Chris Marker’s La Jetee as a Resistance to Identity Coercion

The first part of this paper highlights the ideological underpinnings that significantly influenced the trajectory of French cinema during the transition from the 1950s to the 1960s, encompassing both fictional narratives and documentary productions. The analysis primarily centers around the cinematic works of Chris Marker, a prominent figure in French documentary filmmaking. Drawing on a number of texts by the film theorist Olga Davydova, the author analyses Marker’s artwork as one of the significant manifestations of a tendency shared by many documentary filmmakers of that period, which was linked to the aspiration to transcend the influence of manipulative techniques. This aspiration was predicated on the conviction that it is feasible to attain a depiction of reality that is entirely trustworthy, that is, unmediated by any subjective interpretive biases, and identical to the thing being represented. Marker’s interpretation of surpassing the framework of manipulation was one of the most revolutionary: it entailed dismantling the very foundation of this framework, namely, rejecting the notion that the primary objective of documentary filmmaking is to provide an accurate representation of reality independent of the filmmaker’s perspective. Rather, the French filmmaker contended that the sole viable encounter with authenticity is the spectator’s “unique subjective experience,” which arises when encountering films conceived not as an embodiment of the filmmaker’s aspiration to convey an accurate representation of reality, but as a form of “flux” of “divergences” that resist cohesion. This position places Marker’s work in closer proximity to the cinematic adaptation of the French “le nouveau roman”. This connection becomes apparent in the film La Jetee, whose nameless protagonist is an individual with amnesia who is experiencing a traumatic psychological condition resulting from the nuclear bombing during World War III. The second section of the paper explores this cinematic piece. Employing the insights of prominent scholars such as Katie Caruth, Nathalie Sarraute, Giorgio Agamben, and Boris Dubin, the author uncovers the underlying narrative binary opposition in Marker’s film. This opposition is shown to be analogous to the ideological stances discussed in the initial part of the paper, which were instrumental in shaping cinematic discourse at the critical juncture of the 1950s and 1960s.