a particular part of the image expanded over and over again in an attempt to discover a hidden aspect of the image, it ends up as a large image of darkness filling the screen. What we do see is actually a blank screen; an image of nothingness which contains the same connotations as Frampton’s imaginary photo. Film has the ability to portray the void which cannot represent time or memory, it creates a projected area that can show us a space filled with literally nothing. This may be what Frampton was afraid of.

The film calls into question photography’s ability to truly capture some kind of meaning present in an image. As we see the succession of photographs placed before us and listen to mismatching explanations of their history and meaning, we become unsure about what we are being told and how they relate to the images. As the juxtaposition between images and explanation become more jarring (staring at a mass of spaghetti while listening to a story about Michael Snow), we wonder if any photograph can ever convey the meaning that it and its creator intended to. Even as we begin to piece together the explanations with the images, the photos burn up in front of us, only giving us a limited amount of time to make the connections. If we cannot put the denotations and connotations together quickly enough, the images vanish, not caring whether we understand them or not; apparently displaying an ambivalence towards their own existence.

Whereas ‘La Jetée’ was a film constructed of photographs which were arranged into a narrative; ‘(nostalgia)’ displays photographs filmed by a camera, so that the images initially possess their own spatial existence. The photographs exist within the film, rather than being the film. As they are set apart from the film, we can see that they exist separately, and this allows us to try and understand the images more fully; if the photos filled the frame and were used as separate shots like in ‘La Jetée’, and then suddenly burst into flame, the film would be attempting to convey a completely different idea.

As Rachael Moore states, ‘Frampton’s aim, achieved by releasing the spirits from his photographs by burning them while animating them with language, is to unlock temporality in this new medium’ (2000: 138). As each photograph catches on fire, they gain a temporary temporality as they twist and contort under the heat, their images slowly become unrecognizable. We are soon left with just memories of the images, and with the words of the image to come next. In the attempt to convey the photograph’s meaning with language, they become volatile and eventually turn to dust; unable to contain the words from the past which illuminate them.

As we have seen, both of the films present different arrangements of still images contained within moving images. Although the films both directly capture reality in their still images, they respectively highlight the differences between fiction and non-fiction narratives. ‘La Jetée’ tells a futuristic story about time travel, while ‘(nostalgia)’ recounts real life situations in the past of the filmmaker. Every image we see in both of these films has been carefully constructed before the actual photograph was taken. In Marker’s film, he had clearly storyboarded the images beforehand so he would know how the images would flow throughout the story, and Frampton clearly manipulated reality in his photos to attain the artistic images that he desired. This manipulation is used differently in both films, as Marker addresses Man’s capacity for remembering and the possibility of entering our memories to retrieve information, and Frampton looks at the way images from the past can (or cannot) truly represent memories. Both of the films end in either death or destruction; the death of the main character in ‘La Jetée’ as he tries to reach the moment that has been so ingrained in his memory, and the destruction of all images and the apparent futility of attempting to truly represent a part of the real world in ‘(nostalgia)’.