Je n’ai jamais été un grand fan des oeuvres de Chris Marker. Certes, elles sont uniques et fortes esthétiquement parlant, la trame narrative est toujours aiguisé et sensible. La Jetée est une oeuvre importante, c’est inévitable.
Mais je suis aussi prêt à me lancer dans quelques pensées avec toi Tobias, afin de me détendre l’esprit qui travaille beaucoup ces jours-ci, sur un, deux, trois nouveaux films.
Nous sommes dans un époque du sensationnel, de l’expression exagéré, où la plasticité de l’image l’emporte sur la douceur des traits. Peu de cinéastes réussissent à échapper à cette réalité. La déficience du Cinéma Industriel torture silencieusement l’esprit des gens, les contraints a des scènes sans profondeur. C’est de la violence psychologique, comme dirait monsieur Chomsky.
Le Cinéma, c’est du Cinéma après tout. Il faut créer pour mettre en scène les souvenirs d’un passé incompris, ou représenter une réalité, d’une manière subjective. Proposer aux gens une vision différente et unique, à chaque fois, pour un monde meilleur, enfin pour mieux comprendre l’univers dans lequel nous vivons.
C’est pourquoi, je pense, qu’il ne faut pas se gêner pour rappeller sans cesse au spectateur qu’il est un spectateur, que le film est un film, jouer avec leur nerfs, pour les captiver de la première minute, jusqu’à la dernière. Les méthodes varient et s’approfondissent.
Chris Marker le fait, je crois, en utilisant le photo-roman. Le spectateur recherche le mouvement, mais le mouvement, est en réalité dans le drame qui se produit sur l’écran même. Le spectateur sort de la salle et pense, se souvient du film qu’il vient juste de voir, et formule une certaine vision de l’art et du cinéma. Personne ne fait de réflexion pendant et après la projection d’un film comme Jaws ou la Guerre des Étoiles.
Ce ne sont que des pensées, elles ne sont pas absolues, elles divergeront probablement. Seul les fous ne changent pas d’idées.
Exemple cinématographique:
Premier plan: la salle de cinéma pleine, sombre.
Narration: Ce que vous voyez présentement est le reflet de la salle.
Narration: Vous n’avez aucun contrôle, car en réalité… vous êtes… le reflet.
La bobine étant endommagée, le public étant le reflet, leur sort est en jeu. Si la bobine est endommagée et que nous sommes le reflet… notre sort est en jeu. Le film devient alors le seul espoir du spectateur.
interesting quote by kristeva.
huh?
Hey Johny Boy, it’s french! It’s my reply to Tobias’ thoughts.
Colin, je suis avec toi – La Jetée n’a pas complètement résonné avec moi. Ce qui me frappe dans ce film est la multiplicité qui existe dans la simplicité. Cela est déja apparent dans le titre : La Jetée et ‘La, j’étais’ – ce jeu de mots a une profondeur et une simplicité à la fois. Utilisant une des plus simples formes [le film photo-roman], Marker réussit à rendre implicite l’idée de la mémoire [qui peut être compris, dans un certain respect, comme une séquence d’abstractions visuelles et auditives], et l’idée du rêve [ce qui peut être compris comme la projection basée sur le flux temporel, i.e. les mémoires qui existent dehors l’expérience connue]. Dans ce sens Marker fait un commentaire sur le potentiel du cinéma lui-même.
Je suis d’accord avec toi que le cinéma devrait ‘mettre en scène les souvenirs d’un passé incompris’, et devrait proposer, avec chaque manifestation, une vue unique. C’est pour ces raisons que je considère La Jetée d’être un repère de la créativité cinématique, et aussi parce que la question dans le film est toujours sans réponse.
Je le trouve ironique que c’est moi et toi dans cette conversation, comme c’est nous parmi les cinéastes du Garage qui essayons systématiquement de pousser les limites conceptuelles et de demander comment les représenter visuellement. J’avais toujours considéré La lune synthétique d’etre, en partie, une expérience née de l’éxperience qui est La Jetée. Même si le ton est différent, le monde dans lequel tu plonges le spectateur est éternel, et alors c’est le même monde dans lequel La Jetée existe, existait, existerait.
Le temps. Le vide. L’ubiquité. Trois thèmes qui me suivront pendant toute ma vie.
…and Bobby, yes it is interesting, I think—- Kristeva’s work (especially as regards memory, and her essays on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu) has a lot to offer an interpretation/ exploration of Chris Marker’s films, especially La Jetée.
as long as she’s not more in love with her own words than the thoughts behind them. i dont like overly (reflexive) formalist critics/theorists. i like clear and effective communication. if meaning is difficult to penetrate because of overly aesthetic aims, i’d rather you write a novel. or something more overtly artistic. for me, brevity and simplicity is an art form itself. anyone can complicate. only the great ones can clarify.
That all depends on how you understand the language to which you are condemned to convey ideas. Brevity and simplicity are fine… but life and our experience of it can never be served by pure reductionism (even Koans, simplest of wisdoms, are maelstroms). I understand what you mean though— 90% of academic thought typically obfuscates to disguise an absence of any idea, or to pad out a very simple insight.
Given your dislike of reflexive theorists, though—- I’m not sure you’ll like Kristeva.
She opens doors left closed in Lacan’s room. She’s big on intertextuality, and proposes that the semiotic is an emotional/instinctual field, existing in utterance, rhythm, stress, and intonation of connected speech and not just in the projected meaning of a word. She is closer in this to a Sanksrit understanding of lingusitics than a structuralist one. Her lectures on Proust (which I’ll try and find transcripts for you) struck me as having great relevance to the work of Chris Marker, given as they are all concerned with memory, entropy and the experience of emotion.
yeah, i dont care either if this thread morphs into a discussion of film theory. that’s a good thing. especially if the discussion is interesting. we’ll circle it all back around to marker sooner or later…or maybe not…
1) I’ve not read much Kristeva, but I imagine her work can best be understood as an attempt to inculcate the so-called ‘feminine perspective’ within the academic framework of modern psychoanalysis and philosophy. The fact that she is considered a feminist is telling only because it makes explicit the fact that a woman philosopher writing within an academic field about the experience of being a woman need necessarily be viewed as in some way subversive or otherwise reactionary. I can be fairly certain that any of her attempts to rhetoricize (invented word) or otherwise comment upon psychoanalytical theory in the language of the psychoanalytics (invented word) of the era could not have any intentional misogyny read into them. A woman cannot be a misogynist. Again not being an avid reader of her theories I have never encountered her supposed claim that a misreading can open up subtleties within a given text and I would have to read her direct quote to be certain that it was not in fact a misreading on the reader’s part, but my interpretation would be that she was commenting upon the multiplicity of interpretations inherent within the structure of language itself, for one. In it’s currently diluted form and within its intended usages in the modern era language, i.e. a specific word, is typically meant to convey a single point. However, archaic languages such as ancient Hebrew must necessarily be understood through a more intricate observation. A word in ancient Hebrew is often meant to convey a thing and its opposite, for example. Hence, my opinion about what Kristeva may have been trying to say is that by removing yourself from the limited and compromised tendency to read a single point into a word, phrase or concept, it can help to relax your mind into what is being said between the lines. An example: Kristeva’s view of poetic language as “distinct from language used for ordinary communication, an otherness of language.” A good question here would be whether it might be open to debate that a poem of 10 lines can convey as much meaning as an entire academic essay? Not, be clear, whether a poem or an academic essay is better or worse, but whether despite their different forms they might each at least be equally profound mechanisms of communication.
2) Or perhaps the reader takes offense to Kristeva’s belief that logic falsely “presents itself as the production of meaning.”
3) Or perhaps logic does create meaning?
4) Or perhaps meaning exists without logic.
5) Or perhaps the word meaning has no real meaning.
6) Or perhaps the word meaning means : Linguistics. a. the nonlinguistic cultural correlate, reference, or denotation of a linguistic form; expression.
7) Or perhaps expression has multiple forms and meanings.
8) Or perhaps Kristeva has a very profound sense of irony.
“…she was commenting upon the multiplicity of interpretations inherent within the structure of language itself…”
Yes, agree.
Kristeva is open, as I understand it, to an investigation of the causal root, the intention, behind language- ideas arrive complete, in a bursting open of recognition or intuition— an entire sentence is created (by the speaker), and grasped (by the reader/listener) as a whole.
Good points, T. The ‘investigation of the causal root, the intention, behind language – ideas arrive complete, in a bursting open of recognition or intuition— an entire sentence is created (by the speaker), and grasped (by the reader/listener) as a whole.’. It seems Kristeva’s view of language itself is intimately profound, favoring the notion of experiencing language as a complex structure in and of itself rather than focusing on soundbites. I imagine she would have a lot to say about the degeneration of language that is currently occurring, esp. on the internet and when considering the fact that many of the most ancient languages around the world are becoming, alas, extinct.
Her lectures on Proust sound very interesting. I’ve read ‘A la recherche du temps perdu’ which is of course, even within the title, a profound study of language and its uses, and to my mind also a great work on how language can be used to convey multiple meanings.
The Arabic language interests me in that it is formed of roots for which many words are then structured. I don’t have the book on Sufism and linguistics on hand in which I read this (Idris Shah’s ‘The Sufis’) but it provided some fascinating references to Arabic linguistic structures. And in Paul Nothomb’s Les Tuniques d’Aveugle, in which he imagines a re-translation of Genesis from its ancient Hebrew, he describes how each word, even each letter in the ancient Hebrew version of Genesis holds enormous significance as well as multiple interpretations. Example: an expression such as DGT HYM (degat hayam) allows for three possible readings: the fish of the sea, the fish of a sea, some fish of the sea. When considering that the entire text of Genesis could then be reevaluated linguistically (which task would be enormous) I think Kristeva’s positing becomes more clear – language should not always be taken at face value, and multiple interpretations are a cornerstone of true understanding.
Re: La Jetée – I believe this to be Marker’s intention in the film also. The film is not about face value, but more about the multiple interpretations of time travel, death and love. His ingenious use of still frames in the film, I think, open the audience up to questioning ‘what is film itself,’ ‘does it have limits,’ and ‘how can it push boundaries and evolve.’ And of course he is, as you point out T, commenting upon ‘time, void and ubiquity’ in a way that allows us, as an audience, to question how we view these notions ourselves.
too much reading to catch up.. love la jetee though..
T
La Jetée > Là, j’étais.
«Nous sommes libres parce que nous sommes des singularités nées au hasard de l’histoire et du désir.» Julia Kristeva
Un vertigo parfait, La Jetée, c’est maintenant et toujours… un conte, récit terne, disséqué, ponctué par la musique (violons) des souvenirs angoissés… un monde sans espoir où un règne de terreur caché derrière lunettes télescopiques épiant les ondes cérébrales de leurs prisonniers jusque dans les rêves… Chris Marker nous inculque un directif, un préavis: les rêves au-delà et la mort, les deux se deroulent en parallele.
Pensées.