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Also this issue: Beware the Blob New Movie Shorts Screen Picks |
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July 24-30, 2003
movies
 DAYS OF FUTURE PASSED: Salvador Dali in a Denise Bellon photo from Rememberance of Things to Come. |
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Photography creates memory and tells the future in Remembrance of Things to Come.
For Chris Marker, there is no such thing as a still photograph. Marker’s justly famous La Jetée (1962) was a "ciné-novel" told with photographs, a voyage into the future (and the slightly less future) where the movement, apart from one crucial shot, is supplied only by our imagination. The camera in Marker and Yannick Bellon’s Remembrance of Things to Come (Le Souvenir d’un Avenir) is far more active, but again, the subject is photographs, this time the between-the-wars photographs of Denise Bellon, Yannick’s mother.
Without being confrontational, Denise Bellon's photos take their subjects head-on; two shots of Marcel Duchamp (the Dadaists were a frequent subject) show him addressing the lens, then turning slightly away, as the narration puts it, "as if he could foresee the narration which awaits him." A photo of a body lying by a road, says the narrator (smooth-voiced Alexandra Stewart), "inevitably" calls to mind the stacks of bodies by the roadside to come.
Stewart's even, precise tone seems to admit no doubt, but that "inevitable" is clearly more a rhetorical gauntlet than an unassailable assertion. In the two most recent issues of Film Comment, which devote a combined 40 pages to Marker's oeuvre, the single most insightful comment is André Bazin's remark that in Marker's movies, montage is "vertical," which is to say it occurs not just shot-to-shot, but between a single shot and the overlying narration. To that, I'd add only the thought that while the word "montage" implies a conglomeration of word and image, there's no prompting in Marker's films to resolve that tension. The sound and the image create separate narratives that play endlessly off each other, but never resolve their differences, and the audience is left spinning in between. Marker's observations aren't exactly imposed on Bellon's photos, but they're hardly organic evolutions of them, either. Remembrance is less a biography or an appreciation than a filmed work of speculative criticism, one in which the critic assumes equal importance to the art.
Having seen several of Marker's movies and only one short of Yannick Bellon's (Colette, which screens as part of International House's program, along with Marker's Prime Time in the Camps), it's difficult to see Remembrance as anything but a Chris Marker movie, though his co-director's autobiographical insights must certainly have shaped the film's observations. Marker's themes and motifs -- cats, owls, Japanese culture, the circularity of time -- are overtly stated and obsessively explored; if Remembrance isn't as pure a distillation of those themes as, say, Marker's landmark Sans Soleil (1982), which also employs Stewart's narratorial services, the connections are not hard to spot. As far back as La Jetée, Marker linked photography with memory, and in Sans Soleil, Marker's alter ego ventures that the images he has collected have not only "substituted themselves for my memory: They are my memory."
Likewise, for Marker, time is merely a function of memory: the way La Jetée's protagonist trains himself to travel through time to pivotal moments in his own life, so Marker himself travels through the world of Denise Bellon's photographs, visiting lepers in Africa, seeing men monstrously deformed by the shells of WWI, staring into the faces of Duchamp, Dali, Miró. Bellon's photos thus seem to play the part of a launching pad for the narrator's idiosyncratic, almost violently subjective observations. (It's possible the extent to which Bellon's photos may be meant to stand on their own was obscured by First Run's preview tape, which featured an abnormally large time code that obscured fully a quarter of the screen.) Still, there's no question that Remembrance means to pay Bellon the deepest compliment by exploring in full the myriad impressions evoked by her work.
With its layers of interpretation, constantly forcing the audience to negotiate their own route between sometimes opposing forces, Remembrance is bound to strike some as clinical, but the film's sheer beauty (or at least the top three-quarters of it) is enrapturing, and its pinwheeling logic offers more careening course changes than a big-budget car chase. It screens but once, and then it will be, fittingly, only a memory.
Remembrance of Things to Come
Directed by Chris Marker and Yannick Bellon Fri., July 25, 8 p.m., International House
recommended
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