“La Jetee”, 1962. Written and directed by Chris Marker. Starring Davos Hanich, Helene Chatelain, and Jacques Ledoux. Narrated by Jean Negroni.
From the files of street critic Sandoth “Guy” Fresno, recorded on fourteen postcards that arrived in chronological order this January, waterstained (or so he claimed) from Hurricane Katrina. Each postcard was identical, of the Superdome, whose story, in Guy’s mind, “would make one fuck of a movie”.
So for starters I couldn’t take my fuckin’ bike into Windsor. The bridge, that stinkin’ tunnel, it’s no good for bikes. The Ambassador freaks me out too much, you’re riding that high, anyone could just reach over and drop you five hundred feet into the Detroit River. No thanks.
Anyway, so I hear on the street that there’s a show goin’ on in Windsor. At the Odeon, some crazy movie called The Jetty, or The Pier, La Jetee, only no one I talk to except that Woody Allen freak at the Maple, with his ridiculous beard and leather-patch jacket (it’s August, all right, lose the fuckin’ jacket), says it in French.
What amazes me is that no one I talked to about it ended up making the trek to Windsor to see the thing. And they missed out, man, they missed out. Like sleepin’ through Halley’s Comet–you got another seventy something years to wait, and you won’t be no Mark Twain, either.
Anyway, so I hop on one of our awful buses, reading some John D. MacDonald (the best in the summer, let me tell you) and found myself at the Odeon some two hours later. I got their early, thought I’d preach the gospel of Anthony Mann to the crowd, only there was no crowd. So I sat down and ate a pear and peanut butter sammich, and waited.
Windsor’s a dead town, let me tell you. Creeps me out–it’s like something from a dead future. None of the empty buildings like we have in the Motor City, but downtown closes, and there’s no personality. While I’m waiting, a guy walks up in wrinkled shirt, with little round sunglasses and close-cropped hair. He looked like Thomas Merton, man. He asked, “You’re waiting. For La Jetee?” Spoke in a frog accent. I shrugged, said, “What’s it to you?”
He just smiled and said, “Five minutes if you please.” And walked away.
So finally I get to go inside, me and two other people, a young girl who looked nervous, like she just skipped out of her high school’s chess club to be here, and a fat guy with a bag of submarine sandwiches. That’s it. No one is in the theater, no ticket takers, no concessionaires, nothing. It was free. The Frenchman stood in the back of the auditorium, a calm look on his face. When the girl finally sat–she wandered around the theater taking photos on her digital camera–the lights dimmed, and La Jetee started up.
What a movie. Only it’s not a movie. It’s a photo-roman. Whatever that is. A bunch of still photos cobbled together to tell a story. With narration. Frenchy in back, smoking for God’s sake, narrating with his beautiful accent a story that made me want to break down and cry. Which I did, later, on the bus. No music–though pals tell me the original has a score–just the guy, and I think it was Marker, narrating, smoking, the sound of the projector and, at one point, bird calls. Right at that magical moment, the only moving image in the film, the woman opening her eyes one melancholy morning, and he’s making the sounds of birds at dawn, perfectly. Unbelievable.
That’s what made me cry. It was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen on film. And it made the mornings heartbreaking for a few days.
Marker would narrate, and without ever clearing his throat, continue on the story of the man who jumps back and forth in time after World War III. They remade the movie in Twelve Monkeys, which was brutal, a violation, like painting tits on the Mona Lisa. Hideous.
After the film ended, all three of us sat, stunned, until the film ran out and the screen filled with a blinding light. Marker was gone. I knew he would be; you can’t have a performance like that and not vanish mysteriously.
Photo-roman? I kept telling myself I could make something like that–a bunch of photos, people in costume, a bombed out future. Detroit was made for a thing like that. So I dug up my old Kodak Retinette and began to take some black and white photos. I was going to do nothing more than a remake of La Jetee, on Woodward, in the abandoned train station, having the conclusion in the wrecked bleachers of Tiger Stadium, meeting by the tree that’s shooting up in the cracks above center field. A couple of pals did the acting, and I paid them in Coney dogs. They were great–we got them into some weird sunglasses from the Salvation Army, rebuilt a Buzz Lightyear doll into a crazy weapon, and made a post-apocalyptic world out of Detroit. Made the place seem like it was special, like it was on an even keel with the rest of the world. For once.
But I never got around to putting the thing together–you gotta somehow get these pics onto film, you know? And record the narration. Or follow your movie around and do the yakking with it. And I never found the girl to blink in that pivotal scene. It had to be the right girl, the kind of girl Bernstein never forgets. You know what I mean? We’ve all known her. She breaks our hearts every lonely morning.
I thought I’d try another shot at a photo-roman down here in New Orleans, maybe during the election. But it’s hard enough just trying to get the two-bits together for some buttertop bread. And people here don’t dig the movies like they do back home.
I’ve never seen another of Marker’s films. I don’t even know why he was in Canada at the time. Actually, I don’t really know if it was him or not. Don’t want to know, really.
I’ve still got the pictures from the Detroit experiment. If you’ve got any extra dough, send it along and I’ll credit you with producer. Won’t go to booze, except maybe for a six-pack of beer. Filmmaking isn’t without its hassles, man.
