Memory

In the film La Jeteé, Chris Marker creatively combines still images with voice over commentary and music in order to tell a story about a man who travels to his memory.  After world war three, the city is destroyed, and scientists begin experimenting with time travel.  Specifically they chose one man because he had such a vivid image of his past that he could not shake.  The power of the image allows the audience to travel into time with the man and visit his memories.  The voice over commentary in this film not only provides the audience with an explanation of many of the images, but it adds to the meaning of memory in the film with its unique narration and silence.

In this film the voice over commentary acts as a framework for the movie, but it also serves as a guide.  In Bill Nichols’ Engaging Cinema voice over commentary is also called the voice of God or the voice of authority and it “represents the viewpoint of the filmmaker…it takes the viewer through the material” (115).  In Marker’s film, the voice over commentary guides the audience about what to focus on and where on the screen to focus.  Also in some instances the commentary ceases to exist.  The narration is almost continuous, but whenever the man is traveling back into the past, there is no narration.  This lack of speech draws the viewers in to scene, like an added layer of suspense, waiting for their guide to return.  This allows the audience, as Nichols has stated, to see the viewpoint of the filmmaker, for it creates an emphasis of what is on the screen.

Almost every aspect of Marker’s film involves or refers to the act of remembering or memory itself.  According to Annette Kuhn “in psychical terms, remembering (and, equally importantly, forgetting) is part of the properly human quest for origins which finds its most elemental expression in primal scene fantasies” (159).  In La Jeteé the man’s quest is to find the woman in his mind and he truly gets to live out the fantasy, even though it may seem as a dream.  He does not give up and let his memory take over, and throughout the film he seems to prefer the past than the present.  In addition, the film is seen as memory work, for it reconstructs the memory of the man.  Kuhn defines memory work as “an active practice of remembering which takes and inquiring attitude towards the past and the activity of its (re)construction through memory” (157).  The man is certainly active as he travels to his memory and recreates the memory, which in turn makes new memories for him.  Everything about the film invites new memories to form, old memories to be revisited, and allows the audience to explore the power memory holds over people.

The memory in this film, however, could not be as influential and powerful without the formal technique of the voice over commentary.  This voice of God emphasizes the importance of memory, by guiding the reader to focus wherever it wants.  Also, the voice over commentary is the factor that allows the work to be considered a memory work, for “memory work stages memory through words, spoken and written, [and] in images of many kinds” (Kuhn 157).  Without the spoken and written words in the film, no one would understand the film the same way.  They allow the reader to see memory the way Marker sees memory.  In addition, the voice over commentary is narrated in such a way that also allows the audience to remember the film better.  In multiple instances in the film, rather than explaining the current picture in the frame, the commentary begins talking about another image that is presented afterwards.  This technique makes the image clearer in the audiences mind because they are anticipating it and waiting for it.  Without the voice over commentary, the audience would be lost to the significance of memory in the film, so it is essential to understand this set of images that Marker has put together into a creative, and memorable, film.

Works Cited

Nichols, Bill. Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.,   2010. Print.

Kuhn, Annette. Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination. New York, NY: Verso, 2002. Print.